What Will Happen To Pakistan ?

First came the news of the arrest of the commander of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Baradar, in Karachi, said to be in a joint operation of the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan (ISI) and U.S. agencies. Though the arrest was made on February 8/9, the information became public only on February 15/16. He was reported to be under joint interrogation of the agencies of the two countries. Though this information was first denied by the Interior Minister Rehman Malik confirmation later came from the ISI’s spokesman and subsequently from the Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi. He said the action was not under pressure from allies but in Pakistan’s own national interest. Now it is reported that 124 terrorist suspects have been arrested in Pakistan, including five senior members of the Taliban Supreme command and nine militants with close links to Al Qaeda. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator John Kerry have praised the new cooperation between the Pakistan Army and Intelligence and the U.S. So has the U.S. Special envoy to the Af-Pak area, Richard Holbrooke, who was visiting Pakistan. Mullah Baradar was earlier considered to be a key person in the negotiations between the Taliban and the Karzai regime.

Some observers have described these developments as Pakistani moves to gain the goodwill of the U.S. and NATO to ensure that Pakistan will have its way in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal in 2011. Others think that these actions place Pakistan in an advantageous position to facilitate negotiations between the Karzai government and the reconcilable Taliban as per the strategy formulated in the London conference. As is to be expected, in Delhi the main focus...........

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Tech Revolution:Radically Transformed

It is ironical that the dot-com bubble burst on 10 March 2000 and almost exactly 10 years later Forbes magazine has reported that Bill Gates relinquished his position at the top of the global wealth pile. A lot will be made about Gates’ displacement by Mexican telecom owner Carlos Slim, but the very fact that the man behind the success of Microsoft continues to be very close to the top tells us a lot about the technology business in these 10 years.

Gates struggled to come to terms with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. He first underestimated its power to transform lives and then uprooted competitors such as Netscape with the clinical precision of a late believer. The point is that the pioneers of the online world, who were for a brief point of time seen as threats to the established order, are no longer in sight while Gates has continued to prosper.

A closer look at the Forbes billionaire list shows that three types of technology entrepreneurs have prospered in what many rightly believe is the age of technology. The first is the likes of Gates, Larry Ellison of enterprise software company Oracle and Michael Dell of the eponymous computer maker. These are computer firms founded before the dot-com age. The second group consists of entrepreneurs who built new companies in social networking after the dot-com bust—Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Yoshikazu Tanaka of Japanese networking site Gree. And the third group has software service providers such as Azim Premji of Wipro, who have benefited from the fall in telecom and networking costs since the dot-com boom. Pierre Omidyar of eBay is a rare case of a dot-com entrepreneur who went through the dot-com bust and lived to tell the tale.

Yet, we cannot but note that.........

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Civil Services Exams :New Way !

The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had last month approved the revamp of the preliminary exam on lines suggested by the Union Public Service Commission. The UPSC is further expected to push for changes in the Civil Service (Mains) Examination. But this will be only after examining the response to changes in the preliminary exam.
The UPSC had told the government two years ago there was a need to test not just the knowledge of aspirants in particular subjects but their aptitude for "a demanding life in the civil services". It had also recommended bringing down the number of attempts a candidate could take. But Dr. Singh has kept this aspect on hold.
Now the government has decided to replace the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination with the Civil Service Aptitude Test (CSAT), which will test candidates on their aptitude and analytical abilities rather than their ability to memorise.

“The CSAT is expected to come into effect from 2011,” Minister of State in the Ministry of Personnel, Prithviraj Chavan, told Lok Sabha on Wednesday 10 March – 2010.Confirming the change for the first stage of CSE, he told the Lok Sabha that the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has approved the proposal for introduction of CSAT in place of the existing CS (Preliminary) Examination.
In his written reply, he said: "CSAT is expected to come into effect from CSE, 2011." The proposal to this effect was sent to the PMO last year by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) which conducts CSE every year to select candidates for elite all-India services, including IAS, IPS, IFS, IRS and others Group 'A' and Group 'B' central jobs.
As of now, the change will be effective only for the first stage of the Civil Services Examination (CSE) from 2011 onwards. The second and third stages — CS (Main) Examination and interview respectively — may remain the same till a committee of experts goes into various aspects of the..........

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India's Jugaad:Not Sufficent !

For a nation that prides itself on jugaad, the North Indianism for spunky innovativeness and lateral thinking, it can’t be comforting to find it has slipped in the global innovation index. How far India has gone down in the Insead-CII innovation index is difficult to say since this year’s rank of 56 out of 130 countries compares with last year’s 43rd position out of 107 countries — China is also down six places, though at 43rd, it is ranked above India. Equally, it can be no one’s case the index is flawless. The fact that a report on innovation should give equal weights to political stability as it does to protection of intellectual property or to the number of researchers in R&D per million population is surely problematic. Similarly, while the report suggests India’s education system is doing better than China’s, the World Bank’s Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM) indicates quite the reverse — indeed, not only does India fare worse than.......

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