Number numbers everywhere

Some interesting statistics surfaced yesterday:

Silicon India found out that 43000 Indians received H1-B visa to US out of 65,000 granted in 2006! During the same period 24,622 students made it to Universities in US!
United States can mop up more if it outsourced Student VISA operations to Indian Institute of Technology campuses(IITs)and other Engineering colleges!

A Double whammy for India? I will leave it to you to form your opinion.

Meanwhile, those of you who are data junkies and could spend hours poring over data grids to understand our global community, do not skip NationMaster.
You will curse me.

Codoms 'R' Us - finally size does matter!

BBC  shattered Indian masculine pride by reporting a study conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research that condoms made by International standards are oversized by 3 to 5 cm in length for Indian men! I wonder if spammers knew this all along and if there is a (not so) subtle connection with hundreds of spam emails flooding my inbox last year promising exotic remedies for increasing the size where it matters. Medical opinion, however, has always veered away from the size and held that what you can do with the size that counts. Spammers, of course, are getting smarter and anyone with an email account can testify that junk mail now touts more towards keeping it up longer rather than just stretching it!

Apart from deflating our combined musculine ego on the sub-continent - what else? Is this size mismatch the real culprit for India's ballooning 23% growth in population between 1991-2001! (as Kashmir shows, we have never been good at keeping our borders sealed).
Or, I wistfully think, can we pin the blame of 5.1 million AIDS sufferers in India on this gross overestimation in size of condoms!

Why did it take us so long to figure this out? Need I ask this question!

Democracy to govern Internet?

How does Internet run? The obvious answer is that it runs by itself. Amazing, considering the fact that 1 out of every 6 person on this globe has access to the internet, over a billion people (1,076,203,987 to be exact) , demography larger than India and just shorter than China! Hard to believe that it all runs without any active intervention (maybe that is why it has been running) and some help from IANA keeping track of the IP Addresses and IEPG coordinating its worldwide operations. Things, however, are not as smooth as the beast grows. There are murmurs about US exercising overriding control on Internet.

So why is democracy, the most successful experiment in self governance not been applied to the Internet? Citizens in a democracy have a right to decide the policy, setup institutions and laws to govern themselves. And all citizens have equal rights to do so. If we accept democracy as the guiding star why do we, the little China, not apply the same to the internet? Is it not possible to create a Constitution that applies to the citizens on the Internet? Can we not formulate basic fundamental rights to guarantee right of anonymity, right to access any property on the Internet and of course, freedom of speech and pledge no discrimination? Flight of fancy – maybe, but so it seemed 60 years ago when 40 million Indians were trying to hard to wrest self governance from the British Empire!

It is a matter of time before Internet, as we know it today will become completely ungovernable. Cyber crimes are soaring, unmindful of the terrestrial laws that have jurisdictional limitations. International laws and treaties are slow and difficult to enforce. Laws are upheld when the larger majority agrees to abide by them and that too because it has taken an active step in legislating them.

Internet is a new country…..