Godot syndrome in times of recession

Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot clearly resonates with the quandary faced by the ‘unfortunate lot’ hit by economic downturn. They are today’s Vladimirs and Estragons, waiting desperately for the elusive Godot (read re-employment break).

Like Beckett’s protagonists, they are entrapped in a quagmire of disablement but are trying ‘to hold insanity at bay’ even as their experienced time is attenuated and fractured.

Their sole plausible motive for existence is to meet Godot. They yearn to scream out, "We're saved!". But their wait continues. And in some, disorder and disintegration have started to seep in, perhaps disturbed by too much waiting.

Go Bijili: The Indian water dog

Caught this highly un-endangered long lost desi cousin of the Obamas' newly adopted member in the White House enjoying the sweltering Indian summer in a cesspool of calm.

Waiting for God(ot)?

Though Vrindavan - the 'playground' of Lord Krishna - has lost its sacrosanct glory, an aura of ancientness still lingers on in the narrow bylanes of the town.

Of Beef The Chief & Zappa The Star

Was just surfing the net and banged into a piece of archival beauty – some dude named Rick McGrath's (God bless him) interview with the one and only Don Van Vliet - titled A Candid Conversation With Beef The Chief.

A highly recommended read offering an oceanic view on Captain Beefheart “the player” and Frank Zappa “the worker”. Check out this link The Don Van Vliet Interview... or click on this safe as milk link and THANK ME.
Cheers...

Ode to His Bobness

You stand on the moon
With your guitar in your hand
The 'Pulitzer Gods' hear you singing
And ask, “Who’s that man?”
They try so hard
But they can’t understand
Just how could they too
Make you their muse, dear Dylan

Say (Na)Cheese!!

Mosaic of life in black and white.
Twenty-one clicking salute to the photographer.

Dogdas - hic, hic!!!

He ain't nothin' but a drunk dog...

"Should marijuana be a medical option?"

According to Donald Abrams, M.D. , Professor, Clinical Medicine, University of California at San Francisco:

"I am the Assistant Director of the AIDS Program at San Francisco General, and we have had for a long time patients with HIV smoking marijuana. And one would think it is the HIV community that has brought medical marijuana to the forefront, but in fact, marijuana has been used as a medicine as we all know, hundreds, if not thousands of years before HIV."

Leading Websites Disabled Unfriendly, says U.N. Study

The U.N. marked the International Day of Disabled Persons on December 3 with an interesting report that should give most webmasters and e-salesmen around the world to do bit of rethinking before presenting their estimated target figures. The report revels that most leading websites around the world do not meet the accepted international standards of web accessibility, therefore losing a significant portion of their intended audience by not being fully accessible to all people. Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the www.

The survey, conducted by the British accessibility firm Nomensa, used the globally recognized benchmarks for accessibility adopted in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Websites, according to the guidelines, must allow users, particularly those who used web readers, to easily adjust text size, to easily navigate through a website, to easily differentiate between colors, to offer an alternative to JavaScript that prevents many people from accessing key information, and by allowing keyboard shortcuts.

Nomensa studied 100 leading websites for travel, finance, media, Government and retail shopping in 20 IT savvy countries and found that only three met the basic standards for accessibility. And all three are non-commercial sites – the German Chancellor's, the Spanish Government's and the British Prime Minister's websites. But hopefully, the survey found that a quarter of the websites investigated could easily be brought into conformance with the standards for accessibility. The 20 countries that the firm studied are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, India, Kenya, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russian Federation, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States.

The survey revels the fact that many websites are not even close to reaching the Internet’s full potential for use by persons with disabilities. An accessible website does not necessarily require great expense. But the report also found that many of the websites under review were within “grasping distance” of the minimum standards.

This study should come as an eye opener to many Indian website development companies, specially the .ORGs and the ones surviving on click revenues, to tap the never-given-a-thought audience the chance to be an active part of the www. Moreover, as an U.N. official commented, fully accessible websites are not only good for persons with disabilities, they are good for everyone. Commercially speaking, there’s a glittering pasture of greens out there to be ‘mowed’. Persons with disabilities shop, they travel and they need information just like everyone else. And socially, allowing people to exercise their human rights and play their full part in the economic, social and political lives of their societies just makes good sense all around.

(Facts taken from U.N. report)

Wildly Chilling

A liquor kiosk near Surajkund – a popular tourist getaway located 20 km from Delhi – welcomes visitors in its own ‘spellbinding’ style. Cheers to the Spelling Bee masters!