The Golden Quadrilateral

India is building a superhighway system connecting its four major cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata). This should give you a better idea of the route. National Geographic has a very good presentation about this structure. It is nice to see India undertaking such large projects, without assistance from foreign countries. This project is a good one considering the current road infrastructure. It would be really beneficial for truck drivers who otherwise have to take long trips regularly.

The article depicts not only the state of the highway but also summarizes the entire culture of India. It says that "some Indians live in the 13th century. Some in the 21st, and there are people living in every century in between." It describes problems faced by people from transportation to corrupt politicians. The plight of the common man is shown very well with an interviews of a truck driver who goes on tell that his employment is at stake if he sleeps at night. They actually use drugs mixed with tobacco to keep themselves awake for pretty much the whole day. This culture of labour exploitation is not just among truck drivers, it is quite prevalent in all industries of India, including IT.

At the same time, the presentation emphasizes on very quick growth in some parts of India, because of large companies setting up manufacturing units and employing lots of people. This is a nice thing, but the quick growth makes you think twice. Getting large returns too quickly can be dangerous. Its weird that some parts of the country are still stagnant and some are growing at a pace which can be disruptive.

HTML 5

Like many others, I have been excited about the new HTML 5 standard. It had some really interesting features like TCP Socket Connections (Websocket), Multimedia Support (not the way I would have liked it to be, but anything out of HTML is better than Flash). Unfortunately, It seems that the spec is going to take 13 more years to become official. Ugh! The good thing is that we can forget about the whole thing for a while as its not going to help us much in the near future and use the new 'unofficial' tools which keep popping up now and then. For Hickson's sake, lets just hope that HTML does not get obsolete in 13 years.