Boroline: Old is gold

Boroline is an antiseptic cream that I've seen since my childhood days. I thought that Boroline is used only when we have some small cuts or wounds. I've almost forgotten about it until I rediscovered it recently.

I often suffer from cracked lips. Sometime I have cracked heel also if I don't wear shoes continuously for many days. I used to apply different creams for these. These include: vaseline lip guard, Nivea lip guard, Lotus lip balms etc. For cracked heels, I used to apply some Crack, Dr Scholl etc. But I didn't recover from the cracked lips or heels.

Then someone (my wife or my mom) told me about Boroline. I tried it and I was so impressed with it. Boroline was magical. The crack in my lip or heel were gone after applying Boroline.

Then we found its usefulness as a rash-free cream also for our one year old baby boy. A few days back, we found that the diapers caused some rashes in his legs. There is a special cream named Rash-Free cream for this purpose. We applied that. But his rashes were not completely gone. The skin also turned rough as a result of the rashes. Then my wife applied Boroline and
the rashes vanished in a few hours!

I was curious about Boroline and so googled on it. I found some interesting facts about Boroline:

• It's a very old product. It was launched in 1929.
• It has a website too. It claims that Boroline works wonders to smothen cracked lips, cure cracked heels, soften elbows etc.

Now I'm a big fan of Boroline.

Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research

I came to know about IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) today. I was not aware of this before.

The govt of India has set up 5 IISERs in Bhopal, Kolkata, Mohali, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram last year. They offer 5 year integrated MS program in basic science. The way IITs were established for technical education, I think IISER have been established for science.
http://www.iiser-admissions.in/

I think it's a very good step by govt.

Read this article: http://casi.ssc.upenn.edu/iit/Bhattacharya

The lazy guy that I'm

I'm so good at procrastination. In last six months, I felt many times that I should continue jotting down my beberibang thoughts in my blog. But every time I just procrastinated. Many things happened in my life and around my surroundings during the last six months since my previous post:

1. I added one more year in my life on August 20th. :-(
2. My good, old friend Parthajit's relocation to Bangalore and his joining Synopsys's ATPG R&D team as my colleague in September. (When I use the phrase my old-friend-Parthajit, he reminds me that he is not old; it's just that our friendship is old. I always admire Partha's sense of humour.)
3. My two week's vacation in Assam in September-October 2008. There are many things that I wanted to write about this trip - Jaanmoni's wedding, our search for Moina's bride,
   
4. My brother Moina also got engaged during my trip to Assam.
5. Then my trip to US in October-November. There are many good topics related to this trip. ITC 2008, US Presidential elections, the economic recession, Diwali parties etc. ITC was a very good experience for me. There I met many of the renowned people of our industry. Also, I attended some of the very interesting sessions (Test Compression, Test Power etc).
6. Our patent on Test Compression was filed in US patent office.
7. The 26/11 terrorists attack in Mumbai.
8. Our baby boy Ekagra turned one year on December 24th.
9. Then we purchased a flat on December 30th. That was just the beginning of so many other works (bank loans, agreements, study of many other related things)

Yes, on each of the above-mentioned occaisons, I had many thoughts in my mind and I wanted to write those in my Beberibang. But then I was just lazy. It's very easy to say that I didn't get the time to write. But in reality, I was just lazy. Now I've all these topics in the pipeline.

IIPM: A fake university?

I got a mail in one of my yahoogroups (North-East Professionals) that IIPM has been declared as a fake university. I googled it and found that University Grants Commission has a list of fake universities and IIPM figures in that list.

This is the link to the UGC's list of fake universities: http://www.ugc.ac.in/inside/fakealerts.html.

The enemy within

I was trying to read the history of CPI(M) and why did they break away from CPI in early sixties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_India_(Marxist)
http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article816.html

Most of the founders of CPI(M), except Jyoti Basu and EMS, took a pro-China stand when China attacked India in 1962. They considered the war as a conflict between a socialist and a capitalist state. I believe that our allegiance to nationalism is supreme and more important than our allegiance towards our ideology, religion, language, or any other thing. Unfortunately, for most of the CPI(M) politicians, their ideology was more important than the country. It's so shocking! I've only one word for them: TRAITORS.

I'm originally from Assam. I speak Assamese at home. I'm Hindu. But my nationality is Indian. I'm proudly and passionately Indian. Yes, we do have diversity in India. But that's the characterstic of our nation. Unlike many European nations, we're a multi-religious, multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic country. But we're all Indians.

It's so shocking to see that we've some people in India who supported some country when it invaded India!

Now this same bunch of people are opposing the Indo-US nuclear deal!

We have no branches

There are many shops by the name Aggarwal Sweets that sell sweets in NCR region. They use the same font for their name on a red-background in their signboards. Sometime you might find multiple Aggarwal Sweets in the same locality. The ambience inside these shops is very similiar to each other. They have different varieties of sweets. Besides that, they have a big tawa (frying pan) to make different types of chaats and another big pan to make jalebi. Similarly, there are a few Evergreen Sweets in Noida (one in Brahmaputra market, Sector-27 and another in Sector-41).

Initially I thought that these Aggarwal Sweets and Evergreen Sweets are some chains. But if you read there signboards carefully, you'll see one more sentence somewhere below there names: We have no branches!

(This was a topic of discussion in my earlier lunch table group in Cadence Noida. I'll write about my lunch-table group sometime later.)

History of Pakistan

I've always wondered how history is taught in Pakistan. Do they teach pre-Islamic history? Do they teach the glorious past about Indus valley civilization? After Partition, both Moenjodaro and Harappa became part of Pakistan. Do they feel proud of that?

Pakistan was formed on the basis of religion. But if they study the history of the pre-Islamic era of south-Asia, then it will be clear to them that once upon a time, they were not Muslims.

I had this discussion about history of Pakistan with a friend of mine at his apartment in San Fransisco. My friend knows some Pakistani people in SFO. According to those Pakistani people, Aurangzeb was the best Mughal king. We in India treat Akbar as the best Mughal king.

Then I read an article somewhere (I don't remember the source) about the political unstability, military coup etc in Pakistan. The writer was attributing this to the Aurangzebi culture in Pakistan. Accordng to the writer, Pakistan's history text-books eulogize Aurangzeb as the greatest emperor. Aurangzeb was a ruthless person. He killed his three brothers (Dara, Shuja, Murad) and jailed his father Shah Jahan in order to become the Mughal emperor.

There was some discussion in Pakistan's National Assembly where the religious parties opposed teaching of pre-Islamic history in Pakistan. According to members from MMA, Pakistan's history start from Makkah and Medina. The education minister answered that students should read the pre-Islamic history for the sake of knowledge. The news article about this discussion in National Assembly was published by the Dawn newspaper on 22nd February, 2007.

There are some debates going on about writing correct history in Pakistan. There was an article in the Dawn on July 9 titled History is different from farce. Some excerpts from the article:

Eminent historian and thinker Dr Mubarak Ali says the history written in Pakistan had been “dictated” by the ruling Establishment and represents its wilful perversion of facts “to accord with a fabricated ideology”.

“No authentic history has yet been written about Pakistan and its independence. There is a lot of confusion among the so-called pro-Establishment historians and educationists. Whatever has been written so far is distortion of history and entirely unbalanced,” Dr Ali told Dawn in an interview.
.....
“Some historians negated our ancient Indian and South Asian roots and tried to establish our links with Central Asia or with the Middle East which was historical and intellectual dishonesty,” said Dr Ali.

This article was followed by an Editorial in the Dawn on next day, July 10th. It's titled: A distorted history. Some excerpts:

Our ‘official’ history is riddled with prejudice, inconsistencies and huge knowledge gaps, so much so that there was a time when school textbooks made no mention of the break-up of Pakistan. Even today they offer no detailed account of the causes that led to the creation of Bangladesh — the cultural, political and economic marginalisation of the Bengali people or the atrocities committed in the eastern wing by the Pakistan Army.
....
For many the history of what is now Pakistan seems to begin not with the Indus Valley civilisation but the subjugation of Sindh by an Arab invader, Mohammad bin Qasim. An attempt has also been made to place our cultural roots in Central Asia or the Middle East instead of South Asia and this link, sadly and erroneously, is now widely accepted as fact. Independent research free of official bias is needed to correct these and other more recent distortions of history. Otherwise we may never know where we once stood or where we are now heading.

There is a letter to the editor published in the Dawn today (July 17th, 2008). It's titled: A distorted history.