Monday, May 29, 2006

Acrobatic airshow by Red Arrows of Royal Air Force pilots (UK)


Crowds lined the Bahrain coast yesterday to watch the world-famous Red Arrows who put on a dazzling acrobatic aerial display. Nine crack Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots put on a 22-minute performance above the Manama waterfront in BAE Systems' Hawk jets. it was led by Squadron Leader Dicky Patounas.

The UK's Red Arrows arrived in Bahrain as part of a tour of Europe, India and the Middle East. They created a special manoeuvre, which they called the Palm Tree, in honour of their visit to the Middle East.

I remember their last tour, which was in 2003. This time also it was superb... simply amazing. Me and my collegues were able to watch it clearly from our office.

The thunder sound when they fly past is something which i liked very much. Gives an impression that u r in a warfront.

And we realy enjoyed the show. So after watching their display i searched for red arrows and found their website. Their website address is http://www.raf.mod.uk/reds/

Now my desktop background is of one of their display. :)

Indian Airforce too have an aerobatics team called "Suryakiran". I havent seen their display live. But i have seen some photos and vidoes of their performance. They are as good as Redarrows. Hope one day i can watch their show live. Below is a photo of their display, which shows Color of Indian Flag.


Wednesday, May 24, 2006

if u r using Batelco adsl connection

if u r using Batelco's adsl connection...then from next month onwards u may see the below message ..hehehehe..

Image Courtsey - Angella Fields

BTW u will understand this if u r staying in Bahrain... otherwise please check this link for more info http://www.boycottbatelco.com/

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

No Arms, No Legs, No Worries!

My name is Nick Vujicic and I give God the Glory for how He has used my testimony to touch thousands of hearts around the world! I was born without limbs and doctors have no medical explanation for this birth "defect". As you can imagine, I was faced with many challenges and obstacles.

"Consider it pure joy, my Brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds."

....To count our hurt, pain and struggle as nothing but pure joy? As my parents were Christians, and my Dad even a Pastor of our church, they knew that verse very well. However, on the morning of the 4th of December 1982 in Melbourne (Australia), the last two words on the minds of my parents was "Praise God!". Their firstborn son had been born without limbs! There were no warnings or time to prepare themselves for it. The doctors we shocked and had no answers at all! There is still no medical reason why this had happened and Nick now has a Brother and Sister who were born just like any other baby.

The whole church mourned over my birth and my parents were absolutely devastated. Everyone asked, "if God is a God of Love, then why would God let something this bad happen to not just anyone, but dedicated Christians?" My Dad thought I wouldn't survive for very long, but tests proved that I was a healthy baby boy just with a few limbs missing.


Understandably, my parents had strong concern and evident fears of what kind of life I'd be able to lead. God provided them strength, wisdom and courage through those early years and soon after that I was old enough to go to school.

The law in Australia didn't allow me to be integrated into a main-stream school because of my physical disability. God did miracles and gave my Mom the strength to fight for the law to be changed. I was one of the first disabled students to be integrated into a main-stream school.

I liked going to school, and just try to live life like everyone else, but it was in my early years of school where I encountered uncomfortable times of feeling rejected, weird and bullied because of my physical difference. It was very hard for me to get used to, but with the support of my parents, I started to develop attitudes and values which helped me overcome these challenging times. I knew that I was different but on the inside I was just like everyone else. There were many times when I felt so low that I wouldn't go to school just so I didn't have to face all the negative attention. I was encouraged by my parents to ignore them and to try start making friends by just talking with some kids. Soon the students realized that I was just like them, and starting there God kept on blessing me with new friends.

There were times when I felt depressed and angry because I couldn't change the way I was, or blame anyone for that matter. I went to Sunday School and learnt that God loves us all and that He cares for you. I understood that love to a point as a child, but I didn't understand that if God loved me why did He make me like this? Is it because I did something wrong? I thought I must have because out of all the kids at school, I'm the only weird one. I felt like I was a burden to those around me and the sooner I go, the better it'd be for everyone. I wanted to end my pain and end my life at a young age, but I am thankful once again, for my parents and family who were always there to comfort me and give me strength.

Due to my emotional struggles I had experienced with bullying, self esteem and loneliness, God has implanted a passion of sharing my story and experiences to help others cope with whatever challenge they have in their life and let God turn it into a blessing. To encourage and inspire others to live to their fullest potential and not let anything get in the way of accomplishing their hopes and dreams.

One of the first lessons that I have learnt was not to take things for granted.









"And we know that in all things God works for the best for those who love Him."

That verse spoke to my heart and convicted me to the point where that I know that there is no such thing as luck, chance or coincidence that these "bad" things happen in our life.

I had complete peace knowing that God won't let anything happen to us in our life unless He has a good purpose for it all. I completely gave my life to Christ at the age of fifteen after reading John 9. Jesus said that the reason the man was born blind was "so that the works of God may be revealed through Him." I truly believed that God would heal me so I could be a great testimony of His Awesome Power. Later on I was given the wisdom to understand that if we pray for something, if it's God's will, it'll happen in His time. If it's not God's will for it to happen, then I know that He has something better. I now see that Glory revealed as He is using me just the way I am and in ways others can't be used.

am now twenty-one years old and have completed a Bachelor of Commerce majoring in Financial Planning and Accounting. I am also a motivational speaker and love to go out and share my story and testimony wherever opportunities become available. I have developed talks to relate to and encourage students through topics that challenge today's teenagers. I am also a speaker in the corporate sector.






I have a passion for reaching out to youth and keep myself available for whatever God wants me to do, and wherever He leads, I follow.

I have many dreams and goals that I have set to achieve in my life. I want to become the best witness I can be of God's Love and Hope, to become an international inspirational speaker and be used as a vessel in both Christian and non-Christian venues. I want to become financially independent by the age of 25, through real estate investments, to modify a car for me to drive and to be interviewed and share my story on the "Oprah Winfrey Show"! Writing several best-selling books has been one of my dreams and I hope to finish writing my first by the end of the year. It will be called "No Arms, No Legs, No Worries!"








I believe that if you have the desire and passion to do something, and if it's God's will, you will achieve it in good time. As humans, we continually put limits on ourselves for no reason at all! What's worse is putting limits on God who can do all things. We put God in a "box". The awesome thing about the Power of God, is that if we want to do something for God, instead of focusing on our capability, concentrate on our availability for we know that it is God through us and we can't do anything without Him. Once we make ourselves available for God's work, guess whose capabilities we rely on? God's!









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Amazing is'nt ??... now i cant complaint to my God

u can read more about him at
http://www.lifewithoutlimbs.org/

Monday, May 15, 2006

Kerala Model

An India Americans Seldom See

Economic growth isn't doing much to help average Indians. Economic equality could. So suggests the past quarter century of history in Kerala, India's most equal state.

Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram says the new budget he unveiled last week will help fix all this, by promoting economic growth. “I believe that growth is the best antidote to poverty,"the Harvard-trained Chidambaram proclaimed.
But economic growth, counters Delhi University political scientist Neera Chandhoke, ''does not necessarily lead to social development." What does?

The experience of one state within India suggests an answer. That state, Kerala, has conquered disease and poverty — and illiteracy and discrimination against women and girls — better than any state in India. And the secret to Kerala's success? Equality. Kerala has done more to share income and wealth fairly and widely than any other state within India.

Kerala, by every conventional measure of economic growth, rates as a poor place. Until recently, Keralans averaged less gross domestic product per person than the Indian average. The comforts conventional economic growth delivers — cars, air conditioners, washing machines — grace only a small percentage of Keralan households.

But on the only measure that “ultimately matters” — “the nature of the lives people can or cannot lead,” a formulation introduced by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen — Keralans have created a society that outperforms much of the rest of the world. People in Kerala lead lives that are long and healthy, in vital, safe, tolerant communities.

The numbers document Kerala’s achievement. Morocco, a nation about equal to Kerala in population, generates about three times more wealth per person than Kerala. But people in Kerala, on average, live ten years longer than Moroccans. Colombia, another similarly sized nation, generates four times Kerala’s wealth. But babies die in Kerala at less than half the rate they die in Colombia.

Kerala and California also carry about the same population. California, of course, overwhelms Kerala economically. California generates seventy-three times more growth per person than Kerala’s. But Kerala, not California, enjoys more social peace. In the 1990s, about two hundred thousand inmates packed California’s jails and prisons. The number of full-time prisoners in Kerala: five thousand.

Within India, Kerala boasts the lowest rates of malaria and cholera and the highest rates of access to doctors, nurses, health clinics, and hospitals. Within the world, Kerala boasts a literacy rate that tops the average of all other low-income nations — by an amazing 40 percent.

And the literate in Kerala, unlike most of the rest of the low-income world, include girls as well as boys. In 1994, 93 percent of high school-age girls in Kerala were enrolled in high school, more than three times the rate in the rest of India and the world’s poor nations.

The people of Kerala owe their good fortune, their outstanding quality of life, partly to the accidents of geography. On the west, Kerala stretches along the Indian Ocean. This long coastline has always left Kerala open to new ideas from abroad, everything from Christianity to communism.

Meanwhile, on the east, mountain ranges have kept Kerala somewhat separate from the rest of the South Asian subcontinent. These mountains, together with the sea, helped create a land where divergent peoples — Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Jews — have lived side by side, in tolerance, for generations.

In this heady atmosphere, intolerance — and exploitation — would not go unchallenged. In the nineteenth century, Kerala saw massive protests against the indignities of India’s caste system, an outrageously rigid hierarchy that subjected people in the “lower orders” to life-long humiliation.

In the 1930s, inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, small but significant numbers of Kerala’s wealthy Brahmins, all born at the opposite end of the caste hierarchy, began “renouncing their privileges and giving up their lands.”

About the same time, all across Kerala, grassroot networks of landless tenants were organizing for thorough-going land reform. They would later elect, in 1957, India’s first communist-led state government, and this new government would quickly enact sweeping land reform legislation.

But the legislation would not go into effect. India’s central government promptly dismissed the ministers who would have been responsible for its implementation. Kerala’s peasant associations would not be intimidated. They kept up the pressure, and comprehensive land reform would finally come about, fourteen years later, in 1971. The reform would give about 1.5 million former tenant families title to their first property.

Over the next two decades, under steady pressure from peasant groups and trade unions, elected governments in Kerala, communist and noncommunist alike, would enact still more wealth-redistributing reforms.

Kerala’s minimum wage became India’s highest. Stiff tax rates on the wealthy, meanwhile, helped underwrite the free and low-cost distribution of basic services. Keralans, by the 1990s, were paying no charge for a minimal level of electrical power. In state-supported stores, Keralans could buy everything from rice to batteries at subsidized prices.

All these reforms, notes environmental author Bill McKibben, helped create “a state with some of the most equal wealth distribution on Earth.” (Read this in tune with this)That suited average families in Kerala quite nicely. But outsiders, particularly outsiders with power and wealth, considered Kerala hostile territory.

Industrialists avoided Kerala. They were not about to situate manufacturing plants in a state where wage rates ran three times the Indian average. Kerala, as a result, would not — could not — “grow” in standard economic terms. Without capital to fund ambitious “growth” projects, no giant manufacturing plants would soar above Kerala’s tropical forests.

Joblessness, on the other hand, would rise, to levels that topped the average unemployment rates elsewhere in India. But Kerala did not crumble, as conventional growth economics would have predicted. Kerala, instead, developed. Kerala’s left leaders may “have failed to spur economic growth,” as a 1998 Atlantic Monthly analysis would observe, but “they have been singularly successful at implementing development through redistribution.”

Indeed, between 1973-74 and century's end, only three states in India registered significant decreases in the percentage of their people living in poverty. Kerala led the way, with a poverty rate plunge from 60 percent in the early 1970s to 13 percent by the year 2000. Over those years, poverty rates in Kerala fell over twice as fast as poverty rates in India overall.

So which way for India in the future? India — and the world — might want to study Kerala's recent past.

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i read this in a website... i forgot the link..... worth posting i think
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Sunday, May 07, 2006

Traffic in India

I think this should be placed under Amazing videos

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4157960407243163215

see how smoothly everything works even without traffic lights and traffic police ;)