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Showing posts from September, 2017

Sustainable Welfare

India being a socialist democracy committed to equitable growth of our citizens has always had a set of strong welfare policies aim at various problems namely poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality rates etc. These policies have often been a target of a section of society that is wary of the amount we spend on subsidies and the welfare programs; and when these schemes fails to meet the desired objectives they are quick to point out at their failure and how this is an ill use of our tax rupees. We often forget that it is imperative for us as a nation to ensure that the fruits of development are shared equally by all sections of the society if we are to progress into becoming a developed nation. You can’t underpay your domestic help, the homely maid and then complain about her children’s contributions to the malnutrition statistic. India’s educated elite have failed this nation (and the blame squarely goes on our political leadership especially the Grand Indian Political party

Crumbling Pillar of Indian Democracy

A couple of years back, Facebook launched a new feature titled “See First” which basically meant that if you interact with certain people more than others on Facebook, these ‘preferred’ people would get a precedence. Couple this with the change in Facebook’s algorithms wherein this change was internalized making your ‘interactive’ contacts appear first, the entire social media experience was polarized. I have about 350 friends but after these features were implemented my interaction was limited with a selected group of 5-7 people basically turning Facebook into a Stalking Machine. Moving on from Facebook, this feature was rapidly embraced by other platforms as well including many news outlets and apps which show you the tailor made news feed, specially customized for you. The drawbacks of this system were soon realized as people found – just as in the case of Facebook – that this had led to shrinking of their online reach and they were now getting a lot of stories related to a same