The NGO that Satyam's Raju founded

Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded has a very interesting story ...

Read on ...

I had traveled to the central Indian city [central Indian?] of Hyderabad to visit B. Ramalinga Raju, the founder and chairman of Satyam, one of India's premier technology firms and also cofounder of one of his country's biggest charitable foundations, Byrraju, which is working to alleviate rural poverty. ... [I]n the village of Podagatlapalli, at a small elementary school supported by Byrraju ... the classroom I visited was apcked with Indian kids, who were taking turns working on four colourful "kidproof" learning stations manufactured by Little Tikes and IBM that come loaded with interactive educational software. Each of these KidSmart Early Learning Program terminals were made of blue plastic and had a computer touch screen in the middle. They are specifically designed to promote learning in remote areas, where quakified reading and writing teachers are always short in supply.

How wonderful!

I was wondering what happened to Byrraju . If you visit the site, the foundation seems to be functional, but then it could be an old website that hasn't been updated since the fall of Mr. Raju.

I hope Byrraju will continue to get funds from some source to continue doing what it claims to be doing.
Or was this a front for fraud too? That would be terribly sad.

Does any one know if this NGO, Byrraju, is still functional?

Civilisations Die

This is from clearly-only-America-can-save-the-world kind of book (at least that's the impression I have got from what I have read so far) Hot, Flat, and Crowded written by Thomas L. Friedman.

The well-known Indian author Gurcharan Das remarked to me during a visit to Delhi in 2005 that ... America was a country "that was always reinventing itself," ... because it was a country that always welcomed "all kinds of oddballs" and had "this wonderful spirit of openness." American openness has always been an inspiration to the whole world, he told me. "If you go dark, the world goes dark."

Wow!

I agree with all that Mr. Gurcharan Das has to say about America except that last bit about the world going dark if America going dark. I think - just to give him the benefit of doubt - being an Indian, Mr. Gurcharan Das was being polite to his American guest. For I cannot think of any other reason how he could forget the decline and fall of empires through the ages. One doesn't have to look too far. There was once this empire in which the sun never seemed to set. So great was its reach. Great Britain too declined. The world did not go dark.

Nokia tops in Greenpeace ranking

I am reminded of what Thomas L Friedman said in his lecture titled 'The World is Flat 3.0' This was delivered at MIT as part of their open courseware program and can be freely downloaded on iTunesU. In this lecture he ridicules the current so called green revolution. He says: It is not a revolution. When have you heard of no one getting hurt in a revolution. It is a party out there. (or something similar to that effect).

I agree.