Now that is called snow!

This is a photograph taken in Kashmir, not Canada or Siberia.

As I keep telling my daughter, you get virtually everything in India...

Smart, smarting, gone...

Look up this link.

How much 'smarter' do we need our phones to get?

And how much longer before these uber smart machines start thinking 'Why don't we just get rid of these dumb humans lumbering around like dinosaurs and still thinking they "own" us?'

English in India

Look up this link. They need to conduct 'scientific studies' of this sort to verify home truths like 'an education in English improves your chances of getting a fatter paycheck'! My dear study conductors who suffer from disguised unemployment, hundreds of millions of Indian parents know this already, thank you very much. It is they, and not those who conduct such utterly useless 'studies', who have kept the likes of me in gravy all my working life!

One interesting claim made by this study is that 'only 20% of the Indian population can speak in English, and only 4% can be considered fluent'. Now given my lifetime experience, I think that the first figure is likely to be a gross exaggeration, unless you insist that even the dhaba boy who shouts 'aiye, aiye, bread-butter milega' can 'speak in English'. As for the latter figure, ahem. I suppose all my ex-students now in their 20s and 30s might be technically considered to be fluent in English, but I wonder, truly... I know how many of them talk pidgin or Facebookese, and find it 'too difficult' to write articulate comments on my blogposts!