Extended Vacation For Schools in Riot-Hit Assam Districts

By K Anurag

Guwahati, Jul 30 : Educational institutions in Assam's violence-ravaged districts of Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa and Dhubri are likely to have an extended summer vacation.

Over four lakhs riot-hit are lodged in 278 relief camps in the violence-affected areas and out of those over 200 relief camps have been set up in educational institutions.

According to an official source, out of the 64 relief camps in Chirang district, 54 are located in educational institutions.

Similarly, over 150 educational institutions in Kokrajhar and Dhubri districts are now housing the riot-hit.

With there is hardly any chance of the riot-hit going back home within the next few days, the re-opening of these educational institutions on schedule on August 1 seems highly unlikely.

State Education Minister Dr Himanta Bishwa Sarma informed that in view of the prevailing situation summer vacation has been extended by another seven days.

In case, the relief camps in educational institutions still remain operational beyond the extended summer vacation, the education department will take further steps to make these institutions functional.

Most relief-camp inmates, whose houses have been burnt down, will not be able leave camps till their houses are rebuilt by the authorities and that will not be possible within seven days, an official in Kokrajhar said.

On the other hand, some of the panic-stricken relief camp inmates, whose houses have not been damaged, maintain that they would return home provided they are given adequate security over.

A statement issued by Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi's [ Images ] office said that the situation was becoming normal in the violence-hit districts where 20 columns of army personnel along with 65 companies of central paramilitary forces are keeping vigil round the clock.

Too Late: 11,000 Security Personnel for Assam

Sinlung: Indian Govt is but a reactive force, the cauldron of ethnic fire will keep boiling every now and again.

No government has ever taken steps till date for a preemptive approach.



Northeast will face similar situation again. In another state, in another district.

New Delhi: The Centre has authorised the Assam government to deploy more than 11,000 paramilitary personnel in the state's violence-hit districts and dispatched a C-135 heavy lift aircraft with medical teams and supplies.

So far 7,300 personnel of paramilitary forces have been deployed in strife-torn Kokrajhar, Chirang and Dhubri districts after moving them from other states in the wake of clashes between Bodos and minority immigrants there.
In addition, the state has been authorised to use 11,600 men of paramilitary forces to bring back normalcy in the worst affected areas.
Home Secretary R K Singh said teams of National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) along with experts in drinking water and sanitation issues have been rushed to the affected areas in the same aircraft.
Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth reviewed with Assam Chief Secretary Naba Kumar Das during a video conference last evening the relief and medical arrangements for the victims of one of the worst ethnic violence witnessed in recent times in lower Assam districts.
The meeting was attended by senior officers of the all concerned Ministries and Departments.
"Two teams comprising physician, gynaecologist, paediatrician, public health specialists, resident doctors and nurses have been airlifted from Delhi at 5.15 PM yesterday," an official spokesperson said.

Anna Hazare Is Our National Tragedy

If there were an Olympic medal for persisting with a grand folly, Anna Hazare would not have missed the target like Deepika Kumari and struck pure gold.

New Delhi: If there were an Olympic medal for persisting with a grand folly, Anna Hazare would not have missed the target like Deepika Kumari and struck pure gold. There's no Indian who'll disagree with Anna's determination to root out corruption with the Jan Lokpal Bill, but to inflict yet another fast-unto-death on an unsuspecting nation on a weekend is a ritual that exposes yet again the true colours of the 'Gandhian.'

Like his supporters mainly drawn from the RSS, Anna is a fascist with the vision of a village sarpanch. He cannot keep arrogating to himself the powers of the sole spokesperson of India's collective conscience without playing his political cards with the honesty that is expected of a man occupying the pedestal he does.

We have a political system that has worked largely to our advantage despite its many flaws. Why should we let it be hijacked by a man who has fought no election and has little to offer beyond a one-point agenda devoid of any overarching political vision? And how can Anna have any credibility in the eyes of the people when he's aligned with a Rolls Royce-loving yoga contortionist whose business empire is under investigation?

Baba Ramdev is the last person an anti-corruption movement should be seen with, till he comes clean about the sources of his funds. Yet, he's the man who has emerged as Anna's other crowd provider. The sales agents of his magical cures are ever ready to congregate at his call at the Ramlila Grounds, or wherever their bread-provider directs them to go.

The yoga teacher has never hidden his political agenda, which clearly is backed by his immensely, and ungodly, deep pockets.

But what about Anna? Whose side is he batting on? Why doesn't he take on the politicians he so loves to berate, in electoral contests? If Anna were a democrat with a vision, he would have led a political movement against the present political order, but his politics is that of a village bully.

Listen to him, or else he'll put on display, for one more time, his incredible ability to go on a long protest fast. That may be a salve for the conscience of the South Delhi-South Mumbai middle class, which when it's not expressing its solidarity for Anna, feeds the venality of politicians and bureaucrats, but that's not the political solution to a deep-rooted malaise that's been singularly responsible for bursting India's success-story soap bubble.

As our economic miracle resting on one-sided growth turns out to be as bad a joke as Rahul Gandhi's hunt for gainful employment, the country's piling problems require a multi-pronged attack powered by a new vision, a new force. Anna with his tunnel vision and limited arsenal of political weaponry, is certainly not that force. He's more of a caricature of his cause than a credible alternative. And that is our national tragedy.

How To Survive A Shooting Massacre (Hint: Carry A Torch)

It's the TV "how-to" segment that's a sorry sign of the times.

In the aftermath of the Colorado Batman movie massacre, in which 12 people were shot dead and 58 wounded, Americans are worried about street safety and the local media cycle is moving on to reassuring practical themes.

"How to survive a shooting", is the name of an interview running on Fox News, in which presenter Megyn Kelly speaks with a former US Navy SEAL and sniper Brandon Webb about the survival tips he suggests for ordinary people.

His first tip? That  people carry a small high-powered torch capable of temporarily blinding an assailant, for long enough to get away.

He also recommends people run - "a moving target is hard to hit" - and have a plan. "Don't just close your eyes and hope," he says.

Before she introduces him, Kelly notes that guns are not allowed in movie theatres. “So what could you do to protect yourself if, God forbid, you find yourself in a similar situation?”

Webb is author of The Red Circle, My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I trained America’s Deadliest Marksmen. He has made several TV appearances and writes a self-titled blog on Guns, Gear, Planes, & Politics.

“It’s the frequency of these active shooter scenarios. I just didn’t want to let these people die in vain… ” Webb tells Kelly. “Let’s learn from this for the future”.

In the Fox News segment Webb notes that it can take a long time for authorities and help to arrive.

50 Inspirational Quotes For Writers

Plenty of advice has been written regarding how to beat writers block, but writing is far more than just filling the blank page. From living the creative life to where to find inspiration, Cheryl Craigie of Write to Done has collected a wonderful variety of quotes to keep you inspired

How to live the creative life

1. To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong. ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce
2. Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose…not the one you began with perhaps, but one you’ll be glad to remember.
~Anne Sullivan Macy
3. You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it. ~ Neil Gaiman
4. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance. ~ Samuel Johnson

How to be a writer

5. The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to says ~Anais Nin
6. Start before you’re ready. ~Steven Pressfield
7. Do the work. ~Steven Pressfield
8. If you want to be a writer, you must do two things about all others:  read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. ~Stephen King
9. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. ~Ernest Hemingway
10. Writing is like sex; you don’t have to wait until you’re an expert to begin doing it. ~ Anonymous
11. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere ~Anne Lamott
12. A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. ~Richard Bach
13. The desire to write grows with writing. ~Desiderius Erasmus
14. The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties. ~Graham Greene
15. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me”. ~Jhumpa Lahiri
16.  Don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work ~Pearl S. Buck
17. The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning. ~Anne Tyler
18. Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. ~E. L. Doctorow

Where to find inspiration

19. Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time. ~ Leonard Bernstein
20. Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy. ~ Pyotr Tchaikovsky
21. Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work. ~ Stephen King
22. I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning. ~P eter De Vries
23. If you wait for inspiration to write; you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter. ~ Dan Poynter

Advice on writing

24. Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~ Anton Chekhov
25. Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. ~ E.L. Doctorow
26. Write with the complete palette of emotions. ~ Cindy Lambert
27. Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head. ~ Mike Rich
28. The difference between the almost right word and the right work is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. ~ Mark Twain
29. I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~ Elmore Leonard
30. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very;” otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. ~ C.S. Lewis
31. First, find out what your hero wants. Then just follow him. ~ Ray Bradbury
32. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material…..John Steinbeck
33. When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. ~ Raymond Chandler
34. The objective of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story …to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. Stephen King
35. Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. ~ Barbara Kingsolver
36. Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound. ~ John Gardner

37. It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does. ~ William Faulkner

38. Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps if you have a plan and a course laid out. ~ John Garner
39. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. ~ William Shakespeare

What to write

40. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth
41. Write what you know. Write what you want to know more about. Write what you’re afraid to write about. ~ Cec Murphy
42. Write about what makes you different. ~ Sandra Cisneros
43. Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way. ~ Ray Bradbury
44. Never tell a story because it is true:  tell it because it is a good story. ~ John Penland Mahaffy

Writer’s Block

45. You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block. ~ John Rogers
46. I’ve often said that there’s no such thing as writer’s block; the problem is idea block. When I find myself frozen–whether I’m working on a brief passage in a novel or brainstorming about an entire book–it’s usually because I’m trying to shoehorn an idea into the passage or story where it has no place. ~ Jeffery Deaver
47. I think writer’s block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough,  sooner or later something will come out. ~ Roy Blount, Jr.

Failure

48. Mistakes are the portals of discovery. ~ James Joyce
49. Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks. ~ Dottie Walters
50. You fail only if you stop writing. ~ Ray Bradbury

So don’t keep dreaming  - keep writing.
We’re  busy working with our DreamTeam to collect awesome quotes for a new e-book of quotes on writing and the writer’s life, but we didn’t want to wait to share at least some of the “good stuff.”
Our sincere thanks to the DreamTeam members who generously contributed quotes.  As a token of our appreciation, each will be listed in the upcoming e-book and will receive a free copy when it becomes available.
Submissions for the e-book are now closed, but we’d love you to share some of your favorite quotes in the comments section.
We’ll let you know when the book is available for purchase.
So, what are your favorite quotes for writers?

By Cheryl Craigie, Contributing Editor at Write to Done. Cheryl also blogs at The Manageable Life. Please check it out if you’re interested in making changes in your life.

 Source: writetodone.com

Google Nexus 7 Tablet on Sale for Rs 15,884

New Delhi: The recently launched Google Nexus 7 tablet is now available on HomeShop18.com for Rs 15,884. The company is selling imported units of the Nexus 7 tablet at an additional discount of Rs 2,000.

On visiting the website, you will find that the company is selling the tablet for Rs 17884, but consumers can avail a huge discount of Rs 2,000 and grab the much-awaited Nexus 7 tablet for Rs 15,884.

"Use GC No. 'GC39P4UA81PE' and get Rs 2000 off during check out when you pay online," as mentioned on the HomeShop18 website.

It means that consumers can get this huge discount of Rs 2,000 during the check out process while paying online and can get the unit for Rs 15,884.

According to the company, the unit will be delivered in 17-18 working days.

The Nexus 7 tablet has an internal memory of 8GB and 1GB RAM. It features a 7-inch HD Back-lit IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. It comes engineered with a Quad-core Tegra 3 processor.
Weighing 340g, it is the first tablet to run the Google Android Jelly Bean operating system. The device has a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera.

The tablet is powered by a 4325 mAh battery that is touted to offer up to 9.5 hours of HD video playback and 300 hours of standby.

Assam Riots: Curfew Relaxed in Kokrajhar, No New Violence

Kokrajhar, Jul 30 : The situation in the strife-torn districts of Western Assam is limping back to normal with authorities relaxing curfew in the worst-hit Kokrajhar district today.

The indefinite curfew has been relaxed for the day while night curfew between 6 PM to 6 AM will continue in the other affected districts, official sources said.

The official death toll remained at 53 and there was no report of any fresh incident of violence.

Kokrajhar, Chirang and Dhubri districts are the worst hit among five affected districts, the two others being Bongaigaon and Baksa.

More than three lakh people have been affected in the violence that went on for eight days and most of them are sheltered in relief camps.

With the law and order situation improving, the district administrations are now taking measures to persuade victims to return to their homes.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday visited Kokrajhar and announced a Rs 300-crore rehabilitation package and declared that a probe would be held to ascertain the cause of the clashes.

Massive power failure in North India: Delhi metro services hit

New Delhi, Jul 30 : Seven states in North India have been facing a long power cut since late Sunday night. Due to a massive breakdown in the northern grid, the main power source for the affected states, there has been a massive power outage.

The affected states are Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.

There is no power in Delhi and its neighbouring states since 2 am reports IBN-Live. According to the report, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said that it’ll take another one and a half hour’s time to restore power. “My officers are on the spot. The fault is found near Agra. It will be corrected in one and a half hour time,” he said.

Thousands of commuters in the Delhi Metro will face a harrowing time on Monday morning as services of all the lines of the Metro have been disrupted due to tripping of power supply.

Train services on the 190-km Metro network connecting length and breath of the national capital were affected due to The Northern Grid failure also caused power cuts in large parts of Delhi.

“Metro service will not be available today (Monday) till the supply is restored as it is a major Northern Grid power failure,” a Delhi Metro official said.

The Delhi Metro normally operates over 2,700 trips a day, covering about 70,000 km and carrying around 1.8 million passengers on week days.