Fake Affairs - Indian government's strategy to win more medals at the Olympics

1) Reservation - Reservation of medals and stopping the best from competing.

2) Price Hike - Making travel unaffordable for the other medal prospects.

3) Coalition & Kalmadi - Forming a coalition group at the Games so that nothing gets done and let Kalmadi head everything so that everything falls apart. (Corruption and graft is a given)

4) Peas and Bhupathi – Let them conduct a seminar on team spirit and national pride.

5) Indian Football – A motivational video from the Indian Football Team to inspire the athletes.

6) Mamta Banerjee – A demo on conflict resolution. (Need I say more?)

7) Air India and Indian Airlines – A case study on excuses and justifications.

8) Sharad Pawar – A session on multitasking (Yeah, and ruining everything)

9) Monsoon – If anything goes wrong blame the monsoon. (Had the gold, but alas, the Monsoon)

10) Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev– Threaten the athletes with dharna outside their homes if they don’t win a medal.

11) Rahul Gandhi – Will visit all the athletes personally. (Let’s hope this works this time at least).

12) Dhoble Uncle – Mr. Dhoble will personally accompany the athletes on any parties they attend if they don’t win a medal as per the law of 1960 BC. (Videography will be a must)

13) Cricket  - Let all sports be allowed but only if it has something to do with Cricket. (Let Sachin and Yuvraj compete in all of them )

14) Dhoni and Saurav – They should captain all the events.  (Saurav as mentor only though)

15) Manmohan and Advani – Make Manmohan Singh the Chief PR Officer and Advani the Yatra Chief. (Rath is optional).

Note: Offense intended but not meant.

Great Quotes by Great People

  


"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."

"An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind."

- Mahatma Gandhi.

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"Love begins at home."

-Mother Teresa

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 "I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands."

 "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

- Nelson Mandela

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"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free."

"I have a dream."

- Martin Luther King

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 "The Soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy."

"Freedom of choice is a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions."

- Mikhail Gorbachev

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 "Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. "

- Lenin

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 “The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”

- J. Robert Oppenheimer

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“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such understanding has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

 - Neville Chamberlain

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    "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

- Barack Obama

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  "A tyrst with destiny - A the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awaken to life and Freedom" - August 14th 1947.

- Jawaharlal Nehru

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"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."


- Moses

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The scientific history of radium is beautiful."

-Marie Curie

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"The flame of French resistance must not and shall not die."

-Charles de Gaulle

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"The enemy has begun to emply a new and most cruel bomb."

-Emperor Hiroshito

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"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. 

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. "

- J F Kennedy

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 "We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender". "You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival."

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

"This was their finest hour."

- Winston Churchill

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"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. "

- Charles Darwin

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"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

“You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

- Abraham Lincoln

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“Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

- Ronald Reagan

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 “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

- Isaac Newton

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“That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.”

- Friedrich Nietzche

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“The pen is mightier than the sword.”

- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

- Sun-tzu

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“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

- Fred R. Barnard

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“Divide and Conquer.”

- Julius Caesar

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“Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake.”

- Napolean Bonaparte

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“It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.” - Stewart's Law of Retroaction from Murphy's Law, Book Two.

 

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

-Confucius

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“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”

- George Washington

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"Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny."

-Lao-Tze

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Work like you don’t need money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one’s watching

-Unknown Author

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Moments that Mattered - A Collection of Photos that Defined our Time

A first for the general public, the picture of the “mushroom cloud”? is a very accurate approximation of the enormous quantity of energy spread below. The first atomic bomb, released on August 6 in Hiroshima(Japan) killed about 80,000 people, but it didn’t seem enough because the Japanese didn’t surrender right away. Therefore, on August 9 another bomb was released above Nagasaki. The effects of the second bomb were even more devastating – 150,000 people were killed or injured. But the powerful wind, the extremely high temperature and radiation caused enormous long term damage.

1983 James B. Dickman Dallas Times Herald
For his telling photographs of life and death in El Salvador.

1984 Anthony Suau The Denver Post

For a series of photographs which depict the tragic effects of starvation in Ethiopia and for a single photograph of a woman at her husband's gravesite on Memorial Day.

1997: Annie Wells, The Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, CA - For her dramatic photograph of a local firefighter rescuing a teenager from raging floodwaters

For his memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Photographic staff of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, “for its photographic coverage of students following the shooting at Columbine High School near Denver.”

2002: Staff of The New York Times, “for its coverage of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.”

2001: Alan Diaz, Associated Press, “for his photograph of federal agents removing Elián González from his uncle's home.”

The Afghan girl, a picture shot by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. Sharbat Gula was one of the students in an informal school within the refugee camp; McCurry, rarely given the opportunity to photograph Afghan women, seized the opportunity and captured her image. She was approximately 12 years old at the time. She made it on the cover of National Geographic next year, and her identity was discovered in 1992.

Today we break a little the site’s pattern showing you not a photo but an image captured from a film showing the Palestinian father, Jamil ad-Durra, trying to protect his son from Israeli gunfire moments before the boy was shot dead, the father wounded and a Palestinian ambulance driver who came to rescue them, also killed.

The Tank Man is the picture of a student who tries to stop the tanks in Tiananmen Square standing in front of them. The tank driver didn’t crush the man with the bags but shortly after, the square filled with blood. The photo showed the Chinese that there is hope. However, China is still controlled by a communist regime.

The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which is located near by the borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey.

June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon to bring attention to the repressive policies of the Catholic Diem regime that controlled the South Vietnamese government at the time. Buddhist monks asked the regime to lift its ban on flying the traditional Buddhist flag, to grant Buddhism the same rights as Catholicism, to stop detaining Buddhists and to give Buddhist monks and nuns the right to practice and spread their religion. While burning Thich Quang Duc never moved a muscle.

After capturing and executing Che in 1967, before bury him in a secret tomb, the executioners made a group photo with the body, to demonstrate the people that EL GRAN CHE is dead. The picture actually made him a legend, his admirers said he had a forgiving look on his face and compared him with Jesus.

Adolf Hitler visits Paris with architect Albert Speer (left) June 23, 1940

Award winning photo showing a Iraqi man comforts his son at a holding center for prisoners of war in An Najaf, Iraq, 31 March 2003. AP photographer Jean-Marc Bouju has won the 2003 World Press Photo of the Year competition. Jean-Marc won also the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography. With barbed-wire in the foreground, the picture shows a father who has been detained by the Army’s 101st Airborne division. The man wears a bag over his head, and he clutches his son in his lap.

This photo shows one of the 200+ people who fell to their deaths during the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. The individual has been unofficially identified as 43-year-old Jonathan Briley, an employee of the Windows on the World restaurant.

As early as 1793, Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce and his brother Claude imagined a photographic process, and over the next several years, Nicéphore experimented with various light-sensitive substances and cameras. In 1824 he produced a view from his window on a metal plate covered with asphalt. That and most other pictures fashioned by Niépce in the 1820s no longer exist, but the fuzzy image of a pigeon house and a barn roof taken in the summer of 1827 is a good representation of Niépce’s art. To make what he called a “heliograph,” or sun drawing, Niépce employed an exposure time of more than eight hours. Photography, if not yet practical, had been invented.

Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. For many throughout the world, one teenage girl gave them a story and a face. She was Anne Frank, the adolescent who, according to her diary, retained her hope and humanity as she hid with her family in an Amsterdam attic. In 1944 the Nazis, acting on a tip, arrested the Franks; Anne and her sister died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen only a month before the camp was liberated. The world came to know her through her words and through this ordinary portrait of a girl of 14. She stares with big eyes, wearing an enigmatic expression, gazing at a future that the viewer knows will never come.

This photo was taken as the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed about a minute after lift-off. All seven crew members were killed, including Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first teacher in space. One of the fastest-spreading news stories ever, it is estimated that 85% of Americans had heard about the accident within one hour.

Earthrise 1968

The late adventure photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Captured on Christmas Eve, 1968, near the end of one of the most tumultuous years the U.S. had ever known, the Earthrise photograph inspired contemplation of our fragile existence and our place in the cosmos. For years, Frank Borman and Bill Anders of the Apollo 8 mission each thought that he was the one who took the picture. An investigation of two rolls of film seemed to prove Borman had taken an earlier, black-and-white frame, and the iconic color photograph, which later graced a U.S. postage stamp and several book covers, was by Anders.

Hillary and Tenzing return from the summit of Everest.

This picture won the Pulitzer Breaking News Photography 2007 award. Photo’s citation reads, “Awarded to Oded Balilty of The Associated Press for his powerful photograph of a lone Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces as they remove illegal settlers in the West Bank.

The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.

Assassin of Mahatma Gandhi by

Nathuram Vinayak Godse at point blank range on 30 January 1948 in New Delhi. Godse, a Hindu nationalist activist from Pune, Maharashtra who resented what he considered was Gandhi's partiality to India's Muslims, plotted the assassination with Narayan Apte and six others. After a trial that lasted over a year, Godse was sentenced to death on 8 November, 1949.

This is probably Canada’s most famous picture. The Oka Crisis was a land dispute between the Mohawk nation and the town of Oka, Quebec which began on March 11 1990, and lasted until September 26 1990. It resulted in three deaths, and would be the first of a number of violent conflicts between Indigenous people and the Canadian Government in the late 20th century.

Soviet Union soldiers Raqymzhan Qoshqarbaev and Georgij Bulatov raising the flag on the roof of Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany in May, 1945.

Picture of segregated water in walfountains in North Carolina taken by Elliott Erwitt.

The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat him. This picture shocked the whole world. No one knows what happened to the child, including the photographer Kevin Carter who left the place as soon as the photograph was taken.  Three months later he committed suicide due to depression.

Source: The Pulitzer

Source: BuzzFeed, Inc.

True Glory at the Olympics

The Olympics are around the corner and countries await their destined glory,

To prepare for moments that‘s sure to endure for many generations.

Heaps of sacrifices and pain has gone into conditioning the body and mind,

With men and women living out their dream of competing for their nations.

The Games is a true test of resolve and the human spirit,

Where competing takes precedence over claiming dominance.

It is all about triumph of the body and will over all odds and matter,

Where love for your land and people attain greatest prominence.

The Olympics is about pushing the limits of human capabilities,

Constantly testing the realms and boundaries of mass and mind.

It is not just about bringing accolades, fame and success to a lucky few,

But it is something that unites the brotherhood of the entire humankind.

Over the years we have seen what it means to be triumphant at the Games,

Feeling the rush of adulation and plaudits that is so richly deserved.

Although one is expected to push the anvils of our undefined confines,

It’s crucial to make sure the Games’ sanctified reputation is preserved.

True champions show humility in victory and are gracious in defeat,

Many times victory lies not in coming on top but just in finishing.

Showcasing grit and commitment is often what guarantees exultation,

With willingness to overcome any obstacle no matter how menacing.

In the end it is not about how many medals hang proudly on one’s neck,

But the biggest achievement is the number of friends you made while at it.

Victory is symbolized by shoulders to lean on and hands to hold on,

Relationships that transcend time and will never rupture or split.

It is often said that what’s truly important is taking part and competing,

Bringing glory to kin and country by adding to a story that will last forever.

Immortality is guaranteed to anyone that upholds the Games' founding principles,

Although winning is sometimes everything it shouldn’t be the only endeavor.

Let the Olympics begin and let it be a showpiece of what we are capable of,

Bringing hope, peace and happiness to one and all no matter where they reside.

Let the Games be a harbinger of change for the better that make us bigger and stronger,

All the while upholding what is significant and giving our best with honor and pride.