I have been meaning to setup something for those who cant vote – one category being us the immigrants! Well here it is a way for you to cast your vote, wish this had the ability to set a date for voting and also ask couple of more bill related questions:

May be someone will create a bill relating voting widget, may be use the VoteSmart API.

It’s a historic moment in the history of Indian sports. First ever individual sport gold medal in the Olympics! Abhinav Bindra has made us all of proud. United States has an450 men old Olympic team while the Indian contingent is just about 59! We might not have quality sportsmen to qualify for the big event but the hope of 1.1 Billion Indians is revived by this feet.

Some cynics remark that every 30 years India gets a gold in Olympics so the next will be due in 30 years. Do you think so? Can we do something to change the dire state of Athletics and Sports in general in India? Can we get the nation to think something more than Cricket? Of course all of the nation wants to think something other than Cricket but they need a pillar they need a hero to hold on to. Abhinav might be just it -? We the NRIs (right ? – I’m one now) give quite a bit back to the nation in terms of supporting education, aid during natural disasters etc. But how about if we have a Hope fund for Indian sports! Especially the individual sports? The idea is that this fund trains may 5-10 Indian sports stars from early on – gets them the appropriate coaching from abroad and nourishes their dreams and ambitions. We need more Bindra’s to make our believe in themselves and something must be done about it – more on a consistent, quality driven and citizen fueled approach.

A common result of such success it media hype and melodrama. We often have seen that we the desis fall so much to emotions and just get over-whelmed by feelings. The next steps , action and what we ought to do is usually missing! And thus our circles of misery and overjoy continues . So what could be the next step to promote more athletics in India. Among the NRIs and at least in North America is very popular to try endurance sports like Marathon, Cycling etx. Usually these events are coupled with fund-raising – so how if we associate these events with the cause of moving the state of India sports one notch up. Concrete how if on the Marathon event we invite one of the athletes from India to participate. Usually a fund raising marathon team is about 40-60 people. So if everyone contributes $75-100 we have enough to sponsor an Indian athlete to participate in the event!!! What do you think of the idea?

SiliconIndia, apparently one of the primere India professional network reports that India has degraded in its Forbes business potential ranking. The prime reasons it gives is high inflation and increased personal freedom.

For a while we have been the media has been focusing on every form of outsourcing, technology and the big business cities. But the “gross” in the India GDP comes from small city and small town India. The inflation is attribute of the increased disproportional spending of this small city India. Bit city India was always able to do this! What pains me is that the core problems of the economy are not made a day to day problem talk:
- How is the O of outsourced economy going to finally reach small city India?
- How is the T of technology affect the education in small cities
- How is that bright young folks can find employment in small town India to make a not only local but a global change. Can an infrastrucure to support this be built?

I gradually moved from a small town to smaller town to wealthy city to wealthier country. There is immense opportunity on all this levels but we publicize and want to go after only the top notch ones. It will be great exercise to actually start building the belief in local oppurtunity, and i love that my friend Nipun is doing something like that. Check out Karma Tube is a set of inspirational pieces motivating the change which can happen locally.

• Split folks in groups – share 2 unique things about everyone, test on the same.