Street lights are down

Street lights in the Barathi road are not glowing for nearly a weak.It seems no necessary action have been taken to set the things right.

Some of the lights in the Anna Bridge are also not glowing.Its a regular phenomenon.At all time one or the other light fails to glow in the bridge.

Also a portion of lamps in the high mast in Silver Beach are also down.Even after months the faults have not been rectified.

Damn slow progress

The road partiotioning work in Hospital Road is progressing in a slow phase.It makes everyone inconvenient.Already a few have lost their life because of the stone heaps.It is necessary that apt actions are taken to set things right.

Car Parking

Lawrence Road is congusted any number of steps taken by district authorities,municipality and traffic police are in vain.The paking of a large number of vehicles is a reason for this congestion.The vacant space outside the Thirupathiripuliyur Raliway satation is an ideal site for parking vehicles especially for cars.

As a steps to ease the flow of traffic in Lawrence road the carks can in parked in this site rather than in Lawrence road itself atleast during the peak hours.

An alternative place for parking GH's ambulances

The ambulances of Cuddalore General Hospital is parked in front of it mostly in pedestrians pathways and on the roadside.Instead the old park inside GH campus can be cleared and the space can be utilized to park these ambulances and other vehicles.

Chennai-Pondicherry rail ? NO it must be Chennai-Cuddalore

In the 23rd Southern Zonal Conuncil meeting Ms.Jayalalitha reffering to the Pondichery government's proposal of bulding a new rail route between Chennai and Pondichery had promised to give the land along Buckingham canal.

Already there is a compelling need for a rail route between Cuddalore and Pondichery.Also an proposal to make a new rail route between Cuddalore and Pondicherry.

Therefore it would be better to include all these three project as a single project and make the rail route between Chennai and Cuddalore rather than ending it Pondicherry itself.

Lavish Pondichery

Pondichery as an Union Territory receives more than neccessary fund from the Central Government and use it unproductively.

The announcement of the government of the start of a new Government Medical College bears an example of it.Already there are soo many medical colleges in the UT.There are freakish adding one more to the list.

This case is just an example, laying roads over and over and over again on an road which is already in very good condition,liting highmast and street lamps even during the day time are some of the other examples.

Now there have proposed to build a new cricket stadium.Not because there isn't enough cricket stadium in the country, but to make a political gain and to loot away the remaining wealth from the nearby districts of Tamil Nadu by often bringing people of special occasions and making a large business out of it.

Ok what else?? they have a proposal to bring a free port(duty free port) in Indian Waters.They get so much from the Central Government so there is no need for them to generate revenue through taxation.The direct consequence of this act of bringing a duty free port will be,most ships will prefer this port and there will be large in flow of commodities,so cheaper price compared to the neighbouring state, consequently a large inflow of money from outside through the consumers from neighbouring districts and so an increased business activity and increased money flow in the their territory which only means a complete devastation of the economic activities of the neighbouring districts whose economic condition is already crippled due to the tax consession of the UT.

Its not all that the chief minister has announced that a subsidy of one crore will be given to entrepreneurs who are willing to start a new hotel in the UT.

ONE CRORE subsidy!!! is that paid out of the revenue generated by themselves??? une grande NON who is subsidising whos tax money?? In fact they pay very very less tax compared to people of others states, and get a lion share I am sorry a DINO SHARE.What a discrimination!! is this the equality the Independent India grantees for its citizens????

EU Constitution

Here I given you the link that contains the full text EU constitution(English)
Click the following link EU Constitution

or paste the following URL/website address in your browser's address bar

http://europa.eu.int/constitution/en/lstoc1_en.htm



Also you can use this alternative link

http://europa.eu.int/constitution/en/allinone_en.htm

News items

French Referendum
French vote today whether or not to adopt the EU constitution.Opinion polls have predicted 'NO' is ahead with 55% of the vote share.But it is expected the small fraction of undicided voters will paly a vital role in determining the outset of results.

French people in Pondichery will also be casting their votes in French Counsel.


Rs 75 cr disbursed for tsunami relief in Pondy: CM
As much as Rs 75 crore had been disbursed so far towards relief and rehabilitation of tsunami-hit people in the Union Territory, Chief Minister N Rangasamy said on Saturday.

Housing projects for the tsunami affected people would be taken up utilising the loan from World Bank and funds generated from outside the state, he told reporters here while detailing the achievements of his ministry during the last four years.

He said the government had been in the process of acquiring 100 acres for development of infrastructures for a cricket stadium, educational institutions and a government sponsored medical college in Kadirkamam.

The proposed medical college would be started during 2006-2007 and the approval of the Medical Council of India was being sought for the same. It would have 100 seats.

He said that Rs 1 crore would be available as subsidy to private entrepreneurs constructing hotels in the Union Territory as the government was keen on promoting tourism.

His government had been able to maintain law and order and this was chiefly responsible for development of Pondicherry, he said adding the plan outlay for the current year had been fixed at Rs 810 crore compared to around Rs 400 crore when he took over in 2001.

He said the Pondicherry administration had expressed its readiness to hold the 2nd South Zone Chief Ministers Conference.

Courtesy: Hindustan Times

Jumbo DVDs coming — but at what price?

"Danish ship must be driven out"

The Supreme Court Monitoring Committee (SCMC) has said that the Danish ship "Riky'' docked at a Gujarat port for dismantling, should be "mercilessly driven out of Indian sovereign territory without loss of time."

Responding to a complaint filed before the Monitoring Committee by Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Parikh on behalf of Greenpeace, an environmental group, SCMC chairperson Gopalkrishnan Thyagarajan sought a full-fledged inquiry by a Central agency into the "illegal" entry of the ship into Indian waters.

In a letter to all SCMC members and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board, Mr. Thyagarajan said the SCMC was against "entertaining any interest in allowing the ship to stay for ship-breaking. It should go back to its source country, get decontaminated and thereafter seek return observing all rules and regulations of the Basel Convention as well as applicable rules of the Indian Government."

A formal order to this effect would be issued on June 2, a Greenpeace spokesperson said. "As far as SCMC is concerned, we take a serious and alarming view of the ship as fait accompli, which can have far reaching and adverse implications to India`s environmental care and concerns and international image," Mr. Thyagarajan said.

`Intention to cheat'

"The ship changing its name and arriving on Indian shore illegally clearly demonstrates its intention to cheat and deceive. Its arrival is in gross violation of the directives on ship breaking of the Supreme Court. The ship should not have been allowed to enter Indian territorial waters at all. The letter from the Danish Minister for the Environment cautioned India loudly and clearly. If the ship is considered hazardous by Denmark, the Basel Convention requires India also to treat it as such.

Copyright © 2005, The Hindu.

From THE HINDU's Opinion Column

An opportunity for the devastated islands
P.C. Kesavan and K.Balasubramanian

The forests and mangroves of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands must be used in a sustainable manner for the livelihood security of the local community.

full story>>

Unutilised tsunami relief fund

Rajasthan sitting on funds for tsunami victims: Congress

"The Government also has no information on how much money has been collected by other organizations in the State"

full story>>

CII Tsunami Task Force,CII Tsunami Rehabilitation Project

CII is already helping people affected by tsunami.It has setup Tusnami Task Force and announced Rs.15 cr. rehabilitation package for the fishermen and framers affected by tsunami.
It has also pledged for improving the fishing practices.It said it would "sea hunting into sea farming".
I think Nagapattinam will get a bears share.Its is neccessary for us to stay awake and get the right share for our fisheries.

After a long wait

After a very wait the road partition work in Hospital Road has just geared up.But no pits were dug till date for the installation of the sodium vapour lamps.And please keep visiting the blog for more updates on this project.

Annual Cart festival

Annual cart festical just ended in Pataleeswarer temple.It was really beautiful this time.

Keeping right

Almost all the buses which start from Cuddalore Bus Stand use the wrong( they keep right lane) to go towards the Anna bridge.i.e., the buses come out of the bus stand through the gateway whicch is originally meant for the buses to enter into the bus stand.

They used to do it in the late night hours.But now come this even by 10:00 PM.This interrupts the free flow of traffic in Lawrence Road also increasing the chances of accidents.

Officials must look into this and prevent the buses from violating the rules this way.

The most famous photograph taken in Cuddalore

Finally after lots of difficult I got the photo taken by Arko Datta in Cuddalore two days after tsunami.

World Press Photo jury chairman Diego Goldberg described the winning image as “a true spot news picture with a strong photographer’s point of view.” According to jury member Kathy Ryan, Datta’s photograph is a “graphic, historical and starkly emotional picture.”




World Press Photo of the Year 2004 1st Prize Spot News singles Arko Datta, India, Reuters Woman mourns relative killed in tsunami, Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, India, 28 December.

Silver Beach entry in Wikipedia

I have just now made a posting on Wikipedia about the Silver Beach.I have posted the same here.You can make any changes and edit the content added by me.To do that follow this link

Silver Beach
Long...exoctic...glittering mild in eyes...uusssss....romantic irresistible even tsunami made a visit to Silver Beach in the southeastindian coast. Silver Beach is located just 2 km from downtown Cuddalore however untouched by the busy life of Cuddalore.

Silver Beach is the second longest beach in the eastindian coast.Any one who makes a visit once to this beach will come here for the second time for sure (perhaps people there are expecting even tsunami to visit again).

To the south of the beach the South Cuddalore Bay Area looks as if it were a seperate island.

The back water that seperates the main beach from the island like structure is a safe place for water sports.There is Siver Beach Boat House rents boats for cheap costs(so you can spend long..looong... hours riding).Offcourse this is the best way to relish the beauty of the silvery sand of the beach on north,mint blue sea on the east,beautiful landscape on the south and thats not all,it's beautiful riverscape takes a bend and leads into the greeny dense birds crowded mangrove forest on the west.

I vividly recall the colourful birds fly singing in clear blue sky which may perplex one to the extend to rethink the meaning/purpose of life.I am sure these scenaries and sounds of birds here will keep resonating in the memory of one who comes here, for their rest of their lifetime.

Seating arrangements in Chevalier Shivaji Arangam

One could see the overwhelming turn out of large number of people to Cuddalore Municipal Park.

But this is not the case with the Chevalier Shivaji Arangam(Manjakuppam Ground).Among the various factors few important reasons why people come there in less number is
1.There is no seating no arrangement(installing some benches would solve this problem)
2.Two wheelers and four wheeleers cross from one side of the ground to the otherside along any path they feel like.

Once these problems are sort out the ground will also attract more crowd as in the case of Cuddalore Munipal Park.

News item from THE HINDU

Pollution kills off fish

A large number of dead fish were found floating in the river Gedilam on Tuesday. The discharge of untreated effluents from some industrial units was believed to be a cause for the high level of pollution in the river.

The District Consumer Protection Organisation has objected to the "mindless damage" caused to water sources and water-borne organisms. Its general secretary M. Nizamudeen, blamed the pollution on the discharge of untreated chemical effluents by a sugar mill in Nellikuppam. In a statement, Mr. Nizamudeen said some persons, unaware of the health hazard, were seen collecting the dead fish to sell them. Since the river was polluted, the ground water in the vicinity too had become contaminated.

As the river drained into the sea, it affected marine life as well.

Copyright©2005, The Hindu.

An article from New York Times

Honoring News Photos as Picture-Taking Evolves
By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER
Published: May 3, 2005

Since handing out its first award in 1955 for a picture of a motorcyclist skidding out of control, the annual World Press Photo contest has grown into photojournalism's premier event. The 50th-anniversary exhibition, featuring prize-winning news images from 2004, opens tomorrow at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

This year's Photo of the Year award went to the Indian photographer Arko Datta for his shot of a woman in Cuddalore, in southern India, lamenting the death of a relative killed in the tsunami. World Press Photo, a nonprofit foundation based in Amsterdam, also handed out prizes to more than 60 other photographers from two dozen countries. They were chosen from almost 70,000 entries submitted by more than 4,000 photographers, more than in any previous year.

Though the international jury initially sees each image for a mere two seconds, it still takes almost two weeks of long days for the members to select the winners, using game-show-type clickers to enter their votes anonymously.

The recent uptick in submissions may seem linked to the proliferation of cameras in more and more devices, like cellphones, a phenomenon gradually turning everyone into an aspiring shutterbug. But World Press Photo is open to professionals only, which explains why some of the biggest news photos of 2004 were conspicuously absent.

"We had a lot of discussions this year because of the Abu Ghraib photos and the coffin pictures" of United States soldiers returning from Iraq, said the Argentine photographer Diego Goldberg, the chairman of this year's jury. But they were taken by amateurs. "Journalistically they were very important, extremely important," he said, "but the organization is called World Press, not 'photography in general.' It's about what is being produced by professionals for the press."

Echoing the arguments that news organizations frequently use to explain how what they do differs from what blogs do, many of this year's winners played down the threat of amateurs. Nina Berman, a New York-based photographer who won a prize for a series of pictures showing the lives of wounded American soldiers home from Iraq (originally published in Mother Jones magazine), said amateur photo scoops are an exception. "These took months and months of time," she said of her photographs, which have been collected in a book called "Purple Hearts." "The method of working, the level of expertise, of respect, is just totally different. It's like the third-grade scribble versus the Ph.D. thesis."

Mr. Datta, who works for Reuters, embraces the changes. "I feel it's a welcome trend," he said by e-mail. "The line between professional photojournalists and amateurs is thinning. And with more and more nonprofessionals opting to use their cameras to capture socially relevant images, it can only make photojournalism more popular."

Some winners bemoaned the decreasing number of outlets for classic reportage photography, which has long been a hallmark of World Press exhibitions. "There's so few venues for this work anymore," Ms. Berman said. "Magazines aren't interested so much in news beyond their demographic. This is a major problem."

Erik Refner, a Danish photographer who won the first of several World Press awards in 2002 at 31 (after successful stints as a soldier, athlete and photo model), agrees some markets are drying up. "I see less and less clients willing to publish these, and to pay a reasonable price for them," he said. "It's extremely difficult to sell."

All the more reason for photographers to rise to the challenge, he said, by more actively pursuing assignments, for example, "instead of just sitting and waiting for them to call you."

"You need to regroup," he added. "It's a part of the evolution. Of course the business has changed a lot, but then we just have to adapt to that."

That adaptation can come in the form of taking better photos. A trend that Mr. Goldberg noted this year was how "many photographers went back to shooting medium format," which produces large, lucid negatives still unrivaled by even the best digital cameras. "There you see really the difference in quality."

One photographer keen on traditional film is Paolo Woods, a self-described "digital dinosaur," who won a World Press prize this year for his idiosyncratic images of Iraq, which he shot on square-format, black-and-white film. In addition to the quality differences, Mr. Woods, who is based in Paris, appreciates the pace of analog shooting. "Photojournalists always look for speed, but I wanted to be slowed down somehow," he said. "It's a bit like wine: you make the wine; then you wait a while for it to become good before you drink it. But digital images, you consume immediately."

Though he occasionally shoots digitally and agrees that digital quality will surpass even medium-format film in a few years, he says that seeing each shot on a digicam's L.C.D. screen can lead to lazy picture-making. "You tend to be satisfied a lot more quickly," he said, "but when you're shooting with film, you never know what you've got, and you push on and eventually it's the last image that's the good one."

Another issue debated at this year's contest was whether the flood of pictures from camera phones and sites like Flickr.com might contribute to diminishing the power of the still image. "Those images will not have the same impact," Mr. Woods said, "and that has created a desire to see a certain photojournalism of quality, the real in-depth work. I think in the viewers there is a thirst for good, quality work."

And though space for contemplative photo essays may be decreasing in the print media, photography galleries and photo books are growing in popularity.

"I'm skeptical about the notion of tragedy fatigue or compassion fatigue," said David Campbell, a geography professor at the University of Durham, England, who spoke at the awards ceremony in Amsterdam on April 23, and in a telephone interview, said: "Still images continue to have a surprising degree of power. You wouldn't think that people in the age of the Internet and television would still go out and buy $45 coffee-table books, but they do. It's still the still image, and not the television footage, that sticks in your head."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

A photo from Cuddalore in UN's PhotoExhibition

World Press Photo Exhibition opens at headquarters 3 MAY
(Press Release Note No. 5933)

In observance of World Press Freedom Day, an exhibition of the best press photographs of 2004 will open in the North-East Gallery of the General Assembly Visitors’ Lobby at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, 3 May. This travelling exhibition of winning images selected at World Press Photos’ worldwide 2005 photojournalism contest in Amsterdam will remain on display through 6 June.

Opening remarks at the formal exhibit opening will be made by the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, Shashi Tharoor. Also speaking are the Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations, Dirk Jan van den Berg; Regional Director of TNT, Mark Gunton; and Managing Director of the World Press Photo Foundation, Michiel Munneke.

Among the winning images featured in the exhibition is the World Press Photo of the Year 2004, regarded as the photojournalistic encapsulation of the year; a photograph that represents an issue, situation or event of great journalistic importance. This year’s selection is a colour image showing an Indian woman mourning the death of a relative who was killed in the Asian tsunami catastrophe. The picture was taken in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, on 28 December 2004 by Indian photographer Arko Datta of Reuters.

The World Press Photo contest broke two records this year, 4,266 professional photographers from 123 countries entered 69,190 images. It was also the first time that the judging was completely digital. An international jury gave prizes in 10 theme categories to 63 photographers from 24 countries. World Press Photo, an independent, non-profit organization founded in 1955 in the Netherlands, is committed to supporting and promoting the work of professional press photographers. It has evolved into an independent platform for photojournalism and the free exchange of information.

This photo exhibit is sponsored by the World Press Photo Foundation, the Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations, Getty Images, Canon, TNT and the Department of Public Information. A selection of the winning images is available for publication on the international wire services of Reuters, AP, AFP and EPA. For additional information, visit the World Press Photo website: www.worldpressphoto.nl

For more information on United Nations exhibitions, call Jan Arnesen at tel.: (212) 963-8531, or Liza Wichmann at tel.: (212) 963-0089, or visit the website at www.un.org/events/UNART