Friday, March 25, 2011

Criminal side of the bribery

Commodification of one’s duty and responsibility or misuse of one’s power and authority for the personal gain or favors could generally be termed as bribery. When one turns the pages of medieval history and British rule, both Indians as well as British practiced bribery. It was an influential factor in the political history of our country.

I could only imagine that bribery was there when time immemorial as ancient as cockroaches. As long as power and trust was entrusted to humans, at least on occasions they tend to misuse them. One could find treachery and betrayal even in epics.

When bribery is as ancient, a custom of practice, there was something that differed from time to time. The way it was perceived, encountered and reacted upon differed at different times of human history and at different cultures and countries.

What scares me most is not the bribery itself that prevails in our country today, but the tolerance level the people of India show. Only one way of protecting ourselves from this beast is to curb it continuously with all the might and force we have.

Every one of us knowingly or unknowingly tolerates or practices bribery in our daily lives. I wonder if the imaginative and the intellectual thought about the impact or aftermath of bribery. Did anyone try to trace and assess the damage it leaves upon us? Did anyone try to project the inefficiency that would be incurred in the future by the bribery committed today?

Did anyone try to factor out how many people die or lose their limbs, bear diseases, experience psychological damage, be deprived of their livelihood or even denied the exit out of poverty or barred from educational upliftment?

The people, who accumulate wealth through massive scale of bribery, also join the elite rich families in controlling the most of the wealth of our society. This is evident from larger and larger scandals thrown at our faces regularly nowadays.

The police that protected wealthy and raped the poor during British rule, continues to do the same even today, as I happen to have friends and their family who got arrested and beaten in police station, simply because someone shoved money into the hands of the police.

To get my community certificate, I pay bribe just to avoid harassment and lethal delays.

Even when those few good people left in politics and in bureaucracy work their heart out and rage a war against all other ill-minded forces for bringing out welfare programmes to benefit the weaker section of the society, it doesn’t help. How do we welcome that programme? What happens down there at the lowest level of the programme? Bribery and misappropriation of welfare programme funds, exploitation of PDS food grains, at the very lowest end of government arms, and in small scale.

This small scale bribery by local common men, who belong to exactly the same section which they exploit, weakens the effectiveness of a nationwide programme, leaving a rather larger impact. On the other hand, the large scale bribery and the money involved in it, impacts the economy of the country itself when it is hidden in Swiss banks and comes back as foreign direct investment. This makes the government weaker and weaker economically by increased debt due to the loss of its rightful revenue, thus impacting the quality of life of every citizen.

When the governments are tied together by the thread of bribery, foreigners not only laugh at us, but they also get a chance to coax and exploit the people in power who are ready to sell themselves for money, and influence our governance and foreign relations through disguised agents. Along with dreadful terrorism, this very bribery exposes our country to foreign threats. Bribery and low personal ethics can become a question of national security. Our soldiers are cheated, deprived of their rightful benefits and left with a feeling that our government does not care for them, as it was reported by many military grievances in the news lately. Will they feel proud to give their life for their country when their government can’t even fulfill their basic need and sense of appreciation for their dear service to the nation?

This beast poses threat to the integrity of our nation, weakens economy, increases inequality in the society, and creates dissatisfaction among people of India.

Hence, a sensible way is, to treat bribery with iron hand, to treat it as severe as a rape, as horrible as human trafficking and equal to murdering many lives. We should realize that it is time to curb this with strong legislative changes. The awful impact of bribery should be given due thought and work towards criminalizing all bribery small or big.

It is time for us to shed our tolerance and demand the government to enact laws criminalizing this shameful practice. We are capable of creating a law, as powerful and useful as RTI in this matter as well.

Every act of bribery or misuse of power should be analyzed before the court and the impact it would leave should be projected by experts and punishment should be as severe as the projected impact of the bribery.

The following factors can be considered by experts to decide the punishment for practicing bribery. The financial loss to the concerned parties, psychological impact and abuse, number of persons possibly would be affected, financial implication the loss leaves on our economy, inefficiency incurred by the misuse of authority, percentage loss in future growth of the society, number of socio-economic levels or layers hit by this bribe, etc.

http://www.ipaidabribe.com/sforms/un_convention

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Difference Between NMS and EMS

Haah..... When so many people search Google for this, well I thought it wouldn't harm to write a note on this basic concept.

"Not for Pros".

NMS - Network Management System
EMS - Element Management System

Well, lets define what is a network Node. A node is a single device or entity usually a single physical box, such as a computer, server, router, switch, etc. The node, usually is connected to other nodes in the network, interacting and exchanging data in the language the local network devices understand.

Of course a Network, is a bunch of interconnected nodes where communication between them is usually possible at will if any device wants to talk to other devices.

EMS is a system which manages a single Node or group of similar Nodes. The word 'Element' refers to a node in a network.

NMS is a system which manages the entire network or multiple networks.

EMS can sit in one part of the network and manage node/nodes in other part of the same network(or a different network) or it can sit inside the managed device itself and extend management interface to the outside world.

NMS can sit inside the network or outside the network (but can reach the network) monitoring all the nodes in the network or most of the nodes in the network and the connections among them.

So, the main difference between EMS and NMS is the ability of NMS to understand the inter-relation between the devices of the network. An EMS does not understand the communication links or relationships between devices. It only knows the intricacies of a single device, though it can manage multiple devices of similar type, it treats all the nodes in that group as independent devices not recognizing how they interact among themselves or their complementing functionality or what they mean to each other.

Another functionality of NMS which differentiates it from EMS is, its ability to monitor the inter-links among the devices, or the connecting links in the entire network or the ability to report the faults occurring at various nodes in the network and also predict how such faults disrupt the communication links in the network causing the whole network to not function or malfunction.

So, one can roughly say,

NMS = EMS + Link/Connectivity Management + Management of Relationships among devices + Understanding of contributions of each node in the functioning of the network itself

How does NMS or EMS look like?

Well, both of them can be just softwares with/without graphical interface running in a separate server or in a normal desktop computer or in a network node/device (usually EMS, with a web server).

Current trend is, a server with GUI developed in java or with a web server or an enterprise server.

NMS can perform very complex operations with respect to the network as a whole. The functions are termed as FCAPS.

Fault - Report Link Failures and node failures or faults in the part of a device

Configuration - Modify/enable functionality of a device/node

Accounting - Perform billing, accounting related functions for a commercially used business network

Performance - Measure/improve performance or utilization of the network or devices

Security - Protect the devices or network from harmful or illegal access, implement hierarchical access policy within the network, provide user management (human users accounts) in conjunction with device/network/service access

Literally an NMS can do anything with the network if anyone is willing to put such functionality in the NMS. It can create, maintain, provision or destroy a network or a device within the network. From sending an electronic message to operating a robotic arm to mechanically connect or disconnect devices, to showing the mobile users and their movements on a screen to shutting a water pipe or door, or closing a dam, to anything. The possibilities are endless.

But the devices in that network should be designed in such a way that an NMS can manipulate them easily.

The last notable capability of an NMS is to manage dissimilar devices that is differing in functionality, differing by vendor, or differing in its basic nature (the language a device understands, e.g. IP device and Telecom Device).

On behalf of a friend

Well, I happened to write a birthday gift note to help a friend wishing his lover a happy birthday.

But in reality, he didn't want to borrow my writings and I too won't be able to use them anymore.

Here are they,

1. I love you and thank you for being my first, best and the last love. So is this gift, capturing us together in my dreamy land.

2. Potter molds and shapes the clay. Guru molds and shapes young minds. You mold and shape my heart. With lot of love.

3. You crazy girl. I love you for making me crazy as well. Happy birthday :)

4. Rest of your birthdays are with me. Claim them soon. Lets create some new birthdays too. Just kidding darling. Happy birthday!