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Singapore Travelog #2

Dear Readers – I’ll give you a breather in between my sweltering posts on Srilanka. Here is a short & welcome break, where I delve lovingly on Singapore with Sukumar Rajagopal. You might have seen his previous post in this series – If not, now’s a good time.

The Republic of Singapore is a clump of islands situated roughly 1° North of the Equator. It is extremely hot, humid & sticky even in December. Even 6 AM may prove too muggy for people unaccustomed to the tropics. Since we roamed around like wildebeest, we were sweating profusely & our shirts stuck to our backs & arms. Those who don’t want to stink like skunks  should plan for a “costume change” in the evening: Not exactly preening for the cameras like Shivraj Patil, hope you catch my drift.

During the Monsoon season, the clouds may burst any minute & drench you to your skin in a trice. Hooded Raincoats & Umbrellas that can withstand strong winds are must-haves for travelers.

What is in my top-of-the-mind recall when I think of Singapore?

On the 1st day of our trip, we were nervously negotiating our way to the nearest MRT station – Outram Park. Since punishments for even minor offenses like jay-walking are severe in Singapore, we were very jittery. We were dazed, sleep deprived & the day was sultry. We were wondering if we were lost, wondering if we should ask for directions – a massive ego-crusher which Priya Raju seldom stoops to. At Sukumar’s insistence though, I reluctantly agreed to take a bus & ask the driver meekly for directions.

When we alighted the bus, we were greeted cheerfully by the bus driver – “Vaanga, Vaanga” (“Please Come In”) in chaste Tamil. We’ve been to other 1st world countries before. But never before have we encountered helpful Indians, that too Indians proudly flaunting their heritage. In fact, some of the Indians we met in the United States pretended to be so Americanized as to feign ignorance of their roots.

The bus fare was SGD $1 – and embarrassingly enough, we didn’t have the right change. We bumpkins had just got off the flight & the smallest denomination we had was an SGD $50 note. Red in our faces, we admitted such to the driver. To our utter amazement, the gentleman driver smiled, gave us 2 tickets & said – “Parava illai” (“Don’t Bother”). One of the perils of living in a big city in modern India is, we are so accustomed to rudeness & orneriness in people, that such gestures of kindness knock the wind off our sails. We stammered our thanks awkwardly, but forgot to get the name of the driver. We aren’t forgetting him in a hurry though. He actually set the tone for our perception of Singapore.

No trip to Singapore is complete without a visit to the Jurong Bird Park. Located in the Industrial zone of Jurong Hill, the Bird Park is the brain-child of the legendary Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee. Our 1st stop in the Bird Park was the “World of Darkness” – and we saw HEDWIG! In reality, its an owlery that houses nocturnal birds, including a few Snowy Owls like Hedwig. I was so taken by surprise, that I’m relieved I didn’t chant “Hed-wig, Hed-wig” like the unadulterated Harry Potter maniac I am.

My most favorite place in the Bird Park is the Lory Loft. Its a 3000 square feet fly-in aviary for Lorikeets & it is roughly 9 storeys tall. Lories are colorful, vivacious parrots from Australia & its environs. Visitors can feed them with a special nectar in a cup. All you need to do is, hold the cup aloft – and these bold, raucous, multi-hued birds alight on your arm, shoulder, head or back-pack & feed hungrily. Its a strangely satisfying experience. We were all giggling like kids – 10 year olds & 60 year olds alike. Of course, the Lories had more fun than us – they setup a riotous din with their screeches.

A Rainbow Lorikeet landed on my arm & seemed satisfied with my potential as a perch. Emboldened by this, I crooned to the bird – “Aren’t you a sweetie?”. The Lory, obviously in agreement, closed its eyes & said “Peep” softly. I pleaded gently, “May I touch you?”. Of course, we aren’t permitted to touch the animals, but I figured the Lory may not know the rule. Bad idea. That must have mightily offended the parrot, for it lifted its tail & did its business on my pants. Then said “SCREEEE!!” so loudly that I must have jumped 3 feet in the air.

What about the food in Singapore? I have a small confession to make. I don’t like Chinese Food. I don’t exactly hate it – I just don’t share the world’s obsession with that cuisine. I happen to think that Thai & Indonesian cuisines are wonderful specimens of the heights that Far Eastern food can rise to. I accuse Chinese food of a heinous crime. It makes everything taste like meat. And I mean, everything! Even their water tastes strange.

I & Sukumar believe in the apothegm, “In Rome, do as the Romans do”. We had read that Singaporeans frequent Kopi Tiams – local coffee houses cum food courts. So, we took ourselves to a famous Kopi Tiam in Bras Basah Road. Oh My. It was a vegetarian’s nightmare. Most of the stalls had Korean, Chinese or Japanese food – or so we gathered. The stench from the grilled meat was unbearable. Though a pure vegetarian, I’m no stranger to meat. Thus far, the only food that revolted me so much was the Tripe Soup that a fellow traveler had in Greece.

I spied some long-dead, skinned animal that resembled an elongated bat hanging from a meat hook. In God’s name, I know not what it is. My stomach did a somersault. Only long years of refinement stopped me from bolting out of the doors of the Food Court. After a few more false starts in other food courts in Singapore, we mostly visited restaurants – Irish, American, Italian, Mexican – in fact, any place where the kitchen was hidden from our view.

Ever heard a waiter from the Far East say “Fried Rice”? Chances are, a Thai waiter will serve you “Flied Lice”, amidst your protestations. I’ve read that Japanese lacks an “L”, so Alice of the Wonderland fame had to change her name to “Arisu”. Apparently, the Chinese share this dreaded disease. A funny incident happened on our way to the Asian Civilizations Museum. We flagged a cab & asked to be taken to the Armenian Street. Imagine our horror when the driver tried to shake us out in Almeida Street! I had to spell the name of the street for him. Then, he promptly said – “Oh, Almenian Street. Why didn’t you say so earlier?”.

Of course, this does not apply to the sophisticated, educated elite from the Far East in the corporate world. But, watch out for the swapping of “R” & “L” in Singapore. When they say “Haverock Road”, they mean “Havelock Road”.

The crown jewel of Singapore is of course its zoo. It is an open zoo, where most of the animals are free to move around. It isn’t uncommon to see that the zebras have moved in with the elephants for the day. Or that the Meerkats have sublet their space to a Crowned Crane. Animal lovers who hate to see forlorn looking beasts in oppressive cages will rejoice in this zoo. Truth be told, I was scared out of my wits to see even lions & tigers without cages: only a puny watery moat separated these predators from the visitors. I was relieved to see that leopards & jaguars – that can jump across piddly little moats without disarranging their fur – kept in enclosures.

Our most unforgettable experience was with the ring-tailed lemurs in the “Fragile Forest” section. But to know about that, you should read my next post.

Its a pity that Singapore is thought of purely as a huge shopping mall. There’s more to the country than that. I plan to write a couple more posts on Singapore’s plenitude of charms, before moving on to my beloved Srilanka, the land of my dreams.

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Singapore Travelog #1 – From Third World to First

We just landed back in Chennai after a 7 day tour of Singapore. When you think of Singapore, shopping and the Sentosa Island come to mind. While these are great, if we wrote about them, it may not be that interesting. Here is my first pass at writing about Singapore with a request to Priya Raju to fill in.

3 Themes

In our visit, 3 broad themes emerged – first is Singapore’s remarkable rise from a third world country struggling to find its feet to a bustling city state with per capita annual income more than 22,000 USD (by 1999). Most of the credit for this remarkable transformation, achieved in just 30 years, goes to Lee Kuan Yew, the legendary Prime Minister, who took office as a 35 year-old in 1959 and stepped down in 1990.

Second, Singapore’s achievement in integrating its multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual population into a single whole, devoid of ethnic strife, is an example to the rest of the world.  How did they do that?

Third, the fantastic attractions –  Singapore Zoo, Jurong Bird Park, Sentosa Island and the Botanic Gardens.

In the first few days of our trip, we were very impressed by the superb Changi Airport, the modern MRT (mass rapid transit) train service, bus service and the highway system – overall, a first world infrastructure.

The material in this post is from the following sources:

1. One entire day spent in the Singapore National Museum.

2. We met with some friends and family and gleaned some information about Singapore.

3. Based on a recommendation, we picked up Lee Kuan Yew’s book “From Third World to First”.

Singapura

Singapore’s modern history dates back to the 14th century when Indonesian Prince Sang Nila Uttama spotted the island and decided to establish a city. Legend has it that the Prince and his entourage encountered a strange animal with red body with white chest and black head (sic) and decided to call it Singapura (Lion City) because he thought the animal was a lion.  In the following centuries, merchants from China, Malaya, India and other neighboring areas start settling the city. Its strategic location on the Malacca straits and the easy navigation from China and India piggybacking on the monsoon winds made Singapura a key location in South East Asia.

Singapore

Later in 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles from Britain decided to make Singapura a key British port due to its strategic location.  It is then that it got anglicized to Singapore. Raffles is celebrated in Singapore as the founder of modern Singapore.  Britain sent its prisoners and convicts from its colonies in India and neighboring areas to build Singapore and it quickly became a key maritime, commercial and trading hub of the vast British Empire.

Later during the Japanese territorial expansion in the 1940s, Japanese won a war with the British and occupied Singapore – a period of great misery for the Singaporeans which lasted until the end of the 2nd world war in 1945. As it came out of the Japanese occupation and started to rebuild itself, the British empire started to collapse and Singapore became independently governed. The People’s Action Party led by Lee Kuan Yew won the elections in 1959 with a key plank of merger with Malaya to create the Malay Federation. But thanks to ethnic riots between Malay and Chinese and other  reasons, Singapore was asked to leave the federation and it became an independent republic in 1965 with Lee Kuan Yew continuing as the Prime Minister.

Visionary Leadership

The real of story of Singapore’s rise started then. Lee Kuan Yew had several outstanding members in his cabinet including the brilliant Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee. From the beginning, Lee and his team focused on building investor confidence because they envisioned correctly that it is the investors that will create jobs. Goh, in a landmark decision, decided to invest 50 million dollars to create the state-of-the-art Jurong Industrial Estate. Initially it was derided as Goh’s Folly, but over time it became a magnet for multinational companies which forever transformed Singapore’s labor force and the economy.

Lee’s book covers the far reaching decision to make Singapore into a financial center. In 1968, they found that the international financial system ground to a halt between 6pm San Francisco time and 9 AM Zurich time (in a cycle that includes Zurich, London, New York and San Francisco). They decided to inject Singapore into the system to make a 24-hour financial system possible.  Over time with smart policy making Singapore became a key financial center of the world.

Singapore Government also guarantees an apartment home for every citizen at dramatically subsidized rates. Homes are made available according to one’s earning power. There are no homeless people  and no beggars in Singapore.  Our friends mentioned that the healthcare system is excellent. A quick back of the envelope calculation showed that medicines are quite expensive compared to India but not as expensive as the USA, but the consulting fee for the doctor is affordable.

National Integration

Our friends talked about the National Service patterned after Israel – every citizen upon completion of high school serve 2 years in the National Service and can be pressed into military service within a few hours when needed. This way, they keep the investments in building a full time military to a bare minimum. Post the national service, the citizens have to do 3-4 weeks national duty every year to keep their military skills well-honed. Every company is mandated by law to support this time-off.  It is said that the National Services is an important ingredient in integrating Singaporeans.

The one big thing that stood out for us is Singapore’s decision to make English the main language. School students study in English medium and are asked to study their mother tongue as the second language so that they don’t lose their roots.  With 75% Chinese, 14% Malay and 8% Indian Tamil and others forming 3%, they could have easily made Chinese the main language. By not doing that they avoided making one ethnicity superior to others. That move also avoided minority bashing and other majority-isms that are familiar to us Indians.

This melding of various cultures and the strong western influence in Singapore impacted their food, fashion and lifestyle giving rise to the Peranakan Culture. Who are the Peranakans?

We will cover that in another post. To read the next post in this series, click here.

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Hopes for 2009

Condolences to all those who lost their dear ones in the Mumbai tragedy.

Thanks and Kudos to the commandos, policemen, hotel staff and others who fought the terrorists to save innocent lives. Special salute to the policemen, NSG and ATS forces who lost their lives fighting for their country. The country is proud of you.

Centered around this tragic event, here are my hopes for India for the year 2009 –

1. World community recognizes India as a country that can fight against and survive such dastardly acts and will continue to do business with us. I am certainly heartened by some of the interviews with the survivors, particularly foreigners. One of them urged countries and companies to do business with India lest we give into these terrorists. Another one, a tourist, insisted that she will continue her tour of India. Such spirit needs to permeate across the world community.
2. Every India becomes more aware of terrorism and considers it their civil duty to thwart it. Become more aware of what is happening in the community and in the surroundings. Do not just rely on the government to provide security and fight this menace. It has to start at grass roots and community level.
3. India continues the policy of non-negotiation with the terrorists
4. Pakistan government takes serious steps to eradicate rogue elements (Dawood Ibrahim for example) and terrorist’s camp in Pakistan. (Do not construe this as a statement of assumption regarding Pakistan’s involvement in this tragedy.)
5. The Muslim minority condemns the attack vehemently and goes beyond to rid itself of radical elements
6. The Hindu majority sympathizes with the state of Muslim minority. A few bad apples are giving the whole community a black spot.
7. Our intelligence continues to improve and prevent such attacks rather than just react to such events
8. Politicians do not take advantage of the situation and will act as leaders of the nation rather than leaders of their party
9. India goes onto become stronger – financially, culturally and as a society.

In US, CNN dedicated almost a day and a half to cover the tragedy. I was particularly impressed with Mallika Kapur and Sarah Sidner’s reporting. There was an unfortunate incident where Sarah Sidner was accosted by a mob, but the way she handled the mob was appreciable. Goes to show the danger these reporters sometimes face to give us the story.

I wish the government had done a better job of dispersing information. At various times, we got information that the siege has ended only to see it continue and that was extremely disappointing.

Some of the sites I visited to get latest information included IndianExpress, TimesofIndia, NDTV, CNN, rediff etc. Of these, NDTV surprised me with their reasonably upto date information. Hindu was extremely disappointing.

Coincidentally, I happened to watch the hindi movie – “A Wednesday” around the time of this tragedy. This is a movie based on terrorism and how it affects the psyche of a common man. Naseeruddin Shah was his usual brilliant self. The climax was certainly surprising. As much as I could not agree with the message of the movie, I could not help but empathize with it. Do watch it if you get a chance.

Ganesh

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The Real History of Srilanka – Part 4

Part-2 of this series outlined the background of the “Sinhala Only” Bill in 1956 & traced its outcome – or debacle, depending on one’s point of view. It was a prelude to the “Policy of Standardization”, implemented in 1970.

This was an excruciatingly difficult topic to write about. I had to look beyond many lies, propaganda & over-simplification. The more I read about it, the more I felt that I was merely scratching the surface of a complex, multi-layered problem.

I’m greatly indebted to Professor K.M. de Silva, former Vice-Chairman of Srilanka’s University Grants Commission (UGC) for his unbiased analysis of the issue. His report helped me make sense of the many disparate nuggets of information that I unearthed in this research.

Background

In the Colonial epoch, most of the modern schools in Srilanka were run by missionaries. They offered free English Medium education – but since these schools were predominantly in urban area like Colombo or the Jaffna peninsula, access to these schools was well nigh impossible for the masses that lived in rural areas.

Huge swathes of the Srilankan population were illiterate, or semi-literate. In villages, Buddhist monks taught the upper strata of the society in local temples – but the curriculum was limited to the Sinhala alphabets & simpler works from  Buddhist literature, such as stories from Buddha’s life. The monks were literate, but even their education was mostly centered on learning Pali scriptures by rote at the Pirivena (Buddhist University).

The Battle for Civil Service Jobs

Even 15 years after independence, the biggest employer remained the government & Civil Service jobs were much sought after. Students vied for a B.A. Degree (Liberal Arts) to get a shot at these jobs. Srilankan Tamils dominated enrollment for B.A. Degrees & ergo, had a strangle-hold on government jobs.

Once the balance of power tilted in favor of the Sinhala Buddhists after the “Sinhala Only” Bill, Tamils found it exceedingly difficult to land Civil Service jobs. They turned their attention, hard-work & enviable coaching skills  towards Engineering, Medicine & Science streams. By the mid 1960s, Tamil students were the top-dogs in these streams.

Concurrently, education became free in Srilanka. Enrollment in schools soared & in the early 1960s, literacy rates touched 90%. Many Sinhala students graduated with a B.A. In liberal arts – only to find that neither the government nor the private companies had enough open positions to absorb them. They realized painfully that Liberal Arts degrees had become irrelevant. They turned their sights towards Engineering, Medicine & Science streams – only to find that the Tamils were fairly entrenched in those fields.

Pressure on Universities

In the 1960s, after Sinhala & Tamil medium schools ousted English in the secondary schools, the number of available university seats became woefully inadequate. The universities increased the number of seats very often to accommodate more students. Meanwhile, efforts were on to create new universities for the growing nation. Even 2 Buddhist Pirivenas in Colombo were converted into universities.

But, such expansion was very slow, because of paucity of funds & resources. Many aspiring candidates were bitterly disappointed when they couldn’t secure an admission. University education was, very simply stated, their meal ticket. This resulted in heated competition for the scarce seats in prestigious institutions like the University of Ceylon.

Around the same time, intense political pressure was applied on the selection criteria used by the universities. The Viva-Voce method had already been abandoned & Entrance Exams were the main criteria for admissions. But, this became unmanageable in the late 1960s, because of the sheer number of students passing out of schools. So, they were dispensed with & Srilanka started using the scores from the GCE A/Level (+2 or High School Senior Year) Exams.

But, none of these steps appeased students from backward districts, as most of them failed to qualify for seats. They struggled to compete with the urban elite on pure merit. The universities started feeling the heat – and intense political pressure from the United Front Coalition, which made it an issue during the elections.

Flash Point

After the introduction of the “Sinhala Only Bill” & students were educated in their mother-tongue, universities had to contend with students educated in 3 different languages: Sinhala, Tamil & English. The Burghers & students that attended International Schools had an English Medium education. Only they & the Muslims were permitted to take their exams in English.

Srilankan Tamils who formed at mere 11% of the population occupied 35% of the seats in the Science streams & 45% of the seats in Engineering & Medicine. Such superlative performance led to allegations of general bias & deliberate grade tampering by the Tamil examiners.  Thus, the clamor for seats dyed itself in vulgar ethnic colors & plunged the nation into a sordid communal conflict.

In a Nutshell

At its core, the “Policy of Standardization” started out as a program aimed to help disadvantaged Sinhalas, especially those living in geographically backward areas, that did not have access to quality education during the European rule. It was an Affirmative Action Program. As a side effect, it decreased the number of Tamils enrolling in universities.

This policy made it increasingly difficult for the Tamils to secure a seat in the Scientific & Technical streams. As a result, it aggravated race relations in the country. The Tamil youth in the North-East saw this as a discriminatory policy, aimed at hobbling their high status. This led to their alienation from mainstream Srilanka.

A Word of Caution: It is very easy to trivialize Affirmative Action as an anti-Tamil policy, driven by Sinhala Buddhist Nationalists. In reality, it was much more than that. The entire country was seized with the disease of creating a “Level Playing Field”.

To illustrate, Practical Exams for Science subjects at the GCE/A Level were abolished – catch your breath – because rural schools didn’t have the infrastructure for well-appointed labs. To this day, even schools with labs seldom use them. Students ace exams solely on rote learning & enroll in Medical school without even touching a pipette.

Policy of Standardization

In 1970, Srilanka under the stewardship of the United Front Coalition implemented the “Policy of Standardization”. Its main aim was to increase the number of Sinhalas graduating from universities & to simultaneously deter Tamils from hogging a huge part of the much sought after streams of higher education.

Thus far, entrance to universities was solely based on merit. But, after the introduction of the policy – All the raw marks received by the students were normalized to a uniform scale, so that the the number of students qualifying in each medium was proportional to the number of students taking that exam in that medium. The ostensible reasons for introducing standardization was to level the playing field, to make up for the differences in the facilities, teachers & grading standards that the Sinhalas & Tamils had at their disposal.

Later that year, the qualifying marks were lowered for students from the Sinhala medium.  So, the Tamils had to get a higher score than the Sinhalas to secure an admission to the Professional & Science streams. These steps ensured that more Sinhala students qualified for admission.

But this policy did not change the fortunes of the Tamils much. For e.g., their share of admissions dropped from 35.3% to 33.6% in the 1st year. The actual threat to the Tamils was more symbolic – the rise of the Sinhala bureaucrats & their diplomatic will to swing the system to uplift the majority.

Standardization, RIP

In August 1977, the new United National Party government of Julius Jayawardhene summarily abolished the Standardization of marks. This was a bold move & was seen as a step in the right direction.

But when the exam papers were evaluated, Tamils scored significantly higher than the Sinhalas for the hotly contested professional courses. It was feared with reason that Tamils would once again vastly outnumber the majority in qualifying for these seats. When this news leaked to the Sinhala Nationalist parties,  allegations of rampant favoritism among the Tamil examiners were thrown again & mud-slinging ensued.

The new government made a clever move: It stood by its decision to jettison standardization. But for 1977 alone, it also allowed students who would have benefited from standardization, to enroll in universities. This move increased the number of seats, as well as the number of Tamils, Sinhalas & rural students enrolling in the universities. Thus, it made all sections of the society happy.

Machinations of Minister Mathew

Many Sinhala nationalists couldn’t digest the demise of standardization. In 1978, they reignited communal feelings by claiming that the Tamils could only occupy 35%-40% of the university seats consistently by colluding with the examiners that graded the tests. Their mouth-piece was none other than Cyril Mathew, the Cabinet Minister for Industries & Scientific Affairs.

Minister Mathew was a bitter critic of TULF & a rabid nationalist that pushed the interests of Sinhala Buddhists. When the Parliament was in session, he brandished some exam papers from the 1977 Science stream, which the examiner had graded generously. While this did not prove any widespread bias on the part of the examiners, it was enough to reaffirm the opinions of those Sinhalas that thought the worst of Tamils & Tamil examiners.

Such orchestrations were towards achieving a bigger objective: Quotas for various ethnic groups, based on their population %. Interestingly, the Indian Tamils supported this: they felt that they would benefit by proportional quotas. But, the government was steadfast. The Policy of Standardization was dead & they had no plans to resuscitate it. They were not interested in quotas for ethnic groups either.

Summing Up

So, ethnic preferences ceased to play a role  – but something far more insidious took its place. That’s the subject of a later post.

Meanwhile in Tamil Nadu, clarion calls for a separate quota for Tamil Medium students are becoming increasingly vociferous. At least in Srilanka, standardization is buried & lies rotting. Once started, such programs never end in India – Political will is severely lacking & shameless vote bank politics are par for course. Its a good thing we are too benumbed to care.

Here is the next post in this series – Do check it out.

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Celebrating 1 Million Page Views!

This blog has not exactly had a spectacular run. We have had the occasional links from Desipundit and a few Carnivals, but that is about it.  Last November, we had completed 3 years and 5 months of existence and  the total page view count was 92,443 (from Sitemeter stats for 2.5 years. the first year we didn’t measure the stats).   Last November we switched to wordpress and at that time, we had 450 posts and 850 comments.

As i have said before, i stopped checking the stats long ago. A few days back, i had to pay Pressharbor the hosting fees for the next year and I decided to check the stats just for the heck of it.

For the period Dec 1, 2007 till date, the blog had received 1,089,829 pageviews ! I couldn’t contain my excitement when i saw that. Wow! After drilling down to the monthly stats, I calculated the page views generated by the key crawlers – Googlebot, Yahoobot, Cuill and others to be approximately 7.5%. If you look at the net page views excluding crawler page views, the page views stands at 1,010,299 !

We now have 520 posts including this one and a whopping 3,842 comments – 3,000 of which were logged in the last 12 months. During that time, we did 10 times the page views of the past 3.5 years combined.

Observations

1. Overall traffic from search engines is now less than 5% of the total traffic. It was exactly the other way around before this blog moved to WordPress. This means most of the traffic is coming from regular readers.

2. The addition of new authors and the sheer variety and quality of their posts – Priya Raju, Dr. Abdul Fakhri, Sujatha Manivasagam, NK Sreedhar and most recently Sultana Fakhri, seems to have increased the subscriber base of this blog dramatically.

3. Every month, a portion of visits comes via Google using the keywords -“Sukumar Rajagopal”, “Priya Raju” and “Sastwingees”.  I deduce that these are regular readers but use the search engine to come to this blog. My recommendation to these readers is to use a feed reader. I wrote a post a while ago on how my productivity improved when i started using the Bloglines Feed Reader . You may want to go through that. I now have switched to Google Reader which i think is much better than Bloglines.

Thank You

A celebration is never complete without thank yous. First a big thank you to the readers for reading and commenting and making it worthwhile for the authors of this blog.

Special thank you to regular commenters – Senthil, Archana Raghuram, PK Karthik, Subba Muthurangan, Vamsi Poondla,  Saraswathi, Jaskirat, Ananth  and many others.

Special thank you to Ganesh, my comrade-in-arms who has been with SAST Wingees since Day 1.

Special thank you to Priya Raju, Sibu Kutty, Sujatha Manivasagam, NK Sreedhar, Dr. Abdul Fakhri and Sultana Fakhri – the quality of your posts is what is driving the traffic to this blog. Keep up the great work.

Go SAST Wingees!

Survey

This is to the readers who typically don’t comment –  Are there topics you would like us to cover?   If you can leave that as a comment, we can try to get those covered.

If you are passionate about writing on topics and you would like to be a contributor, please let us know. We welcome new contributors who can expand our vistas.