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Telecom Major Bharti Airtel said it would set up another high-capacity undersea cable, which will connect India to France through West Asia, in association with eight global telecom players by the end of next year.

A formal construction and maintenance agreement to build a high-capacity fiber-optic submarine cable that would stretch from India to France through West Asia was signed in Rome by all the firms. The cable system - IME-WE (India, West Asia, and Western Europe) is the fifth in the series of similar cable systems, which includes the SEA-ME-WE series, and is likely to be available for service by the end of 2009, a Bharti Airtel statement said.

The nine global telecom companies that have come together to form the I-ME-WE consortium include Bharti Airtel (India), Etisalat (UAE), France Telecom (France), Ogero (Lebanon), PTCL (Pakistan), STC (Saudi- Arabia), TE (Egypt), TIS Sparkle (Italy) and VSNL (India).

The supply contract for the construction of IME- WE submarine cable system was also signed on by the consortium members, the statement added. This announcement has come within days of damage to three undersea cables, two off the coast of Egypt and one in West Asia. The damage had slowed down Internet services in India for some time.

About the project, Rajan Swaroop, executive director, global network services, Airtel Enterprise Services, said: “This is in line with our strategy to extend our international footprint and focus on connecting our customers in India to West Asia and Europe.” Existing i2i and SEAME-WE-4 cable systems already provide connectivity across the globe and the I-ME-WE cable system would help to meet the increasing demands of voice, private data and Internet traffic.

This partnership would also play a key role in providing alternate routes for meeting the bandwidth requirements of our customers at any given time, he added. The I-ME-WE cable system is designed to provide 3.84 terabytes per second and covers a distance of almost 14,000 kms, extending from India to France. Bharti already has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEAME- WE-4 to Europe.

The 11^th National Conference on e-Governance commenced at Panchkula with a call to policymakers and professionals to ensure that benefits of Information and Communication Technologies touch the lives of the poor and empower them. 

Addressing the gathering, Haryana Governor Dr A.R. Kidwai, who presided over the inaugural session, said India was the nursery for some of the brightest ICT technologists and scientists, but it also had the largest number of poor in the world at the same time. “No technological advance can be truly complemented if it doesn’t touch the lives of these people. It is this challenge that the industry, academia, civil society and the government agencies will have to keep in mind when they chart the future ICT policy for India,” he said in a concise speech. 

Dr Kidwai said the ICT revolution bypassing the poor had both economic and social costs as the gap between the haves and have-nots would increase in economic terms if benefits from ICT did not percolate. “The benefits would reach the poor only when they are given access to technology and its use. The technology should be rooted in the existing cultural and social milieu,” he said.The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, Department of Information Technology of Government of India and Department of Information Technology of Haryana are organising the conference jointly. 

Union Minister of Communication and Information Technology A. Raja, who delivered the inaugural address, also said that the success of e-governance initiatives would be judged mainly by the benefits it brought to the common man. “We must design systems that go beyond small pilots - to achieve speed, certainty and consistently high quality in the delivery of services - along with comprehensive geographical coverage,” he added. The Minister said that modernising government was about more transparency, user-centricity and inclusiveness. “It was also about responsiveness, removing the complexity of government and liberating citizens to use their talents and skills in an ever-changing and increasingly competitive world,” he said. He also appreciated the State Wide Area Network (SWAN) launched in Haryana two days ago. 

Describing the National e-Governance Plan adopted by the Central government as a major policy initiative having the potential to transform the socio-economic landscape of rural India, he said setting up of one lakh Common Services Centres in six lakh villages across India would bring convenient services to the doorstep of the citizens in both urban and rural areas and also empower them like never before. These centres would be broadband and Internet enabled and would be linked to various government departments at the backend through State Wide Area Networks (SWAN) and State Data Centres. 

Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who also addressed the conference, said information and communication technologies could substantially contribute towards achievement of the social developmental objectives. “In Haryana, our vision is to transform the functioning of the government and make the change from governance to e-governance.” Earlier, Raja also gave away National Awards for e-Governance in different categories for the year 2007-08. 

Sania Mirza has decided to boycott tournaments in India because she was tired of being dragged into controversy after controversy. The latest was her being taken to court for allegedly insulting the national flag.

The man who filed the complaint against Sania is a Bhopal-based lawyer called R.K. Pandey. Interestingly, Pandey, also called the “flag advocate” has filed similar cases against a slew of other celebrities, including Sachin Tendulkar (remember the tricolor cake-cutting fracas?), Mahendra Singh Dhoni, yoga guru Ramdev, T.V. anchor Mandira Bedi, actress Sharmila Tagore, painter M.F. Hussain and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. The latest to be dragged to court is Hamid Kazi, an MLA from Barhanpur in Madhya Pradesh.

Asked whether he does it for the publicity, Pandey from Bhopal: “No, it’s not for cheap publicity. I have filed all these cases on behalf of my clients. I am not the complainant in these cases. What’s wrong in it? It will make people aware about how they should respect our national flag.” “Celebrities don’t have licence to violate the law. If they do, they should be brought to book like any ordinary citizen. The law is equal for all - a celebrity or a common man,” said Pandey, who has filed over a 100 PILs.

The 40-year-old lawyer said that it wasn’t easy to file such cases. “I have meticulously studied the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971 and the Criminal Procedure Code. I can file a case in Bhopal against a person showing disrespect to our national tricolor in the U.S.,” he said, adding that section 179 of the Code of Criminal Procedure allowed this.

“It’s about when and where I come to know of the violation,” he said. “The jurisdiction is decided accordingly.” Tendulkar, for instance, cut the controversial cake in the Caribbean but the case was held to be maintainable in Bhopal. The magistrate’s court dismissed the case but the session’s court restored it, he said. He also boasts of his case against Hussain for his controversial ‘Bharat-mata’ painting.

We all love our national flag - a few of us a little more than the other. But nobody, and we mean nobody, is quite as obsessive about it as R.K. Pandey. Mr. Pandey has been successful at spotting people ‘dishonouring’ the flag as a vampire is good at spotting an open-collared neck showing a thick artery. His ‘victims’; Sania Mirza, Ramdev, Sharmila Tagore, M.F. Husain, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, and the latest, Hamid Kazi, MLA from MP, among others.

The lawyer wants to be given due credit where he sincerely thinks its due, stating that he has “meticulously studied the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971, and the Criminal Procedure Code”. But is Mr. Pandey being a bit too enthusiastic about fighting baddies who, in his mind, insult the nation by treating the flag in a shabby way? We do think so. Mirza, for instance, was caught in a photograph resting her feet with a Tricolour in the frame. Husain had depicted the flag in one of his paintings that wasn’t necessarily a kitschy paean to Bharat Mata.

The law, after much haranguing by commonsensical people, was earlier changed to allow people adorn the Tricolour on their selves with some (silly) rules still in place. We know we’re not quite as comfortable in celebrating our patriotism by wearing a national flag as a swimsuit or piece of underclothing.

But hell, we love our country and our flag too, without getting totally neurotic - and publicity-seeking - as R.K. Pandey.

Forget about the Dirty Thirties or the Naughty Forties. The Frisky Fifties are having the most fun by swapping the boardroom for the bedroom, pronounced a Britain based magazine which went on to extrapolate up to 2025 when people over 60 will outnumber the under 25s in the UK.

Having benefited from a property boom, these 55s own 80 per cent of the nation’s disposable wealth. With the burden of bringing up children now lifted many have money to burn while enjoying greater longevity and better health; though the only fly in the ointment is that more and more of the older age groups are contracting sexually transmitted diseases.

“How long will the party go on?” sighed my septuagenarian sociologist uncle who caught me unawares while I was reading this piece aloud to my wife. In no mood to let me off the hook, my uncle seized the initiative by declaring that India was different from the West and so it must stay. Citing chapter and verse he held forth.

Mid-life crisis is more of a myth in our country despite the so called upwardly mobile class running a rat race to El Dorado. It is a Western construct which feeds on their youth obsessed culture which makes a virtue of relentless pursuit of self-renewal unmindful of the cost to the family and society.

If youth is a gift of God, age is a work of art. It is magnificent to grow old if one keeps young. It is rather foolish to resent growing .old; many are denied this privilege! In fact you don’t grow old. When you cease to grow, in more ways than one, you are old.

You truly should rejoice my son on your 50th birthday. Be happy that you have escaped your forties which are the old age of youth and are arriving at the age of fifty, which is the youth of old age! The one great advantage of growing older is that you can stand for more and fall for less.

Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man like you has no time to form. Take it this way. A man is getting old when he doesn’t care what the new stenographer looks like just as long as she can spell (her charm, I thought). You guys never tire of talking big of China where a person is not accepted as a mature adult until he is 40. An under-forty is not permitted to speak his mind in the presence of the wise, he chortled.

Suddenly uncle turned sombre and said: “The misfortune is that body and mind, like man and wife do not always agree to die together. It is bad when mind survives the body and worse still when the body survives the mind; but when both these survive our spirits, our hopes and our health; this is the worst of all.  Unable to contain myself, I interjected, “Relax dear uncle, who said you are going to be eighty, you are four times twenty.” Guff and guffaws later, uncle dropped into a cool siesta.

Here is wishing you who are tired, retired or re-tyred good luck, happy tidings.