Happy New Year 2011 !!

Very Happy New year 2011 !!

Mahatma Gandhi has maximum quotes on Internet !!

Mahatma Gandhi is known for many things but he has to his name the maximum number of quotations by any Indian on the Internet.

The Internet has a large number of sites which offer quotations on a variety of topics ranging from friendship, love, destiny, life, death, peace and politics. But the net has one site which gives quotations from people from all walks of life all over the world.

The site address is http://www.quotationsbook.com and it features 106 quotations from the Mahatma.

One quotation attributed to him says "The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."

Another quotation says "It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."

The Mahatma is also quoted as saying, "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

He has also said "You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."

Apart from Mahatma Gandhi, there are a number of other Indians from whom quotations can be seen on the site. These people include the Nation's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, former president S Radhakrishnan, Swami Vivekanand and Indira Gandhi.

These people do not match the Mahatma as individually they do not have even 20 quotes to their credit.

One Indian whose name comes as a surprise on this site is that of Oscar award winning music composer, A R Rahman.

He has got only one quote which reads simply, "All my life I have had a choice of hate and love. I chose love and I am here."

Among world politicians, those who surpass the Mahatma are former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill with 183 quotes and former US President John F. Kennedy with 146 quotes.

Noted English writer Oscar Wilde have got 432 quotes and he is followed by William Shakespeare with 420 quotes.

Among religious texts the Bible leads with 370 quotes, The Bhagavad Gita has 45 quotes while the Quran nine quotes.
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Each Unique ID number costs Rs.100: Nilekani !!

It costs the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Rs.100 to generate each 'aadhaar' number, which will help address the challenges of inclusion, the authority's chief Nandan Nilekani, said here Thursday.

Ideally It costs the authority Rs.50 to enrol each individual for the Unique ID (UID) and another Rs.50 on back-end costs, he said.

In his address at the annual Rajinder Mathur Memorial Lecture here, Nilekani said that the aadhaar number will help in making public expenditure more equitable and in building new services for the people.

Nilekani, who took questions after speaking of benefits of the UID, said the country needed well-defined privacy laws to prevent any malicious use of data.

Answering queries about the demand by social activists like Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze against linking the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to the UID, he said that the number should not be used in a way that it denies benefits to anyone.

'Aadhar should not be a basis of discrimination,' he said.

The social activists had, in a statement, said plans to link MGNREGA to Aadhaar should be revoked as it 'threatens to cause havoc' in the fragile structure of the scheme that provides for 100 days of jobs a year to rural households.

Nilekani said the UID can be sufficient identity to open a bank account or get a mobile phone SIM card. Pointing out that penetration of banks was quite low in rural areas, he said the UID can facilitate extending banking to every village.

The UID number will also be beneficial for people who migrate from one part of the country to the other, he added.

Answering queries about possibility of data being misused, he said that the only service provided by the UIDAI was authentication.

'UID is one part of privacy issue. We need a larger privacy and data protection law,' he said.

Nilekani said he wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the issue in May and the government has come out with an approach paper to elicit the people's viewse.

Read more Each Unique ID number costs Rs.100: Nilekani