Vanishing shorelines: Hunting Down Water in India

“The third world war will be a war over water”.

Acclaimed documentary filmmakers Sanjay Barnela and Vasant Saberwal describe the experience of filming India’s current water crisis and tell the story of a people in search of water.

The article contain poetry inspired by their films from Maya Khosla. Here is one of them:

Veerabhai

One day it happens.
The fields go dry under
your open palms.
Not all the monsoon unleashings
Or trickle-down flows
from your neighbor
Will soak them enough.
The trickle will burn into nothing.

For a moment, this knowledge
is a dazzle-blue instant
lit by hard sunlight
And you, a speck hovering, hopeful
floating high above it.
You comb the cumin leaves
With hands that recognise this moment.
As if it already occurred.

There is no turning back.
Metamorphosis takes the old self
down in milliseconds.
And you know that to stay
Means to perish. The dust cloud under your footsteps
Is small as you leave
the shed earth of your life.


Visit OpenDemocracy.com to read the entire article:
Vanishing shorelines: Hunting Down Water in India

Maya Khosla is an Indian poet living in California. Keel Bone (Bear Star Press, 2003), her latest poetry anthology won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize in 2003. She is also the author of Web of Water, a creative non-fiction manuscript, and Heart of the Tearing, a chapbook collection of poetry. Her poetry has also featured in America’s Review, Permafrost, Poetry Flash, and Seneca Review. She has performed at venues such as Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival and at Headlands Center for the Arts, where she was writer-in-residence in 1998.

More poetry by Maya Khosla is available at P&P: RadiKahl Poetry & Prose:

P&P: RadiKahl Poetry and Prose

How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions

Microsoft's lack of multicultural savvy cost the behemoth millions, according to a company executive.

The software giant has seen its products banned in some of the biggest markets on earth--and it's all because of eight wrongly colored pixels, a dodgy choice of music and a bad English-to-Spanish dictionary.

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory.

A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.

Read the full article here:
How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions