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To our Jewish friends...

At the NCI-Frederick campus, we have a series called "Science in Cinema". First of all they'll show a movie related to science and later an expert in the field will offer discussions on the research concerning it. Marking the AIDS day on Dec 1, they screened today the movie "AIDS jaagO". This is a movie for which funds were provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the film was produced by Mira Nair. The entire movie consists of four short films, three in Hindi and one in kannaDa. People in India might have seen this extraordinarily well-made movie.

After watching the shocking video posted by SrI maNi, I remembered a poem I wrote some ten years ago. I am giving an English translation to it hereunder. The Telugu original too is given at the bottom.

- The echoes of a new vEda -

"No woman deserved freedom", say the wise old men
Why am I unfit to breathe the refreshing air of freedom?

The first day of December is International AIDS day. This disease, when it made its appearance, seemed to snuff the light of the entire planet. Today it is under control, thanks to the discovery of many new drugs. It all began in 1988 when the first retroviral protease structure was solved in our laboratory, viz., the crystal structure of Rous sarcoma virus protease and later the HIV-1 protease. I consider our effort as that of the proverbial squirrel trying to help the mythological hero rAmA in building the bridge across the sea.

Thank you for your continued support to iKolam and its members.

We are pleased that there are few members who took the time out to vote as well as comment for majority of iKolam contest entries. As a token of appreciation, we are now creating an express lane just for our "top voters and commenters". The turn around time for rangoli publishing for these members is 24 hours!

In all the years that we have run the contest at iKolam, you were the first one to complain about voting improprieties. Our system depends on the honesty of the members.

BTW, we hate to do this. But here is a dump of the votes cast by members with questionable status, and they all happen to be on entry 181 and 182 - both are your entries!

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Here are some stats about the Mehndi contest:
Total number of entries: 27
Withdrawn/disqualified : 4
Total number of voters: 78

The top three positions that we declared earlier is same as what we found here using the weighted score method.

Here is the weighted score of the rangoli results. It doesn't change the outcome of the winning entry, although there are some changes in the placements, according to the votes received. The top entries in both the lists are more or less the same. And we must add that the weighted score can get skewed too. It all depends on how you slice and dice it.

I am reproducing below a short piece, written in the early nineties, on the eve of Thanksgiving Day. This and other inspirational pieces may be found in the collection "Today's Beautiful gem" at http://www.uramamurthy.com/mohan_gems.html

Today's Beautiful Gem: `Thanksgiving'