The History of Lake Fife, NDA & Burr and Frere Roads, Kirkee, Poona

      LAKE FIFE AT THE NDA, KHADAKWASLA                 BITS OF HISTORY            

Burr and Frere Roads, Khadki, Pune-3

If you ever go to Khadki, Pune-3, you will not see any signage showing either Frere or Burr Road. Frere Rd has become Field Marshal Cariappa Marg, whereas all signboards in the area have been defaced to remove the name BURR. Burr Road starts from Mula Road, parallel to the Mula River, from a once-swampy area called Bhaiyawadi, runs across the cantonment area, past the Central Armoured Fighting Vehicle Depot (CAFVD), Kirkee, Officers' Mess, my home 10 Frere Road and ends up at the military barracks that Kirkee was famous for. Google Maps show that road as Khadki Railway Station Marg, which is not the case. So who were these names dedicated to? Brits, of course.

The Battle of Khadki,also known as the Battle of Kirkee, took place at Khadki, India on November 5, 1817 between the forces of the British East India Company and those of Bajirao II, the Peshwa of the Maratha Empire. Khadki is situated on the outskirts of Pune in Maharashtra, India. It later became a military cantonment. Put together, Khadki and Pune Cantonments form the largest cantonment in the world. Kirkee and Poona have become Khadki and Pune in 1978. Get rid of all vestiges of British residence in India; purge the names. Fair enough.

The East India Company's army was led by Lt. Colonel Burr, who came in from Dapuri village to the west. Dapuri is now Dapodi. The British Resident's name was Mountstuart Elphinston. Elphinston (6 October 1779 – 20 November 1859) was a Scottish statesman and historian, associated with the government of British India. He later became the Governor of Bombay (now Mumbai). Besides being a noted administrator, he wrote books on India and Afghanistan. Elphinston Road starts from Dapodi Bridge and runs through Khadki, the Bengal Engg Gp HQ, Deccan College and ends at the Bund Garden bridges at Yerwada, known to the Brits as Yelloura. Burr Road was named after Lt. Colonel Burr. 

Sir Henry Bartle Frere was appointed as High Commissioner for Southern Africa in 1869, moving from Poona on promotion. His sister, Mary Frere was the author of Old Deccan Days (1868), and Frere Road was named after Bartle Frere, though may believe it was named after Mary.

Harold Charles Chatellier (~1870-1962), the Manager of the Kirkee Club (later Kirkee Police Station and now Khadki Cheshire Home) stated that Frere Road, when first constructed a few years before his birth, ran from Mula River, past the Club all the way to Military Hospital, Kirkee, some 8 km (5 miles) and had maps to prove it. It was sectioned post Independence to run from its Elphinston Road crossing to the new Bombay-Poona highway. The next part, up to the railway line, wasted away into a stony path, but the remainder, from the railway line to MH Kirkee, was renamed MH Road..

NDA & LAKE FIFE

'Khadakwasla Dam  is a dam on the Mutha River some 8 km from the city of Pune in Maharashtra, India. This dam is one of the main sources of water for Pune and its suburbs. In the vicinity of the dam, there is the well-known National Defence Academy (India), the Institute of Advanced Technology (IAT)  and Central Water & Power Research Station (CWPRS). A few kilometres up the road lie Sinhagad Fort and the twin dams of Panshet and Varasgaon which mainly supply water for irrigation.

The Panshet dam was nearing completion in July 1961, designed essentially to supply water to Lake Fife, or Khadakwasla Lake, in such a manner that the huge lake would have more than adequate water for the people of Poona (Pune). The reservoir is the source of water for two canals that start at Khadakwasla. The right bank canal  irrigates about 45,000 hectares of land in Pune district, while the left bank canal supplies drinking water to Pune and Kirkee.

The Panshet reservoir would have a capacity of 2.70 million cubic metres, with Varasgaon reservoir, a larger body, having even more. The Khadkawasla Dam was constructed in 1879 by Capt Fife as a masonry gravity dam, founded on hard rock. It had a height of 31.25 m above the river bed, with a 8.37 m depth of foundation. Its crest length was 1.471 m and had a free board of 2.74 m. The dam had a flood capacity of 2,775 m3/s and a reservoir of 2.78 million cubic metres. It could not accept water from both Panshet and Varasgaon together, unless its sluice gates were fully open, causing an overflow of water into Pune, which would perforce allow the waters to end up in the Bhima River and add to water in reverse flow into the Mula River coming East all the way from Mulshi Lake and dam near Lonavla, a hill station some 50 km West of modern Pune.

Panshet Dam was zoned at a height of 51 m with impervious central core outlet gates located in a trench of the left abutment; hoists were not fully installed when floods occurred at the site of construction. The reservoir had a capacity of 2.70 million m3. Between June 18 and July 12, 1961, the recorded rainfall was 1778 mm (71”), stressing Panshet dam to its limits.

Lake Fife was already 90% full, with water flowing in freely from Varasgaon, besides the abundant rainfall. The people of Pune had no idea of their fate. The rain caused such a rapid rise of the reservoir water level at Panshet that the new embankment could not adjust to the dangerous loading condition. Water rose at the rate of 9 m per day initially, and 24 m in 12 days. Due to incomplete rough outlet surface, the flow through was unsteady which caused pressure surges. Cracks were formed along the edges of the right angles to the axis of the dam causing a subsidence 9 m wide, leaving the crest of the dam 0.6 m (2 feet) above the reservoir level on July 11. The failure was attributed to inadequate provision of the outlet facility during emergency. This caused the fateful collapse of the structure above the outlets. 

What is little known and needs be made public was that '''The People of Pune were Saved Once Again, by the vigilant Indian Armed Forces.'''3,000 Soldiers from the Bombay Engineering Group and Centre(BEG), the College of Military Engineering (CME) and other units were dispatched by HQ Southern Command, Pune, to help. They formed a human chain at Panshet Dam, as Army and commandeered civil trucks brought sandbags by the tens of thousands to shore up Panshet Dam. The engineers were certain the dam would collapse; they were praying that the Armed Forces personnel's aid would delay the inevitable to dawn, so that the people of Pune could be warned in time and those living on the banks of the rivers Mutha and Mula could be evacuated. Despite their best efforts, Panshet Dam caved in at 0330 hrs on July 12 1961. Khadakvasla Dam was the last barrier. 

It took another four hours for Khadakvasla Dam to breach, causing devastating floods in Pune. The dam was later rebuilt. The original dam, built in 1879 as a masonry gravity dam founded on hard rock was the first of its kind in the world.This dam was designed by Sir M. Visvesvaraya. 

Residents started getting some warnings early in the morning and the authorities started moving out the residents living near the riverside. Many residents fled to higher grounds, some all the way to the Parvati Hill. Apparently, All India Radio did not broadcast any warnings, and was playing a regular scheduled music program when the floods struck. The low lying areas of the old city were almost completely submerged. Except for the Bund Garden Bridge, all the bridges were under water as well. Water rushed into the old ‘Peths’ and along Karve Road, Deccan Gymkhana areas. For many hours, the high water levels persisted. Roughly speaking Panshet water reservoir stores enough water for all of Pune’s city needs today (today’s needs are probably 5-10 times more than the 1960s requirements). Imagine all that water being drained out in just a few hours! Some people and rescue workers were trying navigate Deccan Gymkhana, Fergusson College/Jangli Maharaj Road areas in small boats.

    

CALL CENTRES

CALL CENTRES

If you make customers unhappy in the real world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.                                  — Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com

Any successful large company spread trans-globally, say Citibank, can expect to receive thousands of telephone calls 24/7. Over 75 percent of these will come from across the seas, from countries where they have their many branches running. The company will be inundated by the sheer volume of calls originating every second! That’s perfectly natural; what’s 10 am in Dhaka is 10 pm in New York, with time zones split so widely. A working day call in USA will be an evening or night-most often late night call in say, Bangkok. 

A call centre is a simple solution to handle the volume of calls. Every country that the company has presence in has a dedicated office to take all calls from within that country, and reduce the volume of calls to its main office to zero, or thereabouts. Such a centralised office handles all matters related to that company’s local operations, receiving a manageable volume of requests by telephone and responding to calls asking for special or specific advice, be it administrative, financial or technical. 

There are two types of call centres, depending on the nature of services provided. These are:

·         Inbound Call Centres: Companies operate inbound call centres to service incoming calls from customers on product support and generalised information inquiries.

·         Outbound Call Centres: Companies operate outbound call centres for telemarketing, soliciting donations for charitable cause, political corpus building, debt recovery, market research, etc. 

                                        

 

A Call Centre in India                                                                                                        Source: www.forbes.com

 

Call centres usually have a large, well lit and open workspace with seats reserved for that centre’s agents. These seats are called work stations; each work station today includes a dedicated computer for every agent, a telephone headset linked electronically to other stations as well as to the shift supervisor. Call centres can be independent or part of a network with other centres, using local area networks (LAN). As technology jumps in leaps and bounds, voice & data routing inbound to any centre today are interlinked using something novel, the so-called computer telephony integration.

We, the people. . .

PREAMBLE TO THE CONSTITUTION OF INDIA

A cable theft left us (and several others) without telephone and internet connectivity over the weekend. Thrilled to be disconnected from the virtual world, I got busy with household responsibilities. And also managed to attend the Sunday evening service at our parish church, St. Alphonsa’s.

Imagine my confusion when I found myself staring at several whatsapp messages this morning. The same church had been vandalized. Last night.

Some reports term it an “attack on the church”, the cops call it “burglary”. The fact that this most recent one comes just a few days before the Delhi State elections surely seeks to politicize the issue.

I think of it as neither. We are exactly where we were a decade back. I wouldn't even begin to think of it as one religion against another. That's trivializing it and will serve as perfect ammunition for those seeking to divide us.

An attack on a church is an attack on Democracy. Liberty of belief, faith and worship is one of the cherished tenets of our democracy. Those bent on intimidating Christians in India are attacking democracy –their futile efforts will only serve to unify, not divide.

Without falling victim to dogma and hysteria, and rather than succumbing to the usual communal narrative, what emerges for me from this incidents is a narrative that undermines equal citizenship for persons of all faiths; and the freedom to practice one’s faith without fear or insecurity.

There is clearly a failure of the State in addressing the social and political challenges that feed these attacks. And as long as our Government led by the honorable Prime Minister chooses to remain silent, the PM's desire to transform India into a regional giant and a global force will never translate into a reality.

I refuse to be an unequal citizen. I will not let fundamentalists or burglars (whichever way you wish to see it) deny me my freedom. Gandhi was shot because the ‘freedom’ he propounded intimidated his killer. Freedom is a what these miscreants are afraid of. All over the world.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY OFF THE INTERNET

WWW : THE POT OF GOLD AT THE END OF THE INTERNET RAINBOW

How to Create a Rapidly Growing Source of Income-1

Tags: Earn off the web; money from the Internet; earn money from home; easy income from home;   

Introduction

After the invention of the wheel and the harnessing of nuclear power, the single most significant event that has affected our way of life today is the Internet. Every single human has total access to it in the free world. It is one vast storehouse and also the channel of data, so much data that today’s terminology calls it the Internet Cloud, a deft simile, permitting what is called cloud computing; in other words, massive amounts of computing in zettabytes (ZB)(10²¹ bytes )and yottabytes (YB) (10²⁴ bytes) across banks of high speed high capacity servers. The Internet (net) allows any individual who has a workable idea and the basic tools to work the net the facility to monetize his concept, no longer confined to the bricks and mortar markets of yore-the entire world is his market. If he is successful, then he stands to earn a pocketful of gold. He can work from home, with no staff to speak of, at times best suited to him and for as long as he desires. 

Let’s first dispel a myth here. If you think you can get rich overnight, you are living a chimera. It is simply not possible for, say one percent of over 2.45 billion users of the net (that’s twenty-four and a half million people) to all become rags to riches stories. There might be an odd case or two, but those are exceptions. It takes a patient and persistent shoulder to the grinding stone to earn the kind of money where you can live an enriched and carefree life, Yes, it can certainly assist you in earning more, thereby improving your standard of living-a better house, better cars, modern gadgets, etc. Interestingly, the fact is that you are not making money off the net. The net has become the de facto term, whereas you are actually using only part of it. 

The agency centerspan.org was the first to document its analyses of the Internet, which is posted at http://www.centerspan.org/tutorial/net.htm. They say that the "Internet is commonly considered to be a worldwide collection of computer networks, interacting with each other to exchange data using a common software standard." What is most interesting is the fact that the Internet does not have a central authority—there is no "Internet, Inc." that controls the Internet. Local government agencies create policies and standards applicable to their countries, but the Internet is not answerable to any single organization.

Of all the worthwhile features of the Internet, none has captured the public's eye and contributed to the Net's growth so much as the World Wide Web (www). A method of posting and accessing interactive multimedia information, the ‘Web’ is a true ‘information chunnel’, allowing users the world over to access a plethora of information quickly and easily. Very few people know that the first browser that brought multimedia to the Web was the Mosaic, designed in 1992 by programmers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

Today, several Web browsers are available: Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, to name a few. All use Hypertext for inter-communication, ie, use Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML), as upgraded from time to time, to link one webpage or site to another webpage or site. Apart from hypertext and multimedia as two outstanding features of the World Wide Web, the other distinct advantages are (centerspan.org):

¤        Open standards that allow Web pages to be viewed through most any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser.

¤        The ability to make software and data files available for downloading.

¤        Ease of use; just point and click on your browser to access the information you need.

Digressing a bit, household income plays a crucial part in the lifestyle of the average family globally. Closer home, if the average American with an average annual income of roughly $40,000 is used as a reference group, the upper middle class person with a personal income in the range of $75-80,000 may be termed affluent. Sociologist Leonard Beeghley identifies all those with a net worth of $1 million or more as ‘rich’.

Elizabeth Warren, writing for Harvard Magazine reveals that the typical middle-class household in the United States is no longer a one-earner family, reducing parental control over their children, a detrimental side effect. Instead, the majority of families with small children now have both parents rising early to commute to jobs so they can both draw paychecks. “The only real increase in wages for a family has come from the second paycheck earned by a working mother," she says. During the recession, a large number of people realized that there was money to be made from home. Even as the current recession in the Western world and USA seems to be withdrawing, that factor remains unchanged. Work from home! For whom and get paid from which source, you ask? From the Internet, now that the job market worldwide has become accessible to one and all. But this market was always there, you counter. People were living off the net a decade ago. So what’s the difference? The difference is that the world is becoming more and more digital and that the definition of ‘Internet savvy’ has risen well above what it was a decade ago. Moreover, Internet approach and application machines have become far faster, much more user-friendly and are truly multi-task capable. 

For the individual or organization wishing to distribute information, the Web makes "publishing" easy and cost-effective. Putting information on the Web is quite inexpensive compared with traditional publishing, yet puts that information before a potential audience of millions. And unlike a printed publication, a Web document can be revised and updated at any time (ibid). A number of newspapers and magazines have closed down, while others have online versions as well as the good old paper tabloid. Schools are experimenting with the replacement of that text-book by iPads, eBooks are read off palmtops or tablets like Kindle, etc. The pot of gold is taking concrete shape!

That said, no one has ever logged onto the Internet for the first time and started pocketing dollars in a really short period of time. As with all things in life, there is a learning curve, according to Evans Stone, the ‘Home Biz Guy’. In takes an average gestation period of three years of work to build a home-based income. Once you break through, you could earn over $100,000 in just twelve months off the net, and since money begets money, you should now be established on the path to riches. You can come back to the one-income working household, to the benefit of those who will shape your tomorrow-your children.