RamDev Baba Hunger strike latest News

After giving initial indication that he was ready to call off his campaign against black money and corruption, Baba Ramdev finally rejected government's appeal on Friday evening on not to go ahead with his satyagraha starting in the wee hours on Saturday.

Ramdev engaged in a marathon meeting with government representatives -- Union Ministers Kapil Sibal and Sobodh Kant Sahay. The meeting lasted over four hours in a five-star hotel in the national capital. According to sources, Ramdev had almost agreed to call off his satyagraha and go ahead with a token fast. However he wanted a written assurance from the government that all his demands would be fulfilled on which there was no agreement between the two parties.

Confirming that the talks had failed, Sibal however maintained a positive approach. "We had a constructive meeting. Government has given its position in writing. We have told him that we will look into all the issues. We are very happy with the progress," he said.

Ramdev also denied any compromise with the government and said that he would go ahead with the fast.

The government has made several attempts to persuade Ramdev since his arrival in the city on Wednesday. Its representatives -- some senior Union ministers -- have however failed to convince him against the launch of his mass campaign starting at Ramlila Ground in the city. - Original - indiatimes

Ramdev Baba Hunger Strike Reason | Ramdev Baba Hunger strike demands

How Raja spends his days in Tihar jail

New Delhi: It has been over three months since former Telecom Minister Andimuthu Raja has been cooling his heels in the capital's Tihar Jail for his suspected involvement in the 2G spectrum scam. Now, in place of the sullenness and shock of his initial days are friendly chats with fellow inmates, morning walks and evening sessions of badminton, jail sources say.

"Unlike many other high-profile accused stationed in Tihar, Raja seems to have adapted to jail life easily in a short period. Initially, in the first week, he was not talkative or interacting with other inmates, but now he seems to have become friendly with the other inmates in his ward," a jail official told IANS on condition of anonymity.

Most of his new-found friends are serving life sentences.

"He seems to stick to the routine," the official added.

Jail sources said Raja, who was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on February 13 and was taken to the jail on February 17, has never thrown any tantrum at any point of time.

Raja, a prominent Dalit face in the DMK, became the Union Communications Minister in 2007. He is accused of cheating, criminal conspiracy and corruption in the selling of scarce second generation (2G) telecom airwaves to favoured companies at a fraction of their actual cost, causing huge losses to the exchequer.

A total of 12 of the 14 people chargesheeted by the CBI in the 2G scam, including top bureaucrats and corporates, are lodged in Tihar. Raja is stationed at Jail Number One in Ward Number Nine.

"Raja usually takes a one-hour walk from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. inside the ward premises. He has become friendly with the 14 other jail inmates in the ward. He has become so friendly that he had shared his home-cooked food with other inmates," the jail official said.

"For the first few days, the tiffin box that came from Raja's home was small and only for him. But after a few days, the box became bigger, with south Indian food like idli, vada, sambar for breakfast and sambar, rasam and curd rice for lunch. All this he shared with his newfound friends," the official said.

Apart from watching television and reading newspapers and books, Raja also plays badminton with the inmates in the evening.

The jail official also said Raja is much more disciplined as compared to others.

"The only special demand he made was for Tamil newspapers, which has been provided to him," the official added.

According to the source, Raja has stopped getting home-cooked food for the past few days. "He is eating jail food and he has complained about its quality," the official told IANS.

Raja seems hooked to snacks from the Tihar canteen, which he shares with fellow inmates as well. The canteen, which mostly sells packaged snacks and cold drinks, is inside the complex and one has to pay through coupons.

According to Sunil Gupta, law officer and spokesperson of Tihar Jail, since the jail's inception in 1958, using money has been prohibited inside the prison premises.

"But the visitors of the accused, who visit them twice a week, can pay Rs.1,000 a visit to the jail authorities (which adds upto Rs.8,000 a month) and in return get coupons, which they can then be passed over to the accused," Gupta told IANS.

Raja has a separate cell of 15 feet by 10 feet for security purposes, and Ward Number Nine also houses two senior police officers.

The first is S.S. Rathi, former assistant commissioner of police convicted in the 1997 Connaught Place shootout case, and the other is R.K. Sharma, former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer jailed for killing journalist Shivani Bhatnagar.

"As of now there is no chance of Raja coming out of jail," a DMK MP told IANS not wishing to be identified, hinting that DMK chief M. Karunanidhi is instead pitching for the release of his 43-year-old daughter Kanimozhi, who too has been in Tihar since May 20 in connection with the case.

"I think Raja knows it and has reconciled to the fact," the MP added.

Tech mogul pays bright minds not to go to college

San Francisco: Instead of paying attention in high school, Nick Cammarata preferred to read books on whatever interested him. He also has a gift for coding that got him into Carnegie Mellon University's esteemed computer science program despite his grades.

But the 18-year-old programmer won't be going to college this fall. Or maybe ever.

Cammarata is one of two dozen winners of a scholarship just awarded by San Francisco tech tycoon Peter Thiel that comes with a unique catch: The recipients are being paid not to go to college.

Instead, these teenagers and 20-year-olds are getting $100,000 each to chase their entrepreneurial dreams for the next two years.

"It seems like the perfect point in our lives to pursue this kind of project," says Cammarata of Newburyport, Mass., who along with 17-year-old David Merfield will be working on software to upend the standard approach to teaching in high school classrooms.

Merfield, the valedictorian of his Princeton, NJ, high school class, is turning down a chance to go to Princeton University to take the fellowship.

Thiel himself hand-picked the winners based on the potential of their proposed projects to change the world.

All the proposals have a high technology angle but otherwise span many disciplines.
One winner wants to create a mobile banking system for the developing world. Another is working to create cheaper biofuels. One wants to build robots that can help out around the house.

The prizes come at a time when debate in the U.S. over the value of higher education has become heated. New graduates mired in student loan debt are encountering one of the toughest job markets in decades. Rising tuitions and diminishing prospects have led many to ask whether college is actually worth the time and money.

"Turning people into debt slaves when they're college students is really not how we end up building a better society," Thiel says.

Thiel made his fortune as a co-founder of online payment service PayPal shortly after graduating from Stanford Law School. He then became the first major investor in Facebook. In conversation and as a philanthropist, Thiel pushes his strong belief that innovation has stagnated in the US and that radical solutions are needed to push civilization forward.

The "20 Under 20" fellowship is one such effort. Thiel believes that the best young minds can contribute more to society by skipping college and bringing their ideas straight to the real world.

And he has the shining example of Facebook to back up his claim. Thiel's faith in the world-changing potential of Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg's idea led him to invest $500,000 in the company, a stake that is now worth billions.

Still, the Zuckerbergs of the tech industry are famous because they are the exceptions. Silicon Valley is littered with decades-worth of failed tech startups.

Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke University's Center for Entrepreneurship and a writer for TechCrunch and Bloomberg Businessweek, has assailed Thiel's program for sending what he sees as the message that anyone can be Mark Zuckerberg.

"Silicon Valley lives in its own bubble. It sees the world through its own prism. It's got a distorted view," Wadhwa says.

"All the people who are making a fuss are highly educated. They're rich themselves. They've achieved success because of their education. There's no way in hell we would have heard about Peter Thiel if he hadn't graduated from Stanford," he says.

Thiel says the "20 Under 20" program shouldn't be judged on the basis of his own educational background or even the merits of his critique of higher education. He urges his critics to wait and see what the fellows achieve over the next two years.

According to data compiled by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, workers with college degrees were laid off during the Great Recession at a much lower rate than workers without degrees. College graduates were also more likely to be rehired.

But for fellowship recipients like John Burnham, 18, such concerns pale next to the idealism of youth. At his prep school in western Massachusetts, Burnham started an alternative newspaper to compete with the school's official publication.

The entrepreneurial experience of creating something out of nothing captured his imagination. Now his ambitions have grown.

Burnham believes that the world's growing population will put an unsustainable strain on the planet's natural resources. That's why he's looking to other worlds to meet humanity's needs.

Specifically, he believes that mining operations on asteroids could hold the key. For the next two years, he'll be studying rocket propulsion technology and puzzling through the economics of interplanetary resource extraction.

"This fellowship is so much of a better fit for my personality than I think college would be," Burnham says. "When you get an opportunity of the magnitude of this fellowship, I couldn't see myself being able to wait."