Lesson #4: Good family upbringing; strong family ties; real school is at home

We read elsewhere, that China and India will lead the world economies in 2050. Everybody is surprised and is hard to believe that prediction especially concerning India. Not many people know about the country which so far is more known for its Bollywood films and its dancing-on-the-tree than anything else. Whether the forecast would be proven right or not is not important. What I am sure is that, yes these two countries will lead the world sooner or later. One of the key is the good family upbringing: young people are indoctrinated and nurtured by the ethos of hardworking since their childhood.

Lesson #3: Simplicity and humility–substance over physical appearance.

This is India’s strong point, and our unflattered weakness. We tend to appreciate whatever “visible” to the naked eyes more than what the real thing is. We tend to praise the physical beauty than the inner quality; we are the blatant worshipper of consumptive attitude which is–as Fareed Zakaria puts it–the rotten egg, not the inner stuffing–of modernity.

So, without much ado I left India several months ago, on March 2007 to be precise. None but a very few friends who knew that I planned to come home that night. It’s my nature that I am not so much into brouhaha thing. Personally speaking I’m a private, a sort of introvert and fond of quietness. Though I engage in some social activities back then in India and more frequently nowadays as a conscience call and as a way of implementing what I’ve been thinking, I feel I enjoy more when I am in a state of solititude. I’ve been in India for quite long time, previously as a “transit” towards another destination–preferably Europe or North America, but finally I feel “at home” in the country for some reasons which is nothing to do with the earlier plan.

I need a free download Arabic-English dictionary which is comprehensive enough to cover both classical and contemporary / modern Arabic, something you won’t always find in every Arabic-English dictionary.

I found the VerbAce Arabic-English dictionary 2008 is up to my expectation. Free download is what everyone want. And VerbAce is a free software.

Despite I no longer stay in India, emails keep pouring in requesting some clues on how to get scholarship in the Mahatma Gandhi’s country. For time-saving, your time and mine, I’d explain here some important info and how to get scholarship in India the easy way.

First off, Indian government offers scholarship for all academic degrees i.e. bachelor (S1), master (S2) and PhD (S3) of all field of studies but medicine (kedokteran) for this you need a special arrangement. My advice, don’t apply for medical studies in India. The procedure will be quite complicated and tedious; not suitable for an easy-going Indonesian.

To encourage new bloggers to be more active in posting their potentially precious thoughts, I wrote a blogging tip here that writing a paragraph-long posting is just as good as the longer one provided it covers the main idea you want to convey in that brief piece. Previously, I reviewed a blog belong to Alaya Setya who loves making a brief posting. Another case in point is a blog run by a techno geek Willy Sudiarto Raharjo who, like Alaya Setya, seems to like brief posting–one or two paragraphs each  post–and yet he makes his point clear from the very first sentence of every post. This is important, if you intend to make a brief post, make to the point of whatever you want to say, to make your message get accross to the intended audience, indeed to all readers of your blog.

If you are a beginner in the blogging world, and are feeling confused on how to start making your debut post, Alaya Setya’s blog is a good blog to take a look at as an alternative style. But wait, by no means do I say that she is a debutant blogger. Infact, she’s blogging since 2002. So, she’s one of those seasoned Indonesian bloggers who starts blogging at the time when blogging culture was known by few Indonesians.