I grew up in Pondicherry, went to Pondicherry Engineering College (class of 99). I used to bike up from college to Matrimandir a lot of weekends for meditation. There are several communities within Auroville and they each operate kind of independently. Some of them welcome guests to stay with them, and I have stayed with a number of communities. So, what accusation may be true for one community may not be true for other communities.
In the middle of all of that, I found Sadhana forest to be a wonderful community in Auroville that is far away from the madness of Matrimandir both physically and spiritually. Aviram and his family, along with volunteers, are doing a fantastic job of reforesting the area west of the Tindivanam highway. If you are going, once we are past this global Covid19 pandemic that is, I would highly recommend a volunteering stay at Sadhana forest.
Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India. He has a very interesting (and controversial) history. He grew up selling tea at a railway station and now he's Prime Minister of the largest democracy.
In India, our income tax department accepts returns as an XML document, and tax prep software developers have built tools that basically help you generate the XML and upload it to the e-filing website.
Other than this, the government run e-filing website also has a nice interface to do your taxes. It's fairly simple. Just fill in numbers and click Next Next Next Submit, and you're done.
On a related note, a Stanford tax law professor Joseph Bankman had run trials of pre-filled forms for a few California state taxpayers. Listen to his journey on Episode 760 of PlanetMoney podcast:
In 2003, I was working for a startup in India doing GPS/GSM based vehicle tracking system for fleets of trucks. The trucks would have our unit installed in them, and they would use GPS to get the location and send it to our server via GSM text message. Back then, GSM coverage not good, and trucks would go out of coverage for days. To further complicate matters, our firmware used to crash and the unit would stop sending updates.
To help us troubleshoot this, my boss asked me to program the unit to give a missed call to the server every hour. If we got a missed call, we knew that unit was still working. In countries like India, giving a missed call is a zero cost way to communicate. For example: You would pull up in front of a friend's place and give them a "missed call" to let them know that you are waiting outside etc.
Anyway, I implemented the logic and we sent off our field techs to intercept trucks at highways and update the firmware.
The way I implemented the logic was the unit was to call our server's modem number every hour at the top of the hour. No random delay nothing. So, soon after that, around 50 units tried to call our server at the same time. Remember the clocks in the units are being run off GPS and they are super accurate. This caused our telecom company's cell tower BTS to crash. Cell service in my office area, a busy part of Bangalore, was down for a whole 2 hours.
I was called into the telecom company's head office for their postmortem. They didn't yell at me or anything. They were super nice. In fact, when I finished explaining my side of the story, one of their engineers opened his wallet and gave a hundred rupees to another guy. Guess they were betting on the root cause. From what I understand, they escalated the bug to Ericsson who manufactured the BTS and got it fixed. For my part, I added a random delay and eventually removed that feature.
If you observe the 2 scripts in the pic in wikipedia, you would notice that in the original one, the "i's are not dotted" as it were. This seems to be a practice that has carried over from palm leaf writing to metal inscriptions.
The Tamils originally wrote on dried palm leaves with a sharp scribe. So, if you didn't want to tear the leaf, you had to avoid straight lines and dots. That's why there are so many curves in the script.
Also, one of the meanings of my first name "Mani" is literally "Bell".
In the middle of all of that, I found Sadhana forest to be a wonderful community in Auroville that is far away from the madness of Matrimandir both physically and spiritually. Aviram and his family, along with volunteers, are doing a fantastic job of reforesting the area west of the Tindivanam highway. If you are going, once we are past this global Covid19 pandemic that is, I would highly recommend a volunteering stay at Sadhana forest.