Know Why Bill Gates is a Die Hard Fan of Salman Khan

“Salman Khan, you can count Bill Gates as your newest fan”, read one the emails sent to Khan. A voracious consumer of online education, Bill Gates sent him the email expressing his happiness about the nonprofit khanacademy.org, a vast digital collection of free mini-lectures all narrated by Khan, a cheerful, lucid Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager.

Khan Academy started of in 2006 as software Salman Khan created to help his cousins learn academic lessons. By 2009, tens of thousands of students were watching tutorials on the Khan Academy every day, making his $50-a-month web host crash. Though he was operating alone out of his home, his videos already had more views than MIT Open CourseWare and Stanford combined.

One day he got a surprising email from Ann Doerr, wife of famous VC John Doerr. She invited him for lunch where Khan told how he and his family were living off of their savings.

She agreed to invest $100,000 in The Khan Academy. After two months he got a text message from Ann which read

“At Aspen…hundreds of people in audience…Bill Gates on stage, talking about you.”

He had not even came out of this pleasant shock that about a week later he was called to Seattle to meet the second richest person on earth. The meeting was on August 22. Very nervous, he was waiting for Bill Gates in a conference room, when a minute later he walked in and was standing behind him. Khan expresses, “Yeah, just another human being. I spent the next 15 minutes talking about what I thought the Khan Academy could do and how we would do it.” He asked him a few questions and then said simply, “This is great.”

Gates becoming fan of this innovative man is reflected in his words which were published in Fortune Magazine 2 days after the meeting.

He had said, “This guy is amazing. It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources. Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began watching videos, from algebra to biology.

Hailing from Bangladesh, Salman Khan lives in an undistinguished farm house off the main freeway of Silicon Valley, in a converted walk-in closet filled with a few hundred dollars’ worth of video equipment and bookshelves. He produces online lessons on math, science, and a range of other subjects that have made him a web sensation and his site the most popular educational site on the web.
Today Khan Academy playlist has a total of 1,630 tutorials and are now seen an average of 70,000 times everyday generating 18 million page views worldwide. The free tutorials are voiced by Salman Khan himself without appearing in any. You can only see his explanations and diagrams on an electronic blackboard.

The Pakistan Cauldron – Book Review

The Pakistan Cauldron | Pakistan made easy, in four parts

The world is perhaps on tenterhooks about the safety and security of Pak’s nukes under the looming threat of Pak military/ISI raised/supported terrorist groups stealing or getting control of them. But James P Farwell in his new book The Pakistan Cauldron: Conspiracy, Assassination and Instabilityargues that while Pakistan may be a dysfunctional country, its military is disciplined and ruthless in its efforts to protect its nuclear arsenal. 

 

Set in four parts, the book in part one examines A Q Khan’s activity and Musharraf’s calisthenics to silence Khan and to protect Pakistan’s nuclear secrets as well as his ‘communications strategy and tactics’ attempted for Pakistan’s interests. It must also be noted that during Musharraf’s tenure, when Pakistan received substantial arms and monetary aid from the US for fighting against the same terrorists which Pak army/ISI has been covertly supporting, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal grew significantly with Chinese assistance.

 

The second part of the book dwells on careers of and conflicts between Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf as well as events related to her assassination. Part three looks at factors, fallouts and the mystery of Benazir’s assassination and the fourth part titled A Nation on the Brink deals with the aftermath.

 

Assessing the historical legacy and influence of Bhutto, the book brings out that Pakistani intelligence did  not hesitate to lie and even plotted to assassinate its own prime minister and it uncovers the truth about the attitude of Pakistan’s intelligence community to her return to Pakistan in 2007 and what they most feared. In fact, what the book explains about Pakistani power players’ use of  communication to compete for power and consolidate their grip on power, is nothing but the rampant and frequent use of lies, half-truths and repeated denials.

 

Depicting the dynamics that are in play in Pakistan’s current constitutional controversy that has led to former Prime Minister Y R Gilani’s indictment [charge-sheet], which are blowbacks from Pak army’s anger at President Zardari for being too pro-American, it may be the only book so far that [a] shows how the culture of conspiracy operates,  using the Raymond Davis controversy and the attack on bin Laden to illustrate the odd-ball dynamics of this political culture; [b] examines US-Pakistani relations strategically and explains what makes Pakistani politics tick, including how the nation’s weak identity and culture that breeds conspiracy theory, assassination, and a sense of betrayal functions.  

 

Farwell’s background as a national security expert and a political consultant enables him to explain and assess the impact of the bin Laden raid and how that has affected Pakistani politics. 

 

Observing that what is transpiring currently is the outgrowth of over five decades of Pakistani politics, the book provides insights into why Pakistan -US cooperation has become so difficult. 

 

With the author also being an experienced litigator, the book evaluates how President Pervez Musharraf mishandled the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. It does this by using an entertaining approach: creating a ‘Dictator’s playbook’ for damage control and cover-up.

 

Raising the issue of Pakistani involvement in the Mumbai attack, the author comments that Pakistan’s ‘India-phobia’ is self-defeating and that the exposure of ISI training and sponsoring Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba for the 26 November 2008 attack was a signal event affecting the strategic communication mentioned earlier. It is this strong connection between the ISI and Lashkar that Pakistan simply cannot afford to acknowledge and may remain a pending bane in India-Pakistan relations, even if the integrated border check-post linking both Punjabs has begun functioning.  A recommended read for those studying Pakistan.

Author: James P.Farwell
Publisher: Pentagon Press | 2012
Price: Rs 795

India Got Nuclear Tech Through AQ Khan: U.S. Arms

A scandalous claim has been made by a U.S. arms control that AQ Khan, Pakistan‘s notorious nuclear engineer may have passed on nuclear energy to India. Joshua Pollack, a U.S. policy wonk (a person who studies or develops strategies and policies) who has worked on nuclear proliferation commented that India might be the fourth country along with Iran, Libya and North Korea, to which a shortcut to nuclear weapons were provided by A Q Khan.

Little credibility was offered by Pollack to back up his content, apart from some similarities between the centrifuges used by India in its uranium-enrichment program and Pakistan’s centrifuges engineered by Khan. South African court documents have been cited by him, which claims that a member of Khan “association” supplied India’s centrifuge program with specialized equipment, starting in the late 1980s.

It was through the plutonium route in 1972 that India went nuclear, several years before Pakistan, according to Pollack.

Pakistan’s notorious nuclear scientist AQ Khan may have passed on nuclear technology to India, cited newspaper ads in 2006 demanding centrifuge parts claimed a U.S. arms control expert.

“India’s enrichment program progressed slowly… In 2006 the Washington DC-based Institute for Science and International Security revealed that the Indian government had used newspaper ads to solicit bids for centrifuge parts. The details of these advertisements, along with documents Indians gave potential suppliers, provide strong clues about where New Delhi’s supercritical centrifuge technology came from,” Joshua Pollack said in a commentary in Playboy. “Despite some changes, the design is recognizable to the trained eye: It almost mirrors the G-2 centrifuge, a design Khan stole from URENCO in the 1970s and reproduced as Pakistan’s P-2 centrifuge,” as quoted by TOI

Gerhard Wisser,a German in South Africa was in collaboration with Gotthard Lerch in Switzerland to supply specialized equipments to both Pakistan and its proliferation partners, starting in the late 1980s, to India said Pollack.

Pollack speculates despite the fact Khan never mentioned having a fourth customer ever, “Could Khan have been ignorant about Wisser’s dealings with India? His own guilty conscience says otherwise.” Two conflicting cover stories were published as Khan answered his Pakistani interrogators which explain how Pakistan’s enrichment technology could have ended up in “enemy hands”.

Earlier, the overseas network was claimed autonomous by Khan to supply both India and Pakistan. Later an allegation made by Khan said that he was exploited by Indian connection hidden inside Farooq’s Dubai operation. But Musharaff’s biography cited, “the network based in Dubai had employed several Indians, some of whom have since vanished.”

Related articles

• AQ Khan gave India nuclear tech: US expert (ibnlive.in.com)
• Nuclear smugglers who aided AQ Khan face trial in Switzerland (guardian.co.uk)