Wakestock to be first UK festival to use wristbands - BBC News
Wakestock will become the first multi-day festival in the UK to use wristbands instead of paper tickets this summer.
The event takes place between 6-8 July at Cardigan Bay in north Wales.
Red Hot Chili Peppers will be the first band to use wristbands instead of tickets at an outdoor concert in the UK at Knebworth House this Saturday.
Wireless and the Isle of Wight Festival are both also planning to use cashless payment systems this year.
Wristbands are scanned as music fans enter and leave venues or areas
Wristbands are already widely used at concerts in north America.
Coachella in California has used ticketless systems since 2010 which include integrated social media tools so festival-goers can check-in.
Wristbands arrived in Europe earlier this year and were used at Eurosonic Noorderslag festival in Groningen, The Netherlands.
SmartphonesThe wristbands look like standard material festival bands but are fitted with a microchip instead.
It is a similar technology to London's Oyster card public transport swipe cards and uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.
People are registered in and out of venues or arenas with either turnstiles or hand-held devices scanning their wristbands, with organisers able to track the data.
Wakestock is a wakeboarding and music festival
Glastonbury's Michael Eavis was one of the promoters taking a look at the technology in January at Eurosonic Noorderslag festival and says it could be used at Worthy Farm in the future.
At Wakestock, festival-goers can choose to link bands to their social media profiles or used to enter competitions associated with the event.
The promoter of the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert and Wakestock, Stuart Galbraith, said: "We've been waiting for the opportunity to use RFID technology for a while.
"It's a great way to enhance and grow the customer experience for concerts and festivals of the future.
"We are very excited to be working with Samsung and Intellitix in being one of the first UK promoters to embrace this new technology and look forward to developing adaptations across many events."
Samsung says festival-goers will be able to use their smartphones as tickets soon as well.
RSS justifies chief’s statement on prime ministerial candidate (Lead) - Thaindian.com
“We always held that Hindutva, the ideological anchor of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is a liberal, all-embracing and secular idea,” Ram Madhav told reporters here.
“To portray it as anti-secular or narrow-minded is not correct. Hindutva in reality is a true synonym for secularism,” the RSS spokesman maintained.
“This is our ideological position which we have been articulating from time immemorial and the chief of RSS (Mohan Bhagwat) has only reiterated that position,” Madhav said.
“It is totally, utterly uncalled for to link the views expressed before the swayamsevaks to day-to-day political happenings in the country, to individuals or leaders. This is uncalled for and not appropriate,” he said.
Earlier in the day, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had told reporters: “To keep alive the Hindutva ideology, the Hindu ’samaaj’ (society) should come together. And the country should have a prime minister who believes in that ideology or propounds that view.”
Bhagwat’s comments come a day after Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said the Bharatiya Janata Party-led opposition National Democratic Alliance should announce a secular prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
Bhagwat had hit out at Kumar too, saying he was scared to call himself a Hindu and questioned his right to decide what sort of person would make a good prime minister.
RSS backs Modi as Prime Minister, slams Nitish Kumar - Hindustan Times
According to media reports, Bhagwat said that Nitish was scared of calling himself a Hindu. He further added that India should have a PM who propounds Hindutva. Speaking at a public function in Latur, Maharashtra, Bhagwat said that Nitish Kumar is saying this to maintain his vote bank.
The RSS support for Modi comes a day after Bihar CM and JD(U) strongman Nitish Kumar said publicly that the NDA’s prime ministerial candidate in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections should be "secular and liberal". This was seen in political circles as his rejection of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as a possible candidate for the PM’s post.
“The leader of the coalition should have secular credentials and a liberal frame of mind,” Kumar said in a media interview, ruling himself out of the race for prime ministership.
Kumar added that the NDA should declare its PM candidate well ahead of the Lok Sabha elections so that people get to know whom they would vote for. The candidate should be someone who feels for underdeveloped states like Bihar, he said.
Attacking Modi is being seen as Kumar’s attempt to establish his credentials among Bihar Muslims, once seen as a captive vote-bank of his now-fading rival Lalu Prasad.
It also projects him as the NDA's “secular” leader, apart from helping him maintain a calibrated distance from ally BJP in order to keep his options open closer to the general elections.
Bihar deputy CM Sushil Modi of the BJP promptly endorsed Kumar's views: “He (the PM candidate) should have a liberal image that former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee enjoyed.” But a section of the state BJP disapproved of Kumar's utterances and labelled him as “pseudo-secular”.
RSS’s unsecular disservice to NaMo - Hindustan Times
I admire Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi — forget the economic parameters of the state, you just need to go out at 1 am in the morning in Baroda to see and experience the huge number of women and men walking on the roads, free from any threat, real or imagined. That state, when you know that the chances of your being assaulted at that time are close to zero, is to my mind the epitome of security, the first dharma of governance. This sense of security has attracted carmakers like Tata and Ford to Gujarat, a feat that Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is only beginning to aspire for.
So, as part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), when Kumar said that the “leader of the coalition should have secular credentials and a liberal frame of mind”, Modi followers seem to have taken it as an attack on Modi’s perceived non-secular credentials, following his abysmal and shameful mis-governance during the riots at Godhra in February 2002. I see nothing wrong with what Kumar has said. Of course, not only the leader of any political alliance that aspires to govern India, but any citizen of India must be secular. What else can s/he be — a Hindu, a Muslim, a Sikh and so on?
The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) feels otherwise. “To keep alive the Hindutva ideology, the Hindu ‘samaaj’ (society) should come together,” RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat told reporters today. “And the country should have a prime minister who believes in that ideology or propounds that view.” Nothing could be more dangerous or more divisive for India than such an ideology. Were Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Rajiv Gandhi ‘Hindu’ prime ministers? Is Manmohan Singh a ‘Sikh’ prime minister? Thank whichever god you believe in that that is not the case — irrespective of personal faith, India is yet to see a single prime minister who is as rabid about his religion as many in Islamic nations are about theirs.
As we all know, in the path shown by Vinayak Damodar (Veer) Savarkar, for RSS, you can’t be an Indian without being a Hindu. Lace that thought with a political agenda and the foregone conclusion is the creation of a Hindu nation. “For the RSS, Indian identity is the same as Hindu identity, and all members of religious minorities — mostly Muslims and Christians — should pay allegiance to the dominant religious community, at least in the public space,” writes Ingrid Therwath, head of the International Relations department at the Delhi-based Centre de Sciences Humaines, in Cyber-Hindutva: Hindu nationalism, the diaspora and the Web, a recent report I wrote about last week.
Do Indian Hindus want India to be a Hindu state? The rising tide of angry cyber-Hindus aside, most Hindus I know are very happy and secure being secular. While the word signifies a religion-indifferent nation, angry Hindus believe secularism has meant that followers of the world’s oldest religion have lost out, that the word ‘secular’ is really pseudo-secularism, that Hindus are being victimised in “their own home”. This false notion needs to end, but like all who revel in the glory of persecution complex, this is not going to happen soon.
At another level, if it is political change that is being sought — as Bhagwat’s statement suggests — they will have to walk the arduous road towards that regressive state. It is no longer a fringe that can define or change this. Secularism is now a Constitutional provision, through the 42nd amendment in 1976. To change this, the majority in Lok Sabha must belong to those who believe in the Hindu Rashtra theory. With the grace of all gods — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and many more — that is not going to happen soon.
But in the interim, Bhagwat has done a terrible disservice to Modi by strengthening the impression that Modi stands for a Hindu identity, that if he becomes India’s prime minister he will push for the Hindutva notion of our nation. Modi will have to come clean on this himself. If he, as the prime ministerial candidate, walks towards a Hindu Rashtra, the alienation of BJP is destined. And unfortunately, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of Gujarat will not be available to the rest of us.
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