STARTING TODAY

The farce of Global Warming

2010-12-08T03:38:00.000-08:00

The only thing which surprises me about this global warming debate is how come this hoax is running for so long.

Are we polluting and over using our Environment?
Yes, we are. No doubt about that. Anyone who has stayed anywhere for a period of around 20 years or so will say that there is something wrong with the way things are changing. More cars, more factories, less trees. Surely, there are a lot of people who will also claim that the climate is getting increasingly uneasy. From the polluted Ganges, for which the government has extended the time required to 2020 when it will be able to clean it, to the famous ozone layer depletion, to the depleting forests across the world, to the rising pollution levels in cities across the world we see proofs all around us that rapid industrialization does cause harm to environment with known effects ranging from reduction in average health, to destruction of species, to contamination of water and air and so on.
It needs very basic science and tests to prove that over populated cities put a stress on their surroundings and cause a lot of damage to the delicate ecological balance.

Can this have global impact:
No. At least, even if it did so, there is no known technology as of now to gauge the climate of the whole world and suggest such a thing which allows for miniscule variations over a long period of time. The Ozone hole drama was a hoax and has been established beyond doubt. The scientist who first noted this, based his thesis on the premise that Arctic and Antarctic areas had different ozone readings. The fact is that these values fluctuate by over 50% within a single year. Moreover, depletion of ozone layer, as previously attributed to global warming, causes lesser heating of the stratosphere. In other terms , depletion of ozone should be causing cooling. This was conveniently omitted from the articles of global warming Jihadis during the time the hoax had not been caught. Another 2012 kind of prediction was by IPCC (Inter Govt. Panel on Climate Change). In 2007, in its Fourth Report, it stated that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, were at risk of melting by 2035. The source of this information was something written without any scientific basis by some rookie scholar and picked up as a threat by IPCC to the government around the world. R.K. Pachauri got Nobel Peace prize for toeing the line (we shall get to it in a while if this intrigues you). Till 1974, magazine as reputed as 'Time' was insisting that we are going to enter into an ice age. Quite interesting that in the science of global warming which is 'complex' and hence simplified by U.N. doesn't mention anything about cleaning water bodies, planting more trees, checking the massive communication towers mushrooming in cities. There is only one thing it stresses: Greenhouse gases. Why?
Ever wondered why scientists are not able to prove this as hoax? Or is this a collusion of scientists with someone, masquerading something else as global warming? There are leaks which point to it. Some honest voices do get raised, but are neither answered, nor published by media. In fact the data regarding how much the Earth has already warmed is nothing but result of rudimentary scientific calculations based little on pursuit of truth than realpolitik. (Realpolitik?, yeah, we shall come to it as well in a while). There is no scientific evidence, whatsoever, that global warming is taking place comparing the average temperature or Earth today with previous times. The number of cities recording their hottest summers is almost equal to the number of cities recording their coldest winters. The winters have been conveniently brushed aside as El-Nino effect. More than 150 countries meet almost every year over beer and discuss this 'grave danger to humanity'. What do they discuss? The answer answers all the unanswered questions above.

What is being discussed in global climate summits:
Kyoto Protocol was the first serious attempt to create world consensus on battling global climate issue. Target was for all signatories to cut their greenhouse gas emissions (read industries) by 5% compared to 1990 levels. When it was to enter in force in 2005, the biggest polluter country in the world jumped out of this ship in 2002. So what is really going on?
Simple. With all the wars and banks and army and power and U.N at it's disposal, the U.S is having an economy growing at 2%. Greece defaulted on sovereign loan followed by Ireland, with the result that talks of the whole E.U currency defaulting are making rounds. U.S + Europe + Australia + Japan = what we usually consider as developed countries.
Then we have the third world countries ,inter-alia, China, India, Brazil who are growing their GDP at around 9-12%. China keeps swallowing every pound of steel getting produced, while India show a formal one year caution while bank after bank in U.S. collapsed. Now those who studied simple and compound interest more seriously than my younger brother will realize that though this value of growth sounds less, if you take the difference 12-3 = 9% which is the difference in the growth of some third world economies and the developed countries, if this is sustained over a period of say 40-60 years, and understand that it is compounded, the whole balance of development will be tilted against developed countries.

Most of the developed countries gained their wealth devouring the wealth of third world countries in last three centuries, most which since ancient times, were very rich. Now it is obvious that these third world countries are slowly stabilizing and on path to development. Development needs industries. Which will emit Co2. So they will be forced to pay for emitting these gases. Compared to 1990 levels (which most likely is going to be changed to something like 2010), most of the developed countries don't need much accelerated industrialization as they already have established industries. So a nice principle of 'I am done building my home and now you pay me every time you put a brick for yours.'

Guess what developing countries are asking for. Three simple things: Money for the loss of GDP which they will have to bear, technology for clean fuel use, greater share for developed countries in reducing pollution as it is they who have polluted over past three centuries. With U.S. and co. showing a nice middle finger to the developed world on this, the impasse continues. To put pressure we have people like Pachauri given Nobel peace prize just like Liu Xiaobo was given, while Assange is lodged in Jail with host after host getting DOS'd by 'unknown' hackers whenever wikileaks is hosted.

In fact, it will be a disaster, the day the talks succeed, without appropriate safeguards for the developing countries. They will be paying for every industry they create, the global fund to be created for disbursement to them under the control of U.S, ( sorry I mean IMF or something), with international agency (read U.S. agency) to monitor and fine the countries for lapses. It will kill the chance the developing countries have for redemption after three centuries of exploitation, resulting in never ending clutches getting created for them and any chance of change in global dominance for them moving to the mercy or Uncle S. Overall, it is an attempt to keep the world round.

Don't be surprised if four out of next six Nobel peace prize go to some Global warming crausader, with the fifth one reserved for the son U.S. president right after he passes graduation and the sixth one going to some dissenter in China, N.K, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq or Russia. Take a mug of hot coffee and enjoy the Sun.

And yeah, plant a tree for every ten years you live.

Barkhagate: The fourth pillar crumbles

2010-11-23T02:54:00.000-08:00

The character I liked the most in Fountainhead was Elsworth Toohey. There is a long speech he gives once, that shows how the dangerous people in society work. The method is so sly and so cunning that you will end up thinking they are your only chance of survival. But they are hand in glove with the wolves whose single aim is to devour you piece by piece.
Welcome Barkha Dutt. Ever wondered, why the wiki doesn't mention her marital status. It doesn't mention she is married, it doesn't mention she is not married. In latest lingo this is called information blackout. Over past few years there has been a rising trend of bloggers, tweeters, facebookers and the like, who read the internet from their dingy rooms, write things which are so well researched that mainstream media is forced to call them internet Hindus. These people are not under a single banner, un-organized, without a leadership, totally unrelated to politics, and almost none of them votes. These people felt that there was something wrong. Numerous theories floated on the net, names were called, they were baying for blood. There was just one thing that was common to them: Indian media, headed by self appointed captains like Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghosh sucks. And it sucks big time.

But these power honchos are not like the thieves who enter your house at night and carry equal chances of being caught. They are more like the Toohey's of the modern times. When Supreme court repriminded the central government that it is shameful that people in this country are dying of hunger and thousands of tonnes of grain is rotting in FCI godowns, the gullible middle class felt (was made to feel) that these were the only people who could save the country as they regularly fight for the poor, the downtrodden. But these bloggers and tweeterers felt that uneasy question in their mind: "When Mumbai attacks happen, the clamour is 'this is not the time for politics' ", when Kandahar happens, the clamour is "the government bent to the terrorists". Anything against them was construed (by them) as against 'freedom of press'. On the eve of Ayodhya verdict, perhaps the most repeated term by Rajdeep Sardesai was "what if one community resorts to violence", "what if there is blood spilling", but no one could utter anything more than little indignation to them. I felt like they wanted riots, which could help them scale their TRPs. They almost brought to life what Arun Shourie wrote probably in 90s, "repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth". Truth it became for a lot of people, but there were some netizens exposing frequently. Some of them were silenced in the most shameless, arrogant way. Some of them simply couldn't be. While any talk of regulating the media gets them bay for the blood of the person suggesting this, people like Barkha Dutt air programs on the need to 'regulate bloggers'. The fools don't even understand that this is simply not possible. The net is open, it is wild, it cuts across religious and caste lines and only a gradual, certain and mostly truthful thing gets viral. But if the common man is so gullible that he elects again and again the same people who find people like this for president , it is a little too tough for them to believe that the same journalists who (fake) fighting for them could be on the wrong side.

It needed a climax, and climax it got. These self appointed shenanigans are in fact the pimps of the ruling power (the con party). They masquerade as the fourth pillar but are in fact hand in glove with the ruling elite. They got exposed then the Nira Radia tapes were released. The thing which moved them into hall of shame is the way the news was blacked out. For first 3-4 days no one covered it. It just didn't exist for the Indian mainstream media. The 'pepli live' folks who in the age of 24x7 news are available to catch every sneeze of the family scion, just didnt report the news item, which even after being blacked out was
"#barkhagate has been trending as number one topic on Twitter in India for more than 6 days, since the breakout of the news". "
Here is the list of the shameless media houses who are hand in glove with the powers that be who tried to blackout the news:
Hindustan Times ( which has one crook Vir Sanghvi on the payrolls)
NDTV ( of Barkha Dutt Fame)
Times of India: (The world's number 1 Eng daily)
Indian Express ( which has fired Arun Shourie probably 3 or 4 times)
And almost the whole of media.

Chor chor mausere bhai.

Among others, three groups stood out as examples of honesty and courage. Even if it be for TRPs(I don't know) but it needs guts to release things like this. Guts mean courage ( or balls!!) which people of the ilk of Rajdeep Sardesai cannot fathom.
Open Magazine
Outlook India
DNA India (It had sounded an early warning, after netizens, but before the chor (thief) Indian media.

The denials issued by Barkha, Rajdeep, Vir Sanghvi, Nira Radia will put even people like Lalu yadav, Mayavati and Mulayam Singh to shame: simplified almost all of them read " ye opposition ki chaal hai, main hamesha junta ki sewa karta hun aur ise kharij karta hun" (this is a ploy of the opposition, I am a servant of people and reject these allegations). The tapes expose even to the hitherto gullible indian that these media folks played a big role in alloting Telecommunication ministry to A.Raja who looted 1.76 Lakh Crore (176000000000000 rupees.. well I am tired, you ) of the taxpayers money within two years of taking office. That if distributed to the people below poverty line would have solved at least hunger deaths and farmer suicides forever in this country, will hardly melt these scoundrels who otherwise, portray themselves Buddha incarnate.
Legislature was created so that Executive could be in control, Judiciary was created to keep above two in control. Media appointed itself the task of making sure that above three work properly. It didn't know that faceboook, twitter and internet have put so much power in the hands of common people that they can force a news down the throat of even the most shameless and corrupt media houses and force them to publish things which they, otherwise, never would. As of today, Sagarika Ghosh, wife of Rajdeep Sardesai, one of the accused, aired a talk show trying her best to defend the tainted journalists, but making sure to follow the golden rule of the mafia, which Singhvi put so succintly in one of the tapped conversations "can't seem too slanted". Many more newspapers have started printing, showing the news. Twitter users are almost baying for the blood of Barkha Dutt, who is only replying to her bootlickers ( must have learnt the tip from her Majesty while collecting Padmashree).

Kudos to the rising fifth pillar of India democracy, the people, the netizens. The most damning thing that I read about the whole spectrum and media scam was one which said that the so much money was looted, the worst thing is not that the government is not even ready for a JPC probe, the worst thing is not that the PM's office was a mute spectator, the worst thing is not that thousands of tonnes of food rot in our godowns while farmers commit suicide, the worst thing is not that A. Raja is still sitting in some A.C. room, the worst thing is that almost everyone is certain that he will never be brought to justice and that the loot will never be recovered.

Though I fully agree with above, an infinitesimally small, very very small doubt (hope!!) that this might just not exactly be the case, is the greatest relief.

The Maoist insurgency in India - II

2010-09-22T02:14:00.000-07:00

A search on Dantewada throws up only the headlines "Maoist attack so and so...". But there were a lot of unknown webpages devoted to this hitherto unknown district before the infamous attack on CRPF by Maoist which killed 72 of them. It was related to the same problems mentioned in previous post. It was just a matter of time that it was to explode. And it did. See this desperate plea to the world about the dangerous situation it was turning into. Being poor creates a kind of helplessness in this country which only those who stand in those shoes can understand. But this was much more. It was not just an incident of Police atrocity. It was the whole of state machinery engaged in uprooting the residents of an area which they occupied for thousands of years. See how the SP of the area is evading responsibility. Most important thing to notice here is the date. All these are pre-May 10 dates, when the gory killings of CRPF by Maoists had not taken place. If we just go through these and various other links, the massacre is not an incident, but natural chain in a serious events denoting breakdown the of the constitutional machinery. The proponents of development consider the action against tribals necessary but forget that it is our constitution ensures protection for tribal lands by the government. Our founding fathers probably saw the probability of injustice against tribals 60 years ago and decided to keep such a thing in the constitution.

So how exactly it happened? What led the state to commit the atrocity it did and how did it end up being a loser. While the current situation is complicated, it was not so when the MOUs were signed. To understand it also requires a little understanding of law. Not the basic ones like the police should be just and protect the citizens.... those ones we forgot since time immemorial. But the ones which shape the policy of the governments and are designed intrinsically to ensure the over fabric of the nation is sustained and lack of which may result in situations like the one we are witnessing now.
First the the acquiring of land. The law states that the government can acquire any land for "public use". This is often used in places where the government wants to construct railways, roads, etc. MOU is a memorandum of understanding between the government and a private party that underlines an overview of any sort of activity of considerably large scale going to take place in a state. Fifth schedule of the constitution deals with SCs and STs and recognizes the tribals as the owners of the forests which they are inhabiting and calls upon the government to be extra cautious while dealing with them.

P Chidambaram is an economist who is well suited for the role of Finance Ministry.. How come he is the Home Minister?

Now here is a bit of truth. Almost all the MOUs between the government and the private companies are secrets. Public is not allowed to view them. These are basically just a new technique invented by the big private companies to acquire land. No matter how rich they may be, it is tough to convince people to give up their land. So they get an MOU with the government and, inter alia, invariable most of them try to ensure that the government will acquire land for them. One it ensure 'legal sanctity' to the whole atrocious process and next, it is easier for the state with the security system at its disposal to acquire the land. What happens to the 'public good' part of the law is anybody's guess. And the commitment of the government for the development of the people and their claim that there is no money taken by them from these companies, well the less said about it the better. The amount of money involved can be guess by the limit to which the atrocities have been allowed to grow. Almost 600-900 villages have been completely razed in Chhattisgarh alone. A huge army of policemen has been created out of another set of tribals who are paid and given arms to remove village after village, so that the minerals can be taken away. Remember the Reddy brothers? It is claimed that 1 lacs truckload of minerals from Bellary was shipped out of country within 3-4 years and the administration didn't know of it. When it came to know and the Lokayukt started investigation, he was so frustrated that he resigned as he was simply helpless. The whole state apparatus was against him. Roughly 2 lac crore is estimated worth of the Reddy brothers and people on the ground claim that in 1998-99 elections, they used to campaign for Sushma Swaraj on bikes!!
The forest lands are extremely rich in minerals. If you take a map of India with dots on it denoting the mineral rich regions and transpose it over the map of India having dots representing Moist infestation, you will be able to match dot to dot. So what does this mean? As simple as that.
There are no Maoist. At least they are not the 'biggest internal security threat'. The who strife is about the minerals. And yeah, the tribals consider forests their home and the mountains their Gods. Reminds me of Gandhiji's words "Nature has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed". But he suits more in unveiling statues of and garlanding on some days. Need of the hour is "country is anyway going down the drain, loot as much as possible and make sure to grab enough of your share".
There is one thing which was not taken into account. That the tribals are very adamant about their homeland. More than one can imagine. They put up a very strong but hopeless fight against the state for this injustice. The result is the implosion of the situation, resulting in human right violation at unimaginable level, the Supreme Court ordering disbanding of Salwa Judum (armed militia enjoying state patronage which calls them mass uprising against Maoist) and NHRC severely indicting the state government. That this is one issue in which the Cong and BJP were united is another indicator of what level of collective conscience can stoop and also of how much money is available for distribution. The largest number of instances of use of the draconian POTA was in Chhattisgarh and the world came to know of Binayak Sen, the social worker, who was in illegal custody of CG police for two years while international organizations around the world including amnesty internation, American society of doctors , UN requested for his release.

So why does P Chidambaram call it "Biggest Internal threat" facing the country? When Kashmir is burning, Bhopal gas victims got to see 12 months of sentence for people who killed 3000 on a single night and then got bail immediately, when billions have been wasted on CWG, when price rise, aha his area of expertise, is burning hole in the pockets of common man?
Not to difficult to understand when you know that he was in the board of directors of Vedanta, one of the groups involved in Mining operations in India, before he joined the cabinet. Not to difficult to understand that Anil Aggrawall, the majority share holder, was recently the second richest Indian in the world from being an "Anil who??" a few years back. Not too difficult to understand that when he gave this statement, the share price of companies like Vedanta rose the most. It is same Vedanta which was severely indicted by the Environment ministry of India for severe environment law violation in Niyamagiri hills in Orissa, which too witnessed similar situation to acquire the land by the government and hand it over to Vedanta for 'public use'.

It was only natural for the Maoist to use this situation as an advantage. And they are now demi-gods for the tribals who were not only systematically wronged and denied their human rights, but for a long time their wails and pleas ran on deaf years. The media was too busy covering the marriage of Sania Mirza and the growing of the Prince. The situation right now is no less volatile, with CRPF engaged in flushing out Maoists (read tribals). It is going to turn into the typical degradation of situation, army , AFSPA, bombings, custody deaths, rapes, terror from both sides. It is sad to see our own people being treated like enemy by the government. And the almost dead Maoist movement has got the support and self justification it had lost a quarter century back. I shudder to think what the greed of man can get him to do to his fellow human beings. The greed!!

The Maoist insurgency in India - I

2010-08-17T01:18:00.001-07:00

“Mark my words, the day is not far when they(Maoists) will rule a grand majority of India. These 200 districts will become 400 in no time, and inch towards more. No government in India will be able to stop their growth through police, Salva Judums or army” Arindam Chaudhary
While this extreme statement is the hallmark of ‘Management Gurus’ to ensure being noticed and quoted more, this nonetheless is possible. Being another of the middle class indifferent Indian, I hardly cared or noticed any news about the Maoists, but the massacre in dantewada which shook the nation recently, got me interested into what was going on. That my family is staying quite close to the ground zero of April 2010 massacre, can be another idle reason. Adolf Hitler has written in his autobiography about how the media of Germany at the time was not showing the correct picture of Deutsland of the time to the common public and how it was in the control of a few. And this is India we are talking about. The extent to which the rules, laws, judiciary, elections, media and perception here can be subverted can be understood only after a long time spent in the country. If during this time, you are only following the internet items like the Governer’s story, or the extent to which our netas care about our ‘people’, the qualification of our PM, the Industrial growth story of the country, you will be amused. In case you have the typical Indian quality of following the news in a little details, you will be frustrated like most of the rediff.com commentators are. In case you had the divine opportunity to work closely with the government system in the country, it would be more hilarious than ‘Yes Minister”, more scandalous than Princess Diana, more juicy than Rakhi Sawant news and more heart wrenching than the persecuting of the Jews by Nazis.

But what if you are living in a forest, having no electricity, symbol of education, totally cut off from the mainstream economic strides of the democratic giants, whose boundaries you don’t know. What if, all you know is the few square kilometers of forest around you which you worship as a God and which is the source of livelihood for you. What if you don’t know that education is your fundamental right and what if the only understanding of government or ‘India’ that you came to know of was the visit by the forest guards who come and collect money from you or some trucks you might have seen passing by, collecting the woods of trees, which is home for you. What if you suddenly see that the number of trucks coming closer and closer to your small, unknown village is increasing by the day and what if you come to know that 600 villages have been burnt down by some people and your turn might come any time. What if some strangers come to your village with arms and introduce themselves as “Salwa Judum” and ask you to leave your forest, your home, your village, and move to camps created by the government somewhere unknown. What if a slight protest may cause some of your village members to be killed or beaten mercilessly? Would you get violent? If yes, the rest of the content is useless for you, if not, read on.
What if this whole practice is institutionalized? As in, this is not some stray incident, but a regular phenomenon happenning over a course of days and then months and then years. And the pollution from the city is reaching the forests now, the dust, the ores being mined in near by areas. What if some of your village member recites to you the destruction and apathy the ecology of the near by areas are facing. What if next night, once more a group of people come to your village with arms. But this time instead of asking you to move to camp or beating a group of people to coerce the whole village into fear of the inevitable, in case they chose not to obey the dictat of the 'government', they tell you that they are here to help you. They tell you that they have arms and that their 'motive' is to empower the poor and the helpless. They give you confidency that you can fight the police force, that now you also have guns at your disposal apart from the regular hunting arms like bows and arrows. What if you are told by these people that you actually have a right to live and that you. That right to life is something even the government cannot take away from you even if it wanted to because it was an international obligation for every government which was signatory to Geneva convention. Then you start wondering , is this really true? Then how come, your village folks are getting killed and tortured like animals for years and nothing is happening to the offenders, how come even the police are refusing to take up your complaint. By this time, amidst all the mylee, you have heard one word which is dreaded now even more than the government, police and the forest ranger. This one word has been reverberating across all the groups of people who have even visited the village, or you have come into contact with, to try and find out the reason for this mindless violence - Company. You have heard through various people that there is something called 'company' that wants to take away everything from you, your land , your forest gods, the mountains. The place where your forefathers have lived for many thousands of years is not going to belong to your children now. It is going to belong to 'Company'. What does the company want to do with it. No one was bothered for last 6000 years or so. Well, people from the village who have travelled to the 'cities' inform you that they want to dig the mountains, clear the forests. Would your head now be spinning, thinking are these people mad?? Why would someone want to defile the Mountain and forest 'God' like this. Why would anyone want to kill the very same thing which provides us food, shelter, house and everything that we need. And the answer you get is Ores. There is something in the land which is very costly for them. So now, the little logic that you have developed in the forests, tells you that only reason all this mayhem is going on is because of this thing called 'Ore' which is present under the land. So all this burning of villages and killings in mid night, the torture of men women and children and in your village, uprooting of 600 villages over last three years, is because they want to take away 'your' land and give it to 'company' which is going to bring down all the trees and dig all the mountains, and take this thing called Ore. Would this be enough to get you violent against the people who are coming to enforce this? Would you be ready to take help of the people with guns who offered you help against the people wearing same uniforms with guns who are going to come to kill you.

(To be Continued...)

What motivates employees to work : Is it money?

2010-07-28T18:57:00.000-07:00

Nope, it is not money and that is what this blog is all about. Again no, it is not my personal thought, it is a well researched output of a lot of experiments and confirmed by independent experiments!!

I was surprised to see the RSA video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc. Two things out of it stuck outstandingly which I kept pondering over for a couple of lazy weekends:

1. Why do a lot of people work for this thing called open source. For the novices, open source is a movement/community of independent computer programmers who work for free. The job doesn't involve facebooking, twittering or watching the latest funny video in circulation. It involves intense high end work requiring a lot of effort.

2. Why is added money incentive not an incentive? All the people starting from students to employees to company jumpers have only one motivation. The IIMs, IITs, glitzy software companies sell only one good thing they have to offer: money.

Reading inter-relationship of the above two, we cannot but accept what the research pointed out. "Money is a factor as long as it is required to meet a daily need, not beyond that" Simple enough!! Search for "Money is not a motivating factor" , you get one meaningful research mentioned here. Lest you have to go to this link and read the whole thing to understand,I summarized it as "almost always the de-motivating factor for different places is different, and money is one of them somewhere down in the list". Something as path breaking as this should have deserved more research and attention than the sad few results I got online.

More so in the context of my discussion with a friend who is trying to start a company on his own. His single biggest problem has been trying to retain the employees. The reason most of them are quitting is because they are getting higher salary from his competitors. He told me that he didn't mind raising the salary, but there is no end to it, you raise it from X to 1.3X and the competitor will raise it too.

Takeaways:
1. There are a group of people like college hires, people under a lot of loan and all for whom salary is Pri0 for taking up the employment.
2. Progressively the importance of money decreases as people gain experience and learn more about the industry and realize that the experience you gain is more valueable.
3. For the most dedicated/honest employees who are working real hard, the independence/acknowledgement of their work is single most important thing for them. This explains why there are thousands and thousands of programmers around the world working for open source.
4. Above understanding leads us to the presence of a lot of untapped talent pool working here and there to be heard/counted in the vast internet creating applications/marketing videos and working open source. No wonder when I chanced upon the people behind Google Chrome, I saw that there was an open source group working on it and google is trying more and more to be see as open source friendly "come, work independently and take your share of credit".

I am happy to learn that I am not the only one thinking this way :)

Why the smokers can’t (read don't) quit

2010-07-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

“10 years later, you will still be smoking. Or the least ,you will see someone smoking and feel something missing in your life”. A friend of mine had quipped while I was in my Engineering College. 4 of those 10 years
have passed and I am still smoking. A recent blog by another friend who was a Bengali, led me into thinking, why is it that we smokers are never able to quit. For the novices, Bongs are the biggest smokers. I remember that in our college, the BSA (Bengal Students Association) at least of our batch had just one person who was a non-smoker. They are the most addicted ones. A non-smoker in a Bengali college would be almost an outcast.

As a general practice, I googled the title of this blog(I do that for every blog that I write). Google quickly realized that I have now moved from Hyderabad to Seattle so amid the Seattle specific advertisement

suggestions, it led me to this link. The page has a doctor on the left side and some medical terms splattered on the right mentioning how nicotine enters our body and how we try to maintain it and how we experience “mental and physical withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal symptoms can include irritability, anger, depression, tiredness, inability to sleep or to concentrate, restlessness, headaches, and increased appetite.”.

All I could think of was “My *ss”.

Here are the main reasons it is tough to quit, readers (the 1-2 of you who do visit this blog) are
welcome to submit your suggestions.

1. We don’t know:
Yeah! Really. It is tough to comprehend this. But we really don’t know why it is tough to quit smoking. Not every cigarette we smoke is to get the kwan to avoid depression. Most of the times we are smoking is just for the sake of it. Nothing to do, so smoke. Or lets take a break from the work I was doing and smoke. But why smoke? Why not ….. what?? There is no replacement for smoking. I guess it is the subconscious movement of hands which goes to that packet, pulls out that ‘grate, lights it and puff. So I don’t really know why I am smoking. Who cares!!

2. Relax: It does relax the mind. For a moment forget, what else it is doing to the cell vacuoles in your lungs and heard and kidney and brain and joints and what not, the fact is that it relaxes the mind. In today’s world of constant work pressure, peer pressure, pee pressure J and all other kinds of pressure we live in, smoking has its own way of relaxing the mind. Medical journals ascribe this to addition of nicotine in the blood which gives a (false) feeling that the mind is relaxing. In reality it is
not. Well, who cares!!!

3. Kills Appetite: The primary reason the smokers have a craving for smoking is appetite. Smoking kills appetite. You are feeling very hungry and not able to find some food, smoking suppresses the appetite for some time. This describes one of the primary reason for some people smoking alone and once in a while. While it is very very harmful for health in the long (and short) term , who cares!!

4. Craving:There is a natural craving for smoking within 24-72 hours after one stops smoking. This is best understood by smokers who board the flight from any India airport to some long distance international destination. The irony is that the European security checks allow a lighter to be carried, the Indian ones don’t . So the poor Indian fellow is at the mercy of his other country counterparts to lend him one for a few seconds while waiting in another airport. Medical journals again ascribe to nicotine, this craving for cigarette. Who cares!!

5. Company:This is another primary reason for continues/increased smoking if not starting or craving for it. Just for the sake of ‘giving company’. Many times it happens that the smoker friend comes and wants you to join him for few minutes smoking. Now you can’t stand there and watch him smoke. You just join in. If not with a full cigarette, at least a few puffs from the one he has lighted. This adds a
count to the overall average of mine. But , who cares!!

Why we don’t care about our health: There have been many commercials, sky rocketing taxes, banners, posters, requests, curbs, suggestions, warnings, altercations in the life of every smoker. Alas! He still continues to smoke. Smoking is supposedly main reason for cancer, TB, malaria, measles, high and low blood pressure, sugar, anameia and a myriad other diseases that you can think of. Unfortunately , my B.Tech. degree wasted playing age of Empires only allows me to name only these few gathered from the repeated reading/writing for email-forwards. But it doesn’t deter the smoker.
Why? I don’t know. We just don’t care. It is not as if we are scared of all these diseases and not able to
control our urge for smoking. We just don’t care. We know there are health hazards, but when we are smoking, it is not with trembling hands, rather, we are enjoying. Who would give a damn about the x% increase in possibility of cancer, when you could be killed crossing a road in Bangalore and not a dog would bark. It just doesn’t make sense creating advertisements telling how it is putting our life at risk. Our life is at risk almost everytime in India. Of course, if it really happens to someone you
know, it will scare the shit out of you.

A few months back I came to know the story of a friend of a friend of a friend. He went to AIIMS for some check-up. The doc asked him “Are you a smoker”. He answered in affirmative. He was told to go to a particular section where only the smokers were treated. There he was again asked “Do you smoke Will(the favorite of Engineering College students due to its high freakonomic value)”. He again answered in affirmative. He was told that within the smoking section there were two different sections for people who smoke other cigarettes and those who smoke Wills. Man!! This scared hell out of me. Ever since, I dread he wills cigarette. I switched to Wills Classic while I was in India and in U.S. I have been smoking a brand which I cannot reveal until I settle the case with a friend who claims that this brand is only for girls. Smoking, though, continues.

I am quitting: After constant suggestions by a lot of people, seeing that life is given a lot of value in U.S. and realizing that here , you have more chances of getting killed due to smoking than due to being hit by a half drunk lorry driver driving an over loaded truck, and constant nagging by my better half, I have decided to quit over next one month. In case I am successful, I will write another post, cheering myself. In case I fail, this will be a reminder of my failure, at least the title.

Robbie Bach quits Microsoft

2010-05-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

Robbie was the president of the Entertainment and Devices division. He was overseeing the development of Xbox and other devices Microsoft is developing to enter into the consumer market.

The goodbye mail from Robbie makes for a wonderful reading. Microsoft did a great work by posting it online: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/05/26/if-you-want-to-change-the-world-with-technology.aspx

Google apologises for collecting personal data

2010-05-17T15:12:00.000-07:00

Google recently accepted that its world-roving Street View cars have been collecting information sent over open WiFi networks. Only those which were not password protected were accessed and their information was captured. This was inspite of a previous confirmation by the company that this product was not doing anything of the kind and that the data collected was free from any data available even freely.

Now is the time when Google is bearing the brunt of being big. No one gives a damn if some new start up starts collecting personal data. But if google collects personal data, it becomes news. I feel sad and happy about it. It reminds me of the difficulties which the large corporations have to face for everything they do. It also reminds of the importance of openness which the technology world so much requires.

This is not the first time that google has faced heat because of being accused of 'keeping personal data' or being responsible/medium for something wrong being done on the internet. Having a huge product line, it is tough to check each and every one of the million lines of code to ensure that they don't break a plethora of the multiple national and international obligations marking the monitoring of the web world. No wonder google missed it.
But the way google has put out the mistake makes me feel like I am watching one of those cartoon strips on computer/information technology profession.
I will produce it here verbatim from the g-blog for the readers:

"So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."

So one, just one Software Engineer, is able to make his piece of code which copies personal data through so many checks of the google quality bar?? For novices, it is one of the major milestones in any company to ensure that the software is not collecting any personal data without the end user's consent. Hats off to your engineering process :) No wonder most of their products remain in Beta, while the number of such instances of accusation and proofs against google are growing.

The photography genius in software engineers

2010-03-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

In the last few weeks or months rather, I couldn't help avoid noticing the sudden surge in the photography talent of software engineers. I mean, cmmon who the hell created a seperate photography profession, the geniuses are sitting right amongst us. You can find the examples everywhere, from links on twitter to orkut to facebook to flickr to picassa.
I wondered what happened? Is it that the evotuion of humans went wrong and is being corrected now, that the software engineers were meant to top the charts of photography but were somehow being subdued by their bosses? That they decided to break the chains and break free while the women folk thundered the parliament with 33% reservation. My limited understanding of biology and psychology didn't give me an answer, but curosity, it sure did!!!

I guess the cameras have become way too cheap especially in US(bides), the most comon thing your friend will ask you to bring when you are returning from that awsome onsite trip. I guess long time back, the software engineers decided to be great writers (bloggers), right after quenching their thirst at creating so wonderful forwards.
When I entered software industry, my yahoo and google mail box used to be full of such e-mail forwards that I could spend days just reading them. Now it is full of photographs and link to photographs and link to links to photographs. The majority of space in my facebook 'home' window is occupied by photos. Some videos , though, sure grind their way into the midst of plethora of photos, but by far, very few of the.

And anything which is not a human photo (say not the photo of the latest European city they are visiting), there are frantic 'likers' who like it and find it an amazing milestone in the progress of modern art. Scared at being left behind in the praise for this art, my humbke self joins the bandwagon. It is sometime fun to be a rat in a palce where there is no race. No wonder, Farhan Qureshi in wanted to be a photographer of all the professions in the world. And it touched the chord with so many delightfully delighted audience.

I guess no one can beat the fantacies of the software Engineers. From the college, where almost everyone is convinced that he will either join a rock band or become a world leve ager
, or a politician and where college comes last in the priority to the industry life, where the old timers (losers) are still stuck on their passion for blogging, to the new junta which is more interested in photography, that to not of friends or marriage, or tourism, but pure abstract modern photography. Goats, buffaloes, flowers, sky, poverty stricken children, rings, clothes.

While it has made the life of work stricken software engineers so lively and colorful, full of adulation, the real photographers are the ones bearing the brunt. Once a friend of mine was explaining his modern photography to me, it was a sleeping man in a rickshaw, with a dog near it. He was trying to explain to me the serene expression on his face, inspite of poverty which is why it became a modern art. The dog portrayed the essence of human life, you are born, eat to be alive, have sex to breed and die.
At the end I expressed my inability to comprehend such depths of art and told him that he was a farce and that he was another of those people and that he didnt know anything about photography.
He told me about the details of his camers, the pixels and zooms and contrasts and zooming on the subject, work of light on face, polarizers, rims, sunglassing, horizon lining and also about some more cameras which are more costly and he dreamt of buying some day. Having lost the argument, I decided that I should go back to my facebook and 'ooh' on every photo that I see by anyone. But my newly installed chrome browser refused to show the images on any page!!!
No wonder they say, no one can hate software more than Software Engineers.

PRAYER

2010-02-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

Today is Mahashivaratri. In an unexpected turn of events, I ended up in a temple. It was clean. There was no noise on loudspeakers excepts for the bhajan and the bells ringing. It was a serene and joyous experience. I prayed there for 10-15 minutes and came back. It was good to have a small time of peace, feeling presence of God. As always I just thanked Him for all that I have, remembered my good times and the good people I have met in life and thanked Him again for making my life so fulfilling so far.

Religion for me has always been very complicated and confusing topic. The history of it can be traced as back as fire. I have read accounts of religion in many different contexts: the conflict in Palestine, the Rishis of Himalayas, the rites and rituals in marriages, the crausades, the tribal religions in pre-historic times. It has been interesting to hear about the small short stories of religions. All religions.
Consider this:
“It is said that Prophet Muhammad was so nice to the people around him that when he used to go to drink water in a well, the water would rise up to be touched by such humble a man. But he would not take the favor lest the creatures around the water body be affected by it.”
Or this:
“When Lord Rama was in vanavas, there was a demon. She was a follower of Rama. Since he was going to pass through her village, she got some berries for him. A monkey (or something I don’t remember) told her that the fruits might be sour. It would be bad if Lord Rama tasted them it they turned out sour. It was a mischief. Out of devotion she tasted each of the fruits to make sure that they were not sour. The monkey later told that it is ‘jootha’ (mouthed). Obviously if someone has already tasted a fruit, you would not like to eat this. When the monkey later told her this (out of mischief), she was a lot perturbed. When Lord Rama heard of this, he ate all the fruits with a lot of love.” He then gave discourse on Bhakti (devotion) and why hers was true.

Lord Rama was a kshatriya, the tribal woman was, to explain in modern terms, a scheduled tribe woman. But Hindu rules restrict entry of so called backward classes in temples where Brahmins (mostly) worship the kshatriya King. Strange!!!

Almost all the religions have a holy book in common. For Hindus it is Gita, for Muslims it is Quran, for Christians it is the Holy Bible, for Sikhs it is the Guru Grantha Sahib. If you read the real text of these books, there is so much of knowledge, wisdom, rules of virtues and guidance to make tough decisions mentioned in them. But what comes to us is versions of what religion mentions. Thus Quran becomes a proponent of Jihad which is violence, Hinduism becomes an impotent religion not interested in defending itself against its attackers and justification of caste based discrimination, Christianity becomes a tale of false statements denouncing the origin of Humans through evolution. Through centuries all the religions have been allowed to be corrupted, empowering the custodians of religion, creating tussle between political and religious bosses and creating the so called ‘clash of civilizations’. Now it is a little pretentious to assume that such a strong text will not be corrupted over time. Even constitutions get corrupted as different interests try to interpret them in their own way. So it is obvious that the citizentry trying to capture power in the minds of people will try to create interpret the text in a way that suits their vested or non-vested interests. But even after so many centuries of facing the force of myriad groups of people trying to tweak it for their requirement, it still remains a strong force. It got BJP to power in India, resulted in creation of Pakistan, no American Presidential candidate can win an election by denouncing the ‘lies’ mentioned in Bible. And it remains the solitary company of the common man. Why so good and so ba??
The problem lies in the way we interpret our religion. It is usually some television serial, some editorials a couple of books at most and hearing some ‘learned person’ for creating our view. For me, religion has been a never-ending quest to know the Eternal. A quest which begins with the very questioning of whether God exists and moving through the scientific studies which prove the mathematical accuracy of universe which Human mind cannot comprehend, to creation of living beings, to understanding the ills of religion, to finding Him. And it is fun.
A very funny way in which religion has been turned into today is provided by these lines:

“I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said 'Stop! don't do it!' 'Why shouldn't I?' he said. I said, 'Well, there's so much to live for!' He said, 'Like what?' I said, 'Well...are you religious or atheist?' He said, 'Religious.' I said, 'Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?' He said, 'Christian.' I said, 'Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?' He said, 'Protestant.' I said, 'Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?' He said, 'Baptist!' I said, 'Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist church of god or Baptist church of the lord?' He said, 'Baptist church of god!' I said, 'Me too! Are you original Baptist church of god, or are you reformed Baptist church of god?' He said, 'Reformed Baptist church of god!' I said, 'Me too! Are you reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?' He said, 'Reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!' I said, 'Die, heretic scum,' and pushed him off. --Emo Phillips”

When someone asks me if I am Atheist, I rather say yes than explain him my religious convictions as that would take time, but looks like this blog has a lot of time for me.
Religion for me is a subject about which I wan’t to know and learn. I avoid visiting temples as they are too noisy. I don’t believe that lord Shiva is present in that stone where some priests are chanting some shlokas in a language I don’t understand. I find him everywhere. If I want to pray, I can pray even when I am going to sleep. But this is not to denounce the importance of religion. In fact, I think temples (or any religious place) is a good thing if kept clean and less noisy. It creates a collection of people who are there for the same purpose: Pray. It is like having a book in your hand. You can read it in a polluted and noisy traffic signal or in a silent library. Where do you think will your bent of mind have more chances of learning quickly from it?? I believe that there is a lot of treasure in religion. I am a Hindu, but believe that the beliefs of all religions is true. I dislike conversion. It is like saying you want to drink water from glass A and not glass B while both have the same source of water in them. It is folly to assume that people should have freedom to change religion. It only brings strife in society and competition amongst various nefarious to resort to more aggressive conversion. Religion should not be used to frame any government policies, but any policy or government decision should respect the faith. If a temple needs to be demolished to build a road, it should be done. But this should not lead to demolishing many temples (or any religious structure) for any flimsy reason. Studies in religion should be encouraged. When India was the superpower in ancient times, when people from across the world used to come to India to learn medicine, mathematics, science, the one thing that attracted the scholars most was ‘adhyatm’ or religious learning. Adhyatm is a learning beyond any religion. It doesn’t belong to Hinduism or Budhism or Jainism, the formost proponents of it. It is more about using any of your religious learning/conviction and discussing what part of it makes you virtuous, healthy and intrepid. True adhyatm will tell a Muslim never to leave Jihad (Literal meaning from Quran: strife against immoral things in society) or his faith in Allah. A small beginning towards Adhyatm is Yoga which aims at integration of mind and body. Anyone will tell you the benefits of it. Yoga has proven to have healed terminal diseases in matter of months, imagine the power hidden in Adhyatm which the generation has left for denim jeans and pizza corners. I further believe that prayer is a powerful instrument for oneself. I don’t think God will ever come to visit me, but I also believe that he doesn’t need to. God is more than a human in existence. He is a form which my mind cannot comprehend. I don’t find it insane to try writing about something which I , at the onset, believe that my mind cannot comprehend. It is like gravitation and relativity and strings theory. I understand the first one completely, the second one partially and third one not at all. The logical result of the equations of these theories will predict that matter and gravity don’t exist, that everything that is happening is already happened in the dimension of time: something like you travelling on a rail track and discovering new distances. It is just that you come to know about the area of track you have just reached, but it was already present there in same form.
I believe that we should narrate the religious anecdotes to children. It helps in good growth of them. My parents tell me that I was very intelligent since childhood and didn’t need to be taught since class 3 or 4. But my earliest remembrance is of my grandfather chanting the shlokas of Ramayana and me repeating after him. This what when I was like 1-1.5 years old!! This might be a mis-interpretation of mine, but it is my belief.
Take 10 deep breaths concentrating on inhaling. During inhaling try to feel that energy and life is entering you. When you exhale try to think that all the physical and emotional pollutants are leaving your body. Close your eyes, close your brain of all the thoughts for two minutes, and then let your respect for an omnipresent power enter your mind and remember all the wonderful time you had in life. Thank Him for all that you have and seek the blessings for more learning, more experiences in life. Thank all the people you have met for teaching you something or other. Pray for their wellbeing. Pray for betterment of each nation, society, removal of evils and progress of civilization. By now you already have become a saint for two minutes!! This is the first step towards any religion: Prayer and a regular resting place which will provide you solace when you read and learn about religion and start questioning foundation. Go ahead and learn as much about it as you can and it will be a rewarding journey….

“If there we to be a conference of Gods of all religions,there would be only one person speaking”

10 Golden rules to become wealthy

2010-01-29T00:33:00.000-08:00

No, this post is not another of those websites which tell you the trick of earning money. Neither is it the vedic denunciation of money.

It is a very personal account of my own experiences with money while I revolved around the sun for last 24 years. While I abhor writing personal experiences on blog for my own another personal reason, I surely think this strikes a chord with many people, and hence, is also a generic phenomenon. The trigger which got me writing this piece is here.

My earliest face off with money I can remember is trying to get a 25 paise from somewhere in my house. It used to be almost a stealing. For what? Well.. there was this ice cream guy who used to come in front of our school. Just the ice dripped in some orange or red or ping or yellow color. I could die that time to have one such. Almost every week or so I used to manage one stolen 25 paise and have that ice cream. The satisfaction it gave was amazing.
There was limited money available to us, children, at that time. There was no hotel or cinema in the town. The story of children 'seen' eating samosa in the near by dhaba was construed as 'children getting spoilt'.
But looking backwards to my dots in life, that was the happiest time in my life. The They keywords were: cricket, Beautiful weather, rain, aahat, CID, nice roads, good people, clean surrounding, cows and goats coming in the colony and we playing with them, dying to have one bite of the ice cream, homework, unit tests, hide and seek, visit to ancestral village, visiting family and friends on festivals.
25 paise per week was all it took.

Today I earn much much much more than that. In fact when i got my first salary, I didn't know what to do with 80% of it. Even with all the vagaries of the city life, a small part of my salary was enough to support my , rather lavish, lifestyle. The The keywords today are: drink, smoke, promotion, money, shares, stock, tax saving, LIC, electricity bill, air conditioner, car, petrol, Telangana, Apple, Steve jobs, LED TV, four wheel, bonus.
I am trying hard to fight off the accumulating fat, while yearning for that elusive six pack. Home made 'Achaar' has been replaced by the add-ons of the pizza but the taste remains on the tounge, not reaching the soul.

The difference as I see it is earlier most of the happiness of life was on chance based things. Cricket, rain, animals in the area and the like. The share of money in it was very small. But the second set of keywords are all based on money. We try to buy a lot of things with money. Even the rich people or at least the people like us who have sufficient money to lead a very happy life are always harping about how much they lack money. Every one wants to cover one more inch of the 'kitni zameen'

I recently saw a video circulated where people from different economic strata talked about how they would spend if they get Rs500/- Being in city, and a spendthrift that I am, I never thought that Rx500/- was enough to be so useful to people.
Opinions ranged from buying books, to new school shoes, to filling petrol in car to save it for future studies to piercing, to ration things to movies, to cricket bat, to spending on children to the amazing answer like: 'cmmon dude.. you cannot get anything in 500 rupees'
There are still a lot of people for whom it is a lot of money. But I spend it like nothing. And guess what 'it still doesnt buy me the soul stirring satisfaction of that 25 paise ice cream'.

Not without reason had someone opined:

'Do gaz zameen chahiye do gaz kafan ke baad'

The downfall of yahoo: 2006-2009

2010-01-09T04:52:00.001-08:00

When Steve Ballmer came to India, I listened to him in one of our MPRs(Multi purpose rooms). One of the most important things which he said to us and to the media later was that Microsoft needs to re-invent itself if it wants to survive and grow. Well You could put an asterisk (*) instead of Microsoft above and read it as a regular expression.

Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was NASDAQ’d in March, 1995 as “YHOO”. It started a great company quickly scaling to huge proportions. Yahoo's intraday all-time high was reached on January 4, 2000, when the stock hit $500.13!!! On a split-adjusted basis (after two 2-for-1 splits) this would be the equivalent of $125.03 in today's shares. The all time high at the end of a trading day was at 475$ on 3rd Jan 2000. This can safely be attributed to the dotcom bubble which was prevalent that time. But in the bubble , being at the top is quite something, you got to agree. The lowest was at the bust of dotcom bubble at on September 27, 2001 at 8.02$. Here is the status of the stock as of 9th Jan 2010:

I used this site: to get the fluctuation in the price of stock of Yahoo and tried to connect it to various events which might have happened at any time leading to a drop or rise in the stock price. In modern world, it is mostly the news carried by the media, which rushes the expectation adrenaline across the brokers and eventually decides the rise or fall of a stock. But there are many more things like the technology base, strategic bets, competition, legal hindrances, human capital investment, et al affecting the stock price. The effect of all these factors is mostly hidden and more visible when tracked over a longer period of time.

This is what the stock price fluctuation ffor the period 2002-2010 looks like:

Now why the above numbers and data: There was a specific reason I mentioned , the a little irritating, numbers and facts above. The contemporary history of any technology company is usually written by two groups of people. The journalists who are purely dependent on the stock price rise-fall information and are half baked in understanding of the technical strengths of the company. They will not be able to predict if a particular product will be successful or not. They can, at the best, take a look a the sales figures in the first few months of the release or the Beta feedback and try to extrapolate it also taking into account some important things like time of the year ( a high sale of a product in halloween or Christmas time doesnt mean that the product is set for success. Everything sells well in this time). This is good information for intra-day and month long bets. But in the longer period of say 20 quarters , this usually is correct based only on coincidence.
There is another review which goes on. This is mostly not company based but product based. You can aggregate the review for a set of products released by a company and bingo!! You are closer to understanding the overall potential of a company. These insights are mostly overlooked by the people who mostly base their opinion only on third or fourth interpretations of suchoriginal interpretations. I am trying to cover Yahoo from both the angles very succintly.

How the stock performed:
2002-2006 and 2006-2010:
Here is the chart which explains it all since 2002. The company did pretty well and an investment in 2002 would have been giving good returns since then. But there is something wrong which started manifesting itself since 2006 as you can see, there has been a good decline in the stock value.
2002-2006 was the asl plz era and movement by yahoo into multiple segments starting from shopping to catering to multiple and diverse business like news sports, celebrities, stocks and all through its main page and it kept the users hooked to the site. Also incidently this coincides with Terry Semel being brought from Warner Bros as CEO. The fact that he was handling media there and Media through internet became the deciding factor during this period is notable. One can safely assume that he succefully propelled Yahoo into embracing media better during the period compared to starting as a portal and email service. While there are many reports of him being a spendthrift, the stock value growth of yahoo during the period answers for itself. During this time yahoo made very good strategic investments in yahoo messenger making it better and better, moving yahoo news forward on its website in a big way, making its site as a shopping site as well. There were like a hundred thousand things for which you could start right at yahoo!!

2006-2010 was the period when Yahoo had to pay for sleeping while google dinged it with an amazing mail service: gmail. Right from the begining it was obvious that gmail was far better than yahoo as the primary mail service. Add to that the huge orkut userbase google hadd when it bought it. Integrating the orkut user base to gmail meant that the peopel had an advantage of social networking like never before. The biggest loss by yahoo was lack of foresight in understanding the potential of networking sights. How many of you having an account on facebook actually load that heavy yahoo messenger to talk to a friend. We just talk on social networking sights. And slowly but surely the messengers are going to be a thing of past. As the chatting services on the websites become more and more powerful, the messenger softwares are going to see their sunset. Another big lose out by yahoo during 2006 was failing to create a good web based video/picture sharing. Just imagine the difference between two companies: yahoo and google. While yahoo has all the infrastructure, expertise for creating a video service, it waits and waits. Google on the other hand knows that if it starts building a video sharing service from scratch, it will fail well behind others who can do it quicker than others. Also, it recognises that with bandwisdth becoming faster and faster, the video on web is going to zoom through in usage, not just increase. Bang, it buys youtube and at an astronomical price. Yahoo now gets the sense of social networking and offers to buy facebook for 1B. $ , spurned. Later Microsoft buys a minority stake in the company which values it at 15 B. $

The year 2009 and the Microsoft offer and the ad deals
The year 2009 has no doubt been he most happening as well as tumultuous year for yahoo. It began with Microsoft realizing that yahoo share prices had probably reached the lowest it could and now was the best time for the attack. In Feb 2009, Microsoft offered $44 billion valuation for yahoo shares. This was 62% higher than the then price of Yahoo stocks. Microsoft primarily need yahoo to get its search and media business and be a better competition for google. While the one sided offer from Microsoft ended, there was no word from yahoo. Some time later, Microsoft offered, 47$. But later yahoo revealed that it wanted to be valued at 54B. $. Microsoft (read Steve Ballmer) waited, tried convincing and then walked away. This deal would have been the deal of the decade, putting both the companies right in the saddle. It was too obvious that Jerry, the then CEO of Yahoo was considering it as his own turf and didn’t want to be ‘owned’ by Microsoft. It is normal for anyone to have this feeling when he is a co-founder. But he forgot that the primary target of any company is the interest of its share holders , in short as well as long term. Right on the news of Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo, the stocks or Yahoo picked up pace moving upwards. But it wasn’t meant to be. Later in 2009, Google announced a partnership with yahoo which would make the combination owner of 80% of the ads business. It needed child’s common sense that this was going to get mired up in regulator controversy. And it did. Despite the show of efforts from both sides, the inevitable happened: Google walked away. And in a conference a few days later, Jerry expressed willingness to be bought by Microsoft to which Ballmer famously replied: “we have moved on”.

And today....
As per the latest news Yahoo has replaced Jerry with another CEO. The most embarrassing thing for Jerry was that with this announcement, the stock prices started rising again and that is what shows up in the 2009 chart of the yahoo stock price fluctuation. And things got a little tinge better since then, with the partnership with Microsoft wherein the Bing search engine of Microsoft will be used by yahoo for search on its site and the UI will be provided by yahoo has materialized. This has infused some energy into Yahoo to have at least stabilized its stocks for some time. But the losses for the last 4 years are too heavy for yahoo to carry on. As I previously described, the lack of foresight, the lack of respect for share holders money, has put yahoo in a situation from where it will be quite some time before Yahoo can rise again. Not to speak of the employee morale going down. Alas! It was not founded by Steve Jobs :)

Why Yahoo Sucks - Remember asl plz era??

2010-01-04T05:36:00.000-08:00

I have been using Yahoo for a long long time. In fact, yahoo was the first website I came to know of back in school days when I hardly understood what a web site was. Then I got an email-id on yahoo. sidscrazy@yahoo.co.in Now it has been doomed to work as the junkyard for orkut and facebook posts. I hardly use it anymore. Still I had a fascination for yahoo.
It reminded me of the first few years in college when we had this ultra kewl yahoo group chat. "asl plz" still might hit the memory cells in a lot of minds. We used to enter in yahoo chat rooms and look for names which might give hints of being a girl. Like someone named "neha_19_delhi" can be safely be considered to be a girl named Neha, aged 19 and from Delhi. This way there were around 50-100 chat room. There were classification of the chat rooms based on region, interests, technology, society et al. On the right side were the names of all the people online in that chat room. On the left pane which covered 80% of the screen, was a common window. Anyone could write something and post in this common chat window. Sometimes there were groups of people from pakistan bad mouthing India in these common chat windows. We would enter such chat groups in bulk and write all possible abuses for Pakistan. It was fun. A favourite timepass. And you could also ping someone on the list on right side for a personal chat. And it would invariably start with "asl plz", meaning age, sex and location please. This was the primary determining factor based on which I would decide whether I want to chat with that person or not.
All in all it was fascinating.

Since first year, my association with yahoo has been only my second email sid_svnit@yahoo.co.in. I had this as my primary email account. my railway reservation, Hutch bill, some programming forums, ICICI bank account, all details come up here. Most important of all, this account is registered to our college group comps_svnit_2k6 whose mails I love to read, howsoever useless it may be. Yahoo messenger simply vanised from the scene as the requirement moved from chat rooms to networking site: orkut taking the place very nicely. As chatting and e-mail were important still, I took a google account. The google account was(still is) very nice.

Here I will try to give a comparative details on what things in yahoo piss me off as a naive user of e-mail:
- Very frequent change in the website/UI
The gmail login page has remained same since probably the first exe of gmail.com was created. No change. I am so much practiced to it that I know how many tabs I need to press before my cursor moved to the login page. On the other hand mail.yahoo.com changes like it is the college project of some sophomores. Do these yahoo people not understand the basic concept of innovation in UI: it has to be subtle and NEVER NEVER change the entry point of the UI for the end user. NEVER.

- Failing to copy gmail in integrating yahoo messenger to yahoo mail.
When I login into gmail, along with my mails, my chat window opens up in the left side. Again this is very good innovation. The entry point of the UI is not changed and I notice no major change in the UI and hurrah!! there is a chat window. Not only that, it is integrated to my orkut account. So I can chat with my friends on orkut directly from gmail. I feel pity for yahoo in this regard. Today after a long time I wanted to come on yahoo chat. I thought let me use the yahoo mail option. I saw that after logging into the yahoo mail, the chat is simply not able to start. And I am using what might be one of the fastest bandwidth in India. I tried multiple tmies, but no use.
Still I thought that may be there is some folder in yahoo account where my offline messages are getting stored. Didnt find one.

- When I log-in into gmail, I can see all my mails. All which are visible on the front page. One window.
When I login into yahoo mail, probably people at yahoo think that I have logged in to see their silly ads. What they have for me is 15% of the window on the right for bright ads. On a slow machine, a click by mistake on that window and the browser will almost hang as the ads will be for some second grade sites which dont open in less than 5 seconds.
on the left 15% is the folders for my yahoo. That is ok (ok that is good not just ok). The in the centre is my mails. Here 70% of the horizontal space is eaten up by unnecessary things. top 20% by blank space. Bottom 50% by just one line

"Got your eye on one of those emails up there?
Just click on an email to view it down here in this handy reading pane."

And this is not in big font, it is in small font taking only one line. The remaining space is blank.

- Too poor Spam Filter:
I had registered my gmail account for many job sites while I was searching the job for my brother. One by one I started marking them as spam. And it has worked like wonders. At one point I had thought that I will never be able to use my gmail account for anything productive. But now, I use it as all the mails I marked and from same senders (and probably more based on the spam logic) go straight to the spam folder.
Yahoo just fools the end user here. There are many mails I mark as spam. It moves the mails to the spam folder. But it doesnt implement the simplest rule of spam filter that at least from the same sender, all other mails should go to spam folder. I keep getting mails from same senders again and again. Hats off to the coders of Yahoo (where art thou feet??).

- Tough to get yahoo Messenger working on windows Vista:After not being able to read my offline messages, I decided to installl yahoo messenger. Thankfully they have not changed the login page much. But it doesn't log-in. I saw that there is a "connection preferences" options. Tried all possible combinations. No luck!!
Then disabled my firewall. No luck!!
Then installed a new OS, disabled firewall, made sure there was no AV running, and installed YM there. Still no luck with log-in.

No wonder Yahoo declined to be bought for 33$ a share and went to 16$ or so in 6 months. With software brains this good,, what else can be expected from the managers there. Will someone believe that in 2000, its stock had touched $118.75 a share!!!

I tried digging into the downfall of yahoo. Started with the nice wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo .
Will collect and post it later... stay tuned.

(ps: Views are personal)

Why the Dollar Bubble is about to Burst?

2009-12-16T09:36:00.000-08:00

It has been a common understanding now that the US currency is almost like toilet paper. It has no value. For the newbies, here is a small, simplified explanation:
What is money printed on paper. In India you can read what it is. Just take a 10 rupee note and see what is written on it. It would be something like "I promise to pay the bearer a sum of 10 rupee". So what you have is just the paper, but it is backed by the government. The government promises that if you want, anyday, it will give you 'something' worth Rs10. But for internal circulation within a country, the paper should be deemed sufficient.
This 'something' in international transactions is considered to be gold. So effectively, if you have sa 1000 Euros, you can go to a country having Euro as currency and ask for gold worth 1000 Euro. But this is not the case with $ (US Dollar). It is not backed by gold. So the question is, if I have 1000 US Dollars, and I want the US government to give me it's worth, what would I get. NOTHING. You heard it. The country simply doesn't have enough to pay. So you effectively have what is called as debt. The country considers it as debt and think that it would never have to return it. Coercing and crude transactions have kept it alive, but this might not be for long. Why? Read on....

(The below article is copied verbatim from some blog. I have not been able to establisht the correct original source of the article, if someone wants to confirm the ownership and thereby credit himself here, please drop me a mail at sid_svnit@yahoo.co.in )

IRAN HAS REALLY DONE IT… more deadlier than the nuclear..

The Voice (issue 264 -) ran an article beginning, ‘ Iran has really gone and done it now. No, they haven’t sent their first nuclear sub in to the Persian Gulf . They are about to launch something much more deadly — next week the Iran Bourse will open to trade oil, not n dollars but in Euros’ This apparently insignificant event has consequences far greater for the US people, indeed all for us all, than is imaginable.

Currently almost all oil buying and selling is in US-dollars through exchanges in London and New York . It is not accidental they are both US-owned.

The Wall Street crash in 1929 sparked off global depression and World War II. During that war the US supplied provisions and munitions to all its allies, refusing currency and demanding gold payments in exchange.

By 1945, 80% of the world’s gold was sitting in US vaults. The dollar became the one undisputed global reserve currency — it was treated world-wide as `safer than gold’. The Bretton Woods agreement was established.

The US took full advantage over the next decades and printed dollars like there was no tomorrow. The US exported many mountains of dollars, paying for ever-increasing amounts of commodities, tax cuts for the rich, many wars abroad, mercenaries, spies and politicians the world over. You see, this did not affect inflation at home! The US got it all for free! Well, maybe for a forest or two.

Over subsequent decades the world’s vaults bulged at the seams and more and more vaults were built, just for US dollars. Each year, the US spends many more dollars abroad that at home. Analysts pretty much agree that outside the US , of the savings, or reserves, of all other countries, in gold and all currencies — that a massive 66% of this total wealth is in US dollars!

In 1971 several countries simultaneously tried to sell a small portion of their dollars to the US for gold. Krassimir Petrov, (Ph. D. in Economics at Ohio University ) recently wrote, ‘The US Government defaulted on its payment on August 15, 1971 . While popular spin told the story of `severing the link between the dollar and gold’, in reality the denial to pay back in gold was an act of bankruptcy by the US Government.’ The 1945 Breton Woods agreement was unilaterally smashed.

The dollar and US economy were on a precipice resembling Germany in 1929.
The US now had to find a way for the rest of the world to believe and have faith in the paper dollar. The solution was in oil, in the petrodollar. The US viciously bullied first Saudi Arabia and then OPEC to sell oil for dollars only — it worked, the dollar was saved. Now countries had to keep dollars to buy much needed oil. And the US could buy oil all over the world, free of charge. What a Houdini for the US ! Oil replaced gold as the new foundation to stop the paper dollar sinking.

Since 1971, the US printed even more mountains of dollars to spend abroad.
The trade deficit grew and grew. The US sucked-in much of the world’s products for next to nothing. More vaults were built.

Expert, Cóilínn Nunan, wrote in 2003, ‘The dollar is the de facto world reserve currency: the US currency accounts for approximately two thirds of all official exchange reserves. More than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions and half of all world exports are denominated in dollars. In addition, all IMF loans are denominated in dollars.’
Dr Bulent Gukay of Keele University recently wrote, ‘This system of the US dollar acting as global reserve currency in oil trade keeps the demand for the dollar `artificially’ high. This enables the US to carry out printing dollars at the price of next to nothing to fund increased military spending and consumer spending on imports. There is no theoretical limit to the amount of dollars that can be printed. As long as the US has no serious challengers, and the other states have confidence in the US dollar, the system functions.’

Until recently, the US-dollar has been safe. However, since 1990 Western Europe has been busy growing, swallowing up central and Eastern Europe .
French and German bosses were jealous of the US ability to buy goods and people the world over for nothing. They wanted a slice of the free cake too.
Further, they now had the power and established the euro in late 1999 against massive US-inspired opposition across Europe , especially from Britain – paid for in dollars of course. But the euro succeeded.

Only months after the euro-launch, Saddam’s Iraq announced it was switching from selling oil in dollars only, to euros only — breaking the OPEC agreement.. Iran , Russia , Venezuela , Libya , all began talking openly of switching too — were the floodgates about to be opened?

Then aero planes flew into the twin-towers in September 2001. Was this another Houdini chance to save the US (petro) dollar and the biggest financial/economic crash in history? War preparations began in the US But first war-fever had to be created — and truth was the first casualty. Other oil producing countries watched-on. In 2000 Iraq began selling oil in euros.
In 2002, Iraq changed all their petro-dollars in their vaults into euros. A few months later, the US began their invasion of Iraq .

The whole world was watching: very few aware that the US was engaging in the first oil currency, or petro-dollar war. After the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, remember, the US secured oil areas first. Their first sales in August were, of course, in dollars, again. The only government building in Baghdad not bombed was the Oil Ministry! It does not matter how many people are murdered — for the US , the petro-dollar must be saved as the only way to buy and sell oil – otherwise the US economy will crash, and much more besides.

In early 2003, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela talked openly of selling half of its oil in euros (the other half is bought by the US ). On 12 April 2003, the US-supported business leaders and some generals in Venezuela kidnapped Chavez and attempted a coup. The masses rose against this and the Army followed suit. The coup failed. This was bad for the US .

In November 2000 the euro/dollar was at $0.82 dollars, its lowest ever, and still diving, but when Iraq started selling oil in euros, the euro dive was halted. In April 2002 senior OPEC reps talked about trading in euros and the euro shot up. In June 2003 the US occupiers of Iraq switched trading back to dollars and the euro fell against the dollar again. In August 2003 Iran starts to sell oil in euros to some European countries and the euro rises sharply. In the winter of 2003-4 Russian and OPEC politicians talked seriously of switching oil/gas sales to the euro and the euro rose. In February 2004 OPEC met and made no decision to turn to the euro — and yes, the euro fell against the dollar. In June 2004 Iran announced it would build an oil bourse to rival London and New York , and again, the euro rose. The euro stands at $1.27 and has been climbing of late.

But matters this month became far, far worse for the US dollar. On 5th May Iran registered its own Oil Bourse, the IOB. Not only are they now selling oil in euros from abroad — they have established an actual Oil Bourse, a global trading centre for all countries to buy and sell their oil!

In Chavez’s recent visit to London ; he talked openly about supporting the Iranian Oil Bourse, and selling oil in euros. When asked in London about the new arms embargo imposed by the US against Venezuela , Chavez prophetically dismissed the US as ‘a paper tiger’.

Currently, almost all the world’s oil is sold on either the NYMEX, New York Mercantile Exchange, or the IPE, London’s International Petroleum Exchange.
Both are owned by US citizens and both sell and buy only in US dollars. The success of the Iran Oil Bourse makes sense to Europe , which buys 70% of Iran ’s oil. It makes sense for Russia , which sells 66% of its oil to Europe . But worse for the US , China and India have already stated they are very interested in the new Iranian Oil Bourse.

If there is a tactical-nuclear strike on – deja-vu – `weapons of mass destruction’ in Iran , who would bet against a certain Oil Exchange and more, being bombed too?

And worse for Bush. It makes sense for Europe , China , India and Japan– as well as all the other countries mentioned above — to buy and sell oil in Euro’s. They will certainly have to stock-up on euros now, and they will sell dollars to do so. The euro is far more stable than the debt-ridden dollar. The IMF has recently highlighted US economic difficulties and the trade deficit strangling the US– there is no way out.

The problem for so many countries now is how to get rid of their vaults full of dollars, before it crashes? And the US has bullied so many countries for so many decades around the world, that many will see a chance to kick the bully back. The US cannot accept even 5% of the world’s dollars — it would crash the US economy dragging much of the world with it, especially Britain .

To survive, as the Scottish Socialist Voice article stated, ‘the US , needs to generate a trade surplus to get out of this one. Problem is it can’t.’
This is spot on. To do that they must force US workers into near slavery, to get paid less than Chinese or Indian workers. We all know that this will not happen.

What will happen in the US ? Chaos for sure. Maybe a workers revolution, but looking at the situation as it is now, it is more likely to be a re-run of Germany post-1929, and some form of extreme-right mass movement will emerge…

Does Europe and China/Asia have the economic independence and strength to stop the whole world’s economies collapsing with the US ? Their vaults are full to the brim with dollars.

The US has to find a way to pay for its dollar-imperialist exploitation of the world since 1945.. Somehow, eventually, it has to account for every dollar in every vault in the world.

Bombing Iran could backfire tremendously. It would bring Iran openly into the war in Iraq , behind the Shiite majority. The US cannot cope even now with the much smaller Iraqi insurgency. Perhaps the US will feed into the Sunni v Shiite conflict and turn it into a wider Middle-East civil-war.
However, this is so dangerous for global oil supplies. Further, they know that this would be temporary, as some country somewhere else, will establish a euro-oil-exchange, perhaps in Brussels .

There is one `solution’ — scrap the dollar and print a whole new currency for the US . This will destroy 66% of the rest of the world’s savings/reserves in one swoop. Imagine the implications? Such are the desperate things now swimming around heads in the White House, Wall Street and Pentagon.

Another is to do as Germany did, just before invading Poland in 1938. The Nazis filmed a mock Polish Army attack on Germany , to win hearts and minds at home. But again, this is a finger in the dam. So, how is the US going to escape this time? The only global arena of total superiority left is military. Who knows what horrors lie ahead. A new world war is one tool by which the US could discipline its `allies’ into keeping the dollar in their vaults.

The task of socialists today is to explain to as many as possible, especially our class, that the coming crisis belongs purely to capitalism and (dollar) imperialism. Not people of other cultures, not Islam, not the axis of evil or their so-called WMDs. Their system alone is to blame.

The new Iranian Oil Bourse, the IOB, is situated in a new building on the free-trade-zone island of Kish , in the Persian Gulf . It’s computers and software are all set to go. The IOB was supposed to be up and running last March, but many pressures forced a postponement. Where the pressure came from is obvious. It was internationally registered on 5th May and supposed to open mid-May, but its opening was put off, some saying the oil-mafia was involved, along with much international pressure. ………………………

In 2007 Crude was trades around 60 usd. Everyone know dollar was getting weaker and weaker day by day. Than US with the help of their two NYMEX & IPE exchange started rising the price of crude by Future trading on crude( called speculation). Today crude is around 140 usd. It means whole world who were paying 60 usd, now paying 140 usd, means demand of dollar increase to 230% and dollar start again rising.

Even OPEC recently confirmed that in hike of crude, 60% contribution is due to speculation (Future market).

Paa: Pushing to be acclaimed the best performance by Amitabh Bachchan till now

2009-12-08T20:37:00.000-08:00

Paa,
My rating: 1/5.
Directed by Balakrishnan, the movie stars Amitabh Bachchan as a sick child, with Abhishek Bachchan as his father and Vidya Balan as mother.

The publicity team has done a great job by trying to portray it as the best effort by Amitabh Bachahan till now. It is no where close to it. The glass scene in Amar Akbar Anthony, the maturity portrayed in Hum, the natural accent in Agnipath are far stellar performances by him.

But I must give credit to the movie for doing some justice at least to the Talent that Amitabh is. After recent flops by Amtiabh, this one raises some hope. It has been produced under the banner of ABCL which I thought had vanished some time back.

Spoiler: skip this paragraph if you don't like the story being told before you watch the movie.
The story is about a 13 year old child played by Amitabh Bachahan(almost unrecognizable), who is suffering from Progeria. Due to this illness, his ageing is 4-5 times his actual age. Children suffering from this illness usually die at the age of 14-15. And this age advance is not just mental, it is physical as well. Because of this, the child looks very old.
The child was born because of unsafe sex between Abhishek Bachchan (playing Amol Atre, a young politician) and Vidya Balan (playing the child's mother). One thing I liked here is that the first time I saw the taboo of actually saying the word 'comdom' being broken. Amol Atre once clearly calls out that the child was born because they didn't use Condom. At least among teenagers, it is very common in India not to have any knowledge of safe sex and all the details.
I remember my own embarassing details. All that I knew was from some magazines my friends used to bring in college. In fact I didnt knew about about what causes AIDS till my first year in college, about menstruation till second year in college, and about the so called contraction at child birth till an year after completing college..

The movie mostly revolves around the child and his single mother and how Abhishek Bachahan comes forward to accept him as his own son.
The ending is sad with the father mother coming together but as the inevitable, the child dies. The notable thing in the movie was the make up of AB done by Christien Tinsley, the same one who did the make up of Christ in Mel Gibson directed Passion Of Christ.
The movie is quite a close copy of the movie Anjali, which came long back about a child having terminal sickness. But Anjali was class apart,, better directed and the small cute childish sequences were better in it. The story line in that movie was also very very touchy and so was the scena sequence while still being plain enough to entertain children as well as adults.
No wonder I still remember not only the name but many scenes of the movie as well though I was like 7-8 years old when I watched the movie.

Adios.
Sid

Rains, samosas, cricket and the reminiscence of Namrup

2009-06-28T21:57:00.000-07:00

The little drops of water falling on earth, slowly falling on earth, releasing the wonderful dusty fragrance of earth, chilling the soaring temperature in heated lands of India, moisturising the leaves of tress and making them look greener, putting to rest the strong sunlight: A thought only imagined, but rains... Ah!! I love rains. My earliest remembrance of rains goes back to my childhood days in Namrup. It used to rain almost everyday. So much so that if there was a day when it didn’t rain, it would become the talk of the HFCL colony. All the womenfolk would rush to wash their clothes as they can now be dried in sun. You can dry clothes inside your house as well. But that leaves a kind of smell in the clothes which is kind of pungent. No, I never faced the smell. In fact, irrespective of whether the clothes were dried in sun or inside a room under fan, it all same for me. It was my mom who would fret about having to dry them without sun complaining of that pungent which made me believe that the smell actually exists. If I am able to gather the courage to have an argument for an hour over the ‘smell’, I would accept more openly: The smell doesn’t exist if the clothes are dried under the fan.

In Assam, more particularly in Namrup, the people had an almost close relationship with rains. The good thing about the place was that it had very good drainage and was almost on the starting slope of a mountain. So the water wouldn’t log anywhere. Also, it had a lot of lush green vegetation, not the green you see in the national parks of central india, they are brown, I mean the green as what you would probably see in Kerela. So it would be a wonderful view to watch rain water trickling down those leaves, cleaning the already clean surface, almost providing it a shine. Then we would have a lot of thunderstorms. They would be strong loud, audacious and continuous. Almost the whole night. The downpour would be very heavy, recording record levels of rainfalls in a day. Another good thing to happen there was the permanent electricity. In cities, come summer rains, and it is followed by incessant power cuts. So much so that it takes the sheen of elation one feels for rains. But Namrup was different, the electricity never went away. And the homes were close enough. It was a township with quarters side by side and nice narrow roads. The roads were not the slabs like the American roads, nevertheless, the trucks and busses never passed through them. So they remained clean. There was no water logging as well and no garbage. May be due to rains ro some other reason, I never found garbage collecting in namrup streets. Almost all streets had like a narrow road of say 15 feet width. Then on both sides there were strips of grass. Yeah, like the ones which are grown at the cost of hundreds of thousands of rupees in software companies in india. Only difference was that these were natural grasses. They were like another 15 feet width on both sides. And then there were boundaries of houses. In the one I stayed, there were wired bouindaries, aluminium wires, strong enough to stop animals: goats and cows from coming inside but weak enough to give way in case an adult tried to cross them. One of the strips on one of the sides of roads used to be our cricket pitch where the grass would become flat and hard and devoid of bumps because we regularly played there. The wired boundaries were our boundaries and the trees ensured we never lacked stumps. The thick vegetation here and there ensured that the green tennis ball would get lost every now and then and would start the economic management of tiny finance wizard children, where each person would contribute some amount such that the total equalled Rs25/- Then all of us would go to the shop nearby together and get another tennis ball to get the match started again. Almost always, we started to the shop with the decision that we shall continue the innings once we come back, but everytime, it would happen like by the time we are back, everyone has forgotten the scores and the moment of match specific ambition and we would start a new match again. No we never played cricket in rain. You can play football but not cricket in rain. In cricket, you need to see the ball closely to hit it for a boundary. And when it rained, our cricket was stopped. It was replaced by cartoons on TV or going to some friends’ place to enjoy a bunch of pakoras and if his parents were really mature, we would be served some delicious Tea. Sometimes we got rosogulla and samosas if some uncle had just returned from market and was in a very happy mood. After hurriedly eating the servings , we would rush to either cartoon or play a game of carom. But the best moment was to see the sunlight next morning. All of us would start having a feeling of getting the chance to play cricket in the evening. During summer vacations, the innings would start at 9 AM or so. Once we even tried a hand at playing test cricket, but quickly returned to the ‘better’ version once we realized that no one really was able to hold the stumps for more than an hour or so and bowling and fielding was getting terrible boring. Plus, if someone got out on first ball, It wasn’t really fair to him. And we had drains on both sides of the road. After the grass strip ended and before the boundary started. It was about half feet wide and one feet deep. And was almost always filled with water. We would have ball going in it regularly. But it was no thought in it. We would readily pick the ball from the drain water, bounce it hard a couple of times so that the cloth of the tennis ball, sheds the water that has been soaked into it, and start playing again.
At times when the ball was lost and we couldn’t gather enough money to buy a ball, we would go on bicycle rides across the town. The town was spread in about 4-5 M in length and similar in breadth. And we had street lights and again the electricity never went out. The roads were good and the heavy vehicles against which we had to be careful were the two wheelers. The four wheelers in the colony were only items of show off so that the owner could once in a while in a conversation say that he owned a car. There was a road from our town called the “Mohini road” ( I don’t know who Mohini was or is and multiple queries to find the origin of this name failed). This road connected the town to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. This was around 4-5 KM but sometimes we would gather the courage to ride that much and reach there. On the way we crossed the meandering tea gardens and when we reached there we would find again grass strips at the foothills of the mountain before the thick vegetation along with the trees started. Sometimes we would go some deep in the forest of the mountains but never dared venturing too deep into them. There was one time when we started with some food in our bag at 7 AM, reached the foothills at around 8 AM. There was a bug target we wanted to accomplish that day. There was a river which came from that mountain. It had very clean water and was just 20 feet wide at the foot of the mountains. Later it became a big river and joined Brahmaputra. We wanted to reach the origin of the river!!!!
As it happened the best adventurists of the class gathered. I think we were five in all. We were in class six. We took band aid, some dettol and some iron rods taking precaution for all kinds of possible emergency. We met some villagers nearby and asked about the river. They told that the origin is around 15 KM of climb along the river. Then one reached a large pot kind of mountain, something like the top of the mountain beheaded and filled with water. There is a small crack at one side through which the water keeps falling and this creates the river. Our geology(then only geography) became our favourite subject for the moment, close second was zoology as we were told that we would encounter elephant on way. We started the journey. Right at the beginning, we realized our first mistake. The day was kind of sunny, but the river was covered with trees on both sides. At the top, the leaves of the trees on both sides met and there was no sunlight which could reach below. Result: It was very very cold. November 11 Am is not a cold time in Namrup, but it was cold. But we wanted to proceed, so we did. After around one KM of trekking, we found what was the first waterfall I have ever seen in my life. Since there was no way to reach there(we were trekking through river itself, the sides were too stony and not walkable), we were probably the first tourists to see the waterfall. It was right in front of us. Around 20 feet high. And the water was falling very strong. One friend leaned ahead to get wet in water. Till now we were sweating due to treacherous walking and had forgotten the cold. But gallop, he vanished. For a split second , we didn’t realise what happened until he surfaced again, gasping for breath. Then the realization downed on us,, a lesson I remember till today: At the base of any waterfall, right at the place where the water is hitting the ground, it is very deep. Somehow he was rescued. I thought it will deter the resolve, it didn’t. The poor guy was reprimanded to be adventurous , not a fool. As we were walking, we were selecting a leader. The person walking in front was the leader,, or rather the leader had to walk in front. The point was that the person walking in front had to be most careful. A deep hole in the surface of water, some insect, some snake on way, spotting moving trees, meaning elephants and signalling to run away(yeah, based on our discussion with villagers, we had decided to run in case we saw elephants). And in between he had to keep shouting what he felt in his legs. He would walk around 20 feet ahead of others. This was rotating, the leadership baton.
At around 1 PM, we reached a place which looked like a good resting place. We were terribly tired and averaging the estimate of each person, had travelled around 8-9 KM in water, on stones, in up down water surface. We decided to have our meal. There were small bruises in the legs of many people which were washed with dettol and we drank some water from the river as well (it was really so so clean). The place was kind of a huge rocky pot with sand inside it. The softness of the sand made it a nice place to sit and talk. We discussed our ‘strategy’. Since I was in best condition, with no bruises in legs and only one incident of a placing my foot on a thorn which pierced through my chappals and the sole of my leg as well, I was decided as the ‘leader’. But the cold air was affecting me. The sounds of many animals known and unknown were also not a comfortable thing either. We kept walking, everyone was s tired by now that the initial enthusiasm of adventure had turned into a ‘get over it’ attitude. Everyone just wanted it to end, so no talking and joking now. We were just walking and walking.
At around 3 PM , a serious fear dawned and I shouted for everyone to stop. By default, you do what the leader says, everyone. I told everyone that it was 3 PM. The sun sets in Nov in Namrup at around 5:30 PM . We were 4-5 hours of fast walk and 8- hours of current speed walk away from our origin. Now the discussion was serious and everyone tired. Many options were suggested “let’s just go ahead, if we see the origin, nothing else matter”, “are there different animals which come up at night?”, “what if we don’t get the origin by night, how do we walk?” “no we cannot use our torch while walking at night, it will attract all insects and animals near by”, “we can go back and rest at our resting place earlier for the night”, “but what about the food, our stock is over”, “no we cannot eat jungle fruits, I have heard it is poison”, in case someone is injured, what can we do at night, in day returning is easier”. I remember one of my friends when he said there “guys!!! We are going to reach the origin of the river. This might be the single biggest and happiest moment in our life, We will never be able to do it again, you cannot go back”. He was right. We decided to turn back and I as ‘leader’ walked twice faster. And we never tried again. By the time we had next summer break, some of the friends had their parents transferred and the gang was disbanded. In couple of years we got ‘serious’ with the books. The cricket continued though and so did the beautiful rains of Namrup. Many years later, while working in an MNC, I once went there and saw the river at the foothill of the mountain. I felt it staring at me mocking at my failure. And I heard myself saying that we didn’t fail. The journey itself was a memorable one. I have trekked through the bigger Himalayas and crossed rivers on single ropes, but this one was really special. I remembered the comrades of the moment and the wonderful planning, execution and a near failure.

X Men Origins : Wolverine

2009-06-28T03:08:00.001-07:00

Release Date:1 May 2009
Director: Margaret Tang/Gavin Hood
Writer:Marc Guggenheim
Actors:
Hugh Jackman (Logan)
Liev Schreiber (Victor)

The series is based on Marvel Comics' fictional character Wolverine.
Good:
- The performance by Hugh Jackman as Logan
- Story: The twist and turns of the story is captvating. Everytime there is an expectation and sometimes it is met and sometimes it is not.
- Action sequence, I loved the scene where Logan used his nails to stop the bike and turn around skidding, dream of every adventure lover. Even the fight sequence on the top of a round shaped cement building you normally find in areas of Nuclea reactors was awsome.
- The ultimate power. The general was successful in creating the final power which was the combination of the power of all others was great view. But it was pathetic to see him getting killed by two other normal X - Men.

Bad:
- The ending was much uninspiring than what the movie was building it to

Story:
In 1845 Canada, young James Howlett sees his father killed by groundskeeper Thomas Logan. The trauma activates the boy's mutation: bone claws protrude from James' hands, and he kills Logan. In his dying breath, Logan tells James that he is his real father. James flees with Logan's abused son and James' brother Victor Creed. The two survive for over a century as men in their prime, putting their violent urges and skills to use by fighting in the American Civil War and both World Wars. During the Vietnam War, Victor kills a superior after he stops Victor's rape attempt on a villager, James defends his brother, and the two are "executed" by firing squad. They are locked up in chains after the execution fails due to their regeneration powers. Major William Stryker approaches the two and offers them membership in Team X, a group of mutants which includes marksman Agent Zero, mercenary Wade Wilson, teleporter John Wraith, invincible Fred Dukes and electrokinetic Chris Bradley. The duo joins the team, but the group's questionable actions and disregard for human life cause James to leave.

Six years later, James - now going by the name Logan - is living in Canada with his girlfriend Kayla Silverfox. Colonel Stryker locates Logan and warns him someone is killing members of the team. Shortly afterwards, Victor murders Kayla and brutally beats Logan. Stryker offers Logan a way to beat Victor. Logan undergoes an operation to reinforce his skeleton with adamantium, a virtually indestructible metal. Before the procedure, Logan asks for new dog tags inscribed with "Wolverine". Stryker orders Logan's memory to be erased, but Logan overhears and flees, with former team member Zero tracking him. Wolverine takes refuge in the barn of an elderly couple who take him in for the night. Zero kills the couple and attacks, but Wolverine subdues and kills him.

Wolverine locates Wraith and Dukes and asks them about the location of Stryker's new laboratory, referred to as, "The Island". Dukes, now severely obese, explains that Stryker is performing experiments on mutants. One of them, Remy LeBeau ("Gambit"), escaped and knows the location of The Island. Wraith and Wolverine locate Gambit and Wolverine asks for the Island's location, but Gambit suspects Wolverine was sent to recapture him and attacks. Victor kills Wraith and takes a sample of his blood. Wolverine attacks and, with his enhanced strength, almost kills him. Gambit interrupts the fight, allowing Victor to escape. After being convinced of Wolverine's honesty, Gambit takes him to Stryker's facility on Three Mile Island. There, Wolverine learns that Silverfox is still alive and was conspiring with Stryker the whole time in exchange for her abducted sister's safety, but still genuinely loved Wolverine. Feeling hurt and betrayed, Wolverine leaves, and Stryker refuses to give Victor the adamantium bonding promised for his service, on the basis that he will not survive the procedure. Victor, enraged, tries to kill Kayla, but Logan hears her screams and stops him. Logan nearly kills Victor but spares him, and agrees to help Kayla free the imprisoned mutants.

Stryker activates his Weapon XI, a "mutant killer" super-soldier with the abilities of other mutants. Wolverine holds Weapon XI off while the escaped mutants flee. The mutants escape through the facility's tunnels, guided by a young blinded Scott Summers who is following a voice in his head. The party is greeted by Professor Charles Xavier, who offers them shelter at his school. Kayla, mortally injured in the escape, decides to stay. Wolverine lures Weapon XI to fight on top of one of the plant's cooling towers, where Victor arrives and aids his brother. Together, they decapitate Weapon XI. Victor escapes and Wolverine is saved from the collapsing tower by Gambit. As Wolverine carries Kayla to safety, Stryker shoots Wolverine in the back and head with adamantium bullets, knocking him unconscious. Silverfox uses her powers of persuasion to order Stryker to walk away before dying from her injuries. Gambit returns, but the brain damage causes Wolverine not to remember anything. As the police and ambulances arrive, Gambit tries to convince Wolverine to come with him, but he declines, wanting to make his own way. Gambit and Wolverine run opposite ways as the emergency vehicles respond to the devastated cooling tower.

The Terminator: Salvation

2009-06-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

Director: McG
Actors:-
Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright)
Christian Bale(John Connor)
Helena Bonham Carter(Serena Kogan )
Bryce Dallas Howard (Kyle)
Arnold Sch. (T-800 model 101 Terminator)

This is the story of the eventual war between machines and mankind where each one is trying to outnumber the other. Humans are led by jon Connor while the machines are led by Skynet which is the super powerful computer created by humans. The computer has become self aware as a machine and feels that humans are a threat to the machines. So he wants to destroy the humans completely from earth. more importantly most of the machines in the world are under his command.

This is the fourth in the Terminator series, you are suggested to watch the previous three to take full benefit of the sequence of events in the movie. No No, if you are thinking that you watched part 3 but didnt watch previous two, still liked it, the logic is not going to work in this. This is because, unlike previous ones, this is more of characteristic conversations than the Arnold Sch. type action.

Quip to remember from one of the scenes is: "If you're going to point a gun, you'd better be ready to pull the trigger. ...".
Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) says this to a command unit member who points a gun at him.

Or consider this narration towards the end:
"He saved my life. I saw a man, not a machine. We've been fighting a long time. We are outnumbered by machines. Working around the clock, without quit. Humans have a strength that cannot be measured. What is it that makes us human? Not somebody you can program. You can't put it in a chip. It's the strength of the human heart. That's the difference between us and machines"
This describes why the machines are still different from Humans. One human being after being dead was used by machines to infiltrate into the human area.

Here is how imdn describes the movie
In 2003, Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter) of Cyberdyne Systems convinces death row inmate Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) to sign his body over for medical research following his execution by lethal injection. One year later, the Skynet system is activated, perceives humans as a threat to its own existence, and eradicates much of humanity in the event known as Judgment Day (see Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines). In 2018, John Connor (Christian Bale) leads an attack by the Resistance(or humans) on a Skynet base. John discovers human prisoners and the plans for the development of a new type of Terminator incorporating living tissue, but is the only apparent survivor of the attack after the base is destroyed in a nuclear explosion. However, Marcus emerges from the wreckage of the base and proceeds on foot to Los Angeles.

John returns to Resistance headquarters located aboard a nuclear submarine and tells General Ashdown (Michael Ironside), the current leader, of his discovery. Meanwhile, the Resistance has discovered a radio frequency capable of shutting down Skynet machines. They plan to launch an offensive against the Skynet base in San Francisco in four days, in response to an intercepted "kill list" indicating that Skynet plans to kill the Resistance's command staff in four days' time. John learns that his own name is second on the list, following Kyle Reese. The Resistance leaders are unaware of Kyle's importance to Skynet, but John knows that it is because Kyle will later become his father (see The Terminator). John meets with his officer Barnes (Common) and wife Kate (Bryce Dallas Howard) and sends radio broadcasts to Resistance members and surviving civilians around the world.

Arriving in the ruins of Los Angeles, Marcus is saved from a T-600 Terminator by Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and his mute companion Star (Jadagrace Berry). Kyle relates to Marcus the events of Judgment Day and the ensuing war between humans and machines. Hearing John's radio broadcast, the three leave Los Angeles in search of the Resistance. They survive an attack by machines, but Kyle, Star, and several other humans are taken prisoner, while a pair of Resistance A-10s are shot down. Marcus locates downed pilot Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood) and they make their way to John's base, but Marcus is wounded by a magnetic land mine. Attempting to save his life, the Resistance fighters discover that he is in fact a cyborg with human organs, a mechanical endoskeleton, circuitry, and a partially artificial cerebral cortex. Marcus believes himself to be human, demanding to be released so that he can save Kyle from Skynet, but John orders his destruction. However, Blair releases him and helps him to escape from the base. During the resulting pursuit Marcus saves John's life from Skynet hydrobots, and the two form an alliance. Marcus will enter Skynet's headquarters and attempt to disable its defenses so that John can rescue Kyle.

John demands that Ashdown delay the attack so that he can rescue Kyle and the other prisoners, but Ashdown refuses and relieves John of his command. However, John's soldiers remain loyal to him and he sends a radio broadcast asking the other Resistance fighters not to attack Skynet. Meanwhile, Marcus enters the Skynet base and interfaces with the computer, disabling the perimeter defenses and allowing John to infiltrate the cell block and release the human prisoners. The Resistance's disabling signal is revealed to be a ruse, and the command submarine with the Resistance leaders aboard is destroyed by a Hunter-Killer.

Marcus discovers that he was created by Skynet and has unwittingly fulfilled his programmed mission to lure John into the base to be killed. He tears out the hardware linking him to Skynet and leaves to assist John in battling a T-800 model 101 Terminator. John is mortally wounded during the fight, but succeeds in destroying the Skynet base by rigging several Terminator nuclear power cells to an explosive, detonating them as he, Marcus, Kyle, and Star are airlifted out. Kate attempts to save John's life, but his heart is too damaged. Marcus offers his heart for transplant, sacrificing himself to save John. Recovering, John radios to the other Resistance fighters that though this battle has been won, the war is far from over. [D-Man2010]

The movie overall is a disaster for fans of terminator series. As always such series lose their shine and creativity in the fourth part. The action moves are not so thrilling as the previous ones of Arnold fighting another machine. The sound effects are good and the narration and the dialogues are catchy as well.
most importantly in terms of storyline moving ahead, the the viewers wanted yet another piece of thread which will point to something ni future. instead it was begin all and end all movie and nothing from this movie is going to be carried to the next one. People are still going to throng the theaters hoping to see the terminator series moving ahead and expecting the machines to create somethign deadly, they will be entertained as well, but the expecation must be kept low to get some 'feel good' effect.

A pleasant surprise (not anymore for you :p), is appearance of Arnold as an advanced terminator trying to kill john Connor. He was not advertised, so his sudden appearance gets the crowd gasping for sometime. But his appearance is very short and other than his own personality, there is no creative 'good' in it.
Watch it for dialogues and sound effects, and of course for a tribute to the fantastic series the Terminator has been.

John and Michael(writers), please do us favor by creating more twists and turns in the next movie, which hopefully will see all the terminators getting terminated and please move the action scenes as blazing as it was in previous three. Hoep to see 2029 show in much better light.

Movie mania

2009-05-02T05:19:00.000-07:00

For last few months, I have been almost a movie crazy person compared to what I was in college days.
I had two roommates who would start a movie almost everyday after dinner and inspite of my best promises, I would be able to accompany them till the first 20 minutes or so. Months and years later I realized that there were many good movies that I missed.
Now the situation is that I watch almost all the movies that are released, to an extent that now I keep the count and names of movies that I didn't watch.

Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind
Director: Michael Gondry
Lead actors: Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey.

I watched this movie while I was in Redmond. It was one of the nights when it was snowing and our gang of friends, despite all the enthusiasm, couldn't turn this night into another adventure. So I took to bed early just casually started watching this movie.
There is something about this movie which caught my attenton. And while I was exhausted to the extent of dyign, I watche the complete movie.

StoryLine:
The story is about a process from one of the doctors, Dr Howard who can selectively erase memory from someone. This was mostly used by ex-lovers who wanted to get over each other. So Kate(Clamentine) and Jim (forgot the name of character) were together, they slowly had differences coming in between them. Kate is portrayed as a very impulsive person while Jim is very silent and reserved kind of person.

So Kate removes Jim from her memory. Now she remembers everything from the past except the scenes where Jim was present. Jim having realised what Kate has done wants to do the same. But during the time (almost overnight effort), his memory is being removed, he somehow revisits all the good memories they had together.

During this time, he realises that his life wouldn't be better if the memories were removed. But since he is asleep during this time, he cannot do anything other than wait and watch while the memories are being removed from his mind. After that some other patient of the doctor realises that even her memory had been removed and wants to tell all the people whose memory has been erased selectively about it. She send al of them a sound tape of the time when they were narrating all the incidents in their life which they wanted erased.

Kate and Jim also get the tape. What happens after that is something which I wouldn't like to narrate here. But one thing I can confirm is that the ending is a nice one and the steps to it are equally nice.

Performances: This was one of the best performances of Jim I have seen so far. This may be because, being mostly recognised as a comedian, this kind of role has probably never been played by him. But he deals with it very well.

The conversations are one thing to watch out for. Very sweet and nice and so are the show of Jim in his dream.

Seven Pounds

2009-03-01T03:20:00.000-08:00

This is a movie by Gabriele Muccino, yeah the one of "persuit of happYness" popularity... Again it casts Will Smith.
Now Will Smith is an actor I really love for the way he moulds into the character he plays and this one was a little different.

But the sad part was that this character itself was not that interesting. It is a tragic story of a person Tim played by Will Smith who is shown freaking out and talking to different people. He steals the I-Card of his brother and impersonates as an IRS eemployee. His main motive is that he wants to donate his organ to others. he wants to do it because he has lost his wife, Sarah, in a car accident and in the same accident seven other people were killed. So somehow this freaking idea came to his mind.

Now common, if I meet with an accident in which my wife is killed and in which seven other people are killed, I won't really go donating my organs. Fine he might be different but jeez..... cmmmon you could go talk to their family try to comfort them or start a charity or something...

This is not to say that Will screws it up. He has done pretty well and he handles the character very well.

There are two scenes which really touch the heart:
- One is when Will calls this blind guy, Ezra, whom he wants to donate his eyes. Now he wants to be sure that he is a good guy. He wants to donate blood only to good, decent people. And he wants to be sure of it. So he calls him up and speaks very badly to him. He tells him that he feels sorry for him and that it's a very pathetic thing to happen to any one. And he hides all this behind his complaint for something else. He abuses him very badly. But Ezra is so nice, even though he knows that there is a stranger on the phone at the other end, he tries to remain calm... towards the end of the conversation while Will Smith is still abusing him, he politely tell " good bye Sir". Now if I were blind and if someone would talk to me like that I would just rip him apart of phone itself. But this guys performance really makes a stopping moment of the movie.

The second scene is when Will realizes that he is falling in love with the lady he wants to donate his heart to. Now this is a strange thing to happen. He decides that he has to kill himself and give his organs to all the good people and then he finds all of them but the last one and then he finds the last one as well but falls in love with her.
So he just rushes to commit suicide. He calls up Dan who is going to execute his will and then goes to his motel and commits suicide by getting bitten by a Jelly fish which was his pet. He lies in a bath tub where there is ice so that his organs remain preserved.
All the people he had selected get his organs and his house as well...

This movie was tragic but I have watched tragic movies in which the protagonist is not crying in a pathetic was at least once... there could have been few good nice moments in the movie to create the irony effect. But then it was not to be.

If you want to spend a couple hours crying of feeling sorry or pathetic you must watch this movie.. if not I would just suggest get a DVD of the movie and watch only the good scenes...

STARTING TODAY: Keith

2008-12-09T10:54:00.000-08:00

STARTING TODAY: Keith

Beyond Borders

2008-12-09T10:26:00.000-08:00

Director: Martin Campbell
Actors: Angelina Jolie, Clive owen
Genre: Romance, War, Humanitarian aid

This by far is the best performance by Angelina Jolie so much as I have watched till now. The movie portrays the soft, tough, moving and beautiful Angelina.
Clive Owen, I have seen for the first time in any movie, so can't really say much, but his performance was very good as well.

Background:
The movie is the romance that grows between two persons(lead actors) amidst the war torn world in which they have been depicted. The begining is in a posh party in which Jolie is present. She is already married and has a child too. But her husband is not so good a person. Still they are clinging on to their life for the sake of their child. In this party suddenly Clive barges in with an african child and straightaway goes to the centre stage. He tells the rich there how they are submerged in the finest wine that day while he is working in a relief camp in Africa where he has supplies left only for next one week or so and that people are dying in his relief camp at the rate of 40 a day. While all the rich show sympathy, some laugh, some pity, Jolie is moved so much by it that she decides to donate all money she has for the cause. Next she goes to the camp itself and much to the chagrin and despisement of Clive, who thinks that she is another rich girl with delusions of humanitarian engagement and will return back to her world in a few days, she stays there for some time and saves one life. She also comes to feel the pain of the person (mother of the child) whom she could not save.
She also is acquainted with the neglect which the government there has for the common people of the country.
The dialogues of the movie in several of it's scenes are very original and touching.At one point, Clive explains to her how he had taken the boy to US to that party. That child was his first save and the bravest of the millions whom he has seen , who fight the vagaries of nature to survive one more moment, who fight hunger and thirst every moment and win till they can. He felt that he had taken the intrepid face of Africa with him. But in the melee at the party, the child gets lost and is later found dead due to Hypothermia.
After sometime the scene shifts to Vietnam where in the midst of all the war and the consequences which the people have to face, these two meet in trying to sooth the pain of the common people. One of the most amazing scence is when the members of the communist government give a hand grenede to a child because Jolie and Clive are not able to get their shipment of arms for them. They had to bring shipment of arms from US controlled areas because they were 'allowed' to help the common people there by the communist government. Jolie becomes very angry initially when she comes to know of it but later sees reason and joins Clive in the effort.
The climax is when somehow Jolie returns to her home but is not able to get Clive out of her mind. She insists to her sister on seeing him anyhow. The come to know that he has been kidnapped in Chechneya. She decides to go there, with full knowledge that the war there is in it's worst form. The ending is very touching with Jolie getting blown up in a landmine when she had a certain life while Clive escapes though he had death in front of him. Unlike our Hindi movies, there was no masala dialogue delivery. While running away from captors when their fence is just near, she accidently steps on a land mine and knowing that a blast there can save Clive from those captors, she just steps aside to get blown up. Clive lives but remembers their encounters and meetings at various places.
Very touching movie, superb acting, brilliant storytelling and scene creation in myriad background.
Lovely movie, do watch it.

Keith

2008-11-16T09:58:00.000-08:00

This was an interesting movie that I got to watch.
The script is about a boy who just gets to do friendship with a girl telling one of his close pal that "it is nothing serious, you know". The girl is like originally not at all interested in the boy. She has a boy friend as well. The boy friend is a famous guy in the high school. But this guy just wants to spend some quality time. And even trying to win over a 'difficult' kind of girl is a good time pass for him.

This girl eventually falls for the guy. The main reason is 'different' way of living, doing all strange things like teasing people, boozing at night and enjoying some daring acts like staying late at night. Probably this is the first time she is so closely involved in so much fun and frolic. So she starts getting close to him.
one of the best things I like about the movie is that the girl gets close to the boy very slowly. Most of the movies make you feel like "ok this girl goes to that guy because he is the star cast of the movie" But this movie is a little different here.

It shows what almost happens in real life as well. By the time the girl is kissing the boy, even she has no idea that she has come this far.
This boy then again meets his friend who wonders "I hope it's not serious buddy".
It is at this time that the mystery of the movie starts unfolding in a way which has to be judged by the viewer himself.
The boy(Keith) was terminally ill and his close friend was his physio. Everything was Ok except that what started as a small fling had by now turned into a deep love.
This boy was just 14 and he had all this to handle. And yeah, this girl is also in love with him, very deeply.
Adolescents have their own way of dealing with the inevitables of life. This is portrayed in the way they handle this... quite normally.
In the end, Keith dies. This girl(dont' remember her name) lives on with the wonderful memory of the times they spent together. Once in a while she thinks of the past and this brings a smile on her face and a little longer, the realisation of truth turns it into tears...
Sweet movie.. Must watch in case you have a lot of time to spend on it since it runs a little slow. But if you get involved into it very well, every moment of it feels seamlessly interwoven into the single whole creating an enriching and emotional movie.

The time dimension in Game theory

2008-09-03T04:32:00.000-07:00

In my understanding of game theory, to the extent of trying (ok just trying!) the Nash equilibrium, I felt there was an element missing in continuum in which the theory has been developed.
This is the closest I have seen as the proof of what I thought is not a junk wandering of mind. Rather it came out of my appreciation of the theory itself due to which I feel that there is something incomplete with it. This is the Time Factor.
In game theory as described here, all the factors of pluses and minuses are taken with a static angle.
Say there are two persons going for a deal, two of them can either cooperate, or betray each other or one can betray and one can cooperate and vice versa (assuming them to be A and B).
Looking at it from a more holistic point of view, taking the set of persons involved to be more than two, so that the Nash equilibrium becomes applicable here, we don’t take into account that the decision can change over a period of time. The Wiki of Nash Equilibrium here mentions the starting assumption as

“If each player has chosen a strategy and no player can benefit by changing his or her strategy while the other players keep theirs unchanged”

Which in itself is not the correct portrayal of the what really happens in real world. And more applicable is it to more people scenario.
Say we have A, B, C,D,E. Following is the state of how they interact with each other at time say T1,

From To Relation
A A NA
A B Cp
A C Cp
A D Bt
A E Bt

This depicts the relation that A will have with others where Cp is “Co-operate” and Bt is “Betray” the only two relations that one person can have with another when he has to take a decision as per the premises of the theory. Now we can have 4 another such tables and can apply Nash Equilibrium to get an equilibrium which will help us determine what decision should be taken by each player in the game so that he can maximize his profit. This again leaves a loophole of what if all players are not making a decision about dealing or not dealing with all other players. But we can ignore this as of now for sake of clarity.
Another thing we need to exclude from discussion is if some of the players will benefit more by deviating from their original stated Nash Equilibrium position, the way it is done in creating “cartels”. This is because in that case we need to take those “cartels” or sub groups as one continuum to understand the application of the theory.

Now say A changes his stance wrt. any one of the other players. The NA (Nash Equilibrium) for at least one of the other players will change.
So suppose
at time T1 the NA is NA1
at time T2 the NA is NA2
at time T3 the NA is NA3
at time T4 the NA is NA4
at time T5 the NA is NA5.

In the matrix representation of the Nash equilibrium, we can plot this as a 3-D matrix where the third dimension will represent the time and if we look through the third dimension (or the depth of the matrix set created ), we will get a curve by joining NA1, NA2, NA3, … NA5. This curve will be the mapping of how the team as a whole co-operated and what happened during the time T1 to T5.
Now assuming that a change in strategy happens only between T1 and T2, T2 and T3, T3 and T4 but there is no change in strategy between T4 and T5.
So the curve connecting the NA4 and NA5 will be a straight line joining the NAs at these two points and will be parallel to the depth of the 3-D matrix This is shown in the diagram below.

Now based on my prediction of NA2 and NA3 and NA4, my decision of NA1 will not be the Nash Equilibrium. Not necessarily Nash Equilibrium to be exact. This is because now my target will not be to have the maximum of the given set of people at a time T1 but one of the following:
1. Either I will try to maximize the final profit/score/result at time T1,T2,T3,T4,T5 which ever is my deadline period.
2. Or I will try to maximize the sum of scores at time T1,T2,T3,T4,T5.
In case 1, I might be ready to take some loss at stage T1, if I know that this will such and such relationship changes among the member of the sample so that I will have a huge margin at say time T3.
This explains why the government ordering a demolition is not a bad economic step. The people trusted the government and voted it to power. But the government betrayed it. As per Game theory, this should be the worst case scenario. It is . But, only at that particular instance of time. Say this happens at T1. Not at T1 there was a big businessman who didn’t trust the government. The government trusted him and hence wanted to ‘buy’ his trust. So by taking a non best case decision at time T1, government bought his trust at time T2 when there was to be a deal between the government and the businessman. Now he trusts the government. The deal is inked, the government gets a lot of taxes and this is used in welfare of the people.
Now, if profit from the deal with the businessman > profit from keeping the people in their illegal houses
The deviation from equilibrium is justified and makes sense in both the two cases mentioned above
1. Say the government wanted to achieve the maximum at time T2, which was, let’s say, the end of it’s tenure.
2. Say the government wanted the total profit and time T1 and T2 to be maximum
This also explains why the movement of army to take a peak in a battle even at a huge cost is a sound decision.

If we model this matrix mathematically we shall be able to determine a better course of action and based on the target, which will be one of the two points mentioned above, we can decide a course of action more easily for a set of players in a given continuum.

Comment please…

It's Raining in Hyderabad

2008-08-08T15:51:00.000-07:00

For past 8 hours it has been continuously raining here and it's raining cats and dogs.
At 2 am today, three of us from office took umbrella and went out of office to a nearby lake when the rain thinned into a drizzle. Oh! What a wonderful sight it was. It brought back my memories of Assam (Namrup to be exact), where I used to stay and it used to rain a lot. Oh what a wonderful time it used to be as the rain would continue for days after days but there won't be any water logging or any pollution or anything else. It was the enjoyment of nature at it's serenic best. If you get the opportunity, do enjoy the rain of Assam at least once in lifetime. I can assure you that it would be a "worth it" experience.
The lake here was almost overflowing and the water was comning on to the road beside it. The area is called Manikonda and the lake is right opposite to the Wipro office here.
There was one tea stall open there. We had tea in the drizzle and watched some people catching fish which came wandering, perhaps, for food outside the pond.
In the neon street lights, it was a moment worth cherishing. After chatting thre for some time and talking to the people catching fish with hand (!), we came back walking.
The wind was so strong that the raindrops were falling almost horizontal and it was very difficult to hold the umbrella in control.
It was a small period of utmost ecstacy, joy, friendliness, mini-adventure, soaking and enjoyment for me. And since it is Friday today, I am not going to be up before noon tomorrow.

Do get wet in rain at least once in a while, it feels wonderful.

Atlas Shrugged

2008-08-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

I have been reading this book for last one week or so, but frankly, I am not really enjoying it. Reasons could range from delusions because of an overstreching of a strong imaginative thought leading to its abnormal unimaginative appearance to my own realization of the principles talked about in the book in real life and its impractical nature though warned about that in the book itself even before the take off, to my deeper insights into the collaborative environment into which the world is moving in, thanks to the proliferation of information such that the initial vertical depth of a knowledge has become the 'general knowledge' now.
No, Fountainhead is still a masterpeice, but Atlas... is sort of an overkill.

Is anyone out there ready to suggest a good book for me?

A Beautiful Mind

2008-06-04T12:39:00.000-07:00

Book By: Sylvia Nasar
Movie By: Ron Howard

Professor John Nash

Today I was discussing the prodigy characteristic with some of my friends when this book and the movie by same name flashed from the dungeon of my mind, having read the book and watched the movie long ago. A heart renching depiction of a genius mind, super talented mind creates a theory at 21, becomes insane at 30, stops all his work and for the theory he had discovered something at 21, gets Noble Prize in Economics in 1994.

It is about John Nash, an economist who gave the idea of equilibrium in Game theory.
The game theory itself is interesting enough to have grasped my attention for the whole night yesterday. I devoured pages after pages on net trying to understand and be amazed by this wonderful theory. The theory is a generalization of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Consider there are two persons. They can either co-operate or betray each other. If both co-operate, they both get good. If they both betray, they both are punished. But if one of them co-operates and other betrays , only one is punished. Now if you have read macro-economics and understand that capitalist economy works on self interest and how taken in holistic view, it is actually good for the whole society.
The worst thing to happen is one person trusting other and the other one betraying.
The moment I read this idea, though I had read it earlier too, I could see the application of this idea, in a generalized form in many of the ways. I remembered my past and felt that, maximum injury is inflicted, when you are positive/co-operative/trusting and other person betrays.
There is a saying, " better to have a strong enemy then a betrayer". This theory mathematically justifies it. When you know that the other person will betray, you are prepared and hence safe and total loss is not too much.

Now generalization of this theory has its own complication. Say, you want to generalize it in terms of the mutual economic decisions of all the countries, there are many other factors that come into play. The decision to coperate may be dependent on another person. I co-operate if A coperates with B which will happen if B coperates with C and so on. But still, given a particular continnum, I am fairly sure that this can be modelled mathematically.

The theory of equilibrium had profound effect on modern economic growth. The book doesn't talk too mucha about the prodify og John Nash. He was a brilliant chap of course. He won a scholorship to go and study Mathematics at Princeton university.
It was here that he developed this theory at the age of 21! As a person, he was very shy and eccentric. He would hardly be friendly with others and was mostly aloof, lost in his own thoughts.
Later he became an instructor at MIT where he met his future wife Lopez-Harrison de Lardé, devorced in 60's something and later reunited after he got his Nobel Prize in
1994.
The most interesting and humbling part of his life was Schizophrenia attack he faced when he was 30. The almost ended his mathematical life. The book mentions that he was having delusions that there was going to be a great War and that it was his responsibility to stop the war by promoting world peace. He had to be committed to mental hospital many times but he was not able to regain normality. This continued for a long time till about 1970, when he decided to stop taking drugs. He decided to fight this disease in his mind all alone, just by his mental power. It took him a lot of time to recover, but by 1994, when he received his Nobel, he had become quite well and even started contributing to Mathematics and Economics.

In the epilogue, the book mentions about his son. He to was a very talented Mathematician and had many major publications to his credit. But, he too suffered from the same problem as Nash, Schizophrenia. The book also talks about the Gay encounters of Nash, but he later stated the all that might have been parts of his delusions.

Russell Crowe brilliantly plays John Nash in the movie "A beautiful Mind"

After reading the book and watching the movie, we not only come closer to understanding the severity of the disease called Schizophrenia and become sympathetic to all the people suffering from it, but also feel the need for more advances in medical science to treat the disease. The common feeling is that more sharp mind has greater chances of falling in the trap but is not proven medically.

On the part of others this calls for greater compassion for the patient and on part of patient, it require greater coordination with his near and dear ones and attempt to keep his confidence high. Not to suggest that this might be easy, but following the case history of many people who suffered from it, I feel teh medical solutions are far from worthy and relieable as of today.

Another good aspect of reading this book, is the closer understanding of the contribution and importance of science/scientists towads mankind in general and for any country in particular. During the cold war when US and Russia were hell bent on proving their technological superiority over othrs, we saw a huge investment in science and results too. Good that cold was ended and most of the scientific knowledge earned during the period say the light of becoming common knowledge and were used for benefit of mankind. But more than that scientists have the capability to turn the tide of War in modern warfare, change the course of economics in modern complex economic arrangement or take Human being to the next pedestal of evolution.

A quote by Nash is worth mentioning here:
"Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos".
There is a saying "if you haven't got the field medal by 26, you probably will never get it". Young mind is the brightest, as we grow old the ideas from outside that this is not possible, that is foolishness enters and sits out mind. This is rationality and breaks the innovation of mind. Imagine the first person who wanted to go to moon and was seriously trying to get there. Wouldn't the society at that time have called him a bufoon? But then, it is all about the conviction that you have about your idea, about your thought that determines what shape it will take.
Salute to John Nash for the wonderful effort in putting his brilliance in achieving the breakthrough in Game theory.

Those more interested can take a look at :
John Nash
Nash Equilibrium
Game Theory
Quotes by Johh Nash
Schizophrenia

YES PRIME MINISTER

2008-05-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

By Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay

This book is a set of events extracted from the personal diaries and government paper's of Britain. Once you start going through the book, it will move you from most serious note into peals of laughter. The book starts with James Hacker as an MP in British Parliament. It is a struggle for power, smartness, being moral in one's own and other's eyes and how these and other interests of Ministers and beaucrats are inter-woven. When Hacker is proposed to be the PM, he tries to be as modest as possible asking his beaucrats "can I lead the country", they simply ask him "can't you?". Now the narration of the whole set of stories is in words of Hacker occasionally mentioning what others involved in the matter were thinking about the same thing. Hacker mentions in his diary "Of Course I can run the country, I was just trying to be a little humble" :0

Once he becomes the PM, he starts having delusions. He starts imagining himself as some Emperor and others as his "subjects". The spice of the book is an occasional note by the editors. Once after some discussion, where the PM, Hacker was trying to convince the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Humphry Appleby, that he should lie for him, hacker mentions in his diary " he looked at me as if I was lying", bang there the editor add "Hacker was lying".
The most worrying thing for Hacker is Media. Once there was this dog of a little girl lost in a mine field and the media was giving it a lot of attention. Now hacker was a good person at heart by the standards of Politicians. He felt that he should not ask the Army/Air-Force to retrieve the dog, since it would cost the country a lot of money. And he had this feeling that it is finally Taxpayer's money. But he gave in to the urge to earn Media points by helping the girl. Media thanked Hacker for getting the dog of the "poor" girl. Even taxpayer's were happy. One wonder's , if there was money collection from the people who wanted the dog to be saved, would they have given it. THis is one of the worst ironies of Democracy. We like it if the government takes a people friendly but economically foolish step, but we forget that it is our money which is spent.

Another interesting character is Bernard Woolley, the personal private secretary of Hacker. His loyalty hangs between Sir Humphrey, his official boss and Hacker, his political boss. When needed, Humphrey doesn't forget to remind him that "Prime Ministers come and go, It is us who are running the country."

The most wonderful part of the book is when one of his cabinet colleague, Dudely had to resign. This is what happened in short. The Employment secretary, Dudely, gave a wonderful idea of moving ,most the defence personnel to North of England. Of course, no one in Armed Forces(read Defence Ministry) would like it, since they had all their facilities, posh schools, clubs, residences in South. But this would generate a lot of employment in the North based on all small work that these personnel will do.
Now, the Defence Ministry and the armed forces put their bet on Sir Humphery to save them. All he does is tell hacker that probably some is plotting against him. On being asked he denies any knowledge of it but putting all the hints towards Dudely.
Now Hacker calls the chief whip of the party, Jeffrey Pearson.
Here is a short transcript of what transpires:
PM (Hacker): How has it has been gioing?
C(Chief Whip): Good?
PM: Have you noticed something?
CW: (in his diary: Was I supposed to notice something).... silence in actual,
PM: A plot, a leadership challenge..
CW:(In his diary: Leadership challenge? But who?), Well I dont have any evidence
PM: But you have suspicions?
CW:(In his diary: Well suspicions are always there on someone or ther other, safe till now, God! What if he asks me Who?) Well... Um... AHem....Yes
PM: Who are the others involved?
CW:(Great, here is my chance..) Well, others apart from?
PM: Apart from Dudely of course.
CW: (In his diary: Ahh.. So dudely has been conspiring against PM, seems rather strange) Ah.. well, I still need to investigate

Later the minister had to resign based on paranoia of the PM.

One of most wonderful quotes which is mentioned in the book is at a time, when all three main characters Hacker, Sir Humphrey and Bernard Wooley are together and they have to cancel a noble idea(don't remember what? :p). Sir Humphery says " Of course we will do that, in due course in the fullness of time at the appropriate juncture." Of course what this actually conveys is (while reading the book you will get used to such things), 'As long as I am here, I won't let this happen'.

Another interesting anecdote in the book is the mention of the death of some ex PM of Britain. Hacker's wife, a simple person, is surprised to learn that funeral is actually the best time for negotiations. That all the funerals are vigorously used by the diplomats for negotiations. That once it happened that Hacker was so busy in the negotiations that their whole lot forgot to go to funeral for which they had all assembled and had to later blame it on security. Security is something which can be brought to save a politician's face from any absence.

The book is a sequel to Yes Minister which was shown by BBC as television serial and broadcaset on radio between 1980 and 1984. Yes, Prime Minister, ran from 1986 to 1988.

With 488 pages and a reader of average speed, all you need is a little better comprehension ability of English language to really appreciate the juice of the book.
And you can have 4-5 hours of superb uninterrupted humour.
Definitely worth the pence and the time.

The Fountainhead

2008-05-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

Well please excuse me for a personal note before I write about this book.

When I sat down to write blog today, the first thing that came to my mind was that I shall write on a topic like "why I dont feel to write now-a-days" and the obfuscated reason I had decided to offer was "because I dont feel strongly for any thing now". A couple of years back, I had passionate interest in few things. I would devour websites after websites, books after books to learn more about them, but I dont feel the same urge for deeper understanding of those things now. But before I put it down on the blogpost, I asked myself one more time, one final time: " Is there nothing that I feel very very strongly about today". Flying through myriad things, the adventure stopped at "Fountainhead". This is the most amazing thing I have come across in my two years of stay in Hyderabad after "stack overflows".

Foutainhead is the story of Howard Roark, Elsworth Toohey, Catherine, Gail Wynand Dominique, Peter Keating and the rest of the world . My introduction to the book was in a lunch with some people of My Company where on the mention of the name of the book I asked Karthik what is so good about the book. He quipped, "it mentions a building as good not because it looks beautiful, but because each part of the building is in consonance with each other. Just like human body, where none of the parts are there just for the sake of beautification, but they serve a purpose and each seperate function in it, however small it might be, is closely entwined with the rest of the body, every creation of human being should be looked at from the point of view of the purpose it is serving. This is what makes it beautiful". I found in this explanation, an anaswer to a question which I and perhaps many hundreds of people have not been able to frame to themselves. It gave me an anwer to my existence and was enough to stimulate in me a thirst to know more about it. Warned by many people, either you understand it and your life remains no more the same, or you don't and join the band of lesser mortals who couldn't understand, I set on my journey of a lifetime.
Little did I know that it was going to be one of the most fascinating journey that I was to encounter in my life, that I will have a hundred questions answered and a thousand other popping up in my mind while I am going through it.
Following the age old advice of my dad, I read the preface where Ayn Rand explains the reason why she wrote the book. Because she wanted to write it. The theme in her mind was portrayal of an ideal man it should be. This itself was her aim and her reward as well. Hw ideal and how very inspiring.

Howard Roark: An architect. He is the means to portray the ideal man as he should be. A very intelligent person, who has only one dream, to create the best buildings in the world. Only the "best" for him is not money and admiration, but a building which has every details as it should be, which offers no doubts like "what if this thing is changed like that". This is his goal and his reward as well. He doesnt care about anything else. Love, money,fame, respect, admiration, nothing else exists for him. It is not an effort by him to ignore all these things. It comes naturally to him. And he is expelled from his school of architecture. Because he is not ready to copy old architectures. The was he is taught at college. To copy renaissance or gothic architecture and modify them according to modern needs. His dean calls him. He meets. The dean tries to make him recognise that he has done a big mistake and the institute was always lean on him by ignoring his previous restvolts. Roark accepts all this. But the time when the dean offers him to apologise, wait for one year and get a 'probable' chance to get into the institute, he tries to make himself more clear. He says he himself is not interested in joining the institute which teaches him to copy old architecture and copy it to new requirements. He wants originality in his work and anything less is a sin, for which he cannot forgive himself. The surprised dean says' who will let you do it", pat comes the reply which is an iconic quote I have ever read " the question is not who will let me do it, the question is who will stop me".

Peter Keating is his classmate. An intelligent person, for whom glamor and success are everything in life. His interpretation of success is not that he becomes the best architect in the world, but that the world should accept him as the best architect. In all his years at the college, Howard was staying at his house as a tenant. But he was aware of the genius of Howard Roark. Many times, when he was stuck in creating a plan or architecture in some assignment or other, he would come to roark. Roark would help himreadily, but refuse to migle with him along any of the niceties of modern civil life. He is gold medalist of the institute but still has some emptyness feeling inside him the moment he thinks of Roark. He symbolises the life of second handers of the world we meet so frequently in our life and sometimes ourselves behave as one. He rises very high combining his intelligent mind in architecture and business, relations and love, architecture and acquaintences. Still, many times during his professional life, he has to come to roark, because he is not able to think of a foolproof plan or design for a building or because he wants to win a competition which will poroclaim him one step closer to being 'proclaimed' the best architect in world. Roark would readily help him. Not out of humility, or pity or anything else. Just because he likes architecture, an unfinished design is a problem for him and he finds it his divinve duty to solve it. Glamor, money, fame, all these things are nothing in front of the satisfaction of being the doer of the job. When some asks him, "Peter got the credit, what did you get" his reply is "Peter got the credit, but he knows he didnt deserve it. He will always live in fear that it can be taken away from him some day. But who can take away from us the fact that we created it. It is truth and no one can ever change it. Doesnt matter how many people know it, but we created it can there be anything more joyous?"

Elswoth Toohey: In my discussion with friends who have read (and understood) Fountainhead, one thing I have always expressed is that Elsworth is the most interesting character for me in the book. And the one who really moved me the most. There is a long speech by Elsworth to Peter Keating somewhere towards the end of the book. Don't forget to read that part and dont read if you don't have guths accept few tough things about human life. It explains how our mind is hijacked by some people who try to become our leaders. These are the people who will be very nice to you. They will make you feel that you are the most special person in the world with a lot of abilities. This will not be through boot licking. Far from it, this will be through subtle expressions of concern for you. Consider for example a boy going up to a good looking girl in a market and exclaiming "hey! I think I have seen you somewhere?" No don't just try itout really, you might end up getting a slap or two. But just consider it as an example the first time this "trick" was used. Naturally any girl will feel this as a genuine question and the subject deserving some attention from her. Lo Behold ! This is something extremely intricate about him as his quote offers "Don’t set out to raze all shrines – you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity, and the shrines are razed."
I would like to keep a discussion on this for a further moment. I know that there won't be any change in my opinion till then, as to what ever be the time when I decide to write, my own understanding of 'being sure" makes me feel that it is bound by the variation of time dimension. And I dont want to let a learning of my lifetime be drained into the obscurity of being an adolescent's rage, having no meaning what so ever in anothe time or situation context.

Gail Wynand: Gail is the husband of Howard's ex-girlfriend, a very famous and rich person. He is very much like Howard. But he is in a revenge mode. He is like "ok you idiots and morons, if you dont glorify the sheer genius, I am ready to mplay in your own coins and beat you". And he does beat the world, creating a very powerful business of newspapers and real estate starting from nothing. He still harbors the feeling of being himself sometime, and this gets satisfied when he meets Howard. Imagine the situation, Howard had only one love ever, that was the only time he came close to anay emotion at all in his life, and the person who took away Dominique from him offers him to create his mansion. Roark agrees. This wont surprise those who have understood Roark. But Gail likes roark a lot because he is one of the few persons who has not given in to the pressures of the world and remained himself, natural and uncompromising.

Dominique: The girl who fell in love with Roark, and came to know Roark very closely. She wanted to destroy him and all she did was try to break him. This is because she thinks that this world which worships second handers and not geniuses like Roark doesnt deserve the architectural service of Roark.In fact she doesnt want Roark to exist, because he deserves all the accolades in the world which he will never get and the people around him will only try to break him. Rather than such things being done to him, she will prefer him annihilated. In the end she helps Howard in his attempt to remain as such.

My salute to the author who has created an experience which can only be felt and not expressed in words, only realised and not made to realise. Every small sencence and phrase and word in the book is a small unit which seamlessly merges into the perfect whole the author has attempted to create. If Ayn Rand feels Howard Roark to be the portrayal of an ideal man, I would have no qualms accepting "The Fountainhead" as the portrayal of an ideal book. It must have given new meaning, dimension, solace, understanding to thirsty souls of millions like it did to me. Nice read and wonderful journey of human philosophy and objectivism.

Nandigram widens Left front gaps

2007-12-12T05:57:00.000-08:00

Not it has become almost survival plank for the people associated with the Left front government to distance themselves from the whole issue of Nandigram Violence if they want to survive the next assembly elections in Bengal. CPM has already started feeling the heat from its allies in Bengal over the mishandling of the Nandigram issue.
What till now was their weapon, the compulsions of coalition government, which they used to hold the UPA government and the nation to ranson, is now turning to be a sword being used on themselves.

"After thirty years, the Left Front in on course for a split over CPM's unilateralism and the Nandigram and Singur issues," All India Forward Bloc general secretary, Debabrata Biswas said.

After 30 years of rule in bengal lasting around 5 terms the communist have been shaken to their foundations. It would be no wonder if we see the demise of the party after this episode
We must try to understand that no superpower vanishes suddenly from the face of earth. The CPM in bengal is also a kind of super power in terms of winning cosecutive elections and ruling the state with an iron hand. The rot is slow. Some of it is present even at the formation of the power, albeit in very miniscule form and some other come in as part of the general process of growth.

Let us examine what are the possible reasons which might lead to a downfall of the communist government in Bengal:

1. IDEOLOGY: CPM is perhaps one party which has stuck to its idology for past so many decaded while other parties were busy making interpretations of their promises and manifestoes to justify their political moves. With the demise of Soviet Union, the communist ideology got a big setback in global arena. Capitalism or more innocently globalisation was the buzz word after that. Bengal was a little too late in realising this. And even when they did, it turned out to become a Nandigram. First Buddha had a lot of problems convincing his partyment that moving to industrialisation and calling MNCs in the state didn't amount to losing sovereignty. After that, when he started calling the companies, the reaction of almost all investors was same: "Bengal has a lot of potential but the conditions in the state as well as the laws are too archaic, too red-tapist to allow free flow of capital, goods and services. Time and again, the state has been damned for failing to meet the promise to the industrial houses, be it improving labour laws, availing land for industries, moving files faster in the beaucracy. The result is, while states like Karnataka, Andhra, Gujarat, Maharashtra are boasting of the FDI inflows in their state, Bengal CM has only promises to offer that in future soon Bengal will catch up.

2. DEVELOPMENT: You dont develop by taking money from rich and distributing it among poor. But you certainly go back in terms of development if you take money from rich and give it to partymen(read CMI(M) workers). Development of a state is a difficult and a lot of hard work goes into it. I have closely followed the development models of Hyderabad city and just marvel at the genius of the person who is creating such proposals for the government and the speed with which the govt is approving them. Sometimes the government has to evict people and provide them rehabilitation and make sure that babudom doesn't create too much problems for people so that they may start a revolt the time when next round of land acquisition is done.
The CPM model of Bengal was mere apeasement of Mulsim polulation and the partyment and creating an illusion in the mind of the poor that it was working for the development of the state. As regards the middle class and the industries, CPM never considered its existence.

EXPANSION: A major aspect of growth of any political party is expansion. Expansion means not only in terms of geographical location but also maturing of ideas and the ideology that the party follows. Mayawati in here new phase of expansion has embraced Brahmins while a few years ago she used to launch strong tirade against them. The congress expanded by accepting coalition politics. RJD expanded by accepting that the leader needs to show mettle and performance in some sector to woo the whole country and convince them that the party is for development. Lalu jadav was very successful in this by being a revolutionary minister in Railways where he changed the face of Railways from facility to fares to profit. CPM expanded by taking its ideology of killing the landlords and distributing the land among the poor to other states and failed. That explains why it is almost non-existant in other states.

NATIONAL ISSUES: The Indo-US neuclear deal was something which was held ransom to the myopic thought and feeling of the left. What could have been a major step by India in the international arena was turned into an embarrasment by the Left.
When baba ramdev was illuminating the culture and heritage of India by explaining its power and the whole world was bowing to it Brinda Karat started blaming him for selling medicines containing animal and human bones and violating the labelling and licensing norms. There couldn't have been anything cheaper than that. Very soon the newspapers were flooded with articles on how the Multinational companies stood to make a lot of money if the people cured by the cheap and miraculous medicines of Ramdev rejected them and came back to the costlier and 'branded' medicines. This was an abortive and frustrating attempt by the CMP to gain popularity.

INFILTRATION: Infiltration from across the border. Muslims have been the traditional voters of the CPM. Be it due to the numerous Muslim workers the party has or the unquestioned and impeccable record it has in terms of their protection and avoidance of large scale riots in the state. But thwo main reasons led to the aleniation of this community. The first one was the huge migration from the border across i.e Bangladesh. As per intelligence reports and even the admittance of Buddha that migration from Bangladesh has taken up uncontrollabe dimensions. The number of Madrassas is growing exponentially in the border regions. The state government has been sleeping on all the intelligencve reports for decades. Now even the Muslims in the state have started accusng the government of being deaf to their warnings for long. The resources in the state are limited. ISI is known to be extremely active and manage a huge support base in Bangladesh. Infiltration is a national threat. But the government has been downplaying it. At some point of time the government has to stand up for some issues. Go to Gujarat and see the number of mosques as well as Temples demolished by the Modi government for the sake of development. If the speed is fast and the people see the results of such demolition within a year or two, they no only forgive the government but the next time such a demolition is going to take place, the people will be more receptive to the government action.
CPM, for so many years, had only idology and words to feed, cloth and give the people. At some point of time or other, people are bound to realise that they are still hungry. That is when the downfall of the party starts.

Still, Communism has had a profound effect on the mindset of Indian people post independence. Had we not seen communism and its effects in the country and some states, perhaps we would have been eulogising the concept. Indians always have the tendency to like the unknown more and berate their own things. But we had our experiment with this revolutionary model of economic and political development and we saw the failure. Now either CPI(M) rediscovers itself and tries to renew its ideology to work for the present or it will have the last nail in its coffin in the next assembly elections.

Nandigram: A learning episode of democracy

2007-12-11T07:16:00.000-08:00

Nandigram, Political

For the past many days the nandigram mayhem has been the talking point across the spectrum of newspapers, bloggers, mail forwards, political boardrooms. Over the past few days,I read numerous articles, suggestions, news groups and research material on the psycho-political cause and effect of the episode.

WHAT HAPPENED IN NANDIGRAM?

There are many theories as to what happened there which started this blood spilling of innocents and provoked West Bengal CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya to utter the quote of his life "We have paid them back in same coins". From CPM to journalists to villagers to UPA( United Progressive Alliance) to BJP(Bharatiya Janata Party) to the common man who was caught in the battleground off-guard, all have enriching and spine chilling stories to tell. One common thread runs in them all. This is the lesson that we get from imposing too much faith in the democracy and the executive and assuming that nothing is impossible if the government so desires. We understand how true the words were when around more than half a century back it was said that "the best policeman the British had was Gandhi"

The CPI(M)'S VERSION :
The whole issue started with the TMC ( Trinamool congress led by Mamta Banerjee) activists in the guise of protecting the lands from being taken by the government for industrial development (read creating SEZ) started capturing the areas in Nandigram. The SEZ was supposed to be created for the development of the area and it would improve the employment condition in the area and provide a thrust to the almost industrial activity. The government was ready to relocate the people to some other area and also provide the compensation for the land which they were going to part with. This also meant that the common people in the area would have better visibility in terms of more investment coming in, land prices in the adjoining area going up, government getting more revenue from the industries coming in. The area was always a battleground for Trinamool and CPM. The villagers were ready to part with their land as they had full trust in the government of 'common man'. Trouble started with the Trinamool congress putting its hands down into creating trouble. They spread false rumours that the government would take their land away and not give anything to villagers-rehabilitation or compensation.
On January 3rd the preparatory meeting for the visit was in session in Kalicharanpur gram panchayat office. Some activists of Trinamool Congress gathered there at around 11 in the morning. They demanded that the land acquisition notice, served by Haldia Development Authority be scrapped and the panchayat declare that there would be no such acquisition. When the panchayat pradhan refused to meet their demand, the activists started stone pelting, ransacking the houses and a violent was let loose on the "common man" (read CPM supporters). The violence continued for days resulting in the CPM supporters and party workers from the area running away from their home. The thrashed CPI (M) workers and their families took shelter in a camp in the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. All the roads linking the area to the rest of bengal was blocked and even police was not able to enter the area for months. In the end the 'will of the people' prevailed when the police started action against the miscreants and get those who had been removed from their homes back to the village. There was police firing as it was needed to deal with the people who were creating trouble and had themselves huge cache of arms. Police had to return the firing they were facing. Thus the TMC workers who had disguised themselves under the name of BUPI(Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee) were "paid back in their own coins.

THE TRINAMOOL CONGRESS VERSION
:
Bloodshed, torture, threatening, abuse and forced acceptance is the order of the day in Bengal under the CPI(M). The force that the government or more precisely the CPI(M) uses is a common thing in Bengal. Be it the time when they want to impose a bandh, organise a rally, get funds or rig the elections. The common people are either silent or helpless. They donot have the courage to stand up to this regime of coercion, corruption and mismanagement. The only real agenda of the CPM government is to further the strength of CPM workers and make sure that they are the boss in the locality in which they are present. Be it getting a gas connection, an electricity connection, a phone connection, treatment in a hospitalor a railway reservation, the booty goes to the local CPI(M) leader as he can get all these things done. He is called to work once in every five years to get the local MLA win the corresponding election. The means can be anything: murder, bomb blast, coersion, rigging of polls, manipulation of voter list, intimidation. This was one such occasion when the CPI(M) was trying its tried and tested method. Ever since the government expressed its plan to create an SEZ in the area and decided to take over the land of the villagers, the TMC had been informing people about the dangers of such a move. It was agitating against the move for a long time but all the pleas, demonstrations, strikes, pleadings, hunger strikes had gone unnoticed as the state and the central gove were feigning ignorance of the gavity of the situation. The land mostly belonged to poor people who were against the government. So the government wanted to render them homeless by taking their land. The industrial development was just a guise to propage this agenda. The people set to gain from such a movewere those who themselevs were either part of the industries or the CPI(M)people who would take a large booty from the industrial house for doing such an impossible task for them.
In one of such 'peaceful' protests, the CPI(M) workers attached the marching men. There was riot and many villagers were killed and terrorised. The result was further intensification of the agigation of the farmers. There were many outsiders who had come to the area to force the people to accept the dictum of the government. They were the key miscreants whomthe government was relying on. The local people resisted them tooth and nail with the result that they failed to break the resolve of the villagers to give the land to government.Now the CPI(M) was emberassed. It had to prove that CPI(M) ruled in the state. They had to prove their rule which they had been following for so long " you are with me or you are in danger"The government, breaking all the moral code of conduct, administrative diligence and rule of law, sent a large contingent of policemen with the CPI(M) people to reclaim the land. There was mayhem all around. Hundreds of houses were burnt down. Scores of villagers were killed. Some corpses recovered, some left to rot in villages forests where they were running for shelter,some collected together and buried under the ground with complicity of the police.

THE JOURNALIST VERSION
:
Of late there has been the trend of SEZs in the country. An SEZ is an area, a huge one running in thousands of acres given by government to industrial houses for promotion of industries in the state. The industries in the area are given a lot of tax benefits, different labour laws and some other regulations which enhances the industrial growth in the area. For the government, to get such a huge tract of land is impossible. So it chalks out an area where minimum people are habitated. It takes the adjoining area and gives the villagers alternative option for habitation and compensation for the land they sell to the government. By law, the government can take any land in the country, if it so desires, by paying you the compensation. It is not a negotiated selling. You have to sell and take the compensation offered by the government. People in India have a special affliction for their land. No one wants to leave his ancestral land and go and settle elsewhere that too on the promise of the government. However honest the government might be regarding its sincerety to relocate the people somewhere else and pay them compensation, it has to be executed by the huge army of government officers. They are known not only in the region but across the world as a breed to extraordinarily greedy and comatose people. It would be a nightmare for anyone to completely claim his legal compensation. The reluctance to hand over land is everywhere,but the government anyhow is able to convince the villagers, mostly by giving them land in an adjacent area. For the SEZ this ensures that there is a local supply of labourers from the vicinity and for the villagers a promise and understanding that once the SEZ is established, the land rates of the adjoining areas will rise. There is also the promise of jobs in the industries to come up in SEZ.
On January 3rd the preparatory meeting for the visit was in session in Kalicharanpur gram panchayat office. Some activists of Trinamool Congress gathered there at around 11 in the morning. They demanded that the land acquisition notice, served by Haldia Development Authority be scrapped and the panchayat declare that there would be no such acquisition.Samerun Bibi, the panchayat pradhan, refused to accept their demand. The activists became violent and abusive and ransacked the panchayat office. Following this incident the panchayat pradhan called the Nandigram police station. The police vehicle was on its way to the village when they, too, were attacked by an armed mob. Eleven policemen including two sub- inspectors were injured. The police vehicle was cauterized. Within hours, another mob attacked a police vehicle belonging to Khejuri police station about five kilometers away and attempted to burn it. The police refused to enter the area ever since. Armed miscreants along with villagers began destroying bridges and culverts linking roads. They created an atmosphere of terror and barbarianism. On January 5, they virtually destroyed every link road and bridge connecting Nandigram and Khejuri with the outside world. The violent mob also conflagrated an electric sub-station. An armed gang equipped with firearms attacked the Communist Party of India (Marxist) local office in Rajaramchawk and burnt it. Cadres of TMC and other forces roamed around and threatened CPI (M) leaders and sympathizers with oppressing consequences. Several houses of CPI (M) workers and affiliates were looted. CPI (M) workers were forced to leave the villages and take shelter in a nearby camp. The thrashed CPI (M) workers and their families took shelter in a camp in the southern side of the Bhangabera bridge in Khejuri area. On January 6 miscreants of the so-called Jami Rakkha Committee, a conglomeration of TMC, Congress, suci, Naxalite groups and Jamiat ulema-e-Hind attacked the camp at about 3 in the morning. They even prepared bunkers for the attack. There was resistance from the camp and in the ensuing conflict three of the attackers died. It was evident that they gathered there to attack the camp in a planned manner. While this was a very bad state for both the government and the rule of law, what was going to follow was chilling story of state force used on people, concluding that all the villagers, men women and children were the same. They were miscreants and deserved to be dealt with accordingly. They deserved to be raped, burnt alive and rendered homeless.At least 14 people were killed and 39 injured in Nandigram in West Bengal Wednesday as police opened fire to quell mobs and retake the area they lost control of in January after unrest over acquisition of farmland for industry. A minister called it a 'Black Day' for West Bengal. The number is hugely reduced as reports of manydead people buried together is coming up slowly. Manhy hundreds were arrested. It was like an attacck by one nationalist army on another. Only difference was on one side was the sateand on another side, villagers, men women and children whom this very government claimed to represent democratically.According to reports, police entered the disputed area - which had been a forbidden zone since January - from three sides, Chandipur, Tekhali bridge and the Bhangabera bridge encircling Nandigram. Villagers gathered at several points to resist them. They had dug up roads and thrown logs to prevent the entry of police or other officials.Thousands armed with bamboo sticks came out of their homes. While some shouted slogans, others read from holy books or sang devotional songs.In the end the CPM men with the help of government officials and the police were able to reclaim the land from where they were force to flee some eleven months back under the violentattacks of BUPC. To reclaim a small tract of land the government who had failed in first go at the begining further felt aleniated from the people, intelligensia, journalists, authors, bloggersafter it used state force for the help of its partymen. But by this time, the numerous reports of the atrocities committed in the area had reached the whole of nation and shook the democratic ethos of the country to its very foundation. Poople from various walks of life, artists, authors, journalists, common men, even CPI(M) sympathisers stood up against thestate sponsored terrorism in Nandigram. The High Court ordered CBI inquiry into the police firings. The High Court termed the firing illegal in its official standing.
Buddha, who had once been considered a good change from jyoti Basu had lost all the sheen that his government had earned in last so many years with slow but steady industrialisation of the state.

The reaction of common man as always varies from one extreme to another. Any sane person will be surprised at some of the comments:
A software engineer: " Nandi... what. What is that dude. I have never heard of it. ....Ok ok ya I heard tht there was some violence and some police firing. This country sucks man.....mm.. ok so what are you doing this weekend.. wat abt 'Om Shanti Om' ?"

An autoriksha driver in hyderabad: " Police se panga nahi le sakte saab... aap loga ko pata nai chalta... police jo chahe kar sakta.. unke upar to bas neta loga ka chalta. Suna mai kuch ki udhar police se loga ne panga liya aur police bahot mara unko... hamare tara garib hoga saab.... pakka"

An artist from Bengal: " Today all my creations have lost all meaning for me because I will die as a person who voted this government to power. How willI ever be able to undo the evil Idid"Mamta Banerjee: " Buddha must resign and the state placed under emergency"

A Nandigram villagers: " The battle is not yet over. Will will fight for our land till our last breath. They have to kill each and every villager in Nandigram to take this land"

Buddhadeb Bhattacharya : "I said we had paid them back in their own coin. I think I should not have said it, Now I want peace, peace for all, peace for all sections,”

L. K. Advani: "Admission of guilt and apology is not enough and the CPM cadres who had indulged in violence should be proceeded against"

THE LESSON FROM NANDIGRAM
:It is said the the things we learn the harder way stays with us for longer. We can only hope in this case. I had closely followed the work of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and was an ardentfan of this personality. Inspite of all the intricacies of political work and the the difficulty a state like West Bengal present to a C.M., he was very popular with the intelligensia. He had fought hard, sometimes with his own partymen for the industrial development of Bengal. He had read the writing on the wall that capitalist is the answer to even Communist ideological hollow. The state was showing definite signs of progress under him in terms of more companies investing in bengal, improvement of credit facilities in the state. But in the Nandigram,he proved to be another politician. His satisfaction in being able to "pay them back in the same coin" made me recall what I had thought was necessary to be become a politician.
A shayari goes like
" umra guzar jaati hai aashiyaan babane main,tumko daya nahi aati bastiya jalaane mein"
(Its takes a lifetime to create a small hut, dont you feel mercy when you burn down the whole village)

You have to be very very, upto the the level of extreme, cruel if you want a long career in politics. Would you not break down when you hear of a story of a happy family burnt down by a group of people in the insane mayhem persued after a small issue? Would you not fill with shame if you came to know that those people whom you call you partymen have raped women and burnt down houses of villagers.Would you not resign and start proceedings against those men, even if they are your own party men, when you come to know of the atrocities committed by them.The democracy has learnt a big lesson. The police is to maintain law and order. But it can only do the limited. The real police are the people themselves. If you try to poke them beyonda certain point, there is bound to be a bounceback. India with its simmering difference is standing on the verge of becoming a developed nation. But, social unrest is one thing which has never been solved by any government. The lackadaisical attitude of the government confirms what we can expect from them. The silver lining in the cloud is the universal condemnation of the police action in Bengal, the newspaper articles, the blogs, the discussions across the country shouting in unison.Hopefully the next time any government will recognise such a situation early on and tackle it peacefully.

Dohar

2007-11-07T06:02:00.000-08:00

Dohar, near Balia Kothi, Dist: Saran, Bihar

It was around 8 o clock. The silence pervading would have convinced even the nocturnal creatures that midnight had arrived. Nothing was visible inside the room save the classic style furniture, steel boxes, the dimly colored walls and the small lantern lit inside the room. I dared going out of the small room of the big house. Outside the main door, there is a big dusty ground with no grass on it. A few cows were tied on one side and a couple of big trees were imposing their even bigger shades on the ground courtesy the moonlight which was more than generous on this otherwise dark area ensure by the lack of electricity. There were small houses around the ground but all in the vicinity of each other that a less than shouting from one end was enough to call someone busy in the kitchen of the house at other end. The only source of water was a well in the rear side of the house and a tubewell in the left side of the main door. From a far distance I could hear the low grumblings of old men sitting on “khatiya” and presumably criticizing the younger generation for being less disciplined than them and how the new thing called “mobile” can allow one person to call another even when there is no wire connection and how the cows milk is depleting because of the pollution which is reaching the villages from towns.
Amidst this, I gazed up the sky and found the stars brighter than I have ever felt in my life. The top layer of all the trees was shining as if some magic light is present on their periphery. A few hundred metres away I could see the fields of wheat. There too you could see this wonderful effect of light oozing out of the small uniform height plants as a gracious reflection of the light of moon and the stars. I wanted to resist the “logical thinker” inside my mind which kept me telling that this illusion is created because of the fact that for kilometers and kilometers around the house there is no electricity or the dust which make the night sky dim. I just wanted to fade into the magic which I was feeling for the moment.
My grandmother brought one thaali having around two vegetables, around five rotis, some daal, onion cut into small size and some salt. She was cursing the cow which had been sold a few months back as there was no one to use the milk it was giving. Had it been there she would have given me “doodh-roti”. Now the milk was being bought from someone in a nearby village. I have less than vague memories of this being my favourite dish when I was in my ancestral village around 22 years back. You take a large bowl, put a glass of milk into it and take around 3-4 rotis, make small crumbs of it. Put around 2-3 teaspoons of sugar. Then you use your hand to mash the crumbs of rotis. If the milk is pure cow milk, ishot and if there is some extra “chhali” put into the milk, it will be a bit difficult to mash the rotis as the hot milk in which it is kept tend to burn your fingers, but then the taste after that is the best best best thing you will have in all the delicacies you might have tasted. She was also cursing the papaya tree which she had planted a year back for not gicing ripe fruits in time ( the one week time when I was there). “these trees will only give ripe fruits when no one is here to eat but the children of other “tola”, it would have been such a good think if you would have got to eat it”. She put the lantern on the small steel box inside the room, the thaali on the bed over a newspaper and went to fetch water crying out ”have the food babua”. The wheat used to prepare rotis was from our fields which was being tilled by other people in return sharing the produce with us. The vegetables, onions, potato were all from a field near our house. The daal perhaps had been bought from market. I could feel the fragrance of each item the moment I brought it close to my lips, which mostly get lost due to all the travelling that these food items have to go through before they reach us in cities.

Just when I picked up the roti I yelled “ eeya (used for grandma in village) there is no ghee in the roti”. Pat came the pleading answer “but you have a weak liver”. I was diagnosed with jaundice when I was here in childhood, primarily because of eating milk and home made ghee everyday. I just gave a faint smile, those memories when I was 1-2 year old and used to play in dust outside the house dangling in front of me in momentary frames. I was trying to make out the shape of the room in the light of lantern gazing at the paraphernalia in the room. While I was eating my grandmother started describing one person that I had become an engineer, that I was living in a city, that I was having a mobile too, that I was having a bike and a car too, that there was constant electricity in the place where I lived, that I had come by aeroplane, that soon I would be going videsh, that I had been a brilliant student all through. She wondered how difficult it might have been for me to adjust to such dehaati conditions, eating such tasteless food. The other old lady too wondered how good my life was being in such a big city where we had solutions for everything from mosquitos, to travel, to aeroplanes and ready made, tasty food. They could muster the name of chips and pizza in their attempt to take the discussion further. In the light of the lantern, the wrinkles of my grandmother were making small troughs with dark shadow of themselves getting created. The wrinkles were looking all the more prominent and in the light. She was constantly monitoring my thaali lest I would feel shy of asking something if it was needed.

After having my dinner I went for a walk outside, feeling the soothing sound of extraordinary silence pervading the village intermittently broken by barks of dogs or coughing of old men seeping outside the house on their khatia, the smell of smoke coming out of many small huts around our house, the just-to-arrive chillness in air signaling the takeover of winter from autumn, the old men now adjusting themselves in their beds. I took a deep breath, let all the cold air gush in my lungs. I felt a relaxation which I had longed for since childhood. I came back and went to bed. Unlike my flat in Hyderabad where I cant sleep until I have been lying in bed for at least 2-3 hours, here I felt asleep in less than a minute, trying to capture the nostalgic feeling I was having being here, the frames of the wheat fields, the stars, my grandmother, the staircases of the house, the cows outside all coming one by one in front of my drowsy eyes and fading away very slowly.

TAKE CARE OF THE MAIL YOU SEND

2007-05-17T04:53:00.000-07:00

Well to begin with let me clarify that I am not an expert management guru on the finest details of how to write a mail so that you boss is happy with you all the time, so that even if you are the person who has done the crap you get to move the blame on the obnoxious looking colleague sitting a few cubicles away from. This is just a personal practice which I follow, so that I don't end up being pushed to the wall for sending a mail which though factually correct sound against the GOALS and VALUES and INTELLECT and PASSION and .... of my mulninational company. Over the last few months one thing I have realised , though the hard way is that except for a few mortals who unfortunately still clutch on to their dream of becoming an Architect, all others are interested in the result. No one gives a damn if the first chance exception that your debugger is catching is because of a buffer overflow and before it is able to handle it, the user has an API which can access the same variable before the actual catch is present. It might also happen that before a big team meeting the agenda is sent out to you and you are asked for your VALUABLE suggestions regarding the things which need to be included and if you send the reply to "all" instead of sending it to the sender stating that this is all a useless exercise with numbers and charts and pies being displayed in front of you you might end up being reprimanded for sending it in a whole audience. You didn't read between the lines. The sender's boss is always in cc for all such mails. So he has to include such lines. But that clearly means that if there is something missing in the mail, go and talk to him and tell him that his ass is not cleaned properly though he can't see it.
Once it happened to one gentleman in a "multinational" company. There were a host of mails flooding our inbox telling about some programs for the children in office. Now if you are talking about "multinational" and that too about "software" you should better forget children. Instead of the girlfriend in the company next door you want me to bring my child!!!!!
This gentleman , naturally and understandably got irritated and sent a mail stating "whats going on? why are you sending such junk mails? Is there no one to control this?" Now this concern is very valid and even the most anti technical manager will understand the irritation when you are working on a debugger trying to get the register variables when the second chance exception is occuring but because of the optimisation of thecompiler by the time the break happens, the registers have been recycled to contain some other values of some other function which will be called a zillion years later, and then you get a mail "bring your child to work" and then again after 5 minutes, when you are about to control the registers you get a mail " dont forget to bring your child to work" and then again you have got the break and you know that this time, becasue of the condition you introduced in the debugger, you are going to get the values correctly, you get a mail " please make sure that only your child comes to office and not your spouse" and then you see the values of the registers and it is again of the function which will be called a zillion years later and you turn your body back, leaning on the back support of your seat, looking up, taking deep breaths, deciding whether to take the sutta now or after you get those register values, but somehow convince yourself that once you get your register values sutta will get you a divine taste and then again there is a mail "please please please dont forget to bring your child to office on 13th of December at 9:20:20:22 ..." you cant expect yourself to be in the calm state of nirvana. This gentleman , controlled by his testosterone wrote this broad mail and sent it to all the people. Now this included all the bigshots of the company the VPs, the General Manager, the Special manager, the senior Vice President, the junior vice President and God only knows how many other people.
Extreme case of anger is as good as extreme case of nirvana. You dont really know or dont really care who the hell is there at the receiving end. All the VPs, Sr VPs , the GMs are submerged in one sublime self and you can feel the equality pervading across all the living beings alive. The dogs become as good as the managers, the rats become as good as the fellow workers .... All that matters to you in the world is the register values at the time of break in the debugger and you become free to do anything to anyone. A sutta after this action will definitely taste as good.
Next day there was a meek reply from the same gentleman mentioned above " I apologise.....". Alas the Karma!!!

Take care of the following things before you send any mail
1. AVOID OBSCENITY: Yes dude, the college days are over. I know you can't get over this feeling that you are still the young smart, handsome and dashing senior of the college but realise it sooner for your own good. If you got the latest cleavage photo of Lara Dutta keep it for your personal use. Don't send it on company mail. This might be perceived to be spoiling the innocent minds of all the software engineers and you might be claimed to be the odd one out in the crowd among the Dharmveer people of the company and kicked out.

2. AVOID FORWARDS IN A BIG GROUP: Most of the mail servers in companies have this option of having a dl or group so that you dont need to type the name of each person seperately. You can send the mail to one alias or one email id and it will be delivered to all the people who are members of that group. Some such dls are official others are made by people out of ingenuity to pass their time. Forwards in such groups, if having even a small objectionable content invisible even to the hawk will be brought in light and before you know what is happening, the official moral policeman professionally called HR will be looped in and ....

3. DONT REACT SHARPLY ON MAIL: Any harsh remark on mail even if it is against some one who has bullied you on mail creates a negative impact on the onlookers. You are expected to be calm even if the person in front of you is foul mouthing. It may be difficult to practice, but in the long run you only will be drenched in its sweet flavour. In case you feel the situation is going out of hand loop in senior person or you manager or take the matter offline, call that person and settle the matter. This doesn't mean not standing by your words. If you feel that what you are saying is correct voice it but politely accepting the conflicting option as another probable idea.

4. NO TIRADE: There always is a group of people around you whom you detest. Almost every mail thread will end up in some sharp language tone. It might be started from any side. You just can't help it. If it happens, you can't expect other people in the cc list to assume that you are the Lord Rama of Kalyug and 'he' is the Ravana. Avoid it. In case you feel that again the discussion is going to go in a wrong direction, loop in senior people right at the begining. This can help both of you in keeping the thread professional.

5. WRITE MEANINGFUL MAILS: Many a times it happens that a person has written a long mail explaining a technical matter and then gets a lot of questions which he needs to answer. It wastes your additional time and also might lead to misinterpretation. Read you mail properly before you send it. Think about it from a neutral point of view. Try to remove assumptions from your mind. Will a novice person be able to make sense out of it? Is there any obvious question which has been left unanswered? Is there some small mistake that you have made in explaining things? In my case I make it a point to write a mail then work on some other thing and come back to this mail and re read it. If I am able to understand it instantly, I feel I have made myself clear enough.

6. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: Try to keep the mails small. I have never encountered any situation where i had to write more than 3-4 paragraphs even if it was explaining some technical matter which took me 3-4 days to understand. If you feel that the matter is too much to be explained point out only the overview in the mail and attach a document giving the technical details. This is because if the content is really that much , naturally the person would like to store it somewhere on the computer or get a print out of it.

7. AVOID UNRELATED THINGS IN ONE MAIL: Many a times you will see mails which seem to be talking of the polar bear, the serenity of mountains and the latest victory of Australia in one single mail. This removes focus from the message you want to convey. Even if the mail is to the same person send seperate mails for different topics. This helps in searching them when you need to take a look at it after a long time, or in maintaining a discussion on the thread which is mostly related to only one of them.

8. ORGANISE THE MAIL BOX: Keep the mails from your classmates and close friends in some seperate folder. You might have opened one of them and might mistakenly send it to someone which might create an embarassing situation for both of you. Once it happened to me. I had opened a mail having a video about "how to spend time when the boss is away". The video showed people making the office a mess, running helter-skelter and having lots of fun. I wanted to close it but by mistake i pressed a shortcut key so that it was sent to a manager. :) After that I open such forwards only in an off time when I am sure that I am not going to send to a wrong person.

Some small things can help a lot in shaping your career. Taking care of mails is definitely one of them.

The Art Of Public Speaking

2007-02-26T08:33:00.000-08:00

They tell me that I have this good thing of influencing the group which is listening me, speaking out my thoughts and ideas efficiently and eloquently. I am confident while I speak and the words seem to come out of my mouth naturally not showing any sign of effort while still making full sense and talking reason. cmmon guys there is nothing in born. I had to work very very hard on it. I have often wondered what makes me speak so better than others or more generally what makes one person speak better than others. What has caught my imagination more often is what makes some people so much fearful of stage or what is more commonly known as stage-fear. I have seen many people who would do just anything to run away from speaking on the dias, I have even seen people who had the courage to come to the stage to speak something fighting the fear in them, which they believe exists and have failed miserably in front of the audience. Why is this difference present?
Let me share with you one small story of mine which might make the matter a bit clearer. I was in fifth standard when I got or rather was forced down the throat to have to speak in front of a gathering. The occasion was the Gandhi Jayanti and I had to speak something in front of a gathering of students from first to fifth standard not to forget the teachers. I had prepared very well, written whatever I was going to speak on a paper and was ready to read out the matter in front of the gathering. When my name was called out I stood and went to the dias. Mind you no one else had agreed to speak anything among all my classmates who as a bane of the Indian education system were more than happy showing they grades to parents and explaining how they had scored more than Sanju who lived a couple of doors next.
I adjusted the mike in my to make it close to my mouth and put my right hand in my right pocket to take out the piece of paper which I was almost living with for the past 2-3 days.
Alas! It was not there. But where could it be. In front of everyone I was fretting and panicking. I searched it in almost all the pockets I had wishing that there were one more pocket somewhere on me in which the paper was present. But as Murphy told, if there is one chance in a million for a thing to go wrong, it will.

After the humiliation I had a long period of self assessment. I felt that the main reason I failed there was not because I had lost a paper, it was because I had taked help of paper. I don’t know but from somewhere this idea came to my mind that if there is something in my mind, no one can take it. For many days after that I would be alone in my room, imagine the same set of students in front of me in the same room and would speak something. This was just to console myself that I could do it, perhaps to take revenge for soemthing. I don’t really remember. The practice was so intense that to this day I remember the ambience of the room, the students, their dumb, mocking faces, the sympathetic face of the teachers, the sunlight falling in the room, the mike which was in front of me, the mattress on which the students were seated. The zeal after that to improve my speaking has never been extinguished. Even to this day almost every week I take out time to speak out loudly on some topic, imagining that same room.

As I grew up, I got interested in this art of public speaking, realising that in real sense that it involves a lot many other things than just the ability to be able to speak. I would watch politicians speaking on TV trying to understand what made them special. I would even go to the extent of trying to see how they move their face with respect to the mike, how while speaking in parliament, they would make some particular statement effective, how they would use their hand, what angle they would make, how it was related to the tone in which they were speaking –friendly or seriuos, how much they moved their body, how they paused to take breath. I tried to inculcate these things in me and the effort continues to this day.

I would like to share some of the fine pints of public speaking which I have experienced and which is one of the most original versions of the art of public speaking because I am not writing the review of some article I have read somewhere but explaining the things which I have experienced first hand.

How to improve public speaking skills:
1. READ ALOUD: I remember when I was young, my father would ask me to read aloud. While initially it retards your reading spead, if you read aloud for around 2-3 months continuously you will get habituated to speaking the most common English words. So when you are speaking in public , at least you wont struggle with simple words. I have seen people who know very well what they want to speak, but stutter when they speak the same thing. The “aaann” annn” thing takes a lot of time in the actual speaking and in fact is very irritaing to the listener as well. So the first target should be to improve this capability of speaking simple sentences without pause and without stutter. If you have written what you are going to speak on a piece of paper, make sure you read it aloud at least 10-15 times before you actually take the plunge. Again this number may vary but is sufficient for the person who knows the content very well but is not confident enough of his ability to speak.
2. READ A LOT: This is one thing which I realised quite late in my learning cycle but was naturally oriented towards it. Remember, not one songle word that you read goes waste. I am telling this from my own experience. It’s the same as saying that not one lap of practice goes waste. Every line read makes you more and more prepered to face the public. This can be very useful when you are having a debate like discussion with your friends or participating in some group discussion. Some one might be speaking against Gandhi, arguing that if he was really so good and non-violent a person, why is it that he was never offered the Noble prize. If you are not well read, you will have to accept this argument, but if you are aware of the things that are happening around you can counter that though he never got the Noble prize, the noble committee once acknowledged some years back that not giving the prize to him was one of the biggest blunders of the Noble committee and now the time has come when giving the prize to him would more be an insult than appreciation. Knowledge is power. Not only in speaking, but in every field. In today’s world you are what you know. IT is your outlook, your conscience, your very self. If you don’t know the language and civilization you probably are not human enough. Have the urge for knowledge, have the apetite for it. Knowledge is not only the one that you get from the books but from everything that you see around you, be it a movie or a dinner recipe, or some latest fashion trend, or some latest song. Try to get knowledge from and about a variety of things. Read diverse books. I remember that for some period of time my reading habits would include things from history to vedas to computer magazines to constitution to laws to forests to insects to football. And I used to read all these topics with a lot of interest and enthusiasm and not as something forcing down on myself. Knowledge is a powerful thing. Have it. Knowledge makes you more human than anything else in this world.
3. LOOK RIGHT INTO THE EYES OF FEAR: I used to be afraid of ghosts. Once I read a very nice article regarding how to overcome it. It mentioned that imagine the worst possible ghost that you can think of. Whenever you are afraid, imagine it and try to look into its eyes. Right there. Right into the eyes. Not with fear or anger or anything. Just a cold look. When you feel the fear, imagine it into the form of anything any try too look straight into it. Even today if I am practicing for something which I have to speak in public, I imagine that classsroom situation because it was the most frightening thing I ever faced in my life. Fear is an outcome of your own thinking. If you condition your thinking to face it, you can conquer it.
4. GAIN EXPERIENCE: In fact when I was creating the draft of this article I had clubbed this point with the previous. Fear and experience are very closely interwined. It is said that when the soldiers go for some war or some operation for the first time, a lot of emotions cross their mind. They are afraid, they feel it. But as they do it more and more, it becomes a part of them. It no longer remains a big thing but just another thing. Similar is the case with public speaking. The more you speak the more you get confident, eloquent, fearless, clear and effective. Don’t leave any songle chance you can get to speak in public. Remember, each one experience adds to you ability. You wont realise it in short term say first 10-20 appearances but gradually when you master the art, you will be thankful to yourself for each opportunity you used to speak. It is a very good option to have a group of people who can be you friends, brothers or some strangers as well with whom you have a regular session where you chose any topic and discuss it. This way you can practice and in the end each one of you can give the feedback, the weak points, the strong points, the improvements, et al. I used to have a group of friends in college and we used to have hours and hours of debate on any topic. At times we would even get angry and it would almost turn into a fight. Looking back it was one period which made me improve myself in a way which I would never have been able to do otherwise.
5. REMEMBER KEY POINTS: One of the most irritating things I have seen people doing while they try to master public speaking is to memorize line by line of what they have written on a piece of paper. While , for a student with good memory power, this can be helpful in the short run, in the long run it can casue irreparable damage. You lose one line and you don’t have an idea where you are. You voice will also not have the modulation because it will be just like you are reading from a book and are least concerned about what the context of a particular line is. Thus while speaking a humourous line or a serious line your tone will be same and this is the most ineffective communication I can think of. Try to remember only the key points. The only preparation you need is to acquire the ideas. The lines should be flowing freely from your mind, or rather from your hear. Think of the most important thing in your life. It may be your parents, your girlfriend, or your job or anything else. Try to speak about. You don’t need to memorize things about it. Do you? This is because you immerse yourself into it when you are speaking about it. The whole thing appears in front of you in almost graphical format and you just speak. The words come out themselves, the meaning is formed itself. Similarly get very veryy close to the topic on which you are going to speak. Try to think about it from all angles as much as you can. Try to counter your own arguments and see if you can put any argument in a better way. Initially this is a difficult task but with proper practice, you can switch your association with topics in a matter of minutes and in some cases even in seconds.
6. BODY LANGUAGE: It is said that we communicate 70% from our body language which looks so intangible and only 30% from what we speak though language makes all the things so tangible. The importance of body language can hardly be over estimated. Body language is one of the most difficult thing to condition and control. It takes a long time. This is because there cannot be any artificiality introduced into it. If you try to move your hands while in actual your mind is not saying to do it, you will almost be making a mockery of yourself. So the body language should come naturally.
7. EYE CONTACT: Eye contact is very important if you want to communicate effectively. It has been proved by research that if you are not looking into the eyes of someone you are most probably lying. But it doesn’t even mean staring at the same person. The time of eye contact should be optimum, ususally 2-3 seconds for one person and after that you should shift the focus to some other person. Again it depends on the number of people in the group. The worst thing that you can do here is look up or look down while you are talking to someone. This is a common phenomena and usually happens when you are thinking something. So know the things very. You would probably not look at the roof while answering that your name is XYZ but you most probably would if someone asks where was the first session of the Indian National Congress held. The point to keep in mind is that if you don’t really know the thing your will struggle to have a good eye contact.
8. SHORT AND SIMPLE SENTENCES: When you speak and when someone is listening to you, tell yourself that no one is interested in knowing how well you are a pundit in English. Speak at a comfortable level only. Try to speak small sentences. Especially while you are speaking, have mercy one the memory of the people before you decide to club 3-4 sentences into one and create a minute long sentence. Remember the old adage “small is beautiful”. The intention of speaking should always be how well you are able to explain the matter to even the most novice perosn on the topic. Even people who win Noble prize after years and years of research have to ‘sell’ what ever they have done. Speaking in technical jargons will serve no ends. You can only do so in front of subject experts and you will mostly not be explaining to them as they already know.
9. HUMOUR: Humour is the recipe of success, not only in success but in life as a whole. One humourous sentence might bring you to the notice of the crowd. And this is one thing which everyone in the world today wants because in our lifestyle we have time for everything but a sweet smile, a laughter from the heart. Again you need to differentiate sarcasm from humour. Humour is harmless and not directed towards anyone, sarcasm is. While I have read at many places that sarcasm is one of the best ways to communicate something, I have not quite been able to accept this. One because it is indirect and second because you try to laugh at something you probably would be angry at. I prefer to use a sharp, critical sentence instead of sarcasm. Somehow I feel I wouldn’t be honest if I did this and I feel honesty as the most important virtue. If you express what you really have in heart, you can express very well. This thing I would leave on you to decide whether it is good or not to have sarcasm in speaking
10. DON’T PROVE THAT YOU CAN SPEAK: One of the most common traits of novice people while they try to speak in public that I have noticed is that they try to prove that they can speak. They are very concious of their accent, their selection of words, their selection of expressions. This kills naturality and breeds boredom and disbelief in the listener. Put the focus on the listener and not on you. Its like a teacher you can say. If after everything he says he has this kind of question in his mind about himself “ am I right? Am I speaking properly?” the students will be wondering on his strange behaviour. When I speak, I don’t know why I get this feeling that I put myself in the place of the listener and try to understand how easy or how difficult it is to understand what I am speaking. It happens while I am speaking not at any other time. Thus I tend to repeat a few things which somehow I feel might not have been communicated properly. Mind you, I don’t repeat becaue I think that I didn’t speak well, I repeat because I feel that the person in front of me didn’t understand properly. Their expressions, perhaps, brings this thing to me. At the end of the day I want an assuring glow on the face of my listeners. That is my medal, that is my success, that is my appreciation and nothing else.
11. IMAGINE: Imagination is a very powerful thing. You are as great and as insignificant as you can imagine. If you can imagine that a number of kids and not grown ups ar sitting in front of you and are expecting you to explain something to them clearly you will speak better than what you can if you cant imagine. So when any of your argument is countered , don’t take it as an insult but as a query from a child who is ignorant and wants to know more from you. This will give you assurance that the junta is not against you and you can take even the strongest criticism in your stride. If at some point your argument has been proved wrong, imagine that it’s a child who taught you something and have a gratuitous smile while accepting the same. Remember, a humble confession of a mistake is greater than a successful argument, because when you win you forget what you spoke but if you accept some mistake you never forget it. It then become a lesson for the rest of your life. I have found hundreds of time when I have been proved wrong. I never forget any single of mistake which I did in speaking.
12. VOICE MODULATION: People like music. Give them. People like change. Give them. People tend to sleep while listening, wake them up. The best method to achieve this is to modulate your voice. Modulation here doesn’t mean speaking in some very strange voice, or speaking very loud or very low, it means speaking in the same voice as you would in the context of the thing that you are saying. If you are describing the activities of a child, the innocence of the child which you ‘imagine’ should be visible from the tone of your voice. If you are describing harm done to our country by communalism, your voice should have the grimness which this topic so nicely deserves. This will bring naturality in your speaking. They best way to do this is to associate yourself with the thing that you are speaking, associate very closely with it. This will bring the required modulation in your voice naturally.
13. PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION: A picture speaks a thousand words. This is with respect to the opportunity wher you can use some slides or some objects to demonstrate what you are going to speak about. The best teachers have been those who are able to relate the monotonous voice with some real world things. Intelligent use of things can leave an ever lasting impression on the listener. When Yessar Arafat went to the United Nations for the first time he went into the General Assembly with an AK 47 replica in one hand and an olive in another hand. He said in his beginning lines: “I am ready for both peace and war” and there is no other way he could have communicated his thoughts better. This again needs a lot of intelligent thinking and a little effort but as you can see from the example it is worth it.
14. SPEAK FROM THE HEART: If I have to write one line which is tha Mantra of good speaking, which I have adhered to for so many years, which I believe combines everything I have mentioned above it will be this: speak from the heart. If you are honest, if you speak what you have in your heart you will naturally be able to speak very well. Imagine the most important person in your life, or most important thing which is very dear to you. Say 10 line about him/her/it. Just see how all your emotions bring proper modulation to your voice, proper expression on your face, proper eye contact fot you. This is the power of honesty, of truth. It is greater than perhaps any other power in this world. It creates trust among the listeners for you, brings confidence on your face, takes away all fear you might be having and acts like a magic. Use the charm to the best of your use.

Edits: 17/5/08, Edited the first two lines which I felt sounded arrogant and were not really intended in the way they might have conveyed the meaning.

Modern and Traditional

2006-10-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

In course of a night walk with my flatmates in Hyderabad a very nice topic emerged amongst us. The modernity of girls. It was heated but original and thought provoking as well. I was particularly moved by what Ashraf said
" Clothes don't represent modernity".

How true and how false!!!!!!!
False in the sense that if we observe the people around us, the most expressive thing which they tend to use to show (off) their modernity is their clothes. With the neck cut and lenght of skirts of girls going down day by day are we getting modern??? In India particularly we have the habit of copying what the Americans or the Europeans do assuming it to be synonymous with modernity.
In course of a meeting about the social service done by Microsoft, I came to know the instance where the some employees collected old clothes from various sources but the people for whom it was meant refused to accept any used clothes. This it was concluded it due to the cultural psyche of the Indians. As i remember in older days we wanted jeans so as to give ourselves an 'American' look. Nobody thought of buying a faded jeans as it was like a taboo. Now faded jeans is more in demand than colored jeans. As it was revealed by an American citizen, old clothes is a trendy thing in USA!!!!!

In our mad rush to look modern we have forgotten and neglected the basic tenets of modernity. Modernity is not what your look is but what your outlook is. If you think in modern terms, avoid chemical medicines, remain clean, understand your social responsibility, are not afraid of leaving the shores of this country but equally ready to return back if you are needed here, you are the most modern person your traditional clothes not withstanding. Once is naturally reminded of Mahatma Gandhi (ya the one of Gandhigiri) who used to fast, clean his faeces, possess just two pieces of clothes, observe all the rituals but was modern enough to get the whole world flock to him for ideas and guidance to save the fast rotting world. In those times he had the vision that we need to protect our environment. This is modernity.

If a girl wearing less clothes is attracting the boys it is not her modernity but her sex that is attracting them. And sex sells. This is the reason why we are seeing women in almost every ads and almost always semi nude. A girl revealing doesn't portray modernity, she shows her backwardness.
So friends if you want to be modern be from the core through your innovative and noble thoughts, through your kind and humble actions, through full understanding of your responsibilities and not through clothes.

HACKING

2006-09-05T09:53:00.001-07:00

Yeah, i know that once you read the topic you will definitely read the whole article, expecting some methods to

1. hack the password of yahoo or hotmail accounts of your friends.

2.You might even decide to buy the ankit fadia book "An unofficial guide to ethical hacking".

3. You may also post me your problems saying you lost your yahoo id's password and you need to get the password and beg me for the password

4. Or you may ask me tips for learning hacking

5. You may try to piss me off by saying other things

DEAR, IF YOU COME IN ANY OF THE FIVE CATAGORIES PLEASE GET LOST

others may read on........

WHAT IS HACKING
Hacking is programming, 'geek'ing, exploiting, finding holes..... of security, buffer overflowing, stack overflowing, DOSing, Spoofing, Fuzzing, lateral thinking, Mindbending, programming. For me since i was introduced to it, one month back, it is an art.

some examples
1. Printf statement is a bug!!!!!
2. No one can really hack a yahoo id password. I say this to non-hackers. To all the hackers my statement will be nothing is impossible!!!!
3. C language by Ritchie is the best example of a hack!!!
4. If your explorer on windows crashes sometimes, it is not that it is a faulty, its just that it has caught an error a bit late................ but has caught.
5. Hackers are not professionals (like me), they are just teens or kids who are geniuses but have no place to use their mind.

WHAT NOT IS HACKING
1. Finding yahoo id of a friend by guessing as ANKIT FADIA suggests. Send him to a hackers gathering and he wont even be able TO %$^%$$^$%^

2. Using a tool to write multiple scraps on ORKUT.

3. Using keyboard logger to get the password of a friend.

4. Installing some trojan in a remote PC and getting info from that PC.

All these are cheap tactics used by morons who have no mind at all but want to show off their friends that they are hackers

A REAL EXAMPLE

1. Go to c: drive
2. Create a folder named test.
3. Go inside the test folder
4. Create a new folder with a long name in the test folder. Make the name as long as you can. After some limit you wont be able to further increase the length of the name of the folder. Say the name is
abcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghijabcdefghi

5. Come out of the test folder rename the test folder to a long name, again keep increasing the length of the name till a certain limit when you wont be able to further increase the length of the name. Say the name is testtesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttest
6. Now again go inside the test folder(which has now been renamed) to testtesttest…….
7. Try to delete the folder which was created inside the test folder. You cann’t delete it.

Following are the points which I would like to point:
1. The folder inside the test folder cannot be deleted, both from GUI or command prompt.
The commands that I used to delete the folder through the command prompt are
rmdir
rmdir /S
rmdir /Q

2. No operation can be performed on the folder inside the test folder. Although it shows on GUI as well as the the command prompt (dir), on performing any operation on it, the message we get is that the system cannot find the path specified
3. You can create a shortcut to the folder on desktop, but when you double click the shortcut nothing happens

This is hacking albeit in a very simple way. You have to think out of the box to think about it...... long names..... very long names......

I am creating one more blog comitted to hacking only. If you have the following qualities then only you are welcome

1. You know C/C++/Java including pointers, link lists, stack, buffer, address space
2. You know HTML/PYTHON/ASP/JSP/PERL/PHP or any scripting language
3. you like thinking OUT OF THE BOX naturally and not because i am writing all this.
4. you dont mind offensive language which however wont be directed to you if you are not a goody-goody student getting lots of marks in college exam without IQ but by your impression
5. You use all the tricks i speak of purely for learning purpose and not to harm anyone
6. You join me in hating Ankit Fadia, who is not a hacker but a hoax still believed by the media
6. You like numbers and playing with them.......

welcome to

http://www.thegeekhacker.blogspot.com

Sid

HACKING

2006-09-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

TRUST THE FRIENDSHIP

2006-08-30T09:04:00.000-07:00

Just tried a hand at something which i am not really good at, the result was

Forlorn and abject i lay at the gate
longing to die, writhing with pain.
There cometh the soldier smile on his face,
he killed me once, wants revenge again.

Blood oozing past my chest in winter chill,
I look for cover but my hands are still.
Struggle with a sigh trying to speak,
you won, you own , why don't you kill.

The murky eyes adjust as he comes near
to bestow death upon me, victory to his land.
You droop on the side, a cut on the fore,
are you my enemy or my childhood friend?

Yes dear, i defeated you though once more,
and you failed today to find once again,
that to win you have to deceive the other
be it a bloody war or be it our childhood game

You think you won the game on deceit,
think i didn't know what you had hidden.
Couldn't see you loose that day friend
so defeat from victory i had to obtain.

Banished from motherland i leave today,
banished to hell i 've got the sign.
for now i let you defeat my land
though aware ahead of your design.

With last utterence i take your leave,
secret this story you keep always will,
for you believe in winning games and wars
and i want posterity to trust friendship still....

sid

HIRE AND FIRE

2006-08-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

So as usual today during dinner a topic emerged out of nothind and Vipul, Karthika nd myself ended up a lot experience richer, with a few more quotes in our memory bag. It all started with a nice joke which Vipul shared over the food.

A new CEO was hired by a mamoth but dying company with the task of reorganising the work force, restructuring the heirarchy, pulling the company out of the dire states it was in and all other management terminology which could be garnered. The CEO began his work by firing a lot of people and working exhaustively to generate results. In the end he himself was fired....

SO THE TOPIC WAS............FIRING(you guessed it right)
Are the companies justified in firing the people. What all goes on behind the screen. How much notice should the employee be given? Does it really work? What other strategies/methodology should be adopted by the people at the helm of the affairs so that the firing period doesn't end up pushing even deserving people out of the company voluntarily or involuntarily.

THE METHOD
I was both astonished and aghast to know the way in which firing of executives and the employees of the company is done. Suppose the firing of a lot many employees is going on, one fine morning you reach your desk and find the letter which , though with catholic politeness, tells you that you are fired. Yes dear, no time to pack up. No notice whatsoever. This is corporate world. The more you are paid, the sharper is the sword hanging over your neck.

WHAT DO THE EMPLOYEES GET
Well a termination letter to begin with followed by lip sympathy of fellow workers who puff one more sigh muttering 'thank God it's not me'. On the same day your machines and all paraphernalia is packed and you security card is taken back. Now you cann't enter the company premises. Plain and simple. Though you get the next two months salary without working

DOES IT WORK
In very few cases, depending more on what other measures have been taken by the company to arrest rising losses or operating costs, whether the company is able to retain and nourish the remaining empoyees, whether those who remain are given enough incentives to work steadfastedly or they are only given the fear of sword. In most of the cases the those who survive the axe end up being richer as a salary revision follows immedietly.

HOW TO ESCAPE
1.Work sincerely and give results. That's the best way. A company will never fire a valuable emplaoyee and with the kind of transparence in the organisational structure of most of the companies and the cross functional and top-bottom interaction it doesn't take too long to prove oneself to be valuable.
Be prepared, but only to the extent that it ends uo improving your efficiency. Once Md azharuddin said "a little bit of nervousness is needed to get the best out of you". Have faith on Him. If you are destined to be fired you will be.
Don't brood over the impending death on a birth
Be prepared with alternatives in case you are fired. Post your resume in naukri.com today.

IS IT JUSTIFIED
Well if it isn't then all the companies who have made mamoth infracture and innovative ways to deliver results will end up being like moth eaten government companies. But morally the companies should strive to make the transition smoother (zor ka jhatka dheere se lage).

CONCLUSION
We concurred on what Narayan Murthi said
"Love your work but never fall in love with your company, because you never know when your company will stop loving you"

and we derived a new quote of our own
"Love the result. Never love the employee, because you never know when the employee will stop loving you"

MY FUTURE: WHAT I WANT TO DO

2006-07-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today i was going through the profile of the participants of code4bill competitions.
Code4bill is an online programming contest which is used to filter students across India to do internship in Microsoft. Most of them boasted of things which i could relate with myself......

SLEEPING
Once in my first semester in college I had the divine opportunity to have a night out to complete a journal. It was a big thing for me. Has heard lots about this terminology but half a dozen attempts of mine had ended up in a snoozing kid at 7 am in the morning.

And then during the submission................
The concerned faculty just didn't bother to see our journals....... thats it. Call it a good moment or bad as you wish i swore i would never sacrifice my sleep for some stupid stuff.......

The college is a place which has a flow... morning struggle with getting up... listen to the gospels of the profs.... do some stupid coding which is already available with everyone....

In exams... the material or the solution to the previous years question papers..... If you want be innovative and not mug...... you will end up angering the prof(read adhocs for comp guys)...

Till today i enjoy my sleep like anything. Even if there is some big issue and i have to miss my sleep due to it regularly i will quit my job the next day... What am i doing my job for... for my life(till i dont have a wife).. and if i am not enjoying it there is no point sticking to it like a snail....

INTERESTS:
I used to wonder as a kid if i am normal or not. A day before the exams i would try to think about the universe its expanse, its end. I would write poems and articles, try solving maths problems from my elder brother's book........ out of interest..... now i think how honest i was....

You do justice to your life only if you are honest...... to yourself. God has not created any accountant for us. If you feel like doing coding.. do it and nothing else, if you want to write poems go ahead.. put your heart and soul into it.....

FUTURE:
Now comes the question.... if all you did was writing poems and coding(no mugging the material which your prof gave you)... what are you going to do once you are out of college......

I believe we are showed a virtual life when we are at college....mug mug mug.....
rote the words from GRE word list... write campus interview.. get selected.... thats it.. Your life has ended... because you are earning..... Is that what we are born for... No.. I am sure because He didn't create money.... we did......

So what to do???????? Well I am not going to answer it for sure .... simply because i don't know myself what i am going to do..... but one thing is for sure i am not for Microsoft......
My dreams are somewhere else... beyond the horizon and i am sure He has chosen a date to show me that....... Thats it.. have trust on Him....... He has chosen very good future for all of us.... else relativity wouldn't have been discoevered, Mount everest wont have been conquered.......
But to hear him you need to hear yourself.. hear your heart.......

But till the day has arrived follow the following rules:
1. Totally.... totally immerse yourself in what you are doing...
2. Have interests... do things not because the curriculum says you have to do .... but for the love of it....
3. Enjoy every moment of life.... remember...... life is in your hand only.... you are its owner.......

One thing which has become my motto in life...... when i am at the deathbed ... there shoouldn't be a thing which i didn't try..... coz

At the end of your life you feel more sorry for the things that you didn't do than for the things you did.........

first month@Microsoft

2006-07-25T12:58:00.000-07:00

Today i will be one month young at Microsoft. It has been a very learning and inspiring experience till now. I have met people with years and years of experience. The best thing about this company which i have noticed is its people. In the discussion rooms the technology of tomorrow is discussed and the people agree and disagree with such calm and composure that just being in the room you seem to be learning too much.

I have learnt about half a dozen tools of debugging. One month of company seems to have taught me what four years of college life failed to. Coming sunday i will be getting my first salary. The environment here is so good and so positive that i have hardly realised that i have become a professional, the transition from college to company has been a real smooth one.

Right now i am working on a GDR issue and parallely on the timezone tool. I seem to have, to some extent, caught up with the terminology used here viz Gdr issue, fix, logging, etc.

MUMBAI: ARE WE BRAVE OR INDIFFERENT

2006-07-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

The recent blasts in Mumbai, the financial capital of India sent shockwaves across the world. For those who are in general indifferent to this simmering problem the message couldn't have been louder....

People killed were totally innocent, people who may not even be knowing what all these terrorists stand for and what their aim is. The place of target, local train, made the motive even clearer: to wreak havoc and cause as much destruction as possible. Any doubt about the capability of the terrorists to play with our security arrangements was squarely washed away: toll 200 and counting. Any expectation from the government was shattered by the comments:
"We will not be defeated by the terrorists", "Those responsible will not be spared" , "Pakistan, LeT and SIMI are behind those attacks", "SIMI is not behind those attacks", "ISI behind the attacks"

You may be wondering where we have heard these lines. These lines now seem to be a recorded note which are played to the public ears every time a tragedy is confronted by the nation. After all the attacks have become the order of the day. So even now you can be sure an attack is going to occur. So why not keep the comments pre prepared to suit our own interests.

The congress : " the govt will leave no stone unturned to punish the guilty". Everyone knows how the perpetrators of the 93 blasts are roaming free, how many have been captured in Kashmir and how many innocents have been killed in the pretext of counter-terrorist measures.

The BJP "Pakistan and ISI and SIMI are behind the attacks" well for those not clever enough , actually they mean neither the pakistan nor the ISI nor the SIMI. They simply mean the Muslims as if every muslim in indian is a pakistani , working for ISI and SIMI. so what do they suggest to tackle it. Well may be a Lahore yatra by Vajpayee or ask our brave soldiers to fight the enemy without crossing the LoC.

Enough is enough. We need to stop fooling ourselves and playing around with the statistics and comments. every life lost in such incidents is a slap on the face of the nation. bravery is good only to such an extent such that it faciltates peace talks. If inspite of our 'bravery' all we are getting is more such slaps then right wisdom says that its the time to be really brave. If the people of a city are going to their jobs the next day inspite of a blast the previous day, it is not their bravery, it is the cruelty of the city which allows no concession at all.

Forgetting an event like this is not a sign of bravery. It is a sign of callousness and utter disregard to the very basic values of human dignity and freedom to which we boast ourself like owls in international conferences. history stands witness to the adage that a nation is more susceptible to demise if the rot is from within than from external exigencies. The time has some to be tough on terrorism, not by making comments( "aar paar ki ladai hogi") to suit the ears of hollywood dreaming public but in real sense like giving power and resources to the police and anti-terrorist squads, intensifying the intelligence and survellience, prioritising the curbing of terrorism as the goal of government.

As a demand to the government i would like to echo what a wailing father said before collapsing on hearing the news of the death of his son....

"WE WANT NOTHING BUT DEATH FOR THE PERPETRATORS OF THIS CRIME"

alvida

2006-05-13T13:09:00.000-07:00

We are about to leave the college. In fact the students have stareted going. While writing the slam of one of my friends, a few lines came to my mind. A little bit of improvement gave it the following shape... hope to improve more...

ALVIDA

Yadoon ki chita hum jalaake jaa rahe
Aansuon ke aakhri ansh bahake jaa rahe
Zindagi ki hai raftaar badhti jaa rahi
Aur kuch dost hain hum peeche chhode jaa rahe

Kabhi zikra hotoh yaad kar lena humein
Hum to yadoon ke sahare hain jeene jaa rahe
Rok lena ashkon ko aakhon ki gahraai mein
Hum bhi hain apni aah dil mein chupa ke jaa rahe

Zindagi di harpal khushi tumne humein, kya kahun?
Ab ye pal itihaas mein hain samaane jaa rahe
Bas ek aakhri sawaal karta hun tujhse sach bataa
Kya kabhi hain ye pal wapas aane jaa rahe?

Teri khamoshi pe nahi hum sawaal karne jaa rahe
Jawaab-e-ilm se nahi hum inkaar karne jaa rahe
Ae zindagi intezaar karna ek aur mukalaat ka
Hum toh tujhe hi hain peeche chhode jaa rahe

Hamesha saath dene ka hai waada humaara doston,
Todne nahi use hum hain nibhaane jaa rahe
Anjaan hokar bhi kabhi yaad humein karna doston
Hasil-e-manzil se bhi laut kar hum hain aane jaa rahe

Bas ab chalet hain tumko bhulakar doston
Bahot rulaya aur nahi tumko rulane jaa rahe
Maaf karna koi khata gar hui humse kabhi
Ek aakhri baar hain tumko rulake jaa rahe

Cheers comps2k6 svnit surat
sid

Smokers and drinkers are best friends

2006-02-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

There is a water tank on the top our hostel H6 and if you get on the top of it you reach a place which is the highest point of the hostel. The college looks awsome from there. And among a few students among us it is known as Mount Abu.

I had the humbling experience of being with some of my closest friends who were having a drink there as well 'jhaapu' (decipher it urself plz). And that is the point which is favourite among them when they want to 'fly'. I had, a few hours back, got my specs broken in a GPL accident and i couldn't sleep at ten in the night(well for hostelites thats the time when day starts). So had to do something for a timepass. And there came the invitation by them to join them for a drink. I accepted to share only the moment with them, not the drink. And it was an awsome experience. They were all very bright and intelligent students of my college, and if fact, really close pals. It was midnight with the night football match giving a brilliantly superior look to our otherwise ghostly field. The stars were constantly shining and the wind had an unusual warmth in it as if signalling the arrival of winter. For them though it was the best they could manage to celebrate their last few days together!!!!
Once they were 'flying' they started blabbering. After so many years in the college where friendship is more proportional o how much you can bootlick a person than how honest you are to him i was with a group of students who were completely 'out'. And trust me!!!! they discussed all sorts of things jumping from politics to love affairs, from sexual orgasm to parent child relationship. They discussed their personal problems with as much genuineness as the cracked the jokes with ingenuity.
One of them quipped "those who dope are more stable in life than those who don't because they have seen the life from both the perspectives" It was as true as if a 3 year old child complains to his father "papa!papa! my doll is broken. See it is crying" So false yet so true in its innocent portrayal of the things as his mind perceives. They were enjoying themselves, sharing the defeats and roadblocks of life which brought them to a common platform that day. One of them had just lost his girlfriend to fate's unscrupulousness...... she ditched him.
At times they went close to the roof boundary i was scared lest some unfortunate accident occurs but they were in full control of themselves. They were laughing, giggling and crying during different slots of time.
One common thing among them was their concurrence on the idea that they were 'born intelligent but education ruined them'. Indeed had our education system been a little more responsive to the sparkling needs of the adolescent mind many a geniuses would have been groomed into a much better social animal.
Once the avilable amount was exhausted by their incessant drinking they discussed the importance of attending the class the next day, very well aware, that they were running short of the minimum attendence the education system imposed on them, oblivious of the differring needs of the myriad personalities imprisoned under the same system. By the time even i was feeling a bit dizzy perhaps due to the smell. Cursing the society which imposes bars on the individuals with respect to every inch of his private or public life it could invade, i went into the lap of mother sleep.
A well cultured, ettiquetted discussion of best intellectuals of our college couldn't have stood the shine of that innocent talk.

LATE BUT NEVER TOO LATE

2006-02-11T12:34:00.000-08:00

I started my life on this planet with a birth which was delayed by a few days than expected. Not surprisingly i have carried the divine blessing with me by being late for almost everything. Be it filling a form or returning a book to a friend, be it relieving myself at any stopage or boarding a train which is going to be a rush....... being late has been so much of a characteristic with me that when i call my friends at home or to my room in hostel they come a bit late almost expecting me being late as a universal truth.....

Now consider a few times i tried to be on time......
Was ready just too soon and a friend came late and started banging on me.... u bloody asshole why are u ready so soon today.. i came late only because i expected u to be late....
Even for a movie i am always late because of which my friends keep cursing me...
after all the movie deserves to be enjoyed as much as the babes who come there arousing the hidden tigers inside us...
After i broke up with my girlfriend because "you proposed me too early when you were not even sure" i decided not to break the law which the nature has so gracefully bestowed on me.
On arival in the engineering college i found many .... or rather all of them like me in being late and i felt at home at least in this respect.....
But i wondered today .... has it ever made a difference.. big enough to be perturbed for being late. The answer is NO!!!!! and a BIG one for that matter. I don't know if prince charles is what he is because he was 'on time' or some gooddy-gooddy boy won a big enough trophy for being on time. If i am irritated by friends who are 'on time' followers so are they by "sorry yaar late ho gaya" kind of people. The final score is always zero..... and trust me there have been moments when i had to board a running train for being late i have never missed one, was late for my job interview...but thank God!!! so was the interviewer. One friend even confided in me that my trend for being late was so caustic that i will be remembered as "Mr late" by him. Well at least there is something i excelled in. So cheers for all the "late comers". We don't rule the world but the world doesn't rule as well.
By the way its 2 am and a friend is expecting me tomorrow morning for a jog.... already late but not too late......
Good night

BUNK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-02-07T12:05:00.000-08:00

Well as far as i remember i have been the most vocal supporter of bunk in my class. But then today is the first time i felt we are overdoing it. There are teachers who have never seen me in this semester while we are into the middle of the semester. We just had our techfest mindbend 06. It was simply superb. I especially liked the hypnosis show. The person hypnotised many students and made them dance on his commands, made them cry like five year olds and the audience were not only on their feet, they were standing on chairs, clamouring for any inch of space they could find to stand and see the show. The most interesting part of the show, though, came after it ended. Many of my friends were among 30 or so students who had gone to the stage to be hypnotised. And they told that 80 pcent of them were acting!!!!! hai na maze ki baat.
One of them was particularly honest.... said "abe yaar bahut koshish kiya ki hypnotise ho jaon par hua nahi toh kya karta. bas aankh band rakhi aur jo wo bol raha tha wahi kar raha tha" quipped saini. all in all it was fun and that is what matters to us.
Concluding the mindbend was a rock show. Since our ganhiwadi wardens had ordered that barricades should be put up between the boys and girls assuming us tp be born rapists we were getting really frustu!!!! if u are in a college or have been.. u got it right!!!! Soon many students were dancing on stage. I too went. Though i didn;'t understand a single word of was Mrinabh n joji were singing i was banging my head and felt a rock star within me. wats rock though for naive people like me..... go to the stage and start shouting at you highest voice as if someone has put petrol down your asshole and BINGOOOOOOOO most of the viewers will mistake u for a rock star.
The orgasm came when the girls left!!! and the singer started singing our fav song.... the sutta song....
it touched a chord

7TH FEBRUARY 2005 THE BEGINING

2006-02-05T15:24:00.000-08:00

SIDDHARTHA PRAKASH

Hello Mr. reader,
This is my first blog and i suppose you would be reading this line the nth time since every blogger starts with these golden lines only. In it are hidden a thousand desires and fears, a million thoughts and a billion requests. No wonder , though inadverdently, everyone starts with these golden lines only.
Frankly speaking i myself don't know why all of a sudden this desire to write a blog came to my mind. But i do feel that blogs are not only a means to allow others to explore us, it correspondingly allows the writer to explore himself.
So here is where i introduce myself,
In the badlands of Bihar when it was a goodland, there lived a devout named iya. She was a born devotee and spent almost all her time singing symns in the praise of lord Rama. As was the case in those times, her world started and ended within the four walls of her house. When her third and youngest son, who was the closest to her and the most intelligent among the band of three, was seven a bizzaire thing hapened, which though ordinary for us, was a mistake by heavens ang going to shake it apocalyptically. The event was going to be the first chain which would finally be continued to this blog. The cute little boy did the braveheart work of diving in a pond for fun, expecting that his swimming monoeuvre would cheat the weeds lying underneath. Cheating did happen. But in the reverse way. The boy died.
They say the curse of a pure and angelic person can shake the whole universe without butterfly effect. The mother cried and cursed the heavens. "why did you take him away?" was all she had asked. But the pain she felt and the purity of mind she had perhaps shaken the heavens. She had a dream. Lord vishnu came out of the ocean and asked her for forgivenness. Her biggest ever aim in life the four walls of the haveli had allowed was being at the feet of her lord's murti. But she wont forgive him. No scientist has ever tried to find any love stronger than the one which a mother has for her child. The lord kept begging for mercy but she won't forgive. In the end the lord requested her to pick one of the 'mukuts' lying at the sea-shore. She picked a wheatish one. "ah- exclaimed the lord! You washed me of my sin. I will return you your son". And she woke up
Decades later a wheatish son was born in her family who was her grandson. When his the astrologers were consulted to predict the future of the child, they refused to speak saying the child future was "Himgiri Express". It would encompass success and fame they had never imagined. But they hid many things from his parents which the child was going to find about himself when he grew up and mastered those occult sciences.
The scene then shifted to Assam. The land more beautiful than any other place in the world because not only the hills with clouds touching them are wonderful but the people there are living examples of any hope honesty has on mankind of its survival in the times of its strangulation. A small town called Namrup was chosen for the boy to grow up. But as it turned out his mother found it difficult to support three siblings together with the financial and physical or some other problem. So he was sent back. From beautiful, humid, cold, cool and serene place to the heat and dust of his native village. He lived with his grandmother. She loved him very much. She was happy to have him close to him. Lord Vishnu must have been chuckling every time the wrinkled face kissed the boy. His sins were being purged. The grandfather was considered a vary tough man. A person who never compromised. But at the same time revered for what he stood for hard-work, honesty and dignity. He was above sixty yet every time a menacing youth was to be punished it was he who would be invited. He didn't like children at all and was more often than not shouting at them. Not surprisingly, his out-of-place love and affection for the child intrigued the villagers. He would take the child out in the fields and show him the village, he would take him to the village saint and let him sit while aarti was going on. These formed the first and the last imprints the child would have of his formative years. The health of the child deteroriated and he caught jaundice but in those areas where it ensured a comparatively peaceful death, the child cheated death. Even God makes mistakes.... but He doesn't repeat it. It was when he was one bye age that his uncle, whom he considered his father and called papa(his father was living with mother and two other siblings in Assam ), for God-knows-why reason started teaching him. Within next six months when other kids were yet to speak properly the child was speaking verses of Gita and poems in English. His words amused onlookers and whenever there was a guest he would be kept a distance away to give the impression of a stage and asked to recite those verses. And people would clap to the amusement of the child. Life was uncomfortable but a blessing for him there. His grandfather died and the scene shifted back to Assam.
Here he had all the facilities a man could dream of. Permanent electricity, water, cleanliness and better climate. His mother had finally decided that he should live with them. When he joined school at as young as age that allowed his classmates to be two years older than him. But he was bright. He picked up studies very fast and had a proclivity for innovation. When he went to school he didn't take long to top the charts. His parents were never interested in anything other than his academic achievements perhaps not even himself. They would kiss him every time he got a highest in a subject and he wanted every inch of the love which he had been deprived of till now. With his mummy and papa in his mind he would study very hard. But other facets of his talents emerged as well. He started writing poems and as school progressed he picked up arts, games and most importantly newspapers. It was the newspapers which were his window to the world. By the time other students learnt writing gramatically correct sentences he started reading editorials... about class six. But maths was his favourite as this was the only subject which allowed originality. In history, geography, economics he went deep to understand things rather than memorise them. By the time he left school he had become star in true sense. A person all the studious students and rowdies looked forward to for inspiration. He had as many street fights as nightouts for studies. His life existed betweenthe problems of Maths and physics and the person he was going to beat up in next encounter. Emotions, money, aim, decency, carefulness he never knew. In short the real life- he didn't know. He was going to learn that in college. By the time he left school he had been class captain, house captain, school captain, represented school in two different sports, won races, quizzes, debates and elocution. He begged his father to let him drop one year to prepare for IIT as his age allowed rather demanded it. But a slap on the left cheek and off he was to Surat.The year was 2002. He joined it on 26th june, quite awkwardly, the first admission of his batch.

After 20 revolutions around the sun this is me, Siddhartha Prakash, final year, computer engineering at SVNIT surat. I got a job in IBM on 17th may 2005 but fate had other designs and cracked Microsoft on 13th aug 2005. The boy i was talking about? No that's not me. There is still four years of story before that boy would become me. The four years of his college life at the dawn of which he would sit at 2 am in the night to write his blog and vanish into me. These four years were going to take away from him more than he could ever imagine and give him more than he ever deserved. The four years marked the transformation of a student to a person, a child to a man. It is an untold saga of feelings and emotions, of treachery and machinations, of power and politics, of friends and friendship, love and hatred. These four years will be unfolded some other day.

Siddhartha Prakash
BE IV(Co)
SVNIT SURAT