obvious musings

Get your Cricket ..

2005-11-19T23:27:00.000-05:00

When I look at the baseball "crazzies" around me in the US, yes I am talking about the manic Red Sox fans ( here and the movie Fever Pitch ) and others, I only look at them with an air of "how could they be so crazy to spend all that energy and time on what is essentially some middle aged men getting very rich being watched jumping and playing ? ". I did goto Fenway Park, here at Boston and although the atmosphere was great, it was still excessively slow and a boring, moronic way to spend an evening.However, I forget, in a time not long ago when I was in India, I was equally obsessed with a sport which has been called while being compared to Baseball, "Baseball on Valium" ( Robin Williams) and "Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended" (Shaw). So ofcourse its a "I grew up with the sport" thing, "once I know more of the sport, I know more of the strategies and the sport become more cerebral"...So I can cut the baseball freaks some slack.

Getting to the point however, it is very difficult to get any cricket here in the US. But I want my cricket. What to do ? What are the ways really ? In a similar way, as in our society, relative success is measured by your mode of transportation , so are the different ways of accessing cricket. There is the walking method, the Bajaj-Chetak method, the Maruti method and the Mercedes method.

first : The walking method. "F5" ( the refresh button ) is your friend, push it till your finger hurts a.k.a online cricket portals : Rediff, cricinfo.com, cricketnext.com and several others offer live scores on their websites in a text form. Some of them offer ball to ball commentary. Best of all, like walking, its free !

second: The Bajaj-Chetak method. Cricinfo has the live audio ball to ball commentary feed for the matches. It costs just about 6 bucks for the 5 India-SA matches for example. I subscribed to it while the second match was going on. It reminds you of the old Doordarshan-i style commentators, indeed if my ears can be trusted the Doordarshan specialist-I-do-all-sports commentator Anupam Ghulati was one of the commentators. Not the exquisite Richie Benaud or even the always interesting Harsha Bhogle level , but good enough.
But.. you really want to see the flourish of the bat, the swing of the ball.

third : The Maruti method :Wisden in conjuction with CricInfo( ? ), gives a service with which you can watch the live video on your computer.
But if you want the full deal, not just grainy pictures on your computer screen..

fourth : The Mercedes method : Use the satellites : ... DirectTV or Dish. Both of them offer various packages for a particular series, which are expensive but are the most obvious and best way if you already have the satellite channels. Lots of people buy the package and pool in with their friends to share the costs.

In addition there are a couple of superb blogs which track all the goings on in the Indian cricket world. Rediff's resident cricket expert, the superbly practical, cut-to-the-chase type Prem Paniker's Blog , Sight Screen and the vastly knowledgable, indomitable, King of Funda ( Swear to God, he know every possible "effect" or "law" that ever existed ) Amit Varma's creation on cricinfo : WicketToWicket.
And.. irrespective of wether I obsess about a slower sport, Baseball still sucks..

Update : I have heard that there might be a fifth cycle method : There is free audio commentary here but the commentary is bad.

Web 2.0'ing IM.

2005-09-23T22:02:00.000-05:00

Web 2.0 is really taking off.
There are essentially two aspects to it.

The first one is to provide "hooks" to developers which allow then to essentially access the information that they can get on the sites pages programmatically.
Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Salesforce.com all provide "webservices" which are to put it simply an interface into their applications. So, for example you could implement your own "Google" search in your application, build your own Yahoo maps application and show prices in Amazon of whatever books take your fancy in your own webpage.

The second one is to "webify" client applications. With the sudden frenzied resurrection of AJAX helping making the user experience more client like and some very clever and heavy coding in Javascript, smart and patient( ever tried debugging in javascript ? ) developers have with a vengence freed one application after another from the bastions of the desktop.
Consider the advantages, not tied to any operating system, no per client installation issues and no security issues, no version clash issues and ofcourse uinversal access.
Early successes include the email, with Oddpost and to a certain extent Gmail. ( The new Yahoo mail beta which uses oddpost technology indiacate a step in the same direction. ). Kiko for calender and scheduling, Zimbra for collaboration, Netvibes for personal dashboard are other noteworthy mentions.

IM is the latest stronghold of the client to fall. Have a look at Meebo. Meebo allows a user to login to any of the four most popular IM clients from a webpage and allows them to chat all on a webpage ! No client installation required at all. Very cool !

cross posted on the technology blog

An ode to Mithun-Da

2005-09-11T18:23:00.000-05:00

Mithun Rocks .. See here :

Google Talk

2005-08-24T07:53:00.000-05:00

Confirming to persistent rumours, Google has finally released Google Talk. The main punch line is : "Talk and IM with your friends for free".

Google has in my opinion, continously redefined well establised communication paradigms on the web. Cases in point,

Search : Ofcourse, where it all started from.
Email : Much higher storage space, tagging and conversations.
Mapping : Panning and satellite photographs.
Desktop Search : First to integrate with web search and now increased functionality with sidebar.

So I set out to test this product with a lot of excitement especially in what innovative features Google would have added in this well known form of communication and made us wonder, WOW ! they could actually do this over the web ? However on testing it in a word, I was disappointed.

First what does it do : It is a standard IM in which you can add users and then IM/talk to them while they are online.

The good's :

The best part is that it has the Google mark of a scrubby clean interface and simplicity. It does confirm to Google's "Dont make me think" style of UI design.
It feeds in to your contacts from your gmail account so you can directly send invitations from there itself.
The voice quality is very good.
The claims are that it is sufficiently adherent to well known open source standards in IM in particular to the Jabber/XMPP protocol. Read more here.

The bad's/disappointments :

The biggest disappointment is that it did not like Trillian allow us to migrate other IM lists in our list and we have to go about building a new list all over again. What a pain ! It does say that there is no "Service Choice" feaure in VOIP/IM where like a phone service you can communicate with users of other providers. How does Trillian do it then ?
No new innovative features that I could see. VOIP based talk is long available from Skype and now in Yahoo messenger.
No smileys, no avatars, no winks, no music, no games, audibles and this is a biggie NO webcam nothing.

Do leave in your comments.

Cool Software

2005-06-28T12:52:00.000-05:00

The merging of Google and Keyhole produced Google Earth which is free ! Get it here : Google Earth. Although a software engineer myself I love free software :). If you havent heard of what it can do yet, check out some cool pictures here.

Blogger now has picture upload ! So know no using a kludgy Hello or Flickr solution.

Also check out (via Kurt), Yubnub. Its a social browser search shortcut site. Very cool.

Book Tagged

2005-06-19T11:35:00.000-05:00

Priyanka book tagged me. So here goes :

Total number of books I own:
Around 200-300
( I think its not a question which is very insightful though, borrowed books, library, books lent out and never returned, books read on the internet, audio books all are not factored in, maybe should be changed to books I have read ? )

Last book I bought:
"To Kill a Mocking Bird" by Harper Lee
( Actually, technically speaking it was Applied XML programming in Microsoft .NET, but I dont think that is the point of this exercise :) )
I know, I know, this book the favorite of scores of people I know, I can hear shocked "In your 26 years of existence you havent read it YET, how can you justify your existence and so on". There was a similar reaction from someone very recently and then I had to buy it, to see what the fuss was.
However this got me thinking, dont we all have some "popular" books or movies that we just didnt get too. Somehow you were always going to read/watch it but it just missed you by. I know StarWars is another one for me. What is it for you ?

Last Book I was gifted:
The complete Newyorker Cartoons. Hilarious stuff. Along with the Gary Larson's Far Side and ofcourse Dilbert my favorite cartoon series. All kudos to the sweet person who hauled the very heavy book.

Heaviest Book I have :
(See above)

Last book I read:
The World's Religions by Houston Smith
Wondeful, entertaingly written introduction to Religions. I bought it to read about Hinduism acutally. I realised that I know precious little about what religion I am supposed to be in ? Any other suggestions for something that in some way brings together all the mish-mash that the religion seems to be ?

Five books that mean a lot to me :

Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Cary On Jeeves by Wodehouse
India : Shashi Tharoor
The Class : Erich Segal
Guns, Germs and Steel

My next list :

Hirak
Sagnik Nandy
Gvenum
Kurt

Yahoo Messenger - Desi ishtyle

2005-06-10T09:42:00.000-05:00

Instant Messenger users are fanatically loyal to their own programs and their respective program fixation is based on obvious things like on what programs most of their friends are signed on and possibly what features they offer.

Another reason is simply the first program you ever used.

I distinctly remember the first time I used IM. It was the summer of '98 and I was back home from college for the summer holidays. A friend called me and asked me to download Yahoo Messenger and off we went. I also remember jumping up and down in joy for a considerable period of time, thrilled at the prospect of simula-talking with all my friends not paying ( especially then ) the autrocious long distance phone call rates. So it was Yahoo Messenger for me.

MSN Messenger and Yahoo seem to be the most popular in India. AOL definitely seems to be the most popular here in the US. They are also programs like Trillian which combine all your accounts in a single account.

Since my first download, Yahoo has consistently added features like voice chat, avatars, audibles, stealth settings, games and several more.

Yahoo has just come out with an Indian version. Get it here. The COOLEST thing in it are the hindi audibles. Absolutley first class and side splitting funny. If you get it just for the audibles you wont be disappointed. Try it out !

Greatest Movies Ever !

2005-06-02T06:37:00.000-05:00

Time has come out with its list of 100 best movies ever. Apart from the usual suspects, Schindler's List, Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, also warming my Indian cockles I notice that the Apu Trilogy, Nayakan and Pyaasa are included as well. Three deserving director's there ! Here's the list.

Back

2005-05-21T22:22:00.000-05:00

Indira Gandhi's election slogan should be changed for an average desi engineer in the US. Roti, Kapada aur Makaan ( also the name of an Amitabh Bachchan ( I had to Google this most famous surname for its correct spelling! tsk tsk) starrer ) no longer truly represent the toughest assets to accquire to lead a basic life here. Rather let me propose ( pun fully intended ) Biwi, Naukri aur Gaadi. And Ganga ki Saugandh each of them involved a lot of Khoon Pasina for this Mard. Now that the dust has settled, the Raaste ka Patthar have been removed and I have found a nice Dost, have become a Coolie to a different master and can Faraar away on a new car, its time to start blogging again ! :)

Ofcourse I have wonderfully amusing stories about each of these experiences which I will soon write about.

Also I couldnt help notice that this summer is chock-a-block with so many potentially great sounding movies. Hitchiker's, Interpreter and StarWars have already released ( NO ! I will not warrant Monster-whatever-it-is as a movie ). In the next two months, Spielberg's War of the Worlds, Depp starring Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, the marriage breaker ( ? , No, I dont read People and its intellectually stimulating clones, but you cant miss this if you live here in the US, however hard you may try ) Mr and Mrs Smith, Ron Howard's Cinderella Man starring Crowe, Batman Begins, Nicole Kidman's remake of Bewitched and many many more.

In Hindi, there's Vinod Chopra's Parineeta ( lovely songs btw ), Paheli, Bengal's Bose and Aamir Khan's Rising ( all offering more than the usual ladka-meets-ladki-villian baap story ) along with Bunty aur Babli . I rub my hands with glee ( though my *eyes* are crying out with the potential future stress on them) at the prospect of some quality stuff this summer.

Update : Here's CNN roundup of the summer movies.

It's good to be writing something again, never mind the number of readers and all that ..

From Amsterdam airport

2005-01-28T02:02:00.000-05:00

Long layover at Amsterdam on the way to Delhi from Boston. Blogging from Schiphol airport.

Some things stood out immediatly :

Things are super expensive as surprise surprise 1 Euro (no Kroner, Euro everywhere) is about 1.45 US dollars. I can rapidly see my Euro back pack dreams going up in smoke.

Adult material is prominently displayed and sold everywhere.

As I type this I also notice that there is a "Euro" sign on the "5" digit on the keyboard.

Airport is nicely functional, not as glitzy as some American or South East Asian airports.

People are very friendly and everyone speaks/understands English with an almost desi type of accent.

"love all" the tennis "aces" ?

2005-01-25T13:15:00.000-05:00

Kournikova, Sharapova, Graf, Pierce, Sabatini ..add one more to the list, our own Mirza ..What's with tennis and cuteness ? :) . I am sure she is the only one with a nose ring and nine piercing's on her ear though.

However all of those in love with her, (like half of the Indian male
population), a little wait might be required..

Candidly admitting that she does not have a boy friend, Sania says,"It's not the right time to have a boy friend. It's time to focus on my game and not worry about guys."

Didnt know that guys were worrisome though :)

US Foreign Policy - Hypocritical ?

2005-01-24T10:46:00.000-05:00

Read/hear the link on the right panel for Bush's speech in the inauguration ceremony.

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.

Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't it sound a tad hypocritical. Let's look at some of US's closest allies in the "War against terror" and biggest trading partners Pakistan, run by a General who refuses to step down as army chief, Saudi Arabia, autocratic monarchy and China, a communist nation which doesn't have a concept of what human rights really mean.
And where is the money ? and where are the troops ? Is this what the philosophy of conservatism is ?

America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.

Oh I see, that's the way they want to do it now. Remember Iran-Contra ? Rejoice the LTTE's, the Lashkar-e-Toiba's and the Hamas's.

Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

Taking over countries on false evidence and without a plan on how to go about it. Yes.

India thinks he is great for us, however.

Snow Slammed

2005-01-23T09:46:00.000-05:00

picture from my apartment

Boston Logan Airport is closed. Biggest snow storm in many many years.

Here are Boston's previous weather "records". Among them, "Most Snowfall in Single Storm: 27.1"-February 6-7, 1978 (Blizzard of '78) ". This is expected to be surpassed.

Thank God for TV. Time for elaichi chai and pakodas and thick blankets and movie marathons. Skiing anyone ? :)

The Xeroxer is X-Rayed and then X-Posed

2005-01-22T02:13:00.000-05:00

Update (thanks to gvenum) :
Have a look at ragzp's blog. He's copied several posts from yumnyum and lazygeek. He has even copied yumnyum's design !
And wonder of wonders he even has one of my posts !! I wrote sometime before about the comics and serials we grew up in the 80's here and Mr.Ravi Shankar has blissfully copied it here.
I wonder how many more of these kinds we have lurking in the crooks and crannies of the blogsphere. Too bad that he is from Hyderabad, my home town ..

Unbelievable, so stupid that you can ultimately only laugh at it.

There is this guy Mr. Rohit Pinto from San Jose whose entire blog as in each and every post is plagiarised from well known bloggers. The irony is that his blog is called, "life unscripted - a window in my world". It should rather be called "life copied - peeping through the windows of others".. :).

IndiaUncut's Amit Varma first noticed this.

Here are examples :

Rohit Pinto on the call center controversy. The exact same, word to word post, from the original blogger. This guy had even copied the comments. :))

A post on a technical issue here at apress and the same post here on Mr.Pinto's blog.

Find more such examples on Shanti's blog here.

What was this guy thinking ? Why is he doing it ? One possible reason as Shanti suggests is for Google AdSense revenue ? He could have atleast been a little clever and added some of his own comments, changed the language. If you notice, its not like he is quoting them or anything of that sort, even if all his posts would have acknowledged the original posts and copied them, it wouldn't have been such a big deal, but this is plainly incredulous . If you are just going to copy others works verbatim, then why have a blog at all ? Apart from the serious issue of copyright infringement and passing of someone else's work as your own, what satisfaction does he get in being a Ctrl V and a Ctrl C junkie ? Don't you want to blog so that you can express some original opinion about what you are reading and experiencing around you ?

Global Warming ?

2005-01-21T10:18:00.000-05:00

Global Warming ? What warming ? Why cant it hurry up ? Yahoo! Weather - Brighton

Managing Digital Photos

2005-01-19T11:16:00.000-05:00

Picasa, the digital photo manager from Google has just released its second version ! (Ever noticed how all Google "tools" have this rainbow color scheme, the main Google text ofcourse, the Google desktop icon and the above one). Get it here.

I had a look at it last night for a short time and found in addition to the cool features that the original version had (automatic chronological ordering of all the digital photos, superbly intuitive interface, ability to create cool slideshows), there were a couple of things which looked instantly useful.

For those of us who are not really power tweakers (read Adobe Photoshop and Gimp gurus), it gives twelve basic filters to manipulate your digital photos. God send for the artistically challenged like me. Second, the photographs can be emailed through your gmail account right from the application itself. So you can go ahead and select the photograph(s) you want to send and it opens a nice little browser window right there with your photographs attached, along with your normal gmail auto-complete et-al. Nice! No more trying to remember those pesky digital camera auto-generated names when attaching photographs to send in emails.

They are some other small trinkets of efficiency put in too, they now have a link to Hello! right from Picasa itself, so that you can post pictures to your blog right from it. Hello! also now has a IM for photos, so you can exchange photos with friends with an IM like interface. Haven't tried that though !

Its pretty cool, I was thinking though that the reason that Picasa will/is getting a lot of press and users is because its a Google company and also because its free ! (That again, is as a consequence of it being bought by Google). I am sure there are many such tools which are better but cant be free and don't have the Google aura with them. Ah well! Quite an obvious muse that one :)

On the subject of tools, Yahoo has come out with its desktop search too. I think its based on X1 and supports an amazing number of file formats. Why would you want the Google desktop search now ?

India rising in an average US person's consciousness?

2005-01-15T20:14:00.000-05:00

India is definitely the flavor of the season here in the US.
It has been for some time now, earlier though they were the inevitable articles on the rise of outsourcing in India. I was pleasantly surprised though, to see two programs on an another uniquely Indian entity, Bollywood on major TV news magazines.
Aishwarya Rai was all her giggly self on CBS's venerable TV magazine 60 minutes and Bollywood was the subject of a 30 minute segment on ABC's Nightline.

I liked this quote from the latter :

"I would say what soccer is to sport, Bollywood is to entertainment," said Richard Corliss, a film critic for Time magazine and a self-confessed Bollywood fan. "That is to say, it's only a minority taste in the United States, but throughout the Indian subcontinent, in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia straight through to Indonesia, large parts of Eastern Europe, it's the most popular form of entertainment in the world."

Monsoon Wedding first, then to a certain extent, Bend It Like Beckham and ofcourse Lagaan which was nominated for the Oscars have furthered the cause too. Bombay Dreams(which I happened to watch on its penultimate showing on Broadway) though, a brave attempt to sell Bollywood style song and dance to the world masses was simply not good enough.

Is this important ? Do we have to be "validated" here in the US ? Is it just a plug for the release of Gurinder Chadha's Bride & Prejudice soon to be released in the US ? I tend to think that its very important and is a welcome development. One reason that the US is revered (and also despised in some places) all over the world is the soft invasion that its been so successful in affecting in the form of Hollywood and the McDonalds. Bollywood in some way, also "sells" India to the biggest consumer of all, the US. It showcases our culture and our life in a much more effective way then anything else, we are something else, other than the smart science and math wizards, we have a way of life too which is interesting and entertaining, wouldn't you buy some of it oh great flush-with-money Uncle Sam ?
On another level, its a whole confidence thing, even pride in who we are. We should be careful of jingoism ofcourse, however I do think that now many Indians have a new sense of belief in who they are, and realize that they are OK ! :)

Even the CIA seems to think so ! Zakaria talks about this "confidence" in his latest article too.

To understand how much and how fast India is changing, look at its response to the tsunami. I don't mean the government's reaction but that of individual Indians. In the two weeks after the tidal wave hit, the Prime Minister's Relief Fund, the main agency to which people make donations, has collected about $80 million. After the Gujarat earthquake of April 2001, it took almost one year to collect the same amount of money. And remember that the 2001 earthquake was massive (7.9 on the Richter scale), killed more Indians (30,000) than the tsunami appears to have, and also got intense media attention (Bill Clinton headed the fund-raising efforts). What has changed in these four years is the most important new reality about India: the growing wealth, strength and confidence of Indian society.

This change in attitude helps on every level, for long the IT industry in India has been reviled as a back office producer of software services. People ask for all this IT brouhaha in India, name one Indian product which is widely used all over the world. It will come. The natural cycle which ends on a product, involves a huge amount of investment and again a core belief in oneself, both of which is happening know. MIT's Technology Review says so too, in this article, Two Sides of Outsourcing,

Tsunami

2004-12-27T13:03:00.000-05:00

This is not a personal blog, I dont usually write what affects me on a daily basis ..

However, sadness and helplessness have overtaken me today, to a surprisingly great extent.I seem to be struggling today by the ernomity of it.. Some personal hapennings, the depressing weather in this part of the world and the tsunami have all taken their toll.

Its almost a cliche' to say that at these times you feel that we are a pretty insignificant part of creation as a whole. It also rattles your faith, that if there is a God, why does he allow this to happen and allows it to happen to the poorest, the most helpless of his creations. What did they do to deserve this ? Shouldnt there be some kind of cosmic justice after all ? Some kind of order to the life that we live ? Can we be all selfish and not think about it as it didnt happen to us ?

duniyaa banaane vaale, kyaa tere man me.n samaaI
kaaheko duniyaa banaaI, tuune kaaheko duniyaa banaaI
gupchup tamaashaa dekhe, vaah re terii khudaaI
koI chhavi to hogii aa.Nkho.n me.n terii aa.Nsuu bhii
chhalake ho.nge palako.n se terii

I would request you to go to this dedicated blog, Tsunami Help to look for ways to contribute and for the latest updates.

Some suggestions for contributions are :

AID:
Contributions to AID (Association for India's Development) Tsunami fund can be made through secure on-line credit-card deductions from AID's website here.

PrimeMinister's relief Fund:
Donations may also be made directly into Central Bank of India, New Delhi/Mumbai’s following accounts stating beneficiary “ Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, SB A/C with Janpath, New Delhi”.
EFT:U.S. $: A/C No. 000-03847-4 with HSBC BANK,USA, New York. ( SWIFT Code :- MRMD US 33 )

Swades Review

2004-12-18T01:56:00.000-05:00

Saw Swades over the weekend..

The basic premise of the movie, is well known, Indian scientist works in NASA, goes back to his roots to the village, it changes him enough to bring him back.

Firstly, lets get this out of the way, it is NOT an entertaining movie by any standards. It is preaching and can seem to be monotonous and longwinded in places. Thought provoking yes, sincere yes, movie you goto to have a good time no.
Though to be fair, Ashutosh Gowariker never meant it to be.

It is also a simple movie, a stark potrayal, almost "arty" in places, with no real plot, there are no ostentatious sets, not a single "dishum", no "item" numbers, and the dialogue is by corollary hardly hard hitting. It was almost as if the director and the dialogue writer were trying extra hard to make it "real" and believable. For what is essentially a movie whose central purpose is a social awakening of sorts, the dialogues though sincere seem insipid sometime. There is no dearth of them however, we hear sermons on everything from the caste system, root causes of poverty, dowry, women emancipation and equality, the tendency of Indians to fall back on how their culture and tradition is the best if they are accosted about the lack of progress in India.

However the simplicity also works on some levels giving it a believable feel and the subtlety in the situations come out more powerfully. Another by product of this, is SRK's restrained performance. He is hardly a super hero here, hardly the star, there is no hamming, no over the top histrionics from him, he is definitely more Mohan Bhargava than the biggest actor of the always over dramatic and melodramatic Bollywood. Also by extension the other characters in the movie are also slightly more close to real life. The only character who I thought didn't fit in, was the SRK's love interest Gayatri Joshi, she looked ethereal at times, incandescent even, in the dull village setting. She needs to hone her acting skills, but her fresh beauty more than made up for it. As you might be getting the drift, the romantic script was also very limited, all Gayatri tells SRK is I am beginning to fall in love with you. No "I cant leave without you, I will walk with you hell or heaven", nothing. Infact she does not go back with him when he goes back to the US. Very Real !

Reverse brain drain is a reality today but more and more people are going back today because the "conditions" and opportunities in India are good enough for people to contemplate the move.
Mohan Bhargava is also asked this question and he says that he might go and work at the Vikram Sarabhai space center as a project manager.
So the message of the move seems to be convoluted and confused here, did he go back to India to work in his village, for his love and his mother like caretaker or for that indefinable urge to back to ones roots, to what we know best ? The latter if the reason, was not conveyed convincingly enough. Why did he go back finally ? And that is the question in the end ? So this movie works in that it atleast makes us pause to think again about the question on many a NRI's mind today,"should i go back to India ?" . Especially the song, "Yeh jo desh hai tera", definitely plays on your emotions.

One more point to make, here in the US, I know many of my friends and me included, are involved in social organizations which work for India's upliftment like AID, Asha and such like, much of it being a bi-product of these organizations having active chapters in most major US universities. However in India, those of us from cities and large towns rarely have taken part or are taking part in these organizations or helping out in any ways. Here's an idea, like Israel has a compulsory 3 year military assignment for all men (2 for women), India too should have a compulsory one year assignment after graduation, for every graduate to go to the villages and help out in the service projects there !

Also liked this more favourable review from Omar Ahmed at Rediff. Here are snippets :

"Primarily, the film is about India today. Ideologically, Swades adopts a liberal position but with a strong nationalist message. Using the concept of the village as a microcosm for contemporary Indian society, the film explores the failure of culture and tradition in embracing the 'new'; the fear and reluctance to embrace technology, the abandonment of responsibilities for materialism and the West and the need for self sustaining independence as exemplified by the audacious sequence in which Mohan Bhargava leads the village into the act of creating electricity from a stream in the surrounding hills.

Unlike Hollywood mainstream films where the emphasis is typically upon the celebration and triumph of the 'individual', a condition of Western capitalism, Swades focuses upon the power and integrity of the collective mass, suggesting that in order for a spirit of co-operation to exist there must be a disintegration of social barriers and ability for self-criticism. Though Mohan may not be a revolutionary on a wider political scale, he is someone who craves purpose and direction in a world that continues to call itself a postmodern global village.

His journey through India and back to the village where his surrogate mother is staying is a journey of self-discovery. Ultimately, it is the immediate feelings of 'belonging' to a community that draws him back, providing him with an identity that is firmly rooted in liberal humanism as reinforced by the subtle metaphor of water as a source of life, rebirth and enrichment."

Nostalgia Overdose

2004-12-11T10:40:00.000-05:00

Nostalgia. Originally the word meant to signify a serious medical disorder inflicted on a person when he longs for his native land, it ofcourse has a significantly more "milder" connotation today. Sharing one's own nostalgia is tricky business, however.

It is tricky for several reasons, it can probably not be completely shared, it is born out of the life that I lead earlier, it was what I experienced in past and it is not entirely clear that it would generate in you a similar kind of bitter sweetness that it does in me. On that cautionary note, I realise that for a lot of you these images don't make sense, but for me and I hope for many of you too, it will bring back those old days (good or bad, I don't know, that was the best that we knew then) when we were growing up in India, when there was but one TV channel and we knew the entire show timings schedule verbatim (I can still remember when many of the shows played), when we learnt a major part of our history and mythology through the wonderful comics of Amar Chitra Katha, where the antics of Supandi and Chacha Chaudhary, though exactly opposite in their cerebral capabilities both delighted us.

Giant Robot

From what I remember, this show used to come on Saturday evenings and involved a Japanese kid, who had this ultra cool watch, using which he could control, you guessed it, the Giant Robot. The Giant Robot (who now when I look at him looks like a pharaoh ? ), had this utlra cool, rocket type propellers on his back so it could fly. I remember me and my brother jumping all over the place when the kid gives him a command to fly/get activated, screaming on the top of our voices, Giant Robot is coming ..

Vikram aur Betaal

This program also used to come on Saturday evenings. Arun Govil a.k.a maryada purushottum "Ram" himself, played Vikramaditya who had to take Betaal, the wily ghost to a destination without speaking at all during the journey. Betaal always used to tell him a story, which would end in the form of a puzzle and ask Vikram to choose the correct alternative. The stories were rather interesting and this serial was probably inspired from the series in Chandamama.

I especially used to like the opening music of the serial. Just a few days back a friend and me, were shouting on the top of our voices, singing "Vikram aur Betaal" over a bridge here in Boston. Yes I am crazy like that.

He-Man

This is used to be on every Sunday morning. This was the bestest cartoon ever. An "ordinary" prince finds a sword, which if he aims towards the sky and announces "I am He-man, I have the power" transforms him into the most powerful man in the universe, He-man. He and his friends are perennially fighting the evil Skeletor and his cronies. With so many interesting characters with their own little quirks (like having 360 degree vision (Triklops) , to know magic (Orko), to be able to ram into anything (RamMan) ), it provided enough imagination fodder to feed the mind of a 10 year old.

Amar Chitra Katha

I suspect for millions of Indian children, including me they have been the biggest source of knowledge of Indian mythology and history. Between the time when we were not yet ready to read extensive treatises on these topics but we had started to read, this was an ideal tool to whet our imagination and quench the inquisitiveness that starts to permeate within us during those ages.
The have also spurred research.
For who want to relive their past ACK reading experience or want to brush up their Indian mythology here is a link to the complete Ramayan in ACK.

ACK also published Tinkle, a sort of comic children's Reader's Digest with several interesting short stories in a comic form with some classic characters who reappeared in stories in every other edition. Who can forget Supandi, Shikhari Shambu, Ranjha, Tantri the Mantri , Kalia the crow, Hodga and so many more.

Chacha Chaudhary

Disclaimer : Chacha Chaudhary comics had a poor man's feel about them. The cartooning (by Pran) was not by any stretch of imagination art, and the stories too, largely nonsensical.
Chacha Chaudhary was an old man with a razor sharp intellect (or as the comic's oft repeated tag line, "chacha chaudhary ka dimaag computer se bhee tez chalta hai" ), who lived with this giant import from the planet Jupiter, Saboo. Together brain and brawn they solved every problem that came their way.
Simplistic that they were, I still read tonnes of them during my vacations. They were a super easy read and were entertaining I guess at times for their sheer implausibility.

There were several other comics which were pretty popular. Indrajal comics had Phantom, Mandrake and Bahadur (see comment from Gautham for more on him), Tintin and Asterix ofcourse and the ubiquitous Archie comics. Wondering what captures the imagination of a young kid in India today, while I croon this :)..

Yeh Daulat Bhi Le Lo, Yeh Shohrat Bhi Le Lo,
Bhale Cheen Lo Mujhse Meri Jawaani,
Magar Mujhko Lautaa Do Bachpan Ka Saawan,
Woh Kaagaz Ki Kashti, Woh Baarish Ka Paani

Dude! You got to read this .

2004-12-08T13:56:00.000-05:00

From CNN : CNN.com - Dude -- professor studies 'dude' - Dec 8, 2004

A linguist from the University of Pittsburgh has published a scholarly paper deconstructing and deciphering the word "dude," contending it is much more than a catchall for lazy, inarticulate surfers, skaters, slackers and teenagers. Kiesling says in the fall edition of American Speech that the word derives its power from something he calls cool solidarity -- an effortless kinship that's not too intimate. It's like man or buddy, there is often this male-male addressed term that says, 'I'm your friend but not much more than your friend'. He found the word taps into nonconformity and a new American image of leisurely success.

This got me thinking to what extent, language is so much, it is a reflection of our interpersonal relationships, our society, in other words it can be one true parameter to understand the framework we live in. Apart from etymology (which is endlessly interesting in itself), the very fact that certain words were created or modified to convey a meaning which required to be called something is so fascinating.

For example, Blog was recently voted the word of the year 2004 by Merriam-Webster.

Your own personal stalker !

2004-12-01T13:46:00.000-05:00

I had heard about crazy psycho's stalking and snooping around celebrities and beautiful women, but if you are a guy of Indian origin living outside the country and planning to get married to a girl in India then you might have the privelege of your personal stalker.

Here from TOI:

Minister Jagdish Tytler has decided to appoint NRI volunteers who will make discreet inquiries about bachelors who have set their sights on the Indian marriage mart. "Though this is coming a little late, at least the government thought of it at last. It is really sad because many innocent girls take extreme steps like committing suicide after being dumped, as they don't want to trouble their parents. This step will definitely help curb the number of cheating cases," says Soumya Mishra, DCP (Crime).

I will now be looking over my back frequently, will also make sudden jumps around corners to catch the snoopers. If you are in a similar situation I suggest you to do it also.

Spruce up that Resume'

2004-11-22T14:55:00.000-05:00

In this age where a person is defined not by who he/she is, where you are not a person but more of a commodity who should know how to sell oneself, the essential personal marketing tool is the resume'. No wonder people go to great lengths to distinguish their personal statements from others to stand out.

There are people that you hear about who have had full color marketing-campaign like booklets made, some make power point presentations and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde even had a pink and a scented one !

However this resume made by a French designer surely takes the cake. I believe someone at Microsoft saw it and was impressed enough to forward it to the right HR personnel . Enjoy :)

She is pretty !

2004-11-19T19:26:00.000-05:00

Admittedly she can't act, but can't deny it, she can be breathtaking at times.

Aishwarya Rai in Rituparno Ghosh's forthcoming film Raincoat.

My computer has found its wallpaper for now :).

Google for scholars

2004-11-19T17:08:00.000-05:00

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Update :Times of India has this on Google Scholar, focussing on the principal scientist behind it who is an Indian who goes aptly by the name Anurag "Acharya" :-)

Researchers of the world should be mighty pleased with this latest contraption that the folks at Google have come up with.
Its called Google Scholar and is basically a targeted search, catering specifically to research papers and theses and so on.

This is what Google has to say about it.

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

It did find the only paper I ever wrote :). Google Scholar: anirudh garg

What is interesting to me is how now search is becoming more compartamentilazed and how vertical search engines are being paned out which target specifc users/realms of knowledge thus leading to more relevant search results. Although why they had to have a seperate page for it beats me, why couldnt they have a keyword and you could search on the main google page itself, something like research:anirudh garg.

Virgin Mary In Grilled Cheese

2004-11-17T16:31:00.000-05:00

Update : Finally sold for 28,000 $, bought by a casino !!

eBay item 5535890757 - Virgin Mary In Grilled Cheese !

HA HA HA HA .. Only in America

Electoral Map Crazy

2004-11-11T01:17:00.001-05:00

Update : Video graphically illustrating county results.

The US Elections have come and gone. There have been countless theories on why it turned out the way it did , from moral values being the deciding factor, to the Republicans registering more of their core base, to the Democrats not having a clear message and so on.
Along with that there have been a plethora of maps too, to show what really happened. I have put together a sort of library of maps to show what "really" happened as opposed to what you might actually see in "popular media"

1). This is the most popular simple map.
Just shows the different states colored with their majority party color. Looks pretty red doesn't it. A bit misleading though.

2). This represents the true picture as far as the electoral college votes by state go.
This is a cartogram which shows each state appropriately ballooned or shrunk based on the electoral votes that the state actually represent.(look at the super inflated California :) ). So in other terms while the one above was an area representation this is a more accurate population/electoral vote representation.

3). Now, still looking at states if we know look at the actual number of votes cast in each state and accordingly color the states (with blue being fully democrat and red fully republican) we see a pretty "purple" nation, not wholly red or blue.

d). Now, drilling down a bit and we have this map which shows the results county by county.
This is again like the first picture, just a binary picture though shows just which party had more votes in a particular county and paints the county with that color. Its red all over with few sprinkling of blue here and there. Again this doesn't take into account the actual number of votes polled.

e). This is however the cartogram for the above map and things look very different.

e). This map now tries to represent the actual votes counted county by county. (see how ones perception changes from the first county map, however do note a straight line of red through middle America. )

g). Finally this is the cartogram for the above picture which gives the best picture of all.

(with maps from MSNBC, USA Today, Purdue and University of Michigan.)

Getting Organized, My Yahoo and Google

2004-11-07T22:16:00.000-05:00

I was overwhelmed.

Problem 1 :

I was an incurable news fanatic and needed some way to make it manageable.
Like so many of us I am a news junkie, with many interests ranging from politics to people, technology to cricket, from movies to foreign policy and many more. I had this constant, almost manic fear of missing out on the latest and I absolutely wanted my daily fix of browsing through several websites which gave me enough fodder to feed my ravenous appetite for whats newsworthy.
However it was all becoming too difficult to manage, especially with the advent of blogs, which
added to things I had to keep up with.

Problem 2 :

I had no real system of keeping appointments.
One of my colleagues at work had his marriage about a month and a half ago. It was on a Saturday, and I was going to attend the marriage. However I just forgot ! It totally slipped out of my mind. I didnt make it . I only remembered on monday when i saw him that I was to attend his marriage the saturday before.

Problem 3 :

I didnt have one address book which was recent and kept upto date.
My cell phone decided to die one day and with it went away all the contact numbers and email addresses that I had. Woosh like that !

Problem 4 :

Bookmarks in multiple computers
I had bookmarks at my computer at home and at work. I wanted an automatic system which would keep them synchronized.

Solution :

The wonderful people at Yahoo have probably created the best personalized portal of all. It's called My Yahoo

The personalization site lets you add RSS feeds (which are now offered by most news sites and blogs) of your choice , it has a very usable calendar for keeping appointments (where you can set up reminders too, and never forget any birthday again ), you can link up an address book to store all your contact information and to solve my last problem you also have a facility of having your bookmarks stored on the site itself .

In additon to what i mentioned above you can configure it to your local and personal settings so that you can have links to your local weather, TV listings of your favourite channels (which you can add to your calendar automatically too), stored locations for Yahoo Maps, show timings for theatres near you,stock quotes and a lot more.
Ofcourse you can access your Yahoo mail box and Yahoo messenger right from this page.

And all of the above can be on a single page giving you a one click access to all of these.
Needless to say it has made my chaotic life much more under control. Do try it out !
Its all free ofcourse :) ..
It would be interesting to know if anyone has tried similar services and what their experience was with them.

In relation to this I was thinking about Google's business model. What Yahoo has done very well as I have illustrated above is to intergrate all these services under a single log-in and a similar look and feel. However in contrast Google seems to have many (very good) disparate services, Google search, Blogger, Gmail , Keyhole and Orkut, but with no central philosophy, no single access point or layout. Google almost seems like a small excited kid buying up whatever it likes without any grand central scheme of things. In contrast, for example, Yahoo has bought two thick client email applications OddPost and Bloomba, but they have not yet made a hullabaloo about it.They ofcourse must be integrating it with Yahoo mail, and are playing the waiting game therefore.

KeyHole, taking you on a magic carpet ride !

2004-10-28T08:47:00.000-05:00

Update : Terafly also has a similar web enabled service ! Try it here.
Also read this article on Why Google bought KeyHole.

"I can open your eyes
Take you wonder by wonder
Over, sideways and under
On a magic carpet ride"
(A whole new world , Alladin)

Google has just bought a company called KeyHole !
I went ahead and downloaded their trial version. It's pretty neat. They have thousands of satellite images for key metropolitan areas around the world. The real cool part about the software however, is how it literally zooms in to the address you type in and you feel like you are on a magic carpet ala' Alladin, flying from one point to another, all over the world! I "flew" from my address in Boston to the city I grew up in, Hyderabad in India. It was so cool, zooming over the Atlantic, North Africa, Arabian sea and finally to Hyderabad.

Apart from this it would seem to be pretty similar to Mapquest, however it uses *real* satellite photos not vectored lines.

My guess is that Google will use it for local searches, also adding points of interest around the address queried (like the pizza places near my place, below shown as forks). To show you what I am talking about, and to see the difference, see below a keynote picture of the same address as compared to how it looks on mapquest. It doesnt have any routing capabilities though, yet !

(click image to enlarge)

Btw, the Reason magazine for the June issue had on its cover the satellite image of every subscribers own address :).

Organization turned on its head !

2004-10-23T12:14:00.000-05:00

How do we organize things ?
The standard way of doing so is to group them into "similar buckets" so that finding them is easier. So all music goes in the Music folder. If I have a sudden urge of listening to 'mere sapnon ki rani', I go to the Music folder and then in the Kishore Kumar folder and then look for the song I want to play.In short it was the indexed way of thinking. One places and hence looks for later, similarly metadataed entities.

The cost ?
Takes time and effort. Every time I get a new document I have to place it in the right "bucket" so that I can find it easily later following the indexed trail. If I forget or I am lazy to do that, even though it is there somewhere in my digital realm, its lost to me for ever, as I can't find it later.

The shortcomings ?
The indexed method outlined above, is only half useful. The method only indexes file names, not the content inside them.

Why is this even more relevant today ?
We are deluged in content, tens of hundred of emails a day, news feeds, documents, online magazines ..Information glut is not only a reality, its fast becoming a problem.

The new way!
Do away with the heirachical structure, make one folder in your drive, call it Everything :). Place everything you have in that folder. No spending time on organizing and reorganizing your folder etc.
Due to super fast searches which have already indexed your entire drive you dont need to drill down to the correct bucket to find the thing that you are looking for, the search itself will give you the file that you are looking for.

I think this is a big paradigm shift in thinking about organizing documents. Dump your file structure and your indexed way of thinking ! Whatever you want just search for it . Ofcourse Gmail and Google desktop are both steps in that direction.

Now if only someone could invent a way to have a search button inside a book, I would never have to go back and look for what the butler was doing in the second chapter when I am reading the last chapter of the detective novel, when the detective is explaining why the butler is the killer. I would just do a search on the butler !

(with ideas from m)

Next Phase of Search Engines

2004-09-22T00:21:00.000-05:00

The next wave of search engine technology is here.

Amazon (a9), AskJeeves and My Yahoo Search have all introduced capabilities to store past searches and to retrieve them and search your past searches. This is an obvious next step to searching when it is increasingly becoming an extension of one's memory even. Just like we remember that something hapenned last week, there should be a way of remembering your searches automatically so that we can go back to it whenever we want to.

a9 especially has some extra cool features like storing bookmarks and a diary with any site (where one can store notes along with any site) . Also the nifty thing about a9 is that it uses the best content provider for different types of search, so it uses Google for web and image search, Gurunet for reference, imdb for movies and ofcourse amazon for books.

Yahoo search has also like Google has introduced lots of small bells and whistles like local search, maps, calculator ,weather, math/currency conversions, even gas prices and a whole lot of others in the search box itself. Here's the link to the Yahoo search options. Nice ! Heres the Google link.

Btw all Microsoft has to show for search still is poor little msn search. :)

I love it ! Email storage has been turned on its head just in 6 months time because of Google offering 1 GB, with many improved features too. Now the same thing is hapenning to web search, competetion is leading to innovation and almost everyday now we have interesting features being churned out by all the major players in search too.

The latest salvo fired by Google is the desktop search which indexes your entire hard drive, your IE search , all your word and excel documents and searches them in super fast typical Google style. It even integrates this with the Google home page so that you actually see "Desktop" as a tab in addition to Web, Image etc.. This was a much needed tool as frankly Windows search sucks so bad ! Here's the Google Desktop.Its pretty cool ! I tried it today..(Randpm funda .. the port number that it uses on your computer for this service is 4664 ..which is GOOG on the phone )

Speaking of Google it has also come out with Google print, which lets you browse inside books ( amazon already has this though called Look Inside a book ). Its also come out with Google SMS where you can send a SMS to receive back local search results.

I am rubbing my hands in anticipation to see what Google does for storing the search results feature.

Coming up next :Personalized Portals !

Moore v/s Bill O' Reilly

2004-07-28T08:16:00.000-05:00

People this is viewer heaven .. For those following the elections in US, this was the meetup of the two most hawkish, staunch even at times vitroilic supporters of both camps, Michael Moore of Fahrenhit 9/11 fame and Bill O'Reilly of the O'Reilly Factor.
Moore and O'Reilly Pretty interesting !

Also I have been following the Democratic Convention pretty closely and Bill Clinton and Barak made especially stellar speeches .. Great drama.

Crazy internet search.

2004-07-24T16:22:00.000-05:00

While checking out my stats for this blog, I hapenned to notice that there was a visitor from down under, Australia. Was naturally intrigued to how he/she hit upon my site and this was the weird coincidence.. the person had typed "chamionships pastry 2004", he/she (notice I show no signs of being a MCP :D ) ..(also notice the missing p in the championship) in MSN search and the only link that he/she got as results was my site.
My rush to blog when I get an idea, without correcting spellings etc had lead to my also misspelling the word on my blog and by coincidence he/she had also done the same. Besides that I also had pastry and 2004 somewhere.
So this was the link that turned up ! Poor soul (enough of this he/she nonsense :) ).. was trying to locate 2004 pastry cham"p"ionships and turned up on my page instead :)Dont believe me, you can try it for yourself too on MSN search !
Interestingly enough Google does not give my blog as a link for the same misspelled query !

This is also interesting as Google aficionados like me have long played a game called googlewhacking where you choose two words and type them in google to obtain the least number of results. If you get only one result then you have whacked google :).. Ofcourse the two words should have correct spellings unlike what hapenned here :)

Life Goes On !

2004-07-22T19:57:00.000-05:00

Today was the last day at work of a great guy. Although I did not tell him in so many words, I really felt it was cool having him around as I could talk about all the eclectic, weird things I could only think and have an interesting discussion about them with him. (btw these are two others who I can have similarly pointless conversations with g and m). He is going on to law school, so best of luck to him. But ofcourse life will go on.

I was thinking today afternoon, I have been in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Trivandrum, Manipal, Tucson and now Boston for considerable periods of time, have had no less than 15 room mates, met a lot of interesting friends at each stage, always thought that these are the best people in the world and I will miss them terribly and will not be able to adjust to the new place or the old place without them. But life has a strange way of always making itself interesting once again.. You always meet new people, they become acquaintances and then good friends ..The cycle repeats again :)

Quixtar !

2004-07-17T12:22:00.000-05:00

Firstly I will make this posting small following the request of one commenter :)

They swoop on you like vultures waiting on their prey.. They will find you and engage you in conversation at the most unlikely of places ..I have personally been "accosted" at the mall, in the train, at the train station waiting for the train and most sacrilegious of all (for me atleast) in a bookstore. I am talking about the Quixtar agents, or as they like to call themselves Independent Business Owners (IBO's) !

Quixtar for those who dont know is a multilevel marketing organization (also previously known as Amway in the US, still known like that all over the world, since being closed down here), which works by individual people recruiting others to work "under" them, who in turn recruit more etc. Based on the sales of the people "under" you, you get a commission. So the primary aim for you is to recruit as many people as you can under you.

This post is because I have seen so many of my friends, being sucked into it, make it their religion and then come out of it, several thousand dollars lost, and hours of hours of valuable time wasted. Moreover, because it so much takes over their life, and they want their friends also to be a part of it, unfortunately they have become social pariah's.

Here is a Dateline expose on the whole phenomena. - DateLine expose'

How do you tell the difference between a desi and an ABCD ?

2004-07-14T21:23:00.000-05:00

This post is about a epiphany I had today morning, a most "hair" raising experience if there was one..

Today morning we had a fire drill.No, there was no implement with cutting edges involved, nor there were any pyrotechnics involved, it was more of an exercise in testing the musical instruments in the auditory organs of my body ("ear drums" for those who had no clue of what i was talking about.. no more hints from now on :) ), and although it seemed like an everyday ho-hum occurrence for all the americans in my office,I was shaken to the very "Indian ear core" and was totally "shrilled" out.( Although the eerie oooooo bow of the gali ke kutte (dogs) bhoking, the neighbourhood "basti" woman quarelling and the thak thak of my building's watchman danda as he did his rounds in the night didnt effect my (y)"ears" in desh and I slept like kumbhu (of the karan category), this was something else).

However the sound did something else too, it jumpstarted the thing between the organs being tortured. As I walked out I suspect people must have seen a distinct increase in the circumfrence of my head, it was because of the neurons in my brain now crazily aroused, jumping around in uncontrollable brownian motion pushing the "gray" walls of its "matter", in short I was in fullto chahca chaoudhary ka dimaag computer se be tez chalta hai form ..

And then as I was standing there, looking alien like with the bloated head, I saw two Indian gentlemen(cant be sure they were gentle, so scratch that, no, I will not explain how do I know they were men, aha you ask ? how do I know they were Indian, Good question, I think brown skin ..and ofcourse my medula oblongata was in prime form ..so these things came naturally) ..but i digress, this the problem with you, you keep asking stupid questions and lead me astray, I was sharp today morning, now I am the regular bozo, what if I forget what I had to tell in the first place.. Plis, no interruption ..

Anyways as soon as I saw them I could make out man (not necessarily gentle) A was mera types, came to the US to attend grad shool or direct L1 visa, lives on Top Ramen, shares bedroom with 4 other guys, idea of fun is to watch zee or sun or gemini (as case maybe, we are multilingual society i say)tv movie trailors, blushes at the mention of "ash", can tell you ball by ball account of Tendulkars first gali cricket innings when he was still in pre school, speaks only in three letter techie acronyms (ASP, JSP, .NET, SQL, COM, XML etc.. ) and B was an ABCD ( I dont know much about them so I will not describe them :| )..Buttt (no thats not the part of female anatomy I most prefer, but that is the topic of another post, I wanted to close out this para and jump out of this thought, but I know what you are thinking as alternatives ..chee chee.. what did you think it was, anyways ..to clarify matters it is in fact the tip of the fourth toe of the left foot, why ? .. my wish .. i dont have to explain what i like ..and you stop asking pointless questions, I had already given warning before ) .. since brain was firing on all cylinders, I went one step ahead, I thought ki how did I manage to instantly figure out the difference between the two different species, ki who was desi and kiska baap was a desi, ki uncle kaun? ( lame reference, will be understood by die hard fans of Andaaz Apna Apna) ..

and.. then I had the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree enlightenment moment, the answer was right in front of me, it was all clear shampoo ..(i got carried away, years of bombardment on indian channels, scratch out the shampoo) .. it was the ..it was the ..trumpets blowing in the background ..cylindrical, keratinized, filaments characteristically growing from epidermis ..yes ladies and gentlemen, bhaiyon aur unki behon ..it was the baal, juttu, hair (I know only these languages please feel free to add more) that was the difference.. the Indian A had dull, lifeless, disgruntled spaghetti (yes yes, I personify my food.. as Govinda says, meri marzee) plonked on his head and the ABCD ( not at all confused about his hair ) had fresh, gelled, full of life, pointed hair.. that was it, in my moment of clarity I saw the one thing which distinguished them..

So now you have it, you know the secret too, the desi baap of the ABCD bacha had handed him a shiny new bottle of gel on each of his bday and thus the difference ki ABCD ke baal motiyon jaise chamak rahe the!(another obscure reference to an ad, Dabur lal dunt manjan, damn the time I spent on my "Dyanaora" TV watching Indian ads).But dont take my word for it, go out see for yourself and tell me if it is true and I can publish my findings in the "obvious musings journal of immigrational generational differences".

Did I mention that I was standing in front of CVS ..what do you think I bought next ? A shiny new bottle of American Crew Gel, no no not for me ( you are not reading carefully are you ).. for my future ABCD beta ofcourse (there was a sale na ..isiliye) ;)

Microsoft Search

2004-07-10T21:31:00.000-05:00

So obvious muse for the day is, that Microsoft the 800 pound gorilla from Redmond is not so much of an innovator but a brilliant follower. Many many examples to corroborate that fact ( GUI - first in an Apple, late to the "Internet" phenomena (IE etc), original SQL Server basically Sybase and many many others), the point being that though by far it is the most prominent software company in the world there have been pretty much very few paradigm changing innovations from the company. However it has most remarkably and most dominatedly excelled at recognizing these changes, and applied its muscle and brute force and ulimately come out with a more useful product/service in most cases.
The latest example is ofcourse "search". With multiple means of access to information today, most notably the explosion in its "received" due to the internet, search and related technologies have undoubtetly become the next killer application. Surprise surprise, another company has been a pioneer here too, Google ofcourse. However as past experience shows Microsoft will come back. So ladies and gentlemen here we have MSN Search, the new souped up (more like souped down in clutter) version of its search, very Google like. Check it out here at MSN Search.
Read more about it here.
These should be exciting times.. What could Microsoft possibly do this time to dislodge this nimble, very adept, even smart little pesky little fly buzzing (the Google IPO is generating a lot of "buzz" also :) ) and prancing around infuriating its bulky (please refer to what type of animal above) frame to no end ? Especially since Google is free :) ..MS cant give it away free installed with Windows..they have to compete with Google on pure innovation !

US v/s Rest of the World

2004-07-08T16:01:00.000-05:00

I was thinking in view of the increasingly isolationist place that the US finds itself today in this world, that there are so many other things which are more often than not confusingly unique to the United States. Some of the instances that I recount are probably that I have faced myself too and probably faced by anyone coming in this country for the first time !
Some of them which come to mind are :

The most obvious one is that of the measurement system ..
Read this :

The U.S. Customary System is the system used in the United States. It measures length in inches, feet, yards and miles. It measures weight in ounces, pounds and tons, and volume in pints, quarts and gallons. The U.S. Customary System is very similar to the system the colonists brought from England. Much of the system can be traced back to early Babylonian, Egyptian and Roman cultures.

The International (Metric) System, known as SE, is used in most of the world. It is also used for almost all scientific work. A metric system was first proposed in France in 1670. France adopted the metric standard in 1840 and many countries followed. Today, the only developed nations which do not use the SE metric system are the United States, Liberia and Burma.

Get that ! The US still uses an antiquated measurement system which is ahem! used in only Liberia and Burma :)) ..But ofcourse we are the US, let the rest of the world change we wont, let the rest of the world think Iraq is no threat, but we will find
imaginary "weapons of mass destruction" and promptly overrun it.
(Side note here: Why is there not any kind of mention in the US media about the casualties of the Iraqis ? Close to 30,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed too, because of a lie..So who is the oppressor now ? .. Don't they have families and don't they feel equally sad when they lose their loved ones ? Do only some countries have the privilege of happiness, why should some people feel they are more equal than others ? )

And believe me for a person, who is grown up counting in 10's (a.k.a the metric sytem), suddenly thinking in 16's and 12's and multiplying by 1.60933 is highly confusing.. :)
pints, quarts and gallons! Give me a break.

But ofcourse its not limited to measurements, how do you think a date is represented *only* in the United States .. not with the logical day/month/year.. it is month/day/year.. why ? we just want to be different I guess ..

Moving on to sports, what do you think football is for an average American ? Nope it is not the term which is used to actually refer to a sport in which we do use the feet, which they call soccer. It is the americanized version of rubgy which is called football, in which incidentally there is minimum use of the feet !

The national championships are also called "world chamionships" because the rest of the world doesn't matter does it ? "we are the world" seems to be the very clear message here ! ( With apologies to my Telugu friends, just ask the hajaar and one Telugus, who when born have the same view, USA is the world and my ambition in life is to go the US. Make no mistake, your average Telugu "aunty" in India knows more than you would about GRE, american universities, all the "stages" (grrrr) of H1, all the colors of the cards etc.. I was talking to one of them on my last visit to India.(When I was still in school).So which University do you go to ? Arizona I replied. She told me more than I knew about its US News rankings, average GRE score wanted, gave me the contacts of 3 more people there and concluded that if I am not in Stanford then I am nobody ! To say the least I was shocked. I live in a apartment in Hyderabad, where every family in the building has a direct relative in where ? la la la USA )

Btw undergrad is "college" but grad studies suddenly becomes going to "grad school".

Ofcourse there are many other americanisms which are just different (not necessarily stupid ! ) from how it is in India ..

At a restaurant, after the meal you ask for a check, not the bill :) .. I once asked this person at a food court, for the bill !! :O ..She was totally confused and she said why do want a bill (which is verry confusingly also a reference to a dollar), I have already given you back your change (which is the money to be given back) ..It took both of us some time to understand each other :)

The toilet in India is called the restroom here :) (never understood that one, do you feel rested after doing you know what ? ..I guess so ..)

Ofcourse Z is not pronounced as "zed" but "zeee".

There must be several more instances of americanisms which dont come to mind right now, but do exist .. :)

Blog Categories

2004-06-19T08:35:00.000-05:00

Blogging ! In my limited perusal of this form of "self expression on the web" I have realized(noticed ?) that there are essentially some basic broad categories of blogs ..

One is the diary format spilling out my daily "..I got up in the morning and used Dabur laal dunt manjan as toothpaste, aaj i ate pickled porcupine pastry, puked, still couldn't stop eating, hate my job and my boss, today he told me to walk his dog types.. ).Basically these are the online versions of some kind of a reality TV show, recounting ones daily life, though unlike on TV you can choose to talk about what you want ! There also includes some analysis of why they are like they are and what they think etc.. I think these are the majority ones ..

Then there are the others, which usually have no references to their personal life as they live it day to day, but are of the "things we love and want to share" ..the touchy feely, maudlin kinds...
("phool"y kinds), the cute baby version of the blogging world

Then ofcourse you have the link integrators (most professional blogs are like this) ..where the blogger puts together "interesting" links in his subject of expertise and usually leaves a minimal comment accompanying each link..

Then there are others like mine (most boring of the types ofcourse), where there are minimal links..and more like a commentary on a particular issue ..

In the next few posts I will try to include all the different styles mentioned above .. should be interesting..would also welcome comments from people about other characterizations of blogs.. :)

Micro Credit

2004-06-07T20:01:00.000-05:00

I have not blogged for a considerable period of time now and happy to note that some closest friends and family have been complaining. Good to know that atleast *someone* actually reads this stuff..

I guess one of the reasons I didnt write is nothing really "shook me up" enough to take out the finger (so to speak) and start typing away. I recently heard from a blogger that the person actually writes out something during the night and then finalizes it in the morning. I can almost never do that. My writing is a steady flow of consciousness. I dont think much during writing , it works best when its just a flow of awareness , a train of crystal clear realization, a rapid procession of ideas that are waiting ,bound in chains of thought, peeking out, waiting expectantly to leap out at the at the first opportunity when they are set free, on to the screen.That is why by necessity something should be sufficiently interesting and get me excited and worked up enough to actually blog !

There was such an idea which I hapenned to see on television a few days back which actually forced me to say that I have to blog this ! I was watching Charlie Rose ( a great show btw, just a no frills round oak table, and sublime, engaging, literate,intelligent conversation between Rose and a wide variety of the most interesting and talented people in the world ) on PBS on Friday night. The guest this night was a man names Mohammed Yunus. He is the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Basically this person was the pioneer of a concept called "micro credit". Yunus a PhD in economics and a professor of economics in Bangladesh approached all the major banks in Bangladesh in 1977 asking them a simple question. Why dont you give credit to the poor ? The bank managers baulked at the idea. They told him they dont have any collateral to provide, if there is a bad debt then we have no way of getting our money back and so on.He then started personally providing his name as the guranteer for the loans.Eventually he realized that it would be better if they opened their own bank which they did in 1983, the Grameen bank.Today the Grameen bank provides micro-credit loans without a collateral to more than 3 million people in Bangladesh.

Several absolutely fascinating things came out of this discussion. The professor said that he believed that as, the right to live, right to work etc are basic human rights in most countries of the world so should a right to credit. He said that about 3 billion people in the world (about half the population of the world) still lives under 2$ a day. The biggest challenge facing mankind today is to raise their level of living, to eradicate this scourge of poverty.The promise of science and technology in making our lives "easier" cannot be fully realized if half the world is still living even without any basic means to sustain themselves.So what to do ?

To add to that (my comments) it is not possible that you can expect everyone to have an advanced education like some of us have had the good fortune of having. You cannot reasonably expect every villager in a third world country to have the one thing which would take him out of the poverty trap,education. However and this is key, if provided the bed rock , the seed , the very fundamental starting point of a business , i.e capital they can perhaps atleast build a small business and can lead a better life. For that they need credit. But no bank in the world today would give them this accutely needed resource. So basically this half of the world is denied even an opportunity to "do something with their life" ..actually forget about that (to worry about that is the perogative of brooding arm chair pseudo intellectuals like us), they are not being even an opportunity to live a life in which they have enough to eat and a decent place to stay ! The Grameen bank seeks to rectify that..and as mentioned above it provides small loans to those people who want to start their own businesses and its been a very big success with a staggering 95% repayment rate.
I like this idea , it appeals to me in the "Give a person a fish, you can feed him for a day, teach him to fish you can feed him forever" kind of way...

He also mentioned one more very interesting fact. He said that 95% of those loans were made to woman, because they realized over time that they were the ones which had a much higher promise of return. He said that in third world countries poor women become experts at money management, they become true masters of stretching the dollar as far as it can go. Over a period of time, it becomes ingrained in their genes how to make do with the meagre money their husbands provide, how to make the most of it. That is why they found that woman tend to use their earnings wisely, investing it prudently for the children's education and procuring healthy food etc..Moreover they are the ones who use their traditional house hold skills to run sucessful businesses (like selling milk, thrashing out paddy, making traditional food items and handicrafts ).

Overall I think its a fantastic and potentially "changing the face of the world" idea. It is something which has the potential of providing everyone in the world a chance, an opportunity , atleast a faint beacon of hope to lead a somewhat more comfortable existence :)

Indian Elections Results

2004-05-18T17:24:00.000-05:00

Thanks to people posting comments ..Some interesting comments .. Now I HAVE to blog about the elections and the latest political happenings ( no less than a typical Hindi potboiler with all the standard emotions :) .. ) in India.

Firstly why did the elections turn out the way they did ? With "India shining" and the "feel good factor" you would legitimately expect the previous NDA government to ramp home for another five year term. As many commentators have pointed out India "shone" for only the urban and to a certain extent semi urban population of the country. An oft repeated statistic is that still about 27% of the nation lives under a dollar a day.

India is not easy ..its a huge country with millions and millions of people all aspiring to live a better quality of life .. sure some of them benefited but ofcourse not all of them could have and hence did not benefit..I think its a very good sign actually .No longer did people vote on the basis of religious (hence the poor performance of the religious fundamentalist right ) or caste considerations , but on the basis of something more basic the "roti , kapda aur makaan " ( food, clothing and shelter ). Now the cry does not seem to be give us a Ram Temple , it is give us better opportunities to do better in life and that's great !

So anti incumbency set in as far as those people were concerned ..Also the "better offs" probably just stayed at home and did not even go out to vote ! I am also surprised that its not pointed out that the total tally of the BJP was not far away from the Congress and in no way can the victory be called an overwhelming one. I guess what caused this to become a big deal is ofcourse that this result itself was most unexpected ..

Now on the Prime Minister issue. I think Sonia Gandhi did a great job as a party campaigner. She worked very hard, braved the allegations of the NDA about the foreigner issue, she travelled about 60000 Kms throughout the country, roped her son in and when things at best looked chancy for the Congress , got them rejuvenated and lo behold ousted the previous government ! In a country where film stars have temples in their honour , figureheads and dynastic icons (like the members of the Gandhi family) are a huge draw.( No wonder so many actors and even a cricketer have got elected to parliament ). But But But, does that make her an ideal candidate for the Prime Minister of the country. Not by far ! I do not have so much of a problem with her "foreigner" status as some people have .. She has stayed in this country for almost 35 years now and has been a citizen for about 20 years. I think she would have become as Indian as much as it is possible for a person to become. ( Heck I know some of my Indian friends who start considering themselves Americans in a year of when they are here ..with the accent included ) .. However and this is key, I do have a problem with her competency to do the job. With barely a high school degree and with no formal experience in economics, government , international relations , health or in any of the "governable" factors she would simply be too much of a risk to try out! She was an effective tool to bring in the votes, but that does not necessarily mean that she can make the intelligent decisions that a person in her power would be called on to make.

Ofcourse in the latest saga to the great election drama , Sonia Gandhi has withdrawn her candidacy for the PM's post. As expected sycophants have cried , threatened suicide , pointed guns at themselves and what not. Its likely that Manmohan Singh would be the next Prime Minister. Thats simply fantastic ! The architect of India's liberalization , an Oxford educated economist , I think that would be great ! Ofcourse there will be murmurs about him not being in touch with the "common man". Lets see what happens. So India's Prime Minister would be a world famous economist and the President is a renowned rocket scientist. Bodes well for the country isnt it :)

Celebrity Crazy

2004-05-14T17:48:00.000-05:00

Too bad couldnt see Troy today..All shows are full :( ... Brad Pitt was on Charlie Rose last night. After watching the interview I learnt that Brad Pitt is really interested in architecture ...Was that interesting to me ? Should it be ? Why ? I guess what I am hinting at is why are so many people celebrity obsessed. It is true that they might know much more than a movie star than their neighbors. Why should their personal lives be soo interesting to everyone ? Is it because we would want to be in their shoes and we are trying to live our fantasy life through them ?

A related event in India was when millions of women were so taken with the character Mihir in the serial "Kyonkee sans.. " that he had to be brought back when he was killed in a serial .. The "bahu", Smriti Irani actually ran for election in India this time ( though she lost ) and ofcourse several famous hindi actors and actresses have won elections this time ( Dharmendra, JayaPradha, Vinod Khanna, Sunil Dutt , Moushami Chatterjee and many more) ..Even Navjot Singh Sidhu, the former Indian opener also won and election.. I need to write more about the elections and I have some definite thought about them..

Meanwhile DO watch Ash at Cannes here ..this type of celebrity watching I DO approve :)

2004-05-12T23:34:00.000-05:00

Sad..I am referring to the results of the elections in my home state Andhra Pradesh . The curse of a democracy , populist measures , the instant gratification luxuries that a state cant really afford have once again robbed us of a politician who atleast "tried" .. Indeed the first order of business of the new CM is to give free power to farmers in AP.What is surprising in all this is ofcourse the fact that the erstwhile ruling party did so badly even in many ways the "poster child" of the Naidu government , the city of Hyderabad .. Lets see what happens at the national level..

To more cheerful things then .. summer is really here in Boston , if you have the air conditioners on the local transportation called the "T" ( an appliance that I never thought would be of any use in this part of the country btw )you know that it is hot ! And along with the summer, come great movies.. Awaiting Troy and the latest in series of the excellent Harry Potter saga ( prisoner of azkaban ) and ofcourse spiderman 2 and there is one on king arthur and shrek 2 .. note none are set in "conventional" settings ..they are historical, fantasy and even animation in nature..maybe know its conventional to be unconventional ..

Bush - Why ? How ?

2004-05-11T00:08:00.000-05:00

How did Bush become the President in the first place ? For an outsider I am pretty amazed ..This article speaks of his general lack of intellect.. I think this is the problem ..for a person who by all measures is today the most powerful person in the world , it is not only in some ways sad , its also dangerous for the world.. so many obvious stupidities , I think a person, a little better versed in history and economics would have made more educated and correct decisions.. not decisions based on gut feeling and instinct , but more on careful reflection and analysis.. record fiscal deficit , war on iraq , the whole world hates the US , jobs got outsourced , horrible enviornmental policy .. I can go on and on.. However I am still not so sure whether Kerry has provided an alternative ..ok Bush has done a lot of mistakes , but Kerry still has a lot to do so that he is not seen as a straddler and provides some clear direction ..

Pakistan and Webby Awards

2004-05-08T19:04:00.000-05:00

Was going through the Webby awards list .. ( these are the Oscars of the Web !! ) , found links to several interesting sites..
One was the online version of the PBS Frontline .. immediatly started watching a documentary on Pakistan and remained glued to it throughout .. ( in no small measure , because i have fallen in love with the beautiful young (for the lack of a better word) documentarer ! (is that a word ? ( are brackets within brackets like this allowed ? ) ) ..( this is like hyperlinks , my mind keeps jumping from thought to thought so I have to produce all these brackets) ..ok now closing all and returning to the main thread ) ..
These are the links to the Webby's and these are the links to my lady love :) .. ..
Do watch it !

Seriously though, the documentary in a weird way seemed so much more accessible because I could understand the language in the interviews immediatly (being Urdu ,very near to my native language Hindi ) and gave me a fleeting glimpse of whats the current mood of "that country on the other side of the border" was ..

I think for most Indians of my generation and even a generation before , we were brought up in an atmosphere which always potrayed Pakistan as the enemy , as the one country to be hated , to be reviled and abhorred. So much so that rather comically , some of my friends dont buy shirts if they see that it is "Made In Pakistan" . Ofcourse the main issue of contention is the Kashmir issue . However I still feel that Kashmir and hatred of the "other" country seems to be much more a part of an average Pakistani's psyche than an average Indian's . ( another one of my side notes here .. I took a test today of where to place a comma and apostrophe and failed miserably , I think I do need this book .. if you still dont understand why heres the story which should bring in some realization .. :)
A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. 'Why?' groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. 'Panda,' ran the entry for his assailant. 'Large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.' .. Do you get it now ? )
In the US where we are all clubbed under "South Asians", I have had an opportunity to interact with some of them and I did get that vibe. It seems to be fundamentally linked with a Pakistani's very being . I am not exaggerating ..This documentary also points out that .. And that is why Musharraf may try as he might , but he cannot for fear of alienating his people skip around that sore point.
Ofcourse things are looking up these days, with cricket (by all means a minor religion in itself in both countries) ties being started and promise of talks in the future. I personally think Musharraf thought not democratically elected is good for Pakistan , as he appears to be promoting institutions of liberty throughout the country, is progressive and appears to be in control.. I have my fingers crossed. ..
Ofcourse I condemn the proxy war being waged by Pakistan , the terrorists it supports etc.. but still I encourage all my Indian friends that before they are awashed in the typical jingoismistic fervour which accompanies any mention of Pakistan to read the history of the Kashmir conflict and they might see that there are always two sides to every conflict , not one necessarily correct all the time.. ( a further example to substantiate this point . the war in iraq .. the conservatives in this nation do believe that the war was a necessary step and America is safer than before .. )

I read a post on slashdot which says that a researcher and his student have come out with a way to flood a P2P network with bogus files.. I think I experienced that yesterday .. I tried to download some songs through a file sharing service and found that apart from the opening few seconds the rest of the song had random electronic sounds.. hmmm no more free music :( .. which is ofcourse good .. but who doesnt like anything which was free ;) .. arent the best things in life supposed to be free..

And I also after spending 4 hours at a shoe store , ( this looks too much like something a girl would do I know.. but I wanted value for money hmmph !! ) .. i bought two pairs of fantabalous shoes.. I realize if I have to impress pretty young journalists like the one in the Pakistan video I better get my act together :) , graduate student like, socks with sandals will not do any more..

2004-05-08T10:42:00.000-05:00

The Iraqi prisoner abuse issue has to put it in Donald Rumsfeld's words gone "radioactive". Its all over the media ..
Several very interesting issues here ..

Firstly people everywhere are saying though Rumsfeld was not directly responsible for this , he should take the responsbility as the Secretary of Defense , basically take the fall and resign. This will send a powerful and required message to the average person on the Arab street that the US is really serious and does infact regard this as a big enough issue ...
Second how will this affect the politics of american election ?
Third and most importanly , this does not help the already severly damaged image that the arabs have of the americans..

bad bad bad ....

2004-05-05T23:48:00.000-05:00

Although I try very hard to be a non partisan observer in a fiercly Democratic state , even I am amazed at some of the going ons at the very top level of the government ( a side note here , i cant seem to pronounce this word correctly at all .. i tried to use this word and the person whom i was talking just didnt understand it ! .. same thing with cucumber and Somerville and apparently there is nothing called "gifted" and a host of other words.. , also someone used the term 'buns in the oven' and all this hapenned in a space of a day and I am beginning to feel i have to go back to school again and learn english ) ..
so coming back from the rather long side note , my reference is ofcourse to the iraqi prisoner abuse issue..
several points to be made here ..
Firstly Bush apparently didnt know about this at all till he came to know that this was going to be shown on CBS's 60 minutes !! He is supposed to have at his disposal the very best intelligence any person probably had at any time in history ever .. How shocking is that ..
Secondly I felt that the statements that Bush made to the Arabic channels were I felt as arrogant as they can be. Not once did he apologize , he doled platitudes about America being the land of free and justice and irony of ironies he actually stooped down to the level of comparing himself with Saddam Hussain claiming he would have never bought people to justice in such a case !!

The President say that he doesnt do nuance ...this is what i dont understand ..the world is inherently "nuantic" , seeing the world in evil and good , black and white is so ..I dont know almost childish :) ..

Gandhi and the Kennedy family - mirror images ?

2004-05-03T21:03:00.000-05:00

Just a random thought ..
I was watching a program on Kennedy's presidency and then suddenly i had a thought ..how both the Kennedy and the Gandhi family in India have had such surprisingly tragic pasts ..
JFK was assasinated and so was Indira Gandhi .. Robert Kennedy was shot and Rajiv Gandhi was brutally murdered ..
Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash and so did JFK's son ..
Uneasy lie the heads which wear the crown ?
I keep finding patterns like these all the times .. I am sure other do too ..
what should a man do ? I am interested in several things .. I am interested in politics and economics and literature and history and society .. But I realise to "do well in life" one has to singly focus on a goal , on a particular vocation , a single expertise has to be developed .. I have been plagued by this thought for some time now ..

Gmail !

2004-04-30T00:37:00.000-05:00

Yes ! I have a gmail account now too..
Although the primary utiliy that I thought it had was that of the 1 GB space , I realize that it has a very cool interface too, many "bells and whistles" put in there that makes it a useful tool..
Some that come to mind are :
cool key board short cuts , messages are grouped together as conversations and not as individual messages , a very very cool autocomplete feature for email addresses ...
Me and my colleagues at work think its almost a different paradigm , for example you never need a ftp server now ..as you can store all your important files just on google mail (have to stress test with file sizes though )..we also did a back of the envelope kind of calculation whether the space is a big issue ..turns out it isnt..

2004-04-26T23:53:00.000-05:00

Some of my friends have legitimately pointed out that there is no need to be so gush gush about "india shining" or whatever you might call it ..
The argument is that I only talked about IT and IT would directly benefit only about say at best 5 million people, a really microscopic number compared to a billion people that India's population is right now..
Further on, even those people who thought a step ahead , as in that there would be a trickle down effect and not sure about whether the trickle will turn into a flood , or still stay a phenomena which would benefit the only lucky few..
I agree with their concerns/comments , ofcourse IT is not the panacea of all evils and although i do believe the trickle down effect manifests itself in more ways than meets the eye and is stronger than is generally perceived I would again be foolish to think that it would have a far reaching impact..
However I think the point is not that at all.. The point is a bit more subtler than that.. The point is self-confidence and a belief that we can "get things done" ..this may sound corny but it is true.. I feel that Indians are like a man-eater that have tasted blood and the trickle down effect of this is far greater than one can directly measure... Its the image of the country , its how the world now sees us and in consequence how we see ourselves thats changing at a rapid pace and I believe that a large part of that was a direct consequence of our success in IT services. My american friends keep taunting me with statements like 'India is going to take over the world '..what the IT boom has therefore done is to give confidence to the rest of the world that Indians can inspite of all their problems build, create and manage projects on world class levels.. This will in turn obviously rub off ot other industries as well and is doing so..
When Naina Lal Kidwai was speaking at Harvard about India Inc.'s prospect in the future surprise surprise , she didnt speak about IT at all.. She spoke about other success stories, auto components , finance , paints ,telecom , biotech .. ofcourse the classical argument would be cost ..I would say the americans are no fools , they would stop using India for their services and product manufacturing if the quality was below par.. These things are not only cheap they are of superb quality too.. So from the fact that most major Indian IT companies are at CMM level 5 to Reliance having one of the best quality assesments in the world to Sundaram-Clayton Ltd., Brakes Division winning the Deming prize , indian products are no longer wanted for just being inexpensive..

So to summarize , why I am so optimistic is not because of the trickle down effect but the rubbing off effect to the other industries .. the value is , in addition to mrs Rao having a chance of providing lunch to the software enginners that live in her colony and mr murthy managing to expand his private bus business to a great extent because of the software engineers who need to get work outside the city , is 25 year old young mr . swami thinking that why cant he become the next azim premji of biotech ..

also check out tonnes of free online books at Guttenberg
there are some cool wodehouse books too , so I am happpy :) ..

Reverse Brain Drain

2004-04-23T00:34:00.000-05:00

I had come to the US reading books like Whats so great about america .. In this book, D'Souza trumpets the science, democracy and capitalism that he believes have led the West to global supremacy. This was then..

Now I just read this article by Thomas L. Friedman from The New York Times .. who has written widely read and appreciated books like Latitudes and Attitudes , From Beirut to Jerusalem and Lexus and Olive Tree .. and this is exactly how I feel about whats hapnenning in the US right know.. I couldnt have put it better..

"Other executives complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security is making it so hard for legitimate foreigners to get visas to study or work in America that many have given up the age-old dream of coming to our shores. Instead, they are opting to study in England, Western Europe and even China. This is leading to a two-fold disaster.

First, one of America’s greatest assets—its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate—will be diminished, and that in turn will shrink our talent pool. And second, we could lose a whole generation of foreigners who would normally come here to study, and then would take American ideas and American relationships back home. In a decade we will feel that loss in America’s standing around the world. "
Read the full article here

Boht Infosys and Wipro have joined TCS to become billion dollar IT juggernauts... Hoorah ! .. I was in TCS once upon a time and many of my friends have worked or are still working at these companies. So in some very miniscule way I feel happy about their achievements.. Google gave a 1000$ to each of its employees at Christmas ..oho big deal ..so did Infosys ..
Yes a 1000$ which is probably worth like 10000$ if purchasing power is taken into account , to each of its 25000 employees !
So while corporate America still has what is called a "jobless" recovery , in India its quite the opposite ..
Infosys is hiring BIG TIME,
and wonders of wonders so is AMD
I almost feel like what Pandit Nehru said on the eve of Independence is coming true now ..
"Long Years ago we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge ...
A moment comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation,long suppressed, finds utterance... "

Ofcourse 25% of India is still under the poverty line , infrastructure is woefully inadequate.. but its a start ...

2004-04-14T23:27:00.000-05:00

The obvious musing for the day is how this generation of indians is literally all over the world..
It just hit me today when I was talking to a buddy from college who I learnt is in Seattle. As it often happens when two old friends meet we play the "who is where and doing what" charade ..
Believe it or not almost 90% of the people were not in India .. they were in London , NewYork , a couple in Australia , Ireland, Singapore,Belgium, even in South Africa ..
And this is not only in IT , I was speaking to my mother this weekend and I was enquiring about all my childhood friends and no surprise there too , they are working in 10 different countries,not necessarily in IT .
All this when I thought that things were great in India and everyone would want to stay in India itself.. Ofcourse many of them are not working at these places as a permanent worker there but more on deputation for a project from an Indian company.
Also as far as those came to study in US the situation is a little different with many of my friends going back because of a very tight job market , especially for foreign students..However in US too, as I mentioned above, many of my friends have come on work visas sponsored by their Indian companies..
As I always say the rise of IT in India IS great as it has given every young Indian a chance to lead a better quality of life , which is fundamentally what development is all about in my opinion... Ofcourse it can have some unintended effects too..

2004-04-13T19:15:00.000-05:00

When I read back my post from yesterday I realize that it is pretty convoluted and meanders in a pretty incoherent manner.. a friend put it correctly I guess he said it was your "stream of consciousness" .. He was probably just being polite .. I guess the writing will improve as time goes by..

One of the things that i have noticed is the so called Politics of Instant Messengers , I am not sure if anyone has done a study on them..

Firstly I am not so sure about people who are invisible all the time ..say everybody is invisible then how can anyone know who is visible ? You are invisible and so am I , then what ?? Why should I be visible ? Even I have pesky friends who I dont want to talk to sometimes .. How about the argument that I am busy and so I am invisble ? If you are busy then dont log on !!
And it gets worse , what about those people who are visible but have a Busy sign !!! :O :O ... what the hell ..are you trying to tell the world that you are busy ? If you are busy why are you logged in .. Ok one possible explanation is that you are busy talking to someone special , thats it..thats when you become invisible..
Aha.. maybe the scenario is that you are waiting for someone to come online and you dont want to talk to anyone else while you are waiting for them..But if they see that you are busy how can they talk to you ? maybe thats already been communicated ..

One more pet peeve ..one of my friends thinks that the messenger should be a minute to minute description of his daily life ..so he puts in things like "Cutting Nails" , "Staring out of the window", ..so on .. I am not sure why anyone would be interested in this kind of information ..

Also if you see that someone is online that you havent spoken to in a long time, should you make the first move , what if he/she doesnt respond ? Or the see it the other way , if you away for a short period of time and somebody sends a message , will he stop talking to you because you didnt respond ? will he take you as a snob ? Do you have to explain later ..
I am going and logging on messenger now .. You will not know though , I will be invisible ofcourse ;)

2004-04-11T21:58:00.000-05:00

So I have decided that I should start updating my post too.. The trouble ofcourse is that you have to remember the big flashes of inspiration or profound clear level head thinking that you get during your day so that you can write it down ..
I will try to remember them..
A current minor obsession is to figure out why is the "west" so economically prosperous and not the rest of the world.. In that context ofcourse the industrial revolution , growth of capitalism in England etc come to mind ..Reading a book called the Birth of Plenty , which basically says that there are four different factors , the offering of property rights, capital markets, means of communication and the scientifc method.. I am also reading a book called Culture Matters which mentions some other interesting theories though , looks like there was a person called Max Webber who came out against Confucius's theories that they were essentially anti-capitalistic and so China would never prosper.. the point here being that somehow the culture of a community is responsible for its rise .. not so sure about that though .. , as I have also read that later they were some other historians who looking at China's amazing new economic revival claim it to be attributed to values from Confucius !! .. However though it may or may not be true , perceptions do matter I guess. As Naina Lal Kidwai mentioned while answering a question at the IBC at Harvard Business School which I attended that the perception of the fast speaking, mathematically inclined , hardworking , computer programmer from India has gone a long way in improving its image.. But wether a particular culture is more suited for success as compared to the other I am still not entirely sure.. People might still point out at Latin America, but look at Chile.. its the new super star in the Latin American economic landscape.

I think that this argument is somehow like the argument given by people who believe in star signs.. I have frequently seen that they say that they are exactly like their star sign .. What they do is that they read what attributes are associated with a star sign and then try to match what they are with that , not the other way around..

Also reading a book called the future of freedom by Zakaria.. , interesting stuff.. he insists that democracy and liberty are two orthogonal concepts and too much of democracy is not necessarily a good thing..

I have much more to say on this topics.. I will keep posting stuff..

Been to a jagjit singh show , my obvious musing for the day is that I guess Indians become more Indian when they come out of India , they somehow clamour for whatever India they can grab at !

Also met some interesting people on a walk through Boston , a person at MIT's famed media lab , a microbioligist etc..this is what is fascinating in Boston that I get to meet so many different kind of people working in different proffessions ..