My Credo

Scuba diving at Havelock Island, Andaman, India

2012-02-16T08:18:00.000+05:30

Snippets from my underwater Scuba dives near Havelock Island, Andaman, India. This is one of the best places to dive in India with gorgeous and a vibrant underwater life. Andaman is well connected by flights from Chennai and Kolkata.

Don 2 - A Bhelpuri gone wrong

2012-01-02T23:13:00.001+05:30

Thank god for games on mobile devices because they saved me from a near insanity at the movie theatre while watching Don 2! I had to resort to playing games while I waited for the movie to capture my attention. I think I did get engaged for a few minutes in second half when the robbery was being planned but that was all. I rarely watch Hindi movies on big screen because I love to use the fast forward button when the movie stops making sense and slides into monotonous monologue, jarring mistimed Punjabi music & dance sequences and unwatchable violence. Don 2 stands as a symbol for everything that is wrong with Bollywood and that is not to say that Bollywood is unoriginal. We have immense talent pool which has produced some very good movies in the last couple of years (e.g. 3 Idiots, Lagaan, Kaminey, Rock On, Golmaal, Hera Pheri, Dabbang ;) )

Don 2 tries very hard to emulate a fast paced Hollywood movie and falters badly at many places. I know many who have liked the movie because they probably haven't watched the original English movies which has INSPIRED (I guess this is the new term for plagiarism?) Don 2 :) . Don 2 tries to avoid copyright violations by churning many movie shots, story lines, stunts and cinematography styles into a bhel puri that doesn't sit well with your stomach. Here are the top eight things that I think are wrong with Don 2 and why you should avoid wasting your time watching it.

Screen play - Copying scenes from all the Mission Impossible series is not cool unless your stunt director can really match the origniality and your camera man can do justice to the scenes. The opening scene was quite good but then everything after that was a repeat of what I had watched in many movies including the cleanest whitest Jail in the entire world.
Chase sequences - Transporter , Fast & Furious series did a fantastic job at Car chase sequences and they also got police cars chasing the villains when required. If you are directing a car chase sequence and for some reason the Interpol thinks the best way to catch a world famous don is to have a damsel drive right next to don and not shoot at his car tyres or not call for back up makes NO LOGICAL SENSE!
Stunts - Jackie Chan has already raised the bar for fight sequences and how they should be directed. Next time try avoiding the camera from zooming into SRK's nostrils, teeth structures and jaws every two minutes. I think we have had enough of Don's close ups! BTW some of the punches must draw blood if you want to show realism and if you want to shoot, shoot, don't talk!
Stealth - A-team showed us how to steal Currency Mints in a cool way while making us sit at the edge of the seat with their plans and stunts. Doing it again minus the team's chemistry is not a great way to win audience confidence. Ocean's Eleven gave a new dimension to planning, scheming and stealing from Safe's a whole new level. Using the same techniques without the showing the fun side of planning and or missing on building the drama were big misses.
Hacking scenes - Hackers and hacking was made very futuristic by Enemy Of the State and our "would-be" hacker Mr Kunal probably hasn't been coached on how to be a hacker or probably act like one. Looking stylish isn't the only requisite for engaging audience; acting skills are quite important too :) . Also by this time one hopes that security guys pay attention to blips on monitor screens when hackers change what they are seeing. It is high time someone stops this kind of sequence as it just makes the security guys so dumb specially when they are guarding a bank that contains mints to print currency! Also once you blow up the control room and all the rooms are locked it is quite impossible for the hacker to walk into the main safe room while the Interpol had to use Scuba diving equipment to get there!
Acting - SRK needs to really get himself out of the way for the character to shine on screen. I still miss the actor who did good work in Chak De India and for once made me forgot that I was watching SRK. Priyanka's character is so weakly developed that I don't know where to start or end. What a waste of a talented actor like Om Puri who gave us such mind blowing performances as a police officer in ARDHASATY. Don's other lady is wasted and so is Bomman Irani who had a much stronger role in the first movie. For a change some of the newer villains were better!
Direction - There are quite a lot of misses in direction and editing. Mr Don is always one step ahead of his enemies yet time and time again you see this logic falter and a great illogical reasoning given for why he does what he does. Just to give you an example: Don detonates a bomb with his watch when he is threatened to be killed with a funky dialogue. Just minutes before Priyanka is asked to shoot him or else she will be shot and Don faced death by 2 people and he forgets to detonate the bomb. Mr Ompuri is retiring in the opening scene and regrets not arresting Don and there walks in Don surrendering himself. Now one would expect that Om Puri has passed on the mantle to his able protege Priyanka and gone home since Don is now in jail but we see him in active duty till end of the movie!!! Why??? Who called him back and when? Why are all arrests attempts made by a non athletic old guy when clearly the Don is jumping on walls? Why send a lady with exposed skin to catch a dangerous fellow and not an entire SWAT team? Why is the lady's partner never with her when catching the don? If all that Don needed was to eliminate his enemies was to hand over a CD to Interpol why not do it without getting arrested? Oh well, if that happened there wouldn't be a movie I guess :)
Dialogues - Speaking about oneself in third person can be a good thing once in a while but doing it ALL the time isn't really catchy! One tends to start getting detached from the character and the movie itself (howz that for 3rd person blogging?). Priyanka and Om Puri have very lame dialogues for Don's third person rebuttals and the villains are more about snarling than being eloquent.

I don't understand why it is so hard to produce a good action movie in Bollywood without borrowing from Hollywood movies. May be we need some original thinking or better coaching at creative copying! Bollywood has created some fantastic original movies and should probably stick to increasing the creative quotient with original movies than make such an inept attempt.

RFID and Credit Card companies!!

2011-12-29T11:22:00.000+05:30

RFID being used by major credit card companies and they don't want anyone exposing the security holes in it!! Nice

Mythbusters banned from talking about RFID chip by Visa and Mastercard

www.youtube.com

That's why independent media will talk the truth

Wikileaks releases Spy files

2011-12-29T11:00:00.000+05:30

Today WikiLeaks began releasing a database of hundreds of documents from as many as 160 intelligence contractors in the mass surveillance industry. Working with Bugged Planet and Privacy International, as well as media organizations form six countries – ARD in Germany, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the UK, The Hindu in India, L’Espresso in Italy, OWNI in France and the Washington Post in the U.S. Wikileaks is shining a light on this secret industry that has boomed since September 11, 2001 and is worth billions of dollars per year.

Visit the link for more details. Spy Files

Mission Impossible - Ghost protocol (MI4) review

2011-12-18T10:34:00.001+05:30

Of all the movies in the Mission Impossible series, MI4- ghost protocol is probably the most entertaining and there are a few reasons why I am saying this. First of all this is a team event than just a glorified close up of Tom's face in hundreds of angles capturing his attempts at expressing multiple human emotions (which is what MI2 was all about). The villains are much smarter, the gadgets are far more cooler, the stunts stunning at times with fantastic photography and there is a good story line too.

Certain things that do stand out, for a change are:

Mission Impossible 1 had a fascinating story line that was very hard to predict. I think the same can be said of MI4 as well. in MI2 the director got too fascinated with Tom's character and kind of lost the plot. MI3 seemed to bring back some sense but way too much violence, too many sub-plots and a villain who almost seemed inhuman and powerful did spoil the interest.

The violence is not as ghory as MI3 with blood splattering all around and a villain who had some personal vendetta against our here. There are some comical scenes where both the teams end up making mistakes which kind of what happens in real life too. Nothing really goes as planned as per Murphy's law
Some of the stunt scenes are just fantastic, specially ones on the Dubai building and Kremlin's explosion.

There are lots of funny moments in the movie that draw a genuine laugh from the audience like the ID card not working, prison doors not closing, someone getting into the camera projection accidentally or the apprehension the team has on being caught by a magnate when jumping from a 25 foot high wall. The team interactions are quite well done.
Finally I get to see India on an English movie where the plot has some relevance for the location rather than being a land of snakes and elephants or just a showcase for slums and poverty. The villain can actually launch a nuclear missile from India! Quite cool :)
Tom's fascination with women is much more tempered and the ladies have a good role to play than just playing victims who are so hapless that Tom has to travel to the end of the world to rescue them.

There were a few things that just didn't make sense though:

US is still fascinated with making Russia their mortal enemy even though the cold war is long gone. Shouldn't they start talking about China now who really seems to be the next big nuclear, economical threat? :)
Anil Kapoor's role seems to have been forcefully grafted with no real character development or contribution. The guy is supposed to be a multi-billionaire but has no real security around him when a strange woman takes him hostage.
As far as I remember, Mumbaikers never liked Kannada boards but the movie was filled with Kannada boards. This means only two things, one - the original plot was that the finale was going to happen in Bangalore and two - Bollywood woke up and arm twisted MI4 crew to somehow include Mumbai into the plot along with Anil's character. This also meant it was too late to edit all the Kannada boards and locale changes into the movie :) Bangalore would have been so much cooler!!
In their attempt to capture the nuclear launch codes and exchange diamonds, the IMF team creates a very interesting double exchange plot that goes horribly wrong and they are forced to fight both the teams. Why not then concentrate just on the team that has the nuclear code, kill them and ensure that the exchange never happens? No code no launch isn't it?
The ending fight is a lot less dramatic and comes quite sooner than you expected. No real twists in the end too except for a teeny one (I don't want to spoil that one for you).

All in all, it is not a Matrix or Dark Knight but it will certainly keep you entertained for the two hours. Don't miss it on the big screen. You can check out the movie trailer here.

Moon eclipse as seen from Bangalore, India 10 December 2011

2011-12-11T13:07:00.000+05:30

Moon Eclipse- Dec 2011

Eclipse stage wise as it happened. It was more beautiful to watch the changes in hue, colour and shade! I had always wondered what would make our moon go red and now I know it is the shadow of the earth falling on it! Fascinating watch indeed :)

Ban child slavery - Stop buying crackers

2011-10-28T07:37:00.000+05:30

Hope this article will inspire some of you to give up crackers in India and also educate your children that every time they burst one another child like them is trapped into slavery. I stopped it when I was ten years old to protest against child slavery.

http://www.bba.org.in/campaigns/afcc.php

Battle of Los Angeles - movie review

2011-03-13T15:58:00.000+05:30

Thanks to the ongoing ICC Cricket world cup I am developing a new taste for watching movies with hardly anyone in the theatre! This is the 3rd movie in 3 weekends that my wife & I have watched without having to worry about Bangalore traffic, standing in queues for car parking, tickets pop corn, worrying about seating location! I love Bangalore without so many people on road and I am hoping the World cup goes on for another 6 months :)

District 9 created a new benchmark for reality based movie shooting style for alien invasion. Battle of Los Angeles tries very hard to mix District 9 style of camera work, with Independence Day theme, with story line imitating Saving Private Ryan and special effects of the movie 2012. The movie succeeds to some extent to keep you hooked because of all the action going on. It tries to show the alien invasion through the eyes of a handful of marines and some civilians who are to be saved by the marines. Obviously the marines save the day in the end unlike District 9 which was really shot quite realistically including an ending that made sense. The ending almost reminded me of the movie black hawk down and the heriocs of the marines who apparently cannot be just killed and who probably dont have to eat, shit, drink, sleep and also dont feel pain, tiredness and recover quite fast from anything.

The movie begins with meteor showers and soon you discover that those are alien ships dropping like dry leaves all over the world. You wonder why the aliens are attacking and apparently it is for earth's natural resources, the chief one being water! Surprise, surprise, these aliens can be injured and killed easily and they also operate military operations according to ancient rules of human engagement. "Send men to be killed when the whole thing can be done by drones!" They do have their own set of drones too but their controlling tower has to be on earth for the drones functioning. Talk about sophisticated technology that could by pass all telescopes watching the skies, (NASA, NORAD, Hubble) travel through our atmosphere without buring up and then rain terror on us with weapons that seem to behave like our weapons and they are easily killed! Touche!

No attempt is made to develop the aliens characters throughout the movie. Obviously all aliens are ugly looking with no hint of beauty. I have never understood how aliens can be advanced technologically yet have no aesthetics in their looks. Maybe the world isn't all about beauty at all. This is a pure military movie where the characters shoot first and then try to ask questions. No one has time to do anything apart from survival because this is an INVASION. The drones used by the aliens seem primitive and the method used for invasion does not make good sense. It would be easier to wipe out humanity with a disease than bombard them specially when you also want the natural resources to be unpolluted. Any way that's just my say.

The movie is hundred times better than the recent pathetic English movie releases we had: True Grit, Drive Angry or Sanctum (3D or not, these movies sucked biggggg time). It is worth watching it once and if you have a LEDTV or HDTV you can easily watch in the comfort of your home. I rate it 2.5/5

Watch the trailer of the movie below.

funny scary pranks

2010-12-25T22:50:00.000+05:30

WikiLeaks sparks worldwide diplomatic crisis

2010-11-29T09:34:00.003+05:30

Wikileaks.org has started releasing confidential memos exchanged between US embassies and the US government on Sunday 28th Nov 2010. US has warned India that the relationship might go sour with the new revelations. (One wonders why). India It almost sounds like Saas Bahu (or the Bold and the Beautiful) serial at international levels! The leaked documents seem to contain information on what US thinks of many of its allies, neighbours and other countries who don't fall into the previous two categories. I am yet to see anything on India but hoping the information would soon be available.

Highlights include:

US spying on UN members (including current UN secretary)
Pakistan denies US access to Nuke facility
Request by Saudis to bomb Iran
US compared Ahmadinejad to Hitler
Misbehavior by UK royal family
US anger against some taxation rules,
Yemen covering up US drone attacks
Read more at the following links:
Telegraph
To download the Cable documents (called cablegate like water gate) you can go to think: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/

Interesting Pics from Malaysia

2010-11-28T00:12:00.000+05:30

My first Virtualization experiment

2010-11-27T22:54:00.001+05:30

If you haven't tried out Virtualization yet, then I suggest you do and I am not talking about living in a virtual world either :) I have always been a Unix (until Linux came along) fan since college and have dabbled partitioning my hard disk to have multiple OS boots with Windows and Unix. The big challenge with this kind of setup is that if you miss a step, you might as well as kiss good bye to your data on that hard disk. I even bought a different hard disk to just install and run Red-hat for some time. Then one day a virus attack wiped out every thing on my hard disk and I didn't have the patience to go back to re-doing the steps to setup Dual OS boot again. Now that I am formally on Windows 7 (which BTW is a great relief from Vista) I was wondering if it was time to get back to dabble with Linux again. Then I read about Virtualization and how companies are going ga-ga with the cost savings using this concept. For the layman, Virtualization allows you to create a virtual environment on your Desktop/Laptop in which you can install and run any OS you want without having to worry about partitioning night mares or complex installation procedures. So you could run Windows Server 2003 from your Windows setup or even Linux to run in parallel. You save money because you don't need to invest money buying a new machine to install and run the server and if you run into trouble just drop the Virtual instance and you are back to your original OS with no problems. Also, this kind of setup allows you to beta test products that you don't really want to install on your machine. Install-Test-Delete is the mantra :)

Since Oracle acquired Sun, some interesting products have gained visibility specifically the open source kind. VirtualBox is one such interesting Open source product. I recently tried my hand at installing this product to run some version of Linux from this. Installing it was a breeze. The site has pretty good documentation available and I am sure most Geeks would think its a bore reading through such simple routines. The next tricky part was installing a Linux OS in this virtual box. I had setup 10GB worth Hard disk space for this and allocated 512MB worth of RAM to run the instance. This can be easily configured on VirtualBox. I also used the space from my 1TB Seagate external hard disk just to ensure that I don't end up corrupting my boot disk. Once this is setup, my next step was to install Linux onto the virtual setup. You would need either an installation CD or the ISO image of the OS.

Ubuntu 10.1 was my choice since I already had a CD with ISO image file ready for installation from PCQuest November issue. It took me a few minutes to figure out the steps of setting up the ISO link but once that was done, the installation went pretty smooth. I was able to configure my network card in the virtual environment so Ubuntu was even able to download some latest patches as it was installing the server. It took me around 1.25 hours to complete the setup, create an admin user and start using the Linux Server. I was able to test some interesting applications like the Astronomy applications, Sound manipulating app and of course some more cool games.

Overall I would say I am extremely pleased with the simplicity of the process, Virtualbox as a tool and Ubuntu as an OS server. Now I cannot imagine going back to older ways of trying Dual boot at all! Virtualization is here to stay so hop on board!

Official parties - Minefields

2010-11-27T18:50:00.010+05:30

Have you ever been to an office party, where after 30 minutes you wished you were somewhere else? I have been to some of them and believe me when I say this "Some office get together parties should be totally banned for the sake of employee security". Here are some tips on how to survive different parties.

Most office parties have some form of drinking sponsorship. These are political dynamites in a way. I personally don't drink so end up being the one who probably drives the drunk ones home at the end of the party. I also end up being an audience for some of the most foolish things people do on parties after having consumed inordinate amount of alcohol. Inappropriate questions on salary, questioning a peer's job status, picking up arguments with a peer or worse with superiors, flirting with others, throwing up, colliding into a wall & claiming that the wall never existed a few seconds back, nearly drowning in a swimming pool are just some examples of what people end up doing in an official party!

Tips for all those who love drinking and partying: DON'T DO IT IN AN OFFICIAL PARTY!

If you love drinking and partying, you are probably better off doing that with your non-office buddies. Ask a colleague help you control how much you should be allowed to drink or probably drive you home once you start becoming incomprehensible. Also, never ever let a drunken person drive you home. I have lost a friend that way and have also seen 2 of them get into serious accidents. You are probably safer walking home.

The next level of parties are the off site meetings which are held at remote locations from where one cannot escape easily. Here you not only will be eating, meeting with your peers & bosses, you might end up also doing team building activities with some people that you probably dislike to the core. If you are at an off site from where you obviously cannot run away, don't drink at all. Also, no matter how much you feel like ripping off someone's head take a chill pill and walk away. No one likes a nasty person so you might as well look dignified. You will be glad that you saved your career some unhappy moments.

The third one is the family get together party. This one is a tough one too for many reasons. If you have good colleagues who are not necessarily carrying a virtual knife trying to strike you at every occasion, you are probably safe. But if you have some such colleagues you are better off saving your family from meeting such people. After all why would you want them to meet people who you personally think are dangerous for yourself? Avoid bringing family if you have nasty co-workers. Also, some people do bring their "partners" to parties. I think it is again a very risky move. Just imagine that for some reason you break up with that person, do you really think you would be able to hide it from your colleagues? Would you want your peers to know you had a break up? Expose your worst days to people who are probably competing with you for the same job and salary?

To sum it up: Office is not a personal arena and you are probably better off not mixing personal with official unless you have a really cool office with really cool people :)

I came across some interesting statistics on side effects of office parties on careers. Check it out here

2010 International UFO Congress ● ET: The New Agenda 5/12 HD

2010-10-27T00:15:00.000+05:30

Flash flood in Leh! Are you kidding me???

2010-08-06T13:15:00.022+05:30

Just saw the news that Leh had flash flood due to cloud bursts yesterday. Around 60 people have been killed and more missing! My first thought was.. "you must be kidding me" and I will explain why I thought so in detail below.

Read news details on the flood at: Flash floods kill 59 in Leh, more missing

Leh (Ladakh region) has a cold desert climate with 90mm rainfall/per year only. How is a desert area getting flooded out of the blue (quite literally speaking)? You may want to attribute this to global warming, but the theory of global warming itself is a big fallacy as I had documented in one of my previous blogs.

I have personally traveled to Leh couple of times (read my blog with photos on Leh trip), and this is a mountain desert! The sources of water are glaciers melting and becoming rivulets. The mighty rivers include Indus and Zanskar that are completely fed by the glaciers and they melt due to the warmer conditions in Leh.

Curiously though, our neighbor China, who shares a border with Ladakh region, has been using cloud seeding techniques to create artificial rainfall to ease drought conditions in their southern region. Watch a Chinese news broadcast on the same topic.

The science of making artificial rain is now a reality. China used this technology quite heavily in Beijing during Olympics & to reduce pollution as well. Technology can easily become another commercially viable operation or even a military one used to spread havoc on a country's economy. Send fighter planes to drop these heavy particles into regions and trigger flash floods. If you still think I am talking science fiction watch this video on how this technology is being harnessed on regular basis: Humans make Rain

Could this technology be the cause of flooding at Leh? Is some one using this latest invention as another form of attack on the J&K state, which is already struggling in Kashmir on terrorism & civil unrest? Ladakh is the most stable region in J&K with strong military presence to guard our borders. It is also one of the main conduits for food and other supplies to the entire region and a major tourist destination. Most of the people are peace loving and all regions get along fine here. Many Tibetan migrants have found peace and solace establishing their homes here. It is not easy to instigate the people here unlike in the Kashmir valley. Leh is an integral part of India and the only way to destabilize this region is by using natural calamities. I am praying this is not the case and that this is once in a blue moon freak accident.

With the modern discoveries, intelligence communities of nations have to also upgrade their knowledge on how these could be used as potential weapons of mass destruction. Our ancient stories talked about man messing with the weather causing wide scale floods and destroying much of humanity. Vishnu's first avatar as a fish documents this in detail and resembles Noah's ark story quite closely. This is also documented by the Sumerian scriptures which predate the Bible by at least 4000 years and are probably one of the oldest surviving written scripts of mankind. Mankind with its selfish interest can bring upon itself a self destructive force which may not be controllable in the long run.

Don't mess with mother nature, her slight shrug can send continents crashing. You have been warned again.

Giridhar B G

Udupi & Around 2010

2010-06-14T10:58:00.001+05:30

Photos from my recent trip to Udupi (my native place). The beauty of the place is hard to catch in photos but I have tried my best to capture the natural scenic places, people, pets and local flaura and fauna. Hope you enjoy it too..

Hackers expose global warming fraud? (State of fear scenario)

2009-11-22T15:23:00.009+05:30

Some one hacked into one of the server's of University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and discovered dozens of emails that seem to fraud and manipulation of the global warming data. Around 61MB of data was posted on public servers. Was this another ploy to just make money? I don'd mind all the green energy initiatives though since they will ultimately be beneficial to us all. But the reason being given may not be the right one I guess. Hopefully this will not push us back to old ways of wasting and polluting resources. Recently finished a novel by Michael Crichton titled "State of Fear" which is a story of eco-terrorists using mass murder to support the idea of global warming calamity. The ability of people in power to use media, manipulated data, influence and strong arm tactics to keep the entire population in a state of fear is the key theme. Novel did have some data from varied research papers to state that the world is cooling down instead of heating up. Made a very interesting reading as well. Mr Al Gore might be wrong after all?? Telegraph news - on the same topic.

Also saw a video that had a collage of photos from Mars (apparently) which showed the planet in multiple hues apart from red. Not sure if we as human species will ever see the world in its entire sincerity. We always seem to be being manipulated by those who have access to information into a false state of reality. Its an information war every where. Mars Video

2012 - A visual treat

2009-11-17T21:12:00.009+05:30

Personal Movie Rating: 3.75/5 (must watch for visual effects)

One of my friend's friend summed this movie nicely "Indian discovered it, Chinese built it, Americans saved it!". Could not agree more. I am a sucker for movie visual effects and this movie was a with hot chocolate and nuts sprinkled on top treat for me :) I am an artist and the really loved the cinematography of this movie.
I will try to give you my review of the movie without giving away too much.

HD Trailer 1

Story line is pretty thin because the "End of World" theme has been used too often in Hollywood movies. " Independence Day, Matrix series, Day after tomorrow, Armageddon, Deep Impact" cases in point. Surprisingly many of these movies are by the same director ( Roland Emmerich) :)) What makes 2012 stand out is the visual treatment given to the subject at a continental scale. Seeing entire land masses ripped apart, Tsunamis big enough to devour cities (already picturized in Day after tomorrow you say) and Himalaya (not seen before) , volcanoes, earthquakes, continents moving, combination of science (pseudo science some say) with religion prophecies, current happenings retro-fitted into story(including an Afro-american president and China building a dam in Himalayas) make the movie engrossing. I have no idea how they managed to film or animate the destruction of California so damn well. Not even for one second during the entire movie will you think "ha, that's shot in a movie setup" or "what a silly animation". Truly mind blowing visual and sound combination.

Audience response to the movie has been fantastic so far. Movie has grossed over $225M in the opening week, which is not at all bad (INR 20 crore in India!!). During our show time, until interval time, the audience were gripped and spell bound by the visual extravaganza. No one moved in the movie hall when the lights came on. Many were stunned into silence and the murmuring only picked up as we all went to get popcorn. We all ran back into the movie so as to not miss any scenes. Till 3/4 of the movie, the story keeps you engrossed. None of the characters are spared the tragic end making it quite realistic (including our protagonist Indian scientist). The last quarter of the movie was a bit of drag with the American hero image being potrayed all over again. Creating a situation to make the hero and his family heroic was not required.

Closing comments: Watching this movie on DVD will be a waste as the true awesome nature of calamity will not be depicted well on a 40" screen. Please go and watch it in a movie hall. This will be closest you will get, to feel a catastrophe and not fear dying in the process. Do not expect too much of acting dramatics or in-depth character development (like the joker character in The Dark Knight). This is a sci-fi horror depiction of plausible end of the world and treat as such. Please don't take small kids, they will be terrified of the grotesque scenes. We heard small babies cry and kids asking complicated questions while an engrossing scene was on ("daddy is the movie over?!" question by a cute kid) LOL

They should probably release this movie in 3-D! :) I would love to see the train falling over the plane in 3-D. What say?

2009-09-22T00:11:00.000+05:30

Another lake that looked like Tsomoriri
Clouds on the horizon
Rain god descended on us
Nice colors

Leh-Ladakh and Beyond

2009-09-20T23:23:00.003+05:30

Recently did an extensive trip to J&K state as part of TAG INDIA group. Of the many places we visited, some important ones were: Leh, Ladakh, Srinagar, Jammu, Katra, Kargil, Drass, Zanskar, Suru, Lamayuru & Vaishnodevi.

These are photos from Day 1 & 2. Many more to come.

We spent most of the first two days travelling by air from Bangalore to Delhi to Leh. Directly flying into Leh was a

n awesome sight indeed as the Himalayas slowly became visible in the morning sky.

Once we landed in Leh, we went around getting acquainted with the city and also getting acclimatized. Resting for the

first 24-36 hours to let your blood develop more hemoglobin is very important to avoid AMS (Accute Mountain Sickness).

We visited some hotels, Leh Market area, Leh fort and the old Leh palace. Got an awe

some view from the top of the Leh palace of the whole city.

Day 1-2 photos

Amazing TED talks

2009-04-03T13:55:00.006+05:30

I have been hooked to some astounding talks by very smart and intelligent people of this planet on www.ted.com. You might want to go through some of these enlightening talks and learn of new things about ourselves as human beings.

Western civilization excess waste - Amazing talk!! Puts in perspective the excess of US through pictures of excess like the total plastic & paper cups used daily, 2.5 million prisoners & growing, 1100 people dying daily by smoking and so on..

Buggy moral human code - We think we are moral but we are not. We are moral only as long as we know we cannot be caught!

Life on mars - Intereting analysis on data from mars photos

Sixth sense technology - developed by an Indian, this will change the way we use mobile devices to access meta data.

Bumptop Technology - need this in windows soon ;)

Hack technology - Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii remote

Credit Crisis explained

2009-03-19T10:36:00.004+05:30

Came across this Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis by Jonathan Jarvis. Shocking that all intelligent economists, MBAs and governments let this happen. Makes you wonder if intelligence and common sense have any value in a world filled with greed and profit. What is the point of education if it doesn't help us over come such negative tendencies? When you see these animations, the problem becomes so apparent that you wonder why didn't any one warn us about this? Like the Madoff scandal, every one who participated in this system knew that they could make fast money and let it happen any way. Karl Marx had said that capitalism will one day implode because of greed, may this is what he had envisioned.

Wonder where our economy will now head to.... :(

Animation part 1

Animation part 2

Website

Mullaingiri Kemmangundi TAG INDIA Trek

2008-11-25T08:41:00.006+05:30

TAG INDIA blog: Aye Captain! WOW! What a fantastic weekend it was  or was I only dreaming?
We were walking in the places where heavens met the earth with kiss of the clouds.
Chickmagalur being only 250 kms away, we chose to leave late from Bangalore. Everyone dropped into our house, parked their car, and loaded into a common vehicle. Reshmi, down with a severe cold and depressed about dropping out the last minute, wished us a teary farewell & a happy journey!

To wile away more time we took a long break at a Coffee day near Hassan! Yet we reached Chickmagalur in the wee hours. We freshened up at a lodge and had idly with many servings of piping hot yummy sambar!

We started the trek by 7:30. Perfect weather helped the pace. Furious winds were blowing our way almost pushing us off the pathways. Looking down was as exciting as it was dangerous. Rain Gods ensured our safety by not pouring. The National Geographic 1 & 2 went clicking their cameras and capturing the divine beauty in their lens.

The rocks in this terrain were totally different from anywhere else. They were naturally sculpted; multitude of colors & patterns shone from within the rocks. Further, up the hillock, we came to a huge crevice, almost forming a small cave. Here was our first big break. The sunny weather changed its mood. Strong winds brought clouds our way. We found ourselves cutting through the mist. The visibility dropped to 10 ft. Afraid it would rain, we quickened our pace. The weather changed its mind again, the sun shone bright, and we took an apple break. The self designated Captain, Yogi, marched orders to his soldiers. The weather was playing a game with us. Heavy fog enveloped us and visibility dropped to 3 ft. It was very exciting. We were almost close to the peak, when we heard a rumble. A land slide was happening. Thankfully, we were not in the way and were amazed spectators. The winds had picked up speed. We saw birds flying, the winds were so strong that, the birds were pushed back and dropped their feed. WOW! What a sight!

We managed to reach the peak without much difficulty. It was very relaxing. The temple of Mullaina Swamy or Shiva, was being renovated. There were many workers involved in the construction. The priest agreed to feed us. While our lunch was being prepared, we went to explore the caves.

Giri, Anand & Mahesh, first timers to Mullainagiri, went into the smaller cave. Their excitement knew no bounds when they were shown the deeper cave. The beautiful natural patterns on the rocks inside held us enthralled. The torchlights lit up the pitch-dark caves and opened a new world of wonder to us. The cave was clean and the bats flying past us had us ducking our head more than once. Karuna, Mahesh, Anand, Giri & I went at least 50 ft deep. Yogi refused to be tempted to try this adventure and relaxed at the cave entrance.

We then had simple, hot lunch at the priest’s place. Rice & potato sambar with buttermilk satiated all of us. Thanking the priest and getting more directions, we started our descent. Fog engulfed us again. We thought we were lost. Taking left & right direction in wilderness was confusing. After losing the path once, we were back on the correct trail. The scenery changed before our eyes. Every minute, the cloud magic waved by the winds changed the color of the hills. We were all so taken with the ambience, it was difficult to go back to concrete jungle. Anand and Giri took many pictures of the landscape. We completed the trek by 1:30. Though, it felt like 5 in the evening. All of us were famished despite the lunch just a couple of hours before. We made some fabulous sandwiches with tomato, cucumber, onion, ketchup, lime & chips. Yummy!

Our drive was waiting for us at the designated spot. We decided to skip Bababudangiri & go to Kemmannugundi. The bumpy drive could not stop us from dozing off. Captian Yogi, was awake, watchful of the road and the driver. We lodged into our rooms at the Kemmanugundi horticulture Cottage and ordered food for the night. It was very cold; the temperature had affected my phone too.

Dinner was very satisfying. The long day ended with lots of activities. The next day, Anand, Mahesh & Karuna went to another trek to Z-Point. Giri, Yogi & I took our time, and followed them after a while. We visited the rock garden. Life was back to Kindergarten Park again ;) Seesaw, Swing, etc.

Rose garden at Raj Bhavan did not have any roses, but the view from the highest point at Kemmanugundi was spectacular. Bhadra Reservoir could be seen from here. School children on picnic were playing gaily.

Lunch was another satisfying affair. We decided to try another route to avoid bumpy roads and left soon after. On the way, a signboard displayed Kalhatthi falls. Kal is stone, hatthi is climb, and one has to literally climb the stone to get to this falls. Another horticulture guesthouse very close to the falls inspired us for the next event. Yogi also promised to find information about kayaking in Chickmagalur. Next time!

Karuna, Giri & I went to see the temple. We had to wade through calf length water from the falls to reach the temple inside the stone caves. There were a lot of stone carved idols here, the water from the fall was flowing in a very different way from behind the idols.

We saw a strange event here. A young boy of 14 years of age was carrying a very heavy looking huge plate with an idol, flowers and things of worship on his head. A couple was pestering him to answer their questions and resolve their problems. Many people were dancing around the boy with more idols. The Goddess was supposed to descend into the boy’s body and speak. We did not stop to see the consequences and were back on our way.

I bought some very sweet local citrus fruits, the orange variety. Only Giri braved to try one, the rest declined and stuck to mineral water. We had avoided all bumpy roads and were fast approaching the city. The conversation in the cab moved from diverse topics, a debate about internet as a medium to arrange marriages; how Giri, Mahesh, Anand, Karuna & I decided upon our life partners; Nuclear Reactors and Nuclear Plant; Hasiru Usiru; etc. Very Interesting! Avoiding all crammed roads of the city, we reached home well ahead of scheduled time. The icing on cake was the Rainbow we saw at Tiptur. Our pot of gold on the other side of this rainbow was Mullainagiri!

This Diwali (en)lighten yourself!

2008-10-27T07:58:00.006+05:30

दीपावली, the festival of lights is just around the corner and I am hoping every one has had a chance to take a break from their hectic life and relax with family and friends enjoying this most auspicious of all festivals of our country. Wish you and your family a very happy Deepawali! May the festival bring true light and joy into your life and increase your happiness and joy in multitudes. Many say Deepawali is also a time when we sit back and look at the year gone by and reflect on our actions. I am quite sure we would have done many things right and many things wrong but hey that's life! You cannot get every thing right at the first attempt :)

Having said that, I also wish that you would consider a few things to do right this year. For one thing, try Cracker-pooling (yes like car pooling). Get a bunch of family and friends and burst cracker together so that all of you can enjoy the crackers and reduce pollution. Personally if you ask my opinion I would say don't burst crackers at all but then it is individual preference. I stopped bursting crackers way back in school when I saw a documentary on Door Darshan (DD- anyone remembers this channel) on children being used to make crackers. These small kids have tiny hands that are very suitable for the delicate operation of tying, pasting, filling and cutting jobs involved in cracker making. My stomach churned as I watched the inhuman treatment these kids received at their employers hands and was left aghast as I saw the lost look on their face. I could not convince myself after that ever to buy a cracker and I told my parents, friends, teachers, relatives and any one else who would listen to stop supporting an industry that exploited children. The usual reaction from many people would be, how much can one person not buying cracker make a difference? It makes a HUGE difference because it is a collective movement. When many of us stop buying crackers, the cracker industry will suffer losses and close down ultimately. I am sure there are some companies that do not employ children, then may be you could buy from them and encourage such practices. Consider this, that child working in the factory could have been you or your child and if some one is making money out of your helplessness would it not pain you? And any pain introduced into the human psyche comes out in some way or the other. Call it Karma or Newton's law or any thing else you want to call it, but the only way we all benefit as a species of consciousness is when we stop supporting activities that are harming us. Crackers also cause various types of pollution including noise, smoke, waste that in turn are not beneficial to any one of us.

So may be this year, (may be) you can consider just (en)lightening your house with diyas, lamps, candles and stay away from crackers?! That way you will help yourself spiritually, emotionally, physically and environmentally and may be discover a new type of Deepawali with only light all around you.

Making sense of the US Financial crisis

2008-10-05T15:31:00.005+05:30

If you are trying to understand whats happening in the financial world, the cartoons below might be of some help! :)

(click here to view)

Abell Smith
Eat the State!
Oct 7, 2008

EditorialCartoonists.com

(click here to view)

Paul Fell
Artizans Syndicate
Oct 7, 2008

EditorialCartoonists.com

(click here to view)

Rob Smith, Jr.
The Glenn Beck Program
Oct 6, 2008

EditorialCartoonists.com

(click here to view)

Charlie Daniel
Knoxville News Sentinel
Sep 24, 2008

EditorialCartoonists.com

(click here to view)

Ed Gamble
Florida Times Union
Oct 7, 2008

EditorialCartoonists.com

Religion - Zeitgeist

2008-09-27T09:52:00.012+05:30

As a school kid, history never fascinated me and I used to dread the 1 hour long classes and the equally tormenting exam papers. History used to be a lot about what happened on what date without much lessons learnt. All this changed in my 7th grade when a new history teacher started her first class of the year with a grand statement "History is about man's struggle for 3 things..Roti (bread), Kapada (Cloth) and Makan (House)." I was forever hooked to history after that! While studying history one can't help but come across religion and the vast influence it has had on humanity. Hundreds of wars, genocides, smear campaigns and the latest war on terror all hold some link to relgion back ground. I had read some where that man turns to religion when his logical mind is unable to grasp the futility and randomness of life. His only solace is to turn to god through religion with some hope and belief that there exists a divine plan for life.

There is a very satircal comedy on a similar topic titled "Religion is bullshit" by George Carlin who recently passed away :(( . An amazing and insightful look into how religion was invented to keep the masses under control and make money at the same time.
Coming to the topic of today's blog, Zeitgeist means (a German term ) of the time." referring to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era. Our current era is a mixture of rare wisdom and plenty of madness and I think it is time that we all spent some time educating ourselves on the history of religion. You must watch this amazing video on religion titled "One true god of religion".
I am by no means a "religion-hater" per se (unintended pun) but neither have I accepted every thing religion has taught. Religion's divine plan (if such a plan exists) is to spread peace and spirituality among humans or at least that is what my parents and teachers told me when I was a kid. But the harm done in the name of relgion far exceeds its positive influences. Have you ever wondered how did religion actually start? Our divine texts and manuscripts have been modified countless generation of well intending inviduals for aeons and yet we take these scripts at face value with hardly any questions what so ever on their authenticity and factuality. Belief is the last resort when all logic fails. I only know that there are 3 basic truths of my existance:

I am born
I am alive
I am dead

Beyond these 3 facts nothing else is verifiable and has to be taken on trust basis. I keep an open mind to learn new things as long as they make sense to me and ring a bell of truth. I go by what Socrates taught his students "Use logical reasoning". So using this as a tool, there were some questions that did prompt my search on religious history.

Why do ancient religions like Indus, Egypt, Sumerian all have Sun worshippers?
Why were so many ancient gods born on December 25th, the winter solstice?
Why is there a mention of the 3-stars, 3-holy men, trinity in most books?
What is the significance of Sunday (specially for Christianity and Egyptians)?
What's with all the Virgin Mothers of Gods and Heroes?
Are Krishna, Buddha and Christ "real people" or myths?
Buddha and Jesus--Are They the Same?
Did you know that the Catholic Church has admitted for centuries that there are important similarities between Buddhism and Christianity?
What's this Zodiac doing on the floor of an ancient synagogue in Israel?

I came across a very interesting blog on religions and their associated gods. The article is a tome of a recent book written by the author of the blog titled "Suns of God" The author goes by the pen name "Acharya S" and is a member of American School of Classical Studies, Athens and Scholar of Archaeology, History, Mythology and Languages. For reading this blog in detail visit the author's site Truth Be Known. You might just walk away developing a new understanding of our solar system and history of the origin of some of our religions.

The Dark Knight - Movie review

2008-09-18T20:10:00.020+05:30

Very rarely am I enticed to watch a movie more than once in a movie theater and "The Dark Knight" is certainly one of them. The previous movie that really made me go back to the theatre (and to the DVD rental store mutliple time and to finally the purchase store) was the first part of the Matrix trilogy.I will probably dedicate another blog post on that one. This one is all about the Dark night (oops Knight). Just a case in point, both movies are from the Warner brothers stable and boy do those guys know how to pick a movie! Christopher Nolan created a new genre of the batman movies with "Batman Begins" and made people take the comic character with some level of seriousness. Earlier batman movies were more like "Govinda" movies where you had to leave your brains at home to really enjoy the charade. What the earlier movie did was it gave us a good insight into the character of Batman alias Bruce Wayne (that alias switch was intentional) and what drove him to adopt a dual life style to protect a decaying city called "Gotham" (Can be equated to any metropolitan city with corruption). After watching the first movie I did buy the DVD and like many movie goers could not wait for the next one.

I watched the movie on its second week as I could not get the ticket for the first week and it was worth the wait. What this second movie does is explore the character of the batman and his villains in more depth. One at many times during the movie whether Batman by his very presence is ending up creating these villains. I am sure you can watch the movie preview before hitting the hall, but I would like to focus on other facets of the movie today without giving you the story away. By the way the movie has already grossed half a billion and is still running full house in many parts of the world. This is more than what Titanic grossed already and I am quite sure that the DVD sale will easily break many more records.

Pluses

Joker - This movie is dedicated to this joker character played so convincingly by Heath Ledger who alas died due to drug overdose soon after the movie release. I am quite confident that he will be honored with a posthumous Oscar for his performance.
Harvy Dent - Two faced - Without revealing much about one of the heroes of this movie, I must warn you to watch out for the development of this character throughout the movie.
Batman - Although the movie is about Batman it is much more than that. Christian Bale has played the part to near perfection again although I felt the director gave the Joker much more dialogues and exposure. Batman is more than a human being but yet is plagued by the very same forces and choices that we all have to make in our daily lives. I used to be a superman fan as a kid but as a grown up guy I am all for the Batman
Action Sequences - A batman movie without breath taking sequences is incomplete and the movie does not disappoint in this regard. Car chases, bike rides, a plan rescue mission (absolutely loved this one) and a building evacuation/rescue scene are pure adrenaline treats.
Dialogues - Unlike many movies that rely heavily on long drawn conversations and emotional outbursts, the dialogues in the movie are spot on. Crisp to the point and drive home the point. A memorable one is "This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object"
Movie philosophy - Some movies have the unique knack of bringing out a philosophical truth that keeps going in your mind for months together and makes you think. Every character in this movie has a point of view that seems so true and yet so disparate to the others in the movie that potential clashes seem imminent. The part I loved the most was when the Joker burns a big stack of money and says you guys need to have new rules to live by not just money. Some thing to think about. Would you be able to let go of a million dollars because it does not fit into your definition of life's purpose? Would you be able to choose between two equally enticing (or difficult) choices and you had no option of not making a choice? Is that not ironical? If some one applies enough pressure (including endangering your life or your loved one's life) would you commit a crime (and knowing that you would not be caught)? How is a military attack on a city not raise world wide protest but kidnapping of an "important" person cause so many turmoils? Is the universe governed by Order or by Chaos? These and so many other questions are raised through out the movie and I am quite sure you will walk away from the movie with lingering thoughts.
Pace- Love the pace of the movie. Right from the word go till the end the movie does not let you relax and take a back seat. Very much like the Borune Identity trilogy the pace just keeps you pop corn munching all the time.
Music - Back ground Music matches with the movie pace at every junction. It has a lovely rhythm that reaches a crescendo at the right shots. Great work guys.
BatPod and Bat Tumbler - Amazing machines actually constructed for the movie. There is one thing I love about Hollywood movies and that is that they go the full mile in creating an alternate reality. If you love the Humvee then you gotta love the Tumbler. I am quite sure the military guys want some thing like this for themselves too :) and I am damn sure that every guy would love to get his hands on these machines. Do have a look at the BatPod and Tumbler.

Minuses

Not for family- Batman used to be a comic character created for the kids. This one is definitely not for the kids at all and neither for those adults who love comics/cartoons. So I would not call it a "Family Movie".
Violence - Violence portrayed in the movie is quite explicit posturing kidnapping, ransom, hostage execution, torture, shootout killings, arson, bombing, gun fights, fist fights and murder. Personally at many times I cringed at the scenes and would have liked to see less of it. We already live in a world marred by violence seeing it glorified in a big screen is not my cup of tea. Tone down dude (this is to the director)

Closing comments
This movie has every thing that you want in a movie. A plot, a story, great screen play, amazing action sequences, twists, villains (plenty of them), a hero to watch out, great dialogues and an intriguing closing sequence.

Tip: The director is all set to launch the third movie in this series and there is a small scene at the end (just during the titles) where we see a new character being introduced. So do wait till all the names are shown at the movie end. Some thing do with a man and iron. Hope you get the hint.

Have a great time watching the movie :)

Project Chrome - A new browser from Google - finally!

2008-09-02T18:12:00.013+05:30

I always like to try out the fun-net-stuff being developed across the globe and for me having the right tool to browse the internet is very critical. have tried and tested most of the browsers available till date and I was very excited to hear about Google's project Chrome, a new mutli-process (yes it is not multi-threaded) browser that is supposed to revolutionize the way we surf the net. Google gadgets are always fun to download and try out and I would recommend that you do too. The beta download will be made available by 02-Sep-2008 Tuesday (I believe late in the day). You can read through some 40+ pages of a comic based introduction to the new browser here. A very innovative way to introduce a product I must say :) I have read that the download will be made available in this site.

A brief history of browsers
My sympathies to all fellow netizens who had the courage to install, bear and then finally uninstall IE8 (multiple times because there was no clean way to remove it), one of the worst browsers ever launched in the history of internet. My suggestion is this, stick with IE6 and if you are so crazy about multiple tabs then install IE7, but ensure you have the latest version because the initial versions of IE7 had huge memory leak problems taking forever to load/run even on a 1 GB memory machine. There are a few other browser options still available like Netscape Navigator (very famous during the late nineties and early 2000 and one of the few browsers that really gave IE some kind of competition), AOL browser, Opera (they more or less pioneered multi-tab browsing but some how didn't really click) , Avant, Apple's Safari and a couple of open source browsers but nothing fit the bill or stayed long enough to compete with IE. According to usage statistics IE has nearly 75% of all net users .Read more about browser usage trends here. Then came along Firefox that finally gave us a much wanted relief from Microsoft's domination of browsers. Their latest version of the browser, 3.0 is pretty stable and works like a charm with couple of useful plug-ins except for one small flaw. The memory management of Firefox is not all that great and you can feel this when you have around 5-6 tabs open within a single browser instance. There have been a couple of incidents where I had to kill the process to recover some memory for my other parallel running activities.

What can Chrome offer that others cannot?
Based on what I could fathom from their comic book introduction, a few features that might make our browsing easier, faster are listed below. I am waiting for the download to become available and had to make do with some screenshots upto now. :(
Chrome Features:

Chrome will be open source! Hooray I hear you say. This is supposed to incorporate the features that were earlier made available with the google gears project and you get to see/use the code as well.
Mutli-process tabs instead of multi-threaded - so each tab runs in its own space and if one tan fails you dont have to lose all the other browser sessions in different tabs. If this works as promised then I would say is one of the neatest features to have. Plus these tabs will be on top of the address bar instead of below it.
Faster JavaScript loading - For all those web page coders who dump JavaScript codes like there is no tomorrow, this will be great news. Using a new JavaScript virtual machine called V8 they hope to manage memory better.
Incognito mode - :)) I am sure many people are going to love this feature. What ever happens in this mode is not logged into computers. This can be used to ..eehh buy gifts that you don't want your loved one to know?! ;-) (trying to keep a straight face here)
Better phishing and malware filters and capability to launch web apps without an address bar and toolbar are some more extra features.

I am itching to get my hands on this latest gadget from Google. Is it time yet? Happy browsing!

Are we really alone in the universe?

2008-08-19T00:44:00.016+05:30

The recent announcements by the Indian government (Chandrayan Mission) to land a man on the moon by 2020 triggered a lot of questions in my mind. Why do we need 12 more years to do some thing that has already been accomplished and why do we want to do it? Is this another effort to drain our tax money into avenues we have no clue about or is this really about joining an elite club of very few nations that have managed to run space missions? European Moon mission , China Moon mission and Japan Kaguya moon mission recently completed mapping of the moon surface and they have released a lot of information on the moon than NASA ever did. You can download many photos from their sites here

Ever wondered why NASA suddenly stopped sending people to the moon? Considering that the vision set by JFK and the Russians was to colonize the moon ASAP, why would all the nations stop sending missions to the moon after the apparent success of moon landings in the late 60's? There were a flurry of moon landings and then every thing stopped suddenly. Not many know what happened to all that research material gathered! Why the renewed interest by US, China,Japan and India in sending a human back into space by 2020? If we have already sent men to moon, why should it take us so long to get there again and that too in a time when we are far ahead technologically compared to 1960's?! Why divert all the money to build space stations or send probes to mars or to titan? Why not build a base first in moon and then do all these other operations?

These and other puzzling thoughts were going through my mind when I ran across some videos in you tube of US astronauts talking about the same topic. According to these articles men found some advanced civilization on the satellite moon. I know it sounds very strange that no one from earth with a good telescope has ever found a city there. There have been some recent photos of space taken with advanced telescope that reveal strange spaceships orbiting around earth and equally fascinating photos of the moon. To access the videos and photos of this visit this site abovespaceandtime and here. Moon is a peculiar satellite because its rotation and revolution speed match thereby always exposing only one side of itself to planet earth. There is always a dark side that we cannot see from earth and this is where all the action is supposed to be happening. Apparently we found towers and ancient destroyed cities on the other side and were warned not to venture to moon again. There are many videos and sites on this topic.

Video: Possible moon bases wiped out by NASA
Article: Dark Mission - The Secret History of NASA" by Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara

Being a skeptic that I am , I do realize that a lot of this content can be made up. So when I found many US astronauts coming into main stream news and acknowledging that they knew about spacecrafts from other planets, I could not hold back my curiosity on this topic. Call it their last gift to mankind before they head home for their heavenly journey or their last attempt to become memorable in human psyche, but their admissions do credit an audience.

Dr Edgar Mitchell, one of the astronauts who landed on moon talking about UFOs. Video
Gordon Cooper, one of the youngest and oldest men to head to space multiple times talks about his experience with objects from outer space. Video
CNN hosted a show on Larry King Live on UFO's interviewing astronauts, eye witnesses and space program associations - Watch it here

These articles and videos only increased my curiosity in this matter and I ended up doing some more research (or should I say googled? ;)) into this area. I do realize that I am constrained by the content made available on internet but it is never the less quite engrossing. Also before you dismiss this as fallacy let me remind you that in a true scientific society truth cannot be dismissed without adequate research. So I invite you to this quest to find out if we really are alone in this universe. Happy reading and viewing. More links below from credible sources.

Secret transmissions on UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects) by experienced commercial and military pilots - disclosed by FAA under RTI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68xg3zqUXeg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyFq49YBN20
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvNiBfkuWEo&feature=related

NASA space station UFO recordings (near International Space Station)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrnKSX0IsOE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjCmQ5-p8ag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzOF-eAw7I&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fqQ7-_u-rs

Strange places and objects photographed by Goolge Earth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWcIiLFIug0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_9p2eepVQo&feature=related

Possible moon base photos wiped out by NASA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le2GWgHbHHs&feature=related

Life on Mars
Dr Chandra says there is life on mars that NASA is not disclosing

Its tax filing times again :)

2008-07-24T23:02:00.006+05:30

It is that part of the year that you always dread. The long queues in front of Chartered accountants, lots of google searches to understand what forms have changed this year, when is the last date, how do I handle capital gains, housing loans etc etc.. I am going through the same stress and have been scanning for helpful articles to try e-filing my tax returns this year. Yup, no CA, no long lines, no headache unless of course the new system created my our government does not work very well. Will try it and let you know. Mean while there are a few sites that you must all know as Indian citizens which should make your life easier:

First one is the new site that has been created by our Indian government for answering all our tax concerns. You can register as an user with your PAN and provide an email id to get regular updates. Has a lot of information to digest so take your time to go through this site. Income tax India
This also has the link to the new e-filing site from where you can download excel based tools (ITR1-ITR7) that can be used to file your returns. Link to e-filing site
Nithya's tax calculator - An amazing excel tool created and maintained by an Infosys guy (my former colleague I proudly say :)). This will help you maintain your tax status on regular basis and in the year end also do all the calculations for you so that you can file the tax returns on your own. DON'T MISS DOWNLOADING THIS TOOL!
How do I file my tax returns - A very informative article on how to understand and fill out each element of your return form. Read it carefully.
A dummy’s guide to filing tax - - This site has some articles on how to record your capital gains and losses. I am presuming we all have capital losses this year with the share market crash, real estate bubble bursting :) A question every one has but does not know the answers

Happy taxing! :))

Air Car - Can it become a reality?

2008-07-22T20:12:00.003+05:30

Imagine a car that can run on Air! If you think its fantasy then hold on because it is about to become a reality. Our very own TATA has tied up with a European Company (MDI) to release an "Air Car - a car that runs on compressed air" in late 2008 . Sharing some interesting articles on popular websites below. I am just hoping that the Oil syndicates and cartels will allow such a car to be launched and the governments will support it. We will need Air stations (like gas stations) to fill our cars up but it will be a big relief on our pockets and subdue some effects of the oil crisis.

Business week Yahoo Green BBC news

Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL) - A balanced review

2008-06-30T20:06:00.017+05:30

BIAL - The new Bangalore International Airport Ltd has been operational for a while now so I thought it might be a good opportunity to provide a balanced review of our New Airport. Surprisingly on googling (yes it is an accepted term now) for BIAL I hardly found a decent review available. Most reviews are of the HAL airport and are timed any where from 2001 to 2007. Talk about asynchronicity in the virtual world! Some of the reviews are just cribs about the distance and the delays that happened with the flights during the intial days and didn't exactly talk about any thing else. I am hoping my blog will be a balanced review and will provide a better picture of the airport's current status.

Pros
The new Bangalore International Airport is a great relief when compared to the HAL airport in many ways. Plus it has led to a decent enough de-congestion of the airport road as well. I am quite happy to have an international airport in our city as it helps me avoid numerous hops to long established metros of our country.

Location - Although many of you might say that the airport is too far off, do give it a second thought. Not many international airports are located inside cities for a particular reason. It is for safety and environmental health benefits. You don't want to stay near an airport and hear a plan taking off every 2 minutes! I just hope BIAL does not allow any residential complexes too close to the airport.

Infrastructure - Although I am not an architect I have definitely seen many international airports and I would say that BIAL is pretty good as our first effort at creating one in South India. Yet to visit Hyderabad airport so you have to excuse me on that. There is one big terminal with around 14 domestic gates and 4 international gates. Qutie a lot of food counters (much better than HAL any day) before and after check gates. It is much bigger, has many counters for passenger facilities, cleaner toilets, clearly marked areas for baggage, Security, Customs and Immigration, good wireless connectivity, better buses (inside), better elevators and better sitting arrangements. Ample parking space for personal vehicles is a also a great plus. I have also noticed a new ATM counter that has atleast 4 different bank's machines. Now why didn't any one think of that sooner?:)

Baggage - I have walked out with my baggages from international flights in 20 minutes and within 10 minutes on local flights so far. I am hoping they keep up this track record. Much cleaner and easily locatable baggage area. So much better than Washignton Dallas airport.

Security & Immigraion - They have 6 (4-men, 2-ladies) gates for security and around 10 for immigration counters. The people operating look different from HAL and seem to handle the traffic much better.

Connectivity- Meru, Easycabs, city taxis and buses provide connectivity. They store your call details so it is much easier for them to locate you next time and you don't have to repeat your instructions. Volvo bus coverage is decent enough at this stage. (Check Volvo timings here). The entry and exit routes for Airport are pretty decent and do not cause traffic jam as they used to in HAL. The Devenahalli highway provides 4 lane to drive on and is pretty good till we hit the city area.

Flight timings - Highly debatable topic. So far I have not had a single delay although I keep hearing people complain about flight delays and cancellations. By the way no airport in any country is free of these delays. A 10 minute delay per flight is acceptable given the volume of traffic going in and out. I think the ATC tower problems have been sorted out to a large extent.

Cons

Airport tax: The airport tax of INR 1070 sucks big time! Right now this is only for International flights but in another month or so will be levied on local flights as well. This huge drawback affects economy flights and I am quite sure that Chennai, Mangalore & other nearby city flights have shown a drastic reduction in passenger density. Read some more statistics on this here

Connectivity- The fact that it is a little too far from the city one would expect a better transportation coverage. Unfortunately the new Volvo bus network does not cover neither the hot spots of the city nor the peak travel schedules (includin very late hours). My international flights are pretty late in the night and I usually pick very early morning/late evening local flights and this makes the task of finding affordable transportation very difficult (unless company is paying for the taxi service which costs around INR 700 on way). It would also help to have more connecting roads to the airport and also a barrickade to keep people and other non-airport traffic from entering these artery roads.

Cabs - Meru and Easycabs need to start accepting credit cards. Currently they only take cash so you need to keep INR 1500 in your pocket for 2 way transit. The cab service guys need to create a Queue system pretty soon as there is some confusion in locating the cab terminal.

Passenger waiting areas - Business Lounge needs to be slightly larger. With the amount of international planes flying in and out of Bangalore, this definitely needs to be a bigger place. With around 18 gates in one terminal and an average of 200 passgengers per flight, we definitely need more seating space.

Gates - International gates can be made bigger and there can be more space for people to sit. We may need another terminal for international travel soon. I read recently in newspapers and in online communities that BAIL has been instructed to add a new terminal. (read more analysis here) . I also have to agree with Mallya's (Kingfisher) comment that the planes stand too close to each other.

Notice boards - Some board locations can be changed to increase visual accessibility specially in the gate waiting area. Specially at gate locations, one has to really make an effort to locate the notice boards. More of a "nice to have" feature but can become a "need to have" during heavy traffic.

Final comments
The new look of the airport is fantastic compared to the older one. I was so happy to see people (local and foreigners) taking photos of areas within and outside the airport. There are fewer interruptions to those who want to travel and it creates a great first impression when you land at Bangalore. I have heard Hyderabad is better but I am yet to visit the place.

I found a photo gallery from another Mouthshut user here.

Cheerios BIAL!

A world without audience!

2008-06-25T23:04:00.004+05:30

When was the last time you saw a movie star NOT dying to get the audience's attention ? You would ask, isnt that the whole point of becoming famous? To be in the limelight ALWAYS!! Movie stars act in TV serials, reality shows, sell brands through ads, appear on talk shows, buy cricket teams, start news channels; cricket players get into ads, appear on stage shows; politicians appear on sports events, support movie stars, create ruckus to attract TV channels; TV channels have breaking news every minute focussing the most ridiculous, most shocking, most rare, most intriguing news; religious leaders make inflamatory remarks to stoke the ire of their followers; people write books, articles (yup mine included), poetry, artists paint, act, dance etc etc etc What are all these people hankering for? Attention...they want an audience and they want their audience's undivided attention.

Ever wondered why? You might argue that not every one is after attention like the movie stars and I would agree. These are quite extreme examples but can you truly say that you dont hanker for attention? Whether it was your parent's attention or your teacher's attention for better marks or your favourite girl/boy's attention for love, interviewer's attention for a job, your boss's attention for promotion or the waiter's attention for a table, we are always in the process of getting some one's attention. Why is the world so much about having an audience for our actions? Can you imagine a world where there is no observer and try to guess the change that might bring into your world? Would you dress the same way, would you talk the same way, would you have the same habits, would you make the same choices, would you keep the same relations, would you view yourself the same way? Do we really exist because we have an audience? How much of our personality is due to the world and how much is truly our own? Metaphysics and religion have tried to grapple with this issue with not much success. Quantum physics states that the observer changes the experiement by the very act of observing! Religion states that the world is like a mirror, what you sow is what you reap! So are the observed and observer truly bound in a cosmic dance of shiva? Inseperable yet seem to be seperated? Is this the Maya that is talked about in religion? It is said that indifference is that worst punishment even stronger than pain, because it seperates the observed from the observer!
Is this the final illusion we need to break to wake up from this dream of reality? (wow that was a bad pun :))

What drives Inflation?

2008-06-21T23:06:00.004+05:30

Very rarely do we see politicians in India debate over policies or why they should be elected to their posts. This year's american debate to select a nominee from each party had a lot of interesting debates on it and one of the key debates focussed on Inflation. What causes inflation? How should the government handle inflation? Although India and US are different countries with different idealogies, the markets are pretty much the same. Our socialist values are slowly being replaced by capitalistic thoughts and we need to be careful where we draw the line. We are going through a mad inflation rush and the artificial price hike of fuel, a very similar sub-prime crisis, real estate bubble, stock market crash all resemble whats happening in US. Inflation is driven by money being misused for wrong reasons (war, corruption, investing in falling markets etc) and the banks in our country are not helping the cause. First they lowered the interest rates on home loans then gave loan to every one who asked for one (irrespective of their repaying capacity). This lead to an increase in housing prices and drove the prices beyond reach but people still bought home loans. Then banks went back and increased the home loan rates trapping the people into a life long loan repayment cycle. When people tried to sell their homes to cancel the loan there were not many buyer because of the increased home rates! So now there is a demand for home loans yet there is short supply of people who really take home loans. Banks now trying to reduce interest rates wont help the cause much. Putting more money into the system and thereby devaluating the currency wont help either as they drive inflation up. I am specially not happy with commodity trading. This always leads to artificial demand and supply problems that truly dont exist!

Watch the debate focusing on answers provided by Ron Paul on this very topic. He has some words of wisdom which hopefully understand the situation better and I hope some Indian politicians also get to see this. I am quite unhappy that he was NOT selected as the candidate to represent the republican party but I do hope he runs as an independant. He has lot of support from miliatary and common man but not from the corporates who more or less decide who gets nominated to be the president by their funding. It is a pseduo-democracy we all live in.

Youtube video

Arushi murder case: Is humanity becoming more violent?

2008-06-20T21:37:00.013+05:30

Saw an article in rediff today (read here) that India is the murder capital of the world when reading about the Arushi murder case! I hope CBI really has the brains to solve this crime before media loses its interest in the case or some thing more sinister comes along that is news worthy :(

Keeping in mind that the media is suddenly filled with news on violence domestic or, one is forced to ponder is there any validity to the statement and if so, why are we becoming more violent? In a country boasting of 1/6th share of world population, crime if not controlled can take centre stage and damage the social structure for ever. The media may not be completely wrong in showcasing only violent news as breaking news all the time. India has been in the midst of violence in its history right from the ramayana war, mahabharata war, princely inter state wars, mughals and Khans invading us to Ashoka's wars to unite India and to the colonial fights. Humanity has been facing violent struggles for centuries and the question to ask today is, are we better then before or are we heading in a downward spiral to an self imploding destruction? Our stories talk about Kaliyuga where humans devour each other leaving behind a small population to restart the golden age of peace and harmony. Are we at the doorstep of such a change? On a deeper note, why should our history be like this? Why is not possible for human beings to be non-violent? To find the answers we have to read history and also take help from modern science.

History-Mythology

Indian mythology talks of 3 ganas or species of beings above animals deva (god/angel), rakshasa (demon) and manushya (man). The deva gana were a peaceful lot, spiritual, angelic, divine and inspired goodness and godliness every where. Their very presence changed society and created a new dimension of harmony for humanity. The rakshasa gana were the of opposite polarity of the devas, hell bent upon destruction (pardon the pun), enjoyed violence, pain, destruction and drove the society to complete anarchy. Manushya gana had traits of both, were neither devas nor rakshasa but had the possibility of being any one of them at any point of time. According to mythology, the devas and rakshasa gana have been trying to influence us into their paths since we had the potential of change. Thereby the tales of good vs evil, dark vs light and all that. It seems to be a play of large numbers and statistics, democracy if you can call it. We have a choice to be good or evil and our choices determine who or what we become. The kindly gods have in the past tried to obliterate us, so tell the tibetian stories, but have spared us due to the potential of divinity showed by some spiritual monks. There have been many interpretations of ganas in our astrology and I would like to stay away from their gross misinterpretations for marriage etc. If you are interested to understand these more read

Google books

Misconceptions in astrology

Gana - wikipedia

Modern science
Biological research on human beings have proved now that horomones are the main reasons why we are what we are. When we do things that give us pleasure, we basically release a hormone (from our brain or pituatary gland) that makes us feel pleasurable. It is a very addictive feeling too and we keep going back for more. For most normal human beings these activities include reading, music, sex, meditation, dancing etc but for a few with genetic variations these are violent acts!! Believe it or not these kind of people are in constant pain unless they act violently. Their brain wiring has a problem driving them to seek pleasure in violence and thereby leading to disharmony in society. This being a game of statistics, do we know how many such people are there and how is their count increasing? Let us look at our mechanism to punish such violent acts first. When not killed in violent acts or hanged, the prison becomes the networking place for people who share this genetic trait. This came out of a research study on people who were arrested and tried for criminal acts including serial killings, rapes, murders, tortures and other unimaginable acts of violence. Read an interesting article on this titled "Predestined killer".
Another article on "What makes serial killers tick?" They meet more people like them, get brownie points for making violence their way of life and they even have families with the same kind of people when they get out of prison. I am quite sure that a Mumbai bhai will very rarely marry a girl from a normal middle class family :) although Munnabhai may try to make us believe in the opposite :). Many of these people have mutliple marriages and innumerable kids and they are not necessarily worried about the kids upbringing. The genetic phenomenon gets reinforced through the societal and family system through which the kids get raised. Even education on self restraint does them no good. Many of these violent people turn out to be quite educated (dowry deaths, jealous college love affairs ending in tragedy, business killings, honour killings and so on) By the way this has nothing to do with caste creed or gender. It is turning out to be a universal phenomenon across the globe.
Read the following articles to gain some insight on the prison effect
Breeding violence
Prisons breed homegrown terrorists
Prison violence on the rise

Conclusion
To me the people with genetic problems would be the rakshasha guna beings. They seem beyond help and they inter breed among their own kind leading to massive multiplication of the same genetic trait. Our judicial and social systems are only helping them in their cause and the only future I can see is bleak. Normal well educated people hardly have one or two kids in the current world (taking into consideration their income levels, education costs, job costs, economic viability) and we will never have 10 kids or have 4 marriages. So the balance is tipping towards the rakshasa gunas rather than deva gunas. (Guna is a trait) The fact that most of us have no time for spirituality (i dont mean the normal preached ritualistic culture but the trait which is above and beyond all of it, the one trait we know we have in us of divinity) due to our mad rush to survive in a hostile world and all the other activities that distract us (jobs, travel, money, kids, family, property, internet, radio, tv, movies, shopping, music). Where does this leave us? We can raise our collective spiritual levels only when we make time for it. Our decision to uphold the divine and our daily choice to say no to violence is the only way to restore some balance. Do not support governments, corporates, societies, people, friends who violence as the only way out.
The choice has always been ours.

Why is the Oil price going up

2008-06-18T23:02:00.002+05:30

Since the late 80's environmentalists have been warning us that we will run out of oil in the next 50 years or so and the current oil price escalation seems to indicate the truth in their statement. Considering that there are 1000 new vehicles introduced in a day on Bangalore roads, I cannot fathom the collective influence this has on oil prices world wide. Oil is non-renewable and the only way to keep up the supply is to dig up more places that have oil. This is a demand supply nightmare and the only alternative seems to be to stop consuming so much oil. But my past experience of watching Enron stock borkers play havoc with the Energy Commodity price while California burned has made me wary of such steep changes in any goods value. Is there really no game afoot by the stock traders, broking firms, financial institutions or banks? One always wonders. I came across two interesting articles on the same front.
Why Oil prices are so high?
June is Bustin' Oil All over!

Cell phone radiation - warning issued by Indian government

2008-06-17T19:20:00.003+05:30

Article:
Read full article
Related article1
Related article 2
New Delhi, Jun 16 (PTI) Warning people about harmful effects of radiation from mobile phones, the government has asked service providers and makers to avoid promotional advertisements showing vulnerable segments like children and pregnant women using cell phones.
The electromagnetic waves emitted from mobile phones can seriously damage the tissues of the users' brain, according to draft rpt (draft) guidelines of Ministry of Telecommunication.

The draft guidelines suggested measures like limited usage of mobile phones by children, pregnant women and people suffering from heart ailments.

In India, the growth of mobile phones is very high and may cross 500 million by 2010-end, and a large chunk of the users are children.

Many parents provide mobile phones to their children for safety reasons, and to keep connected with them all the time.

The guidelines say that mobile phones/radio terminals radiate Radio Frequency energy that heats up the tissues which may be possibly harmful to human health.

During use, mobile phones are usually kept closer to the ear which is very near to the brain giving rise to fears that continuous use of mobile phone for longer duration may damage some brain tissues.

The report advises people to use hands-free, if longer use is unavoidable and recommends that children below 16 should be discouraged from using cell phones as the tissues of children are tender and are likely to be more affected. PTI

Thank God India Lost to Sri Lanka!

2007-03-24T07:40:00.000+05:30

In many ways I am glad that the Indian team lost to Srilanka in the world cup tournament, because this is good for cricket if not for our players. It has hurt our national pride as a country where cricket is worshiped more than god and it is the only thing that unites our divided nation.

The reasons why I think this defeat is good for cricket are quite easy to understand. Players selected on past laurels, bad selections, person favoritisms, lack of team spirit, lack of application, no real will to win were the main reasons for this shocking defeat. Players who are more worried about ad making, fashion shows, government grants, income tax breaks for their lavish purchases, running hotel chains and money making should stay away from cricket. I am a league player and one thing my coach taught me was never to stop fighting. Even if we know we are going to be defeated we make it a pain for the opposition. Indian team lacks this instinct to fight. This defeat will now force BCCI & the selectors to really think hard and act in a way which is beneficial to the game of cricket. It will be a lot easier to make those tough decisions on player selections as well.

Here are a few things that BCCI and ICC can do to improve the game status in the sub-continent.

Improve the pitch conditions in India and decrease the number of matches the players play in a year. If you play so many matches, the entire process starts becoming dull and boring. Quality of involvement suffers in front of quantity.

Dravid should be removed as captain as he clearly has failed to unite the team in any way. He isn't able to bring that fire in the eyes and the will in the heart to win. The team has become very casual in his presence. Even if you pose as a tiger in a TV AD, you cannot generate the fire within you, if you don't really have the will!

Dhoni , Sachin, Harbhajan,Shewag, Agarkar & Kumble must be dropped from the one day team. Some of these players are way over due for retirement. Learn from the Australian teams! They retire the moment they realize that killer instinct is gone! Dhoni and Yuvi I believe

Karthik, Raina, Pawar, new kids with hunger for win in their eyes must be given lots of chances. Search for better talented and cricket crazy players required.

For god sake, don't allow players do endorse products outside ICC. They make so much money by just posing for a camera, that they are never motivated to play and win! Cricket is hard work with very few chances given, ad making is lazy and simple with unlimited re-takes. Our players are finding it hard to cope up with 2 realities.

I love cricket and the current players of Indian team don't love the game at all. Ask them to go home and act in ads and give TV interviews like Jadeja and Sidhu. They can talk all they want about their past glories and leave cricket game in peace.

The Invitation by Oriah Mountain dreamer

2007-02-14T16:31:00.000+05:30

I came across a lovely prose-poem by Oriah. She has penned so many of my thoughts so well that I cannot but help provide a link to the famous poem "The Invitation". Read it here...

Why I stopped watching TV!

2006-12-09T20:07:00.001+05:30

Since last few months I have not been able to watch TV or read newspaper for more than a few minutes. TV watching has been replaced by 10 seconds channel surfing, cursing and then wondering why I am paying so much money for this every month! For one, nothing seems entertaining or informative any more and secondly all news look stale, uninteresting, cooked up, irrelevant and biased (this is irrespective of the channel or paper). A few years back, Ekta Kapoor bombarded us with soaps with all the masala and jerky camera work and now it is turn of the reality shows. Every other channel has a reality show on every conceivable topic! My choices have more or less narrowed down to Discovery or NG or some sports channel. Market and finance related news channels were a big respite but with the economic fiasco across the globe, I dread to even watch the stocks moving down every day. I am majorly disappointed with the news channel. The 24X7 breaking news culture with the same topic being the breaking news on every channel hardly gives us much choice. Just to analyze the content of the news broadcast in the last few months, let us look at the top news items covered. These examples indicate how media makes you forget what is important and ensures that you always focus on the irrelevant, the less important and events that are just a burden on your memory. These programs only distract you and disengage you from doing your daily activity effectively.

Consumerism plays a big part of all channels. Encouraging one to buy happiness through the products advertised plays a huge part of any news. We are constantly bombarded with goods and services and now even news channels have joined the band wagon. The once delightful "Walk the Talk" with very engrossing conversations has been reduced to "Boss's day out" with a focus on the person's entire day brought into focus! Please focus on the relevant issue here..I don't want to know a CEO's trouser size nor his golf handicap nor the fact that his wife has her own hair stylist :(
With the recent economic downtorn channels are busy analyzing the bail out packages, the banks that are shutting down, people losing money and how our centralized banks are decreasing CRR percentages. Where were the same people when these hideous crimes were being committed by these companies? Has any one even wondered why a company like Lehman brothers which was showing profit on their account till last quarter is suddenly brankrupt? These companies boasted about their accounting transparency (GAAP) and their corporate responsibilities to the society a few days back! Where is all that gone? Why isn't any one in media trying to cover these aspects in news or articles? This is some much bigger than Enron! Why did the banks take our money and put them in investments with such a bad risk exposure? How can banks loan money to people who cannot even repay their credit card bills? Where is coverage on how this happened and what can be done to prevent this again?
Media is quite obsessed with potraying negative news as breaking news. At any point of time in the world, 2 babies are born every second and some one dies in 4 seconds. Life goes on, but if you keep only potraying horror, pain and death as the only news available, the people watching the news channel get hard wired to think and react negatively to life. Case in point the death of ex-IITian who not only killed himself and his entire family. Every day we are alive is a blessing in disguise to focus on good things. Joy is only focussed on during festival seasons that too with the intention of instructing people how to celebrate the festival, what to wear etc. If I spend my festival watching TV am I really celebrating the festival or wasting my time?
With all the negative news going around, the real painful issues are given a back seat. More than one lakh Iraqi people died in the recent war on terror and no news channel has any news on war protests or countries reactions to it but TV channels show live telecast of a child trapped in some well for 2 days. I cannot even comprehend the plight of Assam with the flood situation but have you seen any good updates on what really happened and what actions did the government take to help the people out? These are big events that have a direct bearing on every body's lives but some how are lost in the mass crappy news items covered. In fact I have heard that some poor families are resorting to dumping their kids into wells/pipes so that they get media attention and also some remuneration from the government. It becomes very diffucult to comprehend how strong an influcene media has on day to day life by their choice of topics to telecast!
Actors/actresses found with weapons, having conversations with terrorists from other countries, killing people, hunting animals are granted bail and the media focuses on rallies that support the actor/actresses rather than highlight what wrong these people have done by breaking the judicial system of the country. One actor is more news worthy than thousands of people who are daily affected by bigger problems. Terrorists who have been caught and found guilty of spreading terror are not punished on time and religion is used as an excuse to grant bail! Come on people we can do better than this.
Reality shows are a big hit every where and mind numbing family soap serials are on every channel 24X7X365. I have to wait for weeks to watch a decent scientific or instructive program on even Discovery now. The debates that are shown on channels are usually quite informative and I think we should have more of those to encourage people to think logically and broaden their horizons. edia highlighting the plight of one actress kissed by an actor for days while prostitution of women continues unabated all over country. Actors who have done nothing but act, make money, endorse harmful products, display vulgarity, misuse people attention are always on the news and many of them have now entered politics. Hard working social workers, NGOs, good Samaritans never even make it to news channels unless they are already politicians.
Indian Cricket team is up to its neck in deep shit with low performing, non-cricket loving, money grabbing players, yet they get all the attention in media. They have started participating in dance programs now to keep you hooked into them. No other sports makes it to news unless we have lost a match that day and the media needs some thing else to cheer you up. May be the recent medals won in boxing, wrestling and shooting will help propel some of these sports into limelight. Where is the analysis on the situation of other sports in India? How is all the government funding for sports being spent? Why are we still struggling to win medals in Olympics?
On international news, China launches a new lingerie line is the headline on CNN international news! Did any one even hear about all the homes that were destroyed illegally by the China government to make way for IT parks? Or that the pollution level in Beijing was so high that they had to shut down factories for a month before the Olympic event? I read on the internet that the Chinese citizens who were so happy with the improved air quality now have to get back to breathing polluted air because the factories have been re-opened?

All these factors and many more have converted me to a die-hard fan of the Internet. My suggestion to you would be to spend time on internet (much more interactive media having wider choices of availability) rather than waste time on TV and paper. We have greater choice and freedom to choose the news we want to read and watch. I am tired of opening Times of India with a tragic news of murder and death making front page news every day (even on days of festival). Internet here I come :)

Love my new Honda City CVT!

2006-11-18T09:54:00.000+05:30

Buying a good car in India is a very tough decision unlike in US where you get very reliable and good cars at second hand rates. I have driven Corolla, Camry and Ford cars before (in US) but was very apprehensive about buying a big car in India. Indian roads are not that great, the traffic conditions are horrible in cities, people don’t follow any rules and to top this we have very high fuel costs. Since last 5 years I had been trying to make up my mind
to move from my two wheeler Honda Activa to a 4 wheeler car and 2006 as that year which convinced me to do so. More...

Life throws a curve!

2006-10-28T18:00:00.001+05:30

Some times life throws you a curve

And you just don't know how to handle it.

Should you grab with both arms

or should you wait for it to land in your hands?

Should you let go and jump right in

or wait for things to fit in?

You want to tear open your mind and heart and scream the truth

but some thing in your head holds you back and says wait and watch.

Maybe what I feel is not felt by the other

and what I think is the truth is just a figment of my imagination.

How do you tell some one that they mean a whole world to you

when you are not sure how they feel about you?

How do you hold some one close and at the same time let them go?

How do you love some one and not get attached to them?

Words fail me, my emotions don't do me justice

and I fall short of expressing what I I am feeling right now

May be there is a purpose to all of this that I don't know now

and one fine day all this will be clear
May be Life throws a curve to just make us aware of life itself!

Perceving Reality

2005-09-16T08:43:00.000+05:30

Have you ever caught yourself wondering "what is the ultimate truth or the ultimate reality of our world"? Ever since I learnt during my pre-university college student time that atoms and molecules and strings are just theories that nicely fit the observed behavior of certain events, I have been pondering on the same question. If you have read any thing on quantum mechanics then you might some idea on how current scientists view the reality around us. Physics has now reached into the realms of meta physics and zen appears to be a lot more like a physics thesis than a religion.

Although religion has been with us for quite a while now, it has never answered such deep questions with any convincing proof or an experience of what it preaches. Most people who practise and preach religion have never had direct perception or experience of the deeper realities of our world. They can probably recite every line of ancient manuscripts or give you suggestions on how to lead a happy life, but they have fallen awfully short of helping us realize the ultimate truths of our world. This lead to the development of science, or the study of truth in the early years of 17 century and today pure science has reached the borders of measurable realities of our world. Questions like "Where did I come from before birth and where will I go after death?", "Why should we die if god created us in perfection, if not how did god botch up the job and make me imperfect?", "Why cannot I fly or be at two places at once?", "Who or what is the ultimate creator?","Will I ever be able to perceive this creator?" and so on and so forth have always intrigued mankind. Every generation and civilization has sough to answer these questions in a manner befitting the knowledge level of that generation. But every day we find newer and better answers which goes to prove the point that the answers are not final at all.
What is the knowledge, the ultimate one that really answers every question that we have ever had? And when I say answer I don't mean theoretically but pragmatically, where one can sense, perceive and fully comprehend the reality of the answer. I don't want to learn about theoritical atoms, I want to see and perceive them. I don't want to read about god in scriptures I want to know god in reality! And to top it all, one might say this whole life is just a dream and all our questions can only be answered when we wake up from this dream by either dying or by refusing to be born again.

Only god knows the answers as of now!

Lesson in humility

2005-08-17T11:39:00.000+05:30

There are days when you feel on top of the world and every thing just falls into place and then there are days when nothing you do seems to be right. I was having one of those bad days of my life and was really angry with the circumstances around me. Nothing seemed to be right and I was very agitated with my helplessness. I felt like a puppet caught in some grander schema and crippled by the inhibitions I had cultivated around myself. My heart said some thing, my mind disagreed with it and I ended up doing some things that I really could not understand.

I went driving and being so mad at the world, I hardly paid any heed to the traffic around me. I drove recklessly zig zagging through the chaotic Bangalore traffic amidst blares of horns and hoots and shouts. I felt that my value system was making me an odd person in a world where no one seemed to worry about such things any more. I felt like a fool trying to resist the inevitable and the obvious. My mind was jotting the biggest list of complaints that I could make up against the world, god, fate, people, culture and any thing else that I could think of.

I stood near a traffic signal waiting for the signal to clear. I was seething with rage and frustration and was ready to take it out on any one who was foolish enough to talk to me. Out of no where comes this crippled boy walking with crutches, probably aged around 14, wearing the dirtiest clothes and smelling really awful. Before I could say any thing to shoo him away, he took out a small packet of cotton plugs (the one that is used to clean ears) and said "Sir, I don't want to beg but please help me to survive. Please buy this from me." He was obviously in some kind of pain, but he had such an aura of calmness and humility that I suddenly lost all my tensions and worries. An amazing sense of light headedness and thankfulness descended upon me. It was as if some one had punctured my bubble of tension. I bought a packet worth ten rupees from him. He took the money, touched them to his eyes and thanked me. Tears were streaming down my face as I watched him walk away on his crutches.

Here is a boy who could have easily given up and become a beggar like the countless others in the world. Believe me there are enough beggars in the world. Some dress in rags and some in suits, but they all are beggars of some kind or the other. His legs weren't working well, he was obviously malnourished, he must not have bathed for days but yet he did not seem to be complaining nor did he seem to have any kind of hatred in him! I have given countless treats to my friends, donated money to many, showered gifts on people, but no one has ever shown a gratitude like he did. He was strong enough to bear it all yet make a living like an honest man. I did not understand why I was complaining so much nor comprehend why I so badly wanted others to understand what I felt!

The boy by his mere presence had changed my day from one of the worst to one of the best of my life. I felt humbled, happier and gratuitous to what has been provided to me. The path is always tough, but so can we be. No amount of bookish knowledge can teach me what what I learnt in a few minutes. I had always heard that saints are able to affect their surroundings without uttering a word and I believe I saw one such saint that day. I was stuck in a traffic jam for nearly two hours after that but I never felt any reason to complain. I felt blessed for some reason and I did not know why. I had been taught a lesson in humility by one of the best teachers in the world.

Important Questions!

2005-08-04T22:30:00.000+05:30

Many a times in our lives we get so busy with the day-to-day activities that we lose focus of certain criticle goals of our life. I recently appeared for an interview in a MNC & during the course of three rounds of interview that I under went, a lot of questions were asked that really made me search my inner most thoughts and re-visit most of my ideals and ideas. I realized that there were so many thoughts buried and lost under a huge pile of daily thoughts and I had forgotten most of them! Now that these thoughts have re-surfaced I thought it is best I share with others and try to keep these thoughts on top of all my other thoughts.

Here is a short list of what I have realized and I hope it is of use to some one out there.

There is only constant factor in life and that is "change". Death too is a kind of change but on the edge of extreme makeover!
I can always get another job but not another family!
The hardest decision I have ever made in my life is to choose between two wonderful choices, both having the capacity to change the entire course of my life. This reminds me of the "Road Not Taken" poem.
I don't like being pushed to a corner and not being given a choice. Choice is what differntiates a saint from a sinner.
There are 3 ways to deal with changes that happen around you: Adapt to the change, change the change to the way you want it or go away from the change. There is no point just being around the change and feeling sorry about the change.
There are 3 kinds of people in this world: People who run after material happiness, people who run after challenging work and those who run after emotional needs. Each person has to be handled in a different way in the work environment. The gold digger needs more money, the workaholic needs challenging assignments and the third person needs a lot of care and attention.
There are 3 important characteristics for a project to be termed as successful: The project adheres to the timeline,delivers the promised quality and is adaptable to changes.
There are 3 critical questions to ask every day to yourself " What am I trying to achieve?", "What is my team doing here?" and "How does my role and my team's role affect the organisation?"
There are 3 qualities I look for in a leader. The ability to have the larger picture in mind, strong non-conflicting value system and focus on team's concern.
If I have to choose between integrity and performance I would choose integrity. I don't mind being late than losing some one's trust.

2005-08-04T22:18:00.000+05:30

Me myself & I!

God does not watch TV!

2005-05-22T23:15:00.000+05:30

Thank god that he does not listen to the weather reports on the news channels! The last two weeks had been really hot and dry in Bangalore so much so that I really began to doubt if I was back in Delhi! This city was a hill station once and people would sleep with 3 bedsheets at night during summer nights to avoid frost bites! (my grandma says so too). Any way, our weather bureau with their usual panache and gusto reported recently, that the monsoon season is still miles away and it would take another month of unbearable heat before we would be blessed by showers. So trusting their words (not again you say?) I boldly ventured on my bike to office yesterday with nothing more than a shirt and a pant on me.

I don't think god plays dice and I also think that he hates TV (specially the weather men who seem to act as if they could predict god's actions). He decided enough was enough and that it was time to return Bangalore to its former coolness and glory and did he (she?) do it in style! We had 20 minutes hail storm (never knew hailstorms could be so noisy) and then a wind storm for 20 minutes followed by 30 minutes of glorious thunder lightening and rain! One of the best spectales of light and sound effects I have seen in my life. We could hardly hear ourselves and the thunder really scared off the very bad Bangalore traffic helter skelter. I could finally see the roads (very sorry conditions too) and could take a walk in the rain with no one to bother me.

Don't think I am an anarchist or pessimistic person, but I prayed that god would bless us more with such spectacular displays of weather more often. I felt so much in touch with nature and myself. All the chitter chatter of human life had quietened down and every one was just watching the rain. I felt aleviated and happy after a long time.

Nature reminded me that we are tiny yet part of the large eco-system. We are not above nature and lead a very evanescence life. I just pray there is a storm brewing tomorrow and our weather men are wrong again! :)

Simplicity is Divinity!

2004-12-16T19:28:00.000+05:30

Some of us are complex thinkers albeit simple talkers while others are simple thinkers but complex talkers. The complex thinkers try to simplify concepts and use minimal words to drive their point home. The complex talkers on the other hand, pride in inundating us with a plethora of verbiage that is beyond a normal man's linguistic artillery. If you read the previous line twice you exactly know what I mean. If you have ever read Dilbert's comic strip on manager's colloquial-ness then you have a fair enough idea as to how abstract and pointless some conversations can be. I would like to share a story that I read some time back on the pointlessness of complex language and why more often than not, it is a mechanism to camouflage the underlying lack of knowledge of the orator.

Once upon a time there was a small village nearby a small town, where there was a small school with its share of inquisitive students. On a bright sunny day, one bright student was puzzled by the nature of the glass that covered their windows. He was very curious about how light seemed to pass through glass and not through the stony walls. Unable to control his inquisitiveness, he asked the teacher "Teacher, why does light pass through glass?" The teacher blurted out "Because it is transparent, you fool! How can you not know that?!" The student having never heard of the word "transparent”, felt very ashamed about his lack of knowledge and quietly sat down. He was astounded by the answer and wondered why he never understood it, while every one in the class seemed to have grasped it. He thought to himself "It will take me ages of study to be as smart as my teacher!"

The word transparent actually means "capable of transmitting light so that objects or images can be seen as if there were no intervening material". The student's question was exactly curious about this very nature of glass, "why does glass behave so?!" I am sure Newton must have asked himself the same question years ago, only he was fortunate enough not be among the bright teachers or thinkers of his time!

What we learn from the parable is quite simple. We should not be disappointed by those who do not appreciate your questions, for they do not know the answers themselves. Those who really know the answers will provide you with what you need. There will always be strong opinioned people with a very shallow knowledge base who will ridicule you for questioning their authority or their beliefs or their assumptions or some times their understanding of how the world works. But that should not discourage us from having the courage to ask a question and also have the patience to find out the answers. If you don’t know an answer to a question, have the courage to admit it, instead of wrapping your answers in dialects that no one can really perceive. It is quite surprising how the answers to some of our questions have the capacity to change the understanding we have about ourselves. Some simple questions like “Why does the apple fall from the tree while the moon stays where it is?” have even ushered in a new era of science and technology! As Einstein rightly put it “universe loves simplicity and beauty”. Simplicity is divinity. Now that's a complex thought!

Tale of a dying City

2004-12-15T11:32:00.000+05:30

So much has been written about pollution and the dangers it posses to life on this planet that I was very reluctant to write another article on the same topic. Yet here I am penning another meaningful article that will fall on deaf ears. It will make a good reading, inspire some one to forward it to dozen other people and yet I am sure that it will fail to evoke any positive action from any one.

An evening ride on any of the busy roads in Bangalore will convince you of the problems we have created for our selves. Let us face it. Bangalore cannot keep up with the growth pace of a mad industry. Sure IT fetches money, increases trade, makes us dollar richer, but it cannot replace our environment! We sure are 25-28 years old now, but we will grow older, mind you. Would we be able to still ride our bikes and cars with the same zest and fury as we do now? Will we be able to survive breathing poisonous emissions? I find my parents’ generation struggling to maintain a good health in this environment, in spite of growing up in a much greener planet. Without nature we are zilch! We may survive to our 40’s or may be 50’s but after that we will not have an easy time. We will be hospitalized and we will die a slow painful death.

We have been facing lots of problems with the pollution levels in Bangalore. The vehicle emissions, congested traffic and the rapid decrease in the greenery of the city are just a few of the many problems we encounter daily. They city cannot keep up with the mad rush of growth heralded by the IT industry. Every day we have around 20,000 visitors pouring in to the city from all parts of the world, wanting a piece of the success and the richness heralded by the IT boom.

I remember the same sinking feeling when I left Mumbai some 10 years ago. It was also a great city once upon a time, a lush green town called as the Paris of India. It was reduced to an over populated, dirty, smelly city with tall concrete buildings doting its landscape. The hospitable population had been reduced to a swarm of busy robotic ants running around like crazy trying to reach office, or trying to reach home. Every one wanted a piece of the dying city. Now I hear that there are places in New Mumbai called as “Ghost towns” because no one lives there.

I see a similar Bangalore a few years down the line. The mushroom of apartment complexes is rising every day. The trees are disappearing, water tables are dropping, the roads are becoming un-drive-able and the air is getting fouler. I think it won’t be long before I leave this city as well and move to another remote corner in this world.

You might ask me, why don’t you do some thing about it? My reply would be, I can but I am just one person. The city can be saved only when many of us come together and try to change it. But who has time? We have work to do, we need to build the IT industry, we have to build our homes in the new apartments, we need to purchase that sleek car from Toyota, we have to send our kids to schools, we have to pay for the electricity, we have to fill our stomachs. Some day when we are old and feeble enough, we will think about the city. Then we will cry and raise a monument in its name and pray to its memories. May be that will pull in people from all corners to pay homage, and we could make money! I heard Tirupathi has automated the system to visit god, I was thinking may be we could………..

Passing Thought
~ Most of us are blind to simple Obvious truths ~

Being Happy

2004-12-13T12:42:00.000+05:30

A teacher asked me recently, "What makes you happy"?
I thought a little and then said, "I feel happy when I am helping others, reading books, receving love, and so on and so forth".

Then the teacher asked me, "What will happen when you are not doing any of these things that you just listed"?

I thought a little more and then said, "I will probably feel restless, unhappy and disatisfied"

The teacher then asked me a very strange question "Why are you linking your happiness to the activities you do?"

Happy is state of being not a state of doing. Just be happy any way, dont postpone it or wait for some activity to make you happy.

Truly wise words from a teacher.

The fist blog!

2004-08-10T19:38:00.000+05:30

I have always written articles for an email list that I run but the thought of creating a blog never caught my attention. This seems to be a nice place to express one's views, but how many people do really read these pages? I would have to experiement with this and see what I can make of the traffic! Tell me what do you think of this article I wrote recently.

Simplicity

Some of us are complex thinkers albeit simple talkers while others are simple thinkers but complex talkers. The complex thinkers try to simplify concepts and use minimal words to drive their point home. The complex talkers on the other hand, pride in inundating us with a plethora of verbiage that is beyond a normal man's linguistic artillery. If you read the previous line twice you exactly know what I mean. If you have ever read Dilbert's comic strip on manager's colloquial-ness then you have a fair enough idea as to how abstract and pointless some conversations can be. I would like to share a story that I read some time back on the pointlessness of complex language and why more often than not, it is a mechanism to camouflage the underlying lack of knowledge of the orator.

Once upon a time there was a small village nearby a small town, where there was a small school with its share of inquisitive students. On a bright sunny day, one bright student was puzzled by the nature of the glass that covered their windows. He was very curious about how light seemed to pass through glass and not through the stony walls. Unable to control his inquisitiveness, he asked the teacher "Teacher, why does light pass through glass?" The teacher blurted out "Because it is transparent, you fool! How can you not know that?!" The student having never heard of the word "transparent”, felt very ashamed about his lack of knowledge and quietly sat down. He was astounded by the answer and wondered why he never understood it, while every one in the class seemed to have grasped it. He thought to himself "It will take me ages of study to be as smart as my teacher!"

The word transparent actually means "capable of transmitting light so that objects or images can be seen as if there were no intervening material". The student's question was exactly curious about this very nature of glass, "why does glass behave so?!" I am sure Newton must have asked himself the same question years ago, only he was fortunate enough not be among the bright teachers or thinkers of his time!

What we learn from the parable is quite simple. We should not be disappointed by those who do not appreciate your questions, for they do not know the answers themselves. Those who really know the answers will provide you with what you need. There will always be strong opinioned people with a very shallow knowledge base who will ridicule you for questioning their authority or their beliefs or their assumptions or some times their understanding of how the world works. But that should not discourage us from having the courage to ask a question and also have the patience to find out the answers. If you don’t know an answer to a question, have the courage to admit it, instead of wrapping your answers in dialects that no one can really perceive. It is quite surprising how the answers to some of our questions have the capacity to change the understanding we have about ourselves. Some simple questions like “Why does the apple fall from the tree while the moon stays where it is?” have even ushered in a new era of science and technology! As Einstein rightly put it “universe loves simplicity and beauty”. Simplicity is divinity. Now that's a complex thought!

My Credo

Scuba diving at Havelock Island, Andaman, India

Snippets from my underwater Scuba dives near Havelock Island, Andaman, India. This is one of the best places to dive in India with gorgeous and a vibrant underwater life. Andaman is well connected by flights from Chennai and Kolkata.

Don 2 - A Bhelpuri gone wrong

RFID and Credit Card companies!!

RFID being used by major credit card companies and they don't want anyone exposing the security holes in it!! Nice

Wikileaks releases Spy files

Visit the link for more details. Spy Files

Mission Impossible - Ghost protocol (MI4) review

Moon eclipse as seen from Bangalore, India 10 December 2011

Ban child slavery - Stop buying crackers

Hope this article will inspire some of you to give up crackers in India and also educate your children that every time they burst one another child like them is trapped into slavery. I stopped it when I was ten years old to protest against child slavery.

Battle of Los Angeles - movie review

funny scary pranks

WikiLeaks sparks worldwide diplomatic crisis

Highlights include:

US anger against some taxation rules,

Read more at the following links:

To download the Cable documents (called cablegate like water gate) you can go to think: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/

Interesting Pics from Malaysia

My first Virtualization experiment

Official parties - Minefields

2010 International UFO Congress ● ET: The New Agenda 5/12 HD

Flash flood in Leh! Are you kidding me???

Udupi & Around 2010

Hackers expose global warming fraud? (State of fear scenario)

2012 - A visual treat

Leh-Ladakh and Beyond

Amazing TED talks

Credit Crisis explained

Mullaingiri Kemmangundi TAG INDIA Trek

This Diwali (en)lighten yourself!

Making sense of the US Financial crisis

Religion - Zeitgeist

The Dark Knight - Movie review

Project Chrome - A new browser from Google - finally!

Are we really alone in the universe?

Its tax filing times again :)

Air Car - Can it become a reality?

Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL) - A balanced review

A world without audience!

What drives Inflation?

Arushi murder case: Is humanity becoming more violent?

Why is the Oil price going up

Cell phone radiation - warning issued by Indian government

Thank God India Lost to Sri Lanka!

The Invitation by Oriah Mountain dreamer

Why I stopped watching TV!

Love my new Honda City CVT!

Life throws a curve!

Perceving Reality

Lesson in humility

Important Questions!

God does not watch TV!

Simplicity is Divinity!

Tale of a dying City

Being Happy

The fist blog!