Rs. 32 …

To have so many people struggling to meet ends in such a vast nation is sad enough, what we don’t require is for moronic excel sheet economists to come in and say if you earn more than Rs.32 a day, you are not poor.

Most likely that guy never stepped outside his air-conditioned office, has no clue what it is like to live on the brink. 

The guy who is poor has enough things to worry about, least the economic wizards can do is not to insult them and us with this definition .

Read this too : http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article2622214.ece

Lows in sports

How can you tell when a country is going through a low point of sports ?

Would it be when three of the country's top cricketers are jailed in U.K for match fixing, thus confirming what the rest of the world already suspected ? Hmmmmmmm, that sounds bad enough.

How about when you lose in Kabaddi to U.S.A in the kabaddi world cup ?? (I can count like 3 counties at best which play kabaddi, I'm shocked that there is a world cup for this ! ). Man, that must hurt.

All I can do is this: Hahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa......

Older , Wiser

Yet another birthday passes buy.

A sign of growing old is that …………….. well , I forgot :-D

Done with the mandatory growing old part, the growing up part continues to be work in progress. Guess it always will be , belated happy birthday to myself :-)

The gadget guy

Well, quite an accumulation of gadgets at home now. iPad2 ( gifted by me to Wifey), Kindle ( gifted by my friend to me) and Samsung Galaxy S2 ( Wifey to me). I love gifting :-)

My phone has simply been brilliant so far. Especially in my trip to U.S. It hooks on to free WiFi networks ( which are plenty in the U.S), so then I can be online through Skype , Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk etc, enabling easy access to staying in touch. No need for the exorbitantly priced international roaming plans !!

Need to recharge battery on a daily basis though, I don’t really consider that as too much of a drawback though.

Ad from yester years

Remember seeing this ad several years back. They did not play it very often, but somehow I liked the theme of it a lot.

I could not find the full video, but I think it went something like this ….

In the beginning you just love to play,
because you are a kid, and it's a game.

Then the forehand gets stronger,
and the serve starts to pop,
and the expectation grows.

But you still love to play,

because you're a kid …………... a 27 year old kid,

… And it's a game !!

Sometimes when I watch Sachin Tendulkar, I wonder where he still gets the drive. Maybe he still loves to play because he is still a kid , a 38 year old kid ……. :-)

Daddy, what do you do …

“Daddy , you have seen my time-table at school, right ? “

Yes Indeed, I have

“So you know what I do throughout the day at school?”

Yes, I do know what you do at school. In fact I almost have your daily schedule memorized

“So tell me this. What do you do whole day in office ?”

Errrr ….. I go to the lab, test some things. if they are not working, I try to fix it

“So you are like a repair-man”

Well …… no, not exactly. Sometimes I think of better way to do things. Like I get lot of ideas.(Actually daddy goes to office, drinks coffee, cracks lots of jokes, browses the net, checks mail and comes back . But what the heck, the previous explanation sounds impressive, even to me)

“BLANK STARE”

What do I tell ?

How about “I think about the really tough problems facing us today and try to come up ways to solve them” ? Nice statement, but that is not really what I do most of the time :-(

Should I say that I am a researcher who does not know half the time whether he is right or wrong ?

Or if I am someone whose job involves making vague power point presentations on how to solve problems that may or may not exist ?

I really need to think on how to put this nicely to a 6 year old !!

Terrorism …..

I was browsing the net when I came across this article talking about a potential 9/11 10th anniversary attack in the U.S. I certainly hope that this would not be true

However I am confused after reading the article. The article quotes a person from Homeland security as saying “In this instance, it’s accurate that there is specific, credible but unconfirmed threat information.’’

If its accurate , credible and specific, how the heck can it be un-confirmed ????? I can’t figure this one out, can you ?

One year

“If you want to know the value of a day, ask a schoolboy on the last day before summer vacation.
If you want to know the value of an hour, ask a criminal sentenced to death.
If you want to know the value of a minute, ask a person that just missed their flight.
If you want to know the value of a second, ask a person that just avoided a serious car accident.
If you want to know the value of a millisecond, ask an Olympic silver medalist”

(http://www.johnboe.com/articles/time_management_tips.html)

Wifey informs me that she has completed one year in her job as of today. So if you were wondering whom to ask about the value of one year, you have the answer now :-)

Joys of life

My little one has her headphones plugged into wifey’s 5800 Xpress music. She is listening to “Country Roads” by John Denver. Not just listening too, she is belting the tune out at great volume, with the occasional Air Guitar routine thrown in. Nice to hear , her singing genes ,thankfully, are inherited from the Mom’s side:-)

So different from a year or so back when I was wading in pools of misery. Where have all the dark days gone ? The nature of human mind must be such that a few months of good times and you begin to wonder what the fuss was all about during the not-so-good times .

Here is the song :

Hiding behind the wall

One more article on Rahul Dravid, nicely done. http://www.espncricinfo.com/england-v-india-2011/content/current/story/526147.html

The wall

Two well written articles about my favourite cricketer

Dravid's flame still burns - Harsha Bhogle

Dravid shows his greatness - Sambit ball

Got to learn an interesting stat too. Of the 33 hundreds that he has scored, only one has come in a losing cause !!

Have I made it large ?

Apparently Harbhajan is going to sue. What happened to our sense of humor ??

10 years and a farewell

A colleague of 10+ years quit today. After 10 years, you no longer think of people as colleagues. they become so much part of your life ..The morning tea sessions, chatter over lunch, technical disagreements, office gossip, jokes, family outings … Somehow you cannot think of people just as “colleagues”

Hope the break helps her and family.

And that brings me to the point in the title, 10 years !! Yes, I have completed 10 years in one company. Almost a Dinosaur by modern day standards !!

Pet hates ..

Some time back in by blog, I had professed the pure hatred I have to all the folks who pay through Sodexho / Ticket restaurant coupons.

Well, I have a new category of people to add to the hate list : The nit-pickers.

The very same category of people who insist on picking up any fruit or vegetable one by one. They seem to be incapable of counting in anything more than one unit at a time. By all means you should pick up certain things in units of one --> Coconuts, Apples, Mangoes, Pineapples, Tomatoes .. I have no problems there.

But WHY would you want to pick up 1/4 kg of green chillies one at a time ? Or beans ? Or leaves like curry leaves , mint or coriander. 

I guess India is a free country and they can do whatever they want…………………. As long as they don’t do it front of me, I’m ok too !! :-D

I have the same policy for vehicles with L board, driving slowly in the middle of the road and blocking traffic. I tend to honk the daylights out of them. Couple of friends suggested that I should go gentle on these poor souls.

I have the same answer, You wanna learn driving ? Fine , do it . BUT NOT IN FRONT OF ME !!

Eight years

And still going strong. Happy Anniversary to us !!

A legend retires

Oh, but he chucks, they snickered behind him all the time. He just smiled , returned to the top of his bowling mark and revved up another one at the poor batsman.

Muthiah Muralitharan, in my book is one of the greatest spinners of all time. There was a period when I thought he was a chucker, then I saw this program on TV in which they showed the deformities in his arm and how he was able to bowl all the deliveries even with an arm brace. That converted me to a believer.

Murali bowling with arm brace

The amount of vitriol that this guy had to take has been un-believable. Imagine if you came into work and some of your colleagues kept on shouting behind your back that you are a cheater. How long would you last in that company ? 5 days ? one month ? one year ??

This guy took it for close to 20 years and that is what makes him special. Sure, you can poke deeper into his record and say he did nothing in Australia or India. Well, Shane Warne did nothing in India or West Indies !!

And why so much hatred against Murali alone ? Take a look at some of the contemporary spinners in action. All of them having blatant chucking actions. None of them half as successful as Murali though, probably that is why they are being left alone  ..….

 

I’m sure Murali does not care. 800 wickets, somebody beat that first and then let’s talk !Adios Murali, there goes the last great spinner of my Generation. Why would anyone want to watch test cricket now ?

Wisdom from a six year old

We went to the railway station couple of days back to see-off my sister, brother-in-law and niece. Diya had just spent the good part of her two month summer vacation with them. She has always been extremely attached my sister's family

So predictably on the way back she was sobbing uncontrollably in the car . Both me and my wife were trying to console her and she settled down somewhat after a while.

And then the rain started, the onset of Monsoon in Bangalore.

She turns to me and says "See daddy, it is not only me who is crying. The whole world is crying with me"

What do I say ....... Where does she get this imagination from ?

Keep marching

Often corporate strategies are not very different from what Alfred Tennyson described in his poem The charge of the Light Brigade.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred

Just replace six hundred by whatever is the appropriate number for your organization. The poem would pretty much hold true at some stage during the evolution of the company.

Try sticking around in any one company long enough and you will know how true Tennyson was :-)

Conversations with my daughter

"Daddyyyyyyy, after you finish 10th standard, what do you do" ?
Well, then you have to join for +2
"So after you finish your +2, then will you get a degree"
(Where is she getting these terms like degree from ???) No, you have to join for a degree course after that
"So after that you become a doctor is it ?"
No, there are several kinds of degree courses. You can become a doctor, engineer, a writer, what not
"You know what I want to become ? "
(She is six and she already knows ? I am nearing thirty five and I'm still not sure !! What can she say, she'll say either Doctor like her mom or Engineer like her Dad ) No, I don't know, why don't you tell me ?
"I want to become a dance performer. I want to dance on stage and entertain people "

Considering that my child-hood dream was to become a KSRTC bus driver, I have to say my daughter's one is considerably better

Another b’day

Wifey’s birthday was on Saturday, had a mini family get together here with all her cousins and their families coming over. Kids from age of 2 to 10, boys and girls. 4 hours of absolute mayhem and noise, I loved it :-)

Pretty much crashed whole of Sunday, little one has picked some Asthma related problems once more with a nagging cough and slight fever. The weather is so dry here that the dust never settles, that must explain it for sure.

Chokers

However much Graeme Smith and the South African team deny it, the tag is becoming more of a tattoo on their foreheads.

Here is an account of six memorable chokes : http://www.espncricinfo.com/icc_cricket_worldcup2011/content/current/story/508048.html

Out with the old, in with the new

Blogging from my brand new desktop. Not ultra high-end, but a respectable Core2Duo with 2 GB DDR3 and 500 GB hard disk, with a rather nice 20 inch LCD monitor !!

Still stunned by the less than 30 second boot up to Windows home screen time . Compared to close to 4 mins on my older computer.

The breaking point

You know, sometime you look at a person and can just sense that they are just about to break. One tiny provocation and they will just come at you with all that they have got.

I am reminded of this each time I see Dr.Manmohan Singh. Don't think so, check this out

• Got taken to the cleaners in the 2G scam. Opposition just stopped short of accusing him of taking money himself.
• Announced a JPC to probe the scam, opposition slammed him for doing it "without grace"
• Supreme court quashed the appointment of Thomas as CVC and after supporting his appointment for long, sadly PM was left with an egg on his face
• To his credit , he tried to own up responsibility a bit faster this time, still got murdered by opposition for 'un-satisfactory' statement
• Got blamed for everything from onion price rise to Bofors, still managed to cling on
• Tried to hold a press conference to clear the air, ended up in shooting himself in the foot badly with the 'pressures of coalition politics comment
• And don't forget, the MP bribery scam following the No-confidence vote following Indo US nuclear deal in 2008. Guess who backed the deal to the hilt ? Right answer, our PM himself. Expect a lot more heat to be piled up on him in the coming weeks

What I expect is a spectacular breakdown when he takes on his opponents with a choice of four letter words in Punjabi :-)) Who knows, he may already be at it behind the walls of his house !! :-D

I have the deepest sympathies for our PM. Politics is indeed the most fickle of all professions. Ask V.S.Achuthanandan from Kerala. CM today, not even an MLA tomorrow. Such is life .....

The Worst cup

Is this the Cricket World Cup or is this a competition to showcase incompetence ?

I thought India and England put in strong claims for the most incompetent performance of the tournament during their match-up. India for miserably failing for most parts to contain England in-spite of scoring 330 odd runs, and England for their classic muck up in going from needing to score just about a run a ball with a ton of wickets in hand, to somehow scrambling to a last ball tie ! Now that would a tough one to better, wouldn't it ?

Hah !! Said Graeme Smith and South Africa . The dreaded "C" word applied yet again. How they managed to lose after destroying England for 170 odd runs, only God knows.

They say that South African team does not like solid food. Why ? Because they are scared of choking on it :-)

England entered again with quite a creditable claim to the King of Incompetent Teams (KIT, I like that !!) with a stunning display of standing-with-your-thumbs-up-the-backside approach when the unknown Kevin Obrien carted them all parts of Bengaluru.

India staked their strong claim for the KIT trophy by thoroughly un-inspiring performances against Ireland and Holland. But the performance that might have sealed the trophy for Dhoni and his team was when they lost close to 9 wickets for 30 odd runs while batting. South Africa did make a valiant effort to snatch the coveted KIT title by tying themselves up in knots during the chase and somehow ending up requiring 14 runs of the last over. But India was too strong, there was just no match for Ashish Nehra that day

Just when Dhoni must have putting his feet up thinking that the KIT is in safe hands, on comes Darren Sammy and the West Indian team. To go from 222/6, needing just 22 runs to win in 7+ overs, they Calypso Kings collapsed to 225 all out. That is right, 4 wickets for 3 runs. Now that is really tough to beat

So the competition is really between West Indies and India now. And they play each other next. Brace yourselves folks, this is the real one. The KIT final !!

Whose name will be plastered on the ICC Wall of Shame ? Let us wait and find out

Umbrella : The poem

I came home from work yesterday, pretty exhausted. My little one ran up to me with her rough note. In that was scribbled a small poem, on an Umbrella, for which her teacher has given her a very very good rating. Apparently her teacher told her that it should be published in a news-paper. Well, I don't own a newspaper, but I certainly own this blog. So here it goes, reproduced in full :-)

It is cold, It is cold

I want your umbrella to hold

To hold and sing and laugh

To play and Jump.

BTW those exactly define her activities at home too. Sing, Laugh, Play, Jump. Maybe I should add dance too . Life is great when you are six !!

Sachin Mania …

All I get to hear now is how everyone wants to win the ICC Cricket World Cup for Sachin. Guys, just win it first, ok ? Then dedicate it to your grand-mom, cat, couch , neighbour ……… I don’t care. Just bring the cup home.

My reading is chugging along rather nicely, momentum is everything in reading. So let me keep it going. I decided to get online and check out some new books. Flipkart is a neat little site with a fairly well organized book collection and free shipping.

Now let me see what I want to buy. History , Non fiction, Mystery and thrillers, Sachin Tendulkar, Travel ….

What was that again, Sachin Tendulkar as a book category ????

Surely not !!! He he he , the turbulent week at work is catching up with me. Let me check once more …

No , I was not mistaken. Sachin apparently is a stand alone category of books

Nothing personal against Sachin, top class professional and an absolute legend. But this is taking it a bit too far, don’t you think ?

“Inspirations”

Was randomly browsing through YouTube when I came across this lovely song from Cliff Richard named Theme for a Dream. Now surely I have heard this recently …... Not Pal Pal Har Pal from Lage Raho Munnabhai, is it ??

The original - Theme for a dream

The copy - Pal Pal Har Pal

Sadly so, and it was one of my favourite songs too :-(( You can’t even call it an inspiration, it is a straight lift , with very few changes !!

Here is yet another one of my favs Pehli Nazar Mein from the movie Race, this time hit by a Korean inspiration

The original : Korean song

The copy - Pehli Nazar mein

I also found this website with a large list of songs that were inspired or blatantly copied. Pretty big list, I must say. Conveniently organized under the composer name so that you can find out the more ‘inspired’ ones.

One thing can be said about internet, it certainly does break international barriers , even if it is for copying music !!

SMS flood

Generally I am all for technology, but in some cases people misuse to the point of absurdity. Take SMS for example. I get all sorts of nonsense wishes on my cell phone, here are various samples that I have got over the past few months

1. Happy New Year ( Well this is not too bad, apart form the awful text art some folks seem hell bent on making)
2. Happy Republic day !!? ( really ??? when was the last time you wished somebody in person for this ?)
3. Happy Men’s day ( Please, never ever wish a man on “Men’s” day, if at all there is such a day. I beg of you, please don’t)
4. Happy Bandh !!! ( this was when there was a call for a one day Bandh in Karnataka following the fights between CM and the Governor)
5. Best wishes for “XYZ”-festival ( Might be useful to check at least if this is a festival that I am even aware of, let alone celebrate !!)
6. Motivational messages – (I do read a considerable amount of books, so chances that you will tell me something original is slim. Why not avoid it altogether ? )

I really need to update my phone to something that can bulk-delete. My old-fashioned phone is killing me :-(

Life would be fair if ….

1. Life would have been fair if eating and sleeping made you leaner and exercise made you fat.

I would have been sporting rippling six packs if this were true. But alas, no such luck.

2. Life also would be fair if Engineers made all the money and Managers did all the work !!!!

hmmmm, now that I mentioned it, #1 seems to have a higher likelihood of success than #2 :-((

Omen

Ever woke up one day with an unwavering feeling that something bad was going to happen that day ? Well, I did, happened to me last Thursday. From the moment I got up , I had this extremely tight feeling around my chest. Wifey tried to assure me that ‘All is well’ but the feeling would not go away.

Later in the day, it turned out that the feeling was not entirely misplaced.

I was crossing the outer ring road in my car, cutting perpendicularly across two lanes of traffic at a junction to move to the other side of the divider. I saw a Chevrolet Travera stopped just before the intersection, the driver was asking directions to someone standing by the divider. I took my car forward and just when I was about to pass in front of the Travera, the driver decided that he knew enough about the directions and accelerated forward. And of course he was not looking at the road, he was still making some parting comments to the guy on the divider.

All I could do was brake hard and honk at full blast, almost willing the guy to turn and look at the road. He turned almost in slow motion and thankfully jumped on the brake immediately. His front bumper missed my driver side door by no more than 5 cms. Half a second more, he would have ploughed right into me. Saved by God’s grace, no less !!!

Slept like a baby that night, woke up around 3 a.m to the sound of a female voice calling out my name and knocking on the door. Woke up with a start and listened more carefully. Nothing at all. Maybe it was just a dream, or is it a bad omen again ??

I think I have been reading too many thrillers of late, time to get back into non-fiction !!

Bring on IPL, forget the world cup

Let us just forget about the world cup and cut directly to IPL, shall we ? I mean, I no longer have the patience to watch one full day of cricket.

IPL is a different matter altogether. See the brainless auction / salary system that has been devised. A high quality player like Manish Pandey who has not played for India can only earn a max of Rs.30 lakh , where as someone like Saurabh Tiwary , who has played for India for just 3 ODIs suddenly gets Rs.7.2crores ( USD $1.6 million). I cannot understand why everyone was not put under the auction.

Having said this, the auction was perhaps one of the most entertaining ones that I have witnessed, I hope the IPL itself can surpass that.

Well, at least I hope I can see more innovative ads like this one by Virgin Mobile from last year. Sad that this was never telecast. What has happened to our sense of humor ?

Back …..

Well, it has been a while. Just noting here that I should be back soon with more regular updates.