Traffic Alert?

The depression conditions over Santa Cruz area are much less than the severe depressions and cyclones forming in the Bay of Bengal. Even when there were cyclone alerts in Chennai - with conditions of 85+kmph gales and 110+kmph squalls, the only alert I remember receiving were those warning fishermen not to venture in to the sea and evacuation of people from low lying areas (mostly slums) to higher ground. Now, they have issued a 'traffic alert' in Mumbai. But, I don't see moving of people to nearby schools!

Sunday

I am in the office now, just another guy and the security guy to give me company. My boss has not come in yet. And it is still raining here which means my room might get flooded today too!

Prophet Mohammed

A few days back, there was this report of some people arrested in UP for publishing a picture of Prophet Mohammed. I don't know why printing an image of him is banned.
I got this picture from a history website.
One more from a religion website.

I would like to get my hands on that magazine. Can anyone 'stumbling' upon this and/or reading this tell me why it is blasphemy? Is it coz I is black?

Mumbai Flooded

People must have read/heared/saw something about floods in Mumbai in the news. They say it was a depression around Santa Cruz that caused this rain and almost a metre of rains in half a day led to 'floods'. I was stuck in my office the whole night of the rains and it was better than returning home to sleep in a room full of water. Even a slight drizzle causes my room to get wet and 8 hours of a wall of water falling from the sky ensured some things were floating in my room. Roads were jammed, telephone networks were clogged, utilities were cut off. Very much like rains back home in Chennai. The company provided food for us. I was expecting worse when I went back home in the morning, but things were not so bad. However, when I was mopping up the floor, I saw some centipedes running out. I spent the night fearing the walls might cave in on me. Now, I have to do something about that mouldy smell. I did get a two day holiday - yesterday and the day before. Now, my deadlines remain the same. While most of the mobile telephone lines were down, my faithful CDMA was up all the while - allowing me to talk even with the feeblest signal. CDMA rocks, but Reliance (my service provider) sucks! When I told my father, he was not even slightly worried about the rains - he had seen much worse situations - he used to live close to a river which overflow every year.

the smiling toaster :)

News 1: USA Agrees to'civilian' nuclear cooperation with India
News 2: India may buy $5 bn military equipment from US

Dilbert says:

If you don't get that smiley face on the toaster, India's first nuclear fission explosion was allegedly code-named the Smiling Buddha. Rather, it was reported that Indira Gandhi was informed that the Buddha has smiled after the event.

When did Dilbert turn political (apart from offshoring bashing?)

Covers

Some people make covers of some famous songs. Sometimes they are crappy, sometimes they are better than the original. Sometimes, they are funny, sometimes they are bizarre - like this version of NWA's Straight outta Compton, by Nina Gordon. I was left speechless!

Ironies

There is this story in Sun, about how some lady is selling pictures of her bathing children on e-bay. What is the ad that I see just below that picture? A photo of a family with three children in a pool!



Another one one e-bay - some guy selling a cricket ball signed by Michael Vaughn. Calling him "Ashes winning Captain!!!!" is premature and seems farfetched. The closeup of the ball says "made in India".

world cup 2007

The 2007 world cup schedule has been released. India has been put in the easiest group. If we cannot move into the super-8's, I have nothing to say against them except "off with their heads".

three suns

Scientists have discovered a planet with three suns. Big deal! They must come stay for a few days in Madras, they might be motivated enough to think the earth has other suns too! CNN Article

irregular combatants, not indians

Indians Beware of what you say! Anything you say against the world's only free country with democracy will land you in Guantanamo Bay or Diego Garcia or some unnamed place. Be afraid, the world's big brother is watching you, right in your homes, at your work, when you are in the toilet. You can't run anywhere, you can't hide anywhere. Sovereignty was a thing of the past. Welcome to Malabar Front.

Corporate Training!

I handled my first training session today. I have been preparing the training material for over 3 weeks and today I had to handle a class of over 30 fresh recruits. My legs hurt from standing/walking around for 7 hours. Phew!

Another anti-American Indian?

Wasn't it some president of Coca Cola that said the biggest competitor to coke is not pepsi, but water? The Godfather said, monopoly is the most efficient form for corporations - they don't have to worry about competition, no cost cutting, more and more profits. looks like coca cola has been successful in eliminating competition wherever they go. This photo by Sharad Haksar has made them sue him as it is 'causing them damage.' They are also famous for their 'secret formula'. I guess their secret formula is all the groundwater where their plants are!

Die Cocacola!

There are also other photos that he has put up in his website - http://www.sharadhaksar.com, though they are in shockwave/flash. I remember installing flash in many computers, even in many browsing centres, and that is a huge pain.

These are brilliant!



More Photos

Muddy Matheran

While by and large the trip to Matheran was peaceful, and fun, there were some incidents which almost gave me a headache. One of them was the 'debate' with two über-capitalist guys. Both seemed to agree that my 'sources of information' are screwed up and I must read 'The Economist' to get my fundamentals right.
We argued for sometime about the differences between capitalism and libertarianism - I have contempt for that American word, which they copied from the French. Naturally, the next topic was anarchy. Now, they would not listen to me that Somalia is the only country with no government - they believed there were atleast four countries ruled by anarchy, an oxymoron right there!
The discussion turned to civil wars. I wonder, what war is ever civil? They seemed to think the civil war in Sri Lanka is not one but it is only terrorism. The Tamil minority there were never oppressed by the Sri Lankan Government, and it is not the 'Tamil people' who were fighting the government, but 'only some terrorists'. Wha?

Matheran - Day 2

[from Day 1]
We had to wake up very early in the morning – at 6 am, so that we had enough time to visit all the points. 6 am, my normal wakeup time seemed tooooo early this time. None of us took bath that day, we simply couldn’t. We then started walking up and down the rolling hill road. Our first stop was Charlotte Lake – which looked like an artificial lake made by damming up one of the sides. The water overflowing from the dam created a great waterfall downstream. All the waterfalls I had seen were from the bottom, and this was from the top! While we were admiring the beauty of the view from the falls, one of the moronic tourists threw a plastic peanut bag into the stream. We then walked to some of the view points there – Lord Point, and Lumley Seat, which had no railing to protect us in came someone fell down. We saw a phallic looking rock from there and we would be seeing that wherever we went.
We then walked back to Echo point, and Honeymoon point. There were another three moronic tourists relieving themselves, in a tourist spot! Our next stop was Louisa Point, one of those places where you want to build a cottage and allow no one else to come within 5 kilometres of! The scene was captivating. This is the place where the phallic rock is present. From here, we could see a Maratha fort in the distance, a British watchtower, and the first bungalow built in Matheran, and some other places. There was this guy with a telescope, fleecing tourists, as usual – he was showing ‘5 points for only Rs. 10’, of which two were of the paddy fields in the valley below and one was of the rock that was just metres away – Lion’s Head, which had featured in many Bollywood movies.

After spending almost an hour there, we started walking back to the station, and we had lunch at a Gujarati place. A few friends from the plains who just wanted to ride the toy train, up and down, joined us. They did not get tickets up hill, but they hitched a ride anyway, and caught up with us. An hour later, we went to the station to get tickets back down. Unfortunately, they were sold out just moments after we joined the queue. We thought we could ‘bribe’ the ticket collector and somehow get a ride. After half an hour of debating, he relented and let us one girl from the group to ride till the taxi stand. I was disappointed as this was the fourth toy-train that I had missed – the other three being the ones to Ooty, Darjeeling and Shimla, in that order. I and another guy then decided to ride a horse downhill, all by myself. Unfortunately, I got a grandpa horse that would not go more than a trot, how much ever I kicked it.
I thought our excitement was over once we reached the taxi stand, but then, there was some more left. The taxi we got was a rickety old Premier Padmini, whose doors had no handles, no levers inside to open the door or roll the windows, and had to be pushed to start. It sounded like the car was running on a motorcycle engine. After a few metres, the silencer broke and we dragged it till the plains where it broke completely and fell down. From Neral, we caught the train back to Dadar.

Matheran - Day 1

I went to Matheran for the weekend with some of my classmates. This was the first trip outside Bombay. Unlike the other hill stations in India, which have all been built by the British (except for Kodaikanal, built by the Americans), this seems to have been built by the Parsees living in India.
I started from my home in Andheri at around 4.30 pm on Saturday and went to Dadar station. We first went to Kalyan and got another train to Neral. There is a narrow gauge train from here to Matheran. Unfortunately, the train was cancelled that day due to fog and light rains. So, we took a taxi up the hill, at Rs. 50 per person. We reached the taxi stand within 15 minutes, and some sections of the road were steep. There were a few waterfalls along the way and people were wetting themselves under it. It brought back memories of trips to Gangtok and Darjeeling, where the ‘hills’ were much higher and the roads were very narrow. The view of the valley below was gorgeous, and there was this single Adivasi village down, below. The actual hill-station of Matheran was closed to traffic and only men and horses were permitted up, after paying Rs. 25 for adults and Rs. 10 for children as ‘capitation tax’. The sight of rickshaws pulling up old people and people with luggage appeared as an anachronism. We started walking up the dark, cobbled road through some light drizzle. One of the power cables had fall down and the area plunged into darkness from time to time. We saw a bunch of ‘youthful’ tourists walking down, which gave us an idea of the tourists we would see there.
After 30 minutes of walking, we reached the market place, and the place we stayed at was quite close by. The room was not all that great – we had concrete platforms instead of cots and a bed placed on it. There were 4 such ‘cots’ in a room and we had a 50% off-season discount – Rs. 550 for one room. Once you go up the hill, the cost of everything increases by Rs. 5.
We went to our rooms and went to this place ‘Hookahs and Tikka’ in the market for dinner. The place was not that great – tiny portion of food at more than the normal rates in the plains. Moreover, there was a blackout and there were gaslights into which thousands of insects created hara-kiri. After seeing the toilet facilities on the hills, I took some tissue papers from the restaurant, just in case, which proved immensely helpful on Sunday. Some of the guys went to get drinks – they got a bottle of vodka and came back to the room. Surprisingly, only three guys drank and we crashed soon after.
(continued...)

Waterboy

This Evian ad from Europe is amazing.

An animation of a 'water boy' who climbs out of a glass of water and walks to the beat of "We will rock you," by Queen. I don't want to break the funny parts, but I can't help but laugh when he extinguishes a fire by peeing on it. The final few scenes explain how there are so many waterbodies all over the world - the water boy and a water girl do something inside a big red throbbing heart, and they have five little water bodies. The best ad I've ever seen since that plywood ad with that Punjabi boy who remembers his previous life and talks in Tamil with his still living, 80 year old 'wife.'

Nethack

I was playing nethack late evening when three people saw me - one 'developer' dude and my boss and a 'systems' guy. I evaded the dev dude by saying that I was a network in it and I was pushing packets around. I couldn't say the same to my boss. I just said that was something my friend sent me and I was trying to figure out what it was. The third guy, who was a linux admin or something did not know what this was! How could they be computer engineers without knowing what it was? But then, most 'engineers' in India have no relevance to what they studied and their career. There are many guys here who 'studied' civil and mechanical engineering but wanted to get into only 'software field,' because 'companies like Infosys pay very well.' Anyway, some of my classmates are planning to go 'trekking' to Matheran and I am planning to go along. I don't want to miss it like last time when they went (sort of) rock climbing. Yeah.

Lightbulb joke

How many invisible pink unicorns does it take to change a lightbulb?

1) THERE IS ONLY ONE TRUE INVISIBLE PINK UNICORN (BBHHH), YOU HERETIC!!!
2) Funny joke, now make one of Buddha! You can't, otherwise you will be blown to hell with such a joke. Only true believers of The Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUH) are subjects of ridiculous "jokes"

Ms. Sushmita Sen vs [insert name here]

One Indian 'newspaper' - called so only because it is printed on paper - today reported about cyber squatters buying web domain names based on some 'bollywood' personalities.

Who would say that www.liveindia.com is Priyanka Chopra’s site or that www.fisheyenetwork.com is Pooja Bhatt’s? Others like Kareena Kapoor are totally disinterested in a cyber presence.

Says Kapoor, “I’m a hardcore Bollywood heroine and have no clue about the net or its misuse. Neither do I own a domain name. My staff handles all my mail.” Like Kareena many stars are shocked when told that their domain names could be abused and turned into porn sites.

Fisheyenetwork.com is not Pooja Bhatt's personal website, it is about her production company 'Fisheye Networks.' And, Kareena Kapoor '[has] no clue about the [inter]net or its misuse'. Maybe she had forgotten that it was just a few months before that a clip showing her tongue-wresting with her 'boyfriend' in a bar. The movie, caught on a mobile phone camera, was widely circulated through email and was available for downloads in some 'desi' websites (so was I told). Maybe she thought they were sent through 'MMS' alone, which is beyond the reach for most mobile users - cost of handset (which is coming down), cost of sending one big MMS (which they say is coming down), etc.

The main story was about Sushmita Sen, who said she was going to sue the squatter. While the news article is new, the news that the name sushmitasen.com was taken up by some Toronto guy is old.

Domain: SUSHMITASEN.COM

Created: 2003-05-30
Updated: 2005-06-27
Expires: 2006-05-30

Registrant
SUSHMITASEN.COM
c/o Nameview Whois IDentity Shield
141-757 W. Hastings St., Suite #777
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6C 1A1

For two years, didn't anyone know about this? Moreover, this has been registed by a name which doesn't look like a company to me. With the guy 'under the care of ' of Nameview Whois IDentity Shield (nameview.com)Repeated requests to view the webpage nameview.com were refused.

“The guy who has stolen the domain name is sitting in Toronto,” fumes Sen. “He should brace himself for a nightmare as I’m taking him to court.”

I have no experience of any courts, even within India, atleast till now. But, judging by the court cases that newspapers (real ones) report about, I think I must laugh at her naivety. Or, I could be wrong in this one.