31 July 2008

Evolution of Language

A friend of mine always interrupts when anyone uses the word "postponed", saying that there is no such word. It affects the actual discussion. Yeah I do agree, there was no such word. But when it is accepted and understood between all the people in India and even some dictionaries include that word as belonging to Indian English, I do not see a problem.

If someone is creative and cooks up a word in their mother tongue, they are viewed as smart people where as when you do that in a foreign language, your own people consider it as lack of fluency. The same applies for accent and pronunciation.

On the same note, there is another word: post-paid(use & pay), cooked up to be the opposite of pre-paid(pay & use) where, post-payable would have been more appropriate but, post-paid is easy to understand.

Let us keep the evolution going

22 July 2008

Powerless India

Every day power cut announced in Madras, due to power shortage. May be the consumption is going up and production is unable to keep up. If this is the problem, it could be overcome easily. Madras is the ideal place to harvest energy from the "Sun". It is always hot, four seasons a year, 10 years a decade! Hopefully this is not a gimmick to make people believe that the India-USA Nuclear deal is the only way to live normally.

A country can be called as developing only if it improves? I remember my colleague from Germany, who was surprised even by the short power failures due to technical faults which is quiet normal in India. Now add this to that, probably he wont accept India as a developing nation :(

09 July 2008

Luxury @ my disposal

Left from office by the afternoon shuttle @ 2pm from BTP to Silkboard. I was the lone passenger in the swaraj mazda 20+ seater, with driver and an attender. With the price of fuel sky-rocketing (rockets usually come down unless they escape the gravity), using the services of 2 men just for me was real luxury. I felt a bit uneasy doing so!

Also I used to wonder why Americans call Petrol as gas when it is actually liquid in state. Petrol is also known as gasoline and gasoline should have shortened to become gas. So petrol is gas which is actually liquid