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 :(

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

10 incarnations

Watched Kamalhasan's Dasavataram and enjoyed it. Only the protagonist looks like Kamal, they could have used 9 other actors for the other 9 avatars. I mean to say that I enjoyed the screenplay except the 12th century scenes are not related to the story,(James bond/high-tech + Ramanarayanan do not gel well) and it is also unreal (bad acting, very neat and clean crowd etc). I never got the feeling of awkward camera to show more than one Kamal in a single frame! But make-up sometimes doesn't fit well at some scenes. Some drops i liked

* Bush: can we drop an atomic bomb over the bio-hazard to prevent it from spreading?
* Fletcher(US) to Japanese: remember Hiroshima? Japanese: Remember pearl harbour?
* Showing that the monkey knows to press the keys first and later showing it use the passwords
* Balram Naidu's (Telugu) preference for Telugu over Tamil & Tamil over English.
* Tamil kamal on speaking in English instead of Tamil to the Telugu guy: "Some people from Andhra who learned Tamil will save Tamil"
* "It would be nice if God was true" ==> ?
* Somewhat forced God versus[why is this always versus ;)] science discussion
* Media declaring Asin as Girlfriend of the US Scientist [anyway it becomes true later]
* Is luck == god? People forced into mosque for investigation are saved from tsunami, tsunami saves more people by killing a fraction of them...
* I have the same sane ideas as of the protagonist, so I like it more :-)

What about you? Liked it?

Misproportion

Management people "often" say that God has given 2 ears and 1 mouth, use them proportionately. They mean to say listen twice as much as you speak. But me a technical/logical person feel that they are asking to do the opposite. With 2 ears when you listen for a minute, it is equivalent to 2 minutes of listening, so we need to speak for 2 minutes to balance it!

Sachin walks the talk

There was an advertisement on TV, which shows kids who loose on different sports and give reasons.. "because... because..." then Sachin says "Losers will always have reasons... " The News continues " Sachin accuses 3rd umpire after loosing against Mohali! Yes Sachin proved that losers always have reasons to blame

Living in the past

August 14, 2003
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz : Rs 38,000

Jan 2004:
PlayStation 2 : Rs. 15,990

Feb 2005:
iPod shuffle (1GB): Rs 12,400

today:
Intel Pentium 4 3 GHz : Rs.2699.00
PlayStation 2 : Rs. 6,990
iPod shuffle (1GB): Rs. 2,700

Yeah but today we have core2duo, iPhone, Playstation 3, right???? If we are prepared to live in the past(which is not so far behind considering the pace of gadgets evolution) the price comes down manifold, IOW if we want to be on the bleeding-edge, we need to pay more:(

So If you are a consumer, better live in the past and if you are a business, then try to lead the race, to charge a premium from your customers. BTW why all this rant? Bought a PS2 :-)

BUT PS2 doesnt feel like a gadget of the past. It might be good enough if you do not have a HDTV, for SDTV it is good enough(gr8). The first game I bought is "God of War 2". Though I hate both the God and War, I like God of War 2. I usually play driving sims and split-screen racers. But I got GOW2 just coz Gran Turismo & Burnout were not available at that Sony world.

Weak end

I went out for a official-{non-official}-trip (IOW official picnic) to Bheemeshwari, a fishing camp which is around 3 hours from Bangalore. This duration, and no of people were much smaller than, what I was used to. But it was nice. Got introduced with the people with whom I would be sharing the office space here after.

Played and discussed a lot. The weekend ended with some chat about Language of thought

Corrupt People == corrupt politicians == corrupt Country

If a party bribes voters with their own money, it is illegal. But if they promise to pay/bribe after they will win, that too not from their pocket but country's money, it it legal.

Political parties in India use this huge hole and bribe the voters with TV, loan waivers, unfair reservations for the majority etc... and they do win elections using these cheap means at the cost of the country.

But it is not correct to blame only the politicians, it is the cheap people who are happy, as long as they are benefiting at the cost of ones own country. As long as such cheap, stupid people are majority in a country, the nation is destined to have corrupt politicians.
But the minority who are not really amused by these bribery are at loss. That is the problem with democracy :(

Also I hope one day people would directly vote for policies rather than vote for people who will device policies. But with these kind of people around it would !@$#$%@#%$# I seriously doubt the benefits of democracy. Law should evolve for the society to evolve, but law is becoming extinct.