still alive

alive.... but settling in....still dont have broadband.....been busy swimming n working ...will start posting again in july

outsourcing

whom would you rather believe... this ....


or the wise guys at onion....

irshad!!

And over at the tagging life blog, Westy has come up with this lyrical gem...

There is a valley in the east of spain
Where the clouds hang out, pouring rain
The valley is wiide and has a gentle slope
A fantastic place to have a dope

Boris...the spider

As the New York times says in its take on Yeltsin and his era,

No one recognized more than he how far short he fell of his goal. In his resignation speech, he told the Russian people: “I ask forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, in one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich, civilized future.”

At the end, he was a man worn down. “I feel like a runner who has just completed a supermarathon of 40,000 kilometers,” he wrote in his memoir. “I gave it my all. I put my whole heart and soul into running my presidential marathon. I honestly went the distance. If I have to justify anything, here is what I will say: If you think you can do it better, just try. Run those 40,000 kilometers. Try to do it faster, better, more elegantly, or more easily. Because I did it.”

In an era of manufactured political leaders, Yeltsin was the last of the old school politico's. Someone who could orate, who could mingle, who could get drunk, who could shake a leg, who would use the local transport, who would remember what it meant to be poor and disenfranchised and who would get angry at the state of things around him. Power corrupts and Yeltsin too left the stage to polite applause and muttered whispers, but for a brief moment in time, he was the man who dared raise his voice and take a hammer to the machine-state.

Perhaps it would have been better if he had been a spider, able to weave his web and hang by a thread, play the parlour games and tread lightly on the ground...
Still we must judge a man by his actions in his youth and middle age, not in his dotage. For those who remember, Boris was not a spider, but a bear of a man, poking his nose where it wasnt appreciated, shoving his way into places where he wasnt welcome and forever ready to stand up and climb on tanks and talk to the people directly.

Look, he's crawling up my wall
Black and hairy, very small
Now he's up above my head
Hanging by a little thread

Boris the spider
Boris the spider

Now he's dropped on to the floor
Heading for the bedroom door
Maybe he's as scared as me
Where's he gone now, I can't see

Boris the spider
Boris the spider

Creepy, crawly
Creepy, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly

There he is wrapped in a ball
Doesn't seem to move at all
Perhaps he's dead, I'll just make sure
Pick this book up off the floor

Boris the spider
Boris the spider

Creepy, crawly
Creepy, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly

He's come to a sticky end
Don't think he will ever mend
Never more will he crawl 'round
He's embedded in the ground

Boris the spider
Boris the spider

and i aint no animal....

excerpts from an article about a man from gorakhpur......full article here

"He apes buffalo's bellowing to such an extent that whenever he visits the cattle-shed, a simple call by him (Munna) makes all the buffaloes turn their attention towards him. Likewise, crows too hover around his head no sooner than he gives out a call of caw-caw," said Raju, one of Munna's friends. "

and another -

"It may be of interest to know that the famed hunter-turned naturalist, Jim Corbett had mastered the art imitating the roar of mating call given by a tigress. It is said that often, he relied on it to lure his game."

thank god for a free press.... we would be so deprived of astonishing information if not for them....

btw.. Shantaram, the book about a guy in mumbai, too had characters from Gorakhpur, the bear handlers who loved their bhaloo, went back with him to their home in Gkp.

message in a bullet

Excerpts from the video message that Cho sent to NBC

"You had 100 billion choices and ways to avoid today but you decided to spill my blood instead," Cho said in one of the more coherent passages aired by NBC. "You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off. ... I didn't have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," said Cho, the son of Korean immigrants who reportedly work in a dry cleaning business, in a passage apparently addressed to his victims. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. ... They weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything. "

shot through the heart...and you're to blame

Quoted from the Guardian - She said the gunman "was just a normal-looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout-type outfit. He wore a tan button-up vest, and this black vest, maybe it was for ammo or something

In virginia tech.... 32 people killed by someone wandering around in a boy scout outfit and spraying bullets..... hmmmmmm

totally wierd.... whatever happens... theres something rotten in denmark....why are schools and colleges the best targets? ..... why not target offices ( where people may actually thank you for giving them a break ) etc...why does it happen in schools and colleges mostly.....

One theory doing the rounds is that the guy was angry coz his girlfriend had been cheating on him.

wierder...

qant..ass

Update .. an anonymous commenter informs me that i am an idiot for posting this....and its patently false and hopelessly outdated; since the current aussie humor standards are hovering at 73% below 1997 levels ....

note to anonieperson... please take up matter with Tamanna... see below...

Hat tip to Tamanna

"
After every flight, Qantas pilots fill out a form called a gripe sheet, which conveys to the mechanics problems encountered with the aircraft during the flight that need repair or correction. The engineers read and correct the problem, and then respond in writing on the lower half of the form what remedial action was taken, and the pilot reviews the gripe sheets before the next flight. Never let it be said that ground crews and engineers lack a sense of humor.
(P = the problem logged by the pilot
S = the solution and action taken by the engineers)

P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.
P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.
P: Something loose in cockpit.
S: Something tightened in cockpit.
P: Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet per minute descent.
S: Cannot reproduce problem on ground.
P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
S: Evidence removed.
P: DME volume unbelievably loud.
S: DME volume set to more believable level.
P: Friction locks causes throttle levers to stick.
S: That's what they're there for.
P: IFF inoperative.
S: IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.
P: Suspected crack in windshield.
S: Suspect you're right.
P: Number 3 engine missing.
S: Engine found on right wing after brief search.
P: Aircraft handles funny.
S: Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right, and be serious.
P: Target radar hums.
S: Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.
P: Mouse in cockpit.
S: Cat installed.
P: Noise coming from under instrument panel. Sounds like a midget pounding on something with a hammer.
S: Took hammer away from midget.

:-D

Vonnegut 1922 - 2007

Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls Before Swine (1965), Mother Night (1966), Welcome to the Monkey House (stories, 1968), *Slaughterhouse Five; or the Children's Crusade: A Dance with Death (1969), Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (1973), Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapágos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), Hocus Pocus (1990), Timequake (1997), Bagombo Snuff Box (stories, 1999) and on and on ...unfortunately the chain shall stop now...and Kurt Vonnegut, god bless him, will no longer pour out the molten lumpy crackling prose that made each book of his feel like a journey in a amateurish space ship.

I was doing my summer internship in an architects office in Calcutta in the middle of the worst spells of summer that Kolkata has ever seen. Luckily the American Centre was just behind my office, and I took a membership in their library. For a couple of months while I commuted in trams, buses and trains, I was lost in the world of American writing. Not knowing much about American authors apart from irving wallace and robert ludlum etc, I took potluck each time, choosing books based on their titles. It was a good move, and led me to discover authors like Mailer, Styron, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Saroyan, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald et al and I was having fun escaping from the heat of the city, sitting in the airconditioned library, when I should have been standing by a construction site taking notes....but hey...

So one day I chose Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. With a title like that, you could hardly lose. Had a nice ring to it. By the time I had finished the book, I knew I had stumbled upon a treasure. Soon I had read the entire shelf and it was a lot of heavy reading to pack into a 19 yr olds head in the short span of a month, still I will always remember how it used to feel to dip into the purple-green prose of Vonnegut and emerge later refreshed and weary as if from a long journey.

Read yesterday that Vonnegut had passed away at the age of 84, in Manhattan. A giant, truly.

Links -
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/04/12/vonnegut_obit/

from those who knew him.

the official (sic) website

the wiki

Cold Turkey - An article by Vonnegut

Brief Bio

Quotes by Vonnegut

Fact of the day - go vegan

Fact: -The United States alone slaughters more than 10 billion land animals every year.

Interesting post in "Philosophical Musings blog" which pointed me to this article from where I pulled out the above factoid.

An excerpt -

Last year researchers at the University of Chicago took the Prius down a peg when they turned their attention to another gas guzzling consumer purchase. They noted that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we'd need if we just ate pasta primavera, faux chicken nuggets, and other plant foods. On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels--and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide--as does a calorie of plant protein. The researchers found that, when it's all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.

According to the UN report, it gets even worse when we include the vast quantities of land needed to give us our steak and pork chops. Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the total land surface of the planet. As a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of slashing and burning the world's forests. Today, 70% of former Amazon rainforest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. These forests serve as "sinks," absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, and burning these forests releases all the stored carbon dioxide, quantities that exceed by far the fossil fuel emission of animal agriculture.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the real kicker comes when looking at gases besides carbon dioxide--gases like methane and nitrous oxide, enormously effective greenhouse gases with 23 and 296 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, respectively. If carbon dioxide is responsible for about one-half of human-related greenhouse gas warming since the industrial revolution, methane and nitrous oxide are responsible for another one-third. These super-strong gases come primarily from farmed animals' digestive processes, and from their manure. In fact, while animal agriculture accounts for 9% of our carbon dioxide emissions, it emits 37% of our methane, and a whopping 65% of our nitrous oxide.

Its a college, its a university, no its Infosys Mysore

In a story on how India is running out of tech workers, and the ways companies like Infosys are adapting to it, by setting up virtually their own educational institutions..the Time magazine reports

"It has 120 faculty members, more than 80 buildings, 2,350 hostel rooms and a 500,000-square-foot education complex. There's a movie complex built inside a geodesic dome. An army of workers sweeps the already-spotless streets and trims the already-perfect lawns.

Month by month, it's getting bigger. Today, some 4,500 students at a time attend the 16-week course for new employees. By September, there will be space for 13,000.

Infosys spent $350 million on the campus, and will spend $140 million this year on training, said Pai, the human resources chief."

april fools day

Courtesy of the careerbuilder website...heres a list of the funniest 10 pranks pulled off at work on April Fools Day.


1. Sent a letter signed by the president of the company that informed employees they would have to take potty breaks in alphabetical order.

2. Decreased the size of boss's lab coat. Joke continued after April 1 with boss perplexed by his coats getting tighter each week while he was dieting so diligently.

3. Made for a very foggy day with dry ice in the urinal.

4. Changed all of boss's reading glasses to clear glass.

5. Sent a note to co-worker's pager that said to contact "George." The number was to the White House.

6. Employee went to the restroom and when he came out, he ran into a wall of tape draped across the doorway, courtesy of his team.

7. Put "random burping" program on boss's computer that would loudly burp every few seconds. It went on for days.

8. Brought in jelly doughnuts filled with ketchup.

9. Had someone with a "questionable" profession call the office and ask for directions.

10. CEO placed a very large and official-looking "For Sale" sign in front of the building.

The essential guide to email writing

Interesting review in the New Yorker, about a book on how to email. This book seems to lay down the rules for this new medium, and it reads ....

Shipley and Schwalbe enumerate six essential e-mail types (the Ask, the Answer, Grovelling, etc.), eight deadly sins (too casual, too vague, too illegal, etc.), and a four-step checklist (S.E.N.D.) that reflects the authors’ broad-ranging e-mail conservatism. “S” stands for simple, “E” for effective, “N” for necessary, “D” for done. Generally, they’d have you hit “send” later and less often. They offer a hermeneutics of the cc, an invocation against the word “please,” and a number of rather chilling but by now self-evident rules (“Never forward without permission, and assume everything you write will be forwarded”). The reader gulps at the thought of unexploded self-incriminations ticking in servers around the world. The authors, astonishingly, come out in favor of exclamation points (“ ‘Thanks!!!!’ is way friendlier than ‘Thanks’ ”), abbreviations (“Is LOL . . . really inherently more opaque than FYI?”), and emoticons (those smiley faces and the like may “bug many people but they make us smile”).

and everyday the paperboy brings more

News of the day.... After 60 years of independence, we finally got around to doing a survey of our children being abused...and the results -

"More than half of India’s child population has been scarred by sexual abuse. The nauseating statistic, indicating that 53 per cent of the country’s children are sexually assaulted, was revealed by the Government of India’s first survey on child abuse."

read more here -

Embedded :)

You know when technology has totally embedded itself in your life when -

- after embedding the micro iPod chip in your testicle it can sense when you're having sex and play the right music.

a quarter empty

A quarter of the year is almost over. 3 more quarters left to finish off 007. Its been a busy time, and now the summer is threatening to wipe out all memories of the season past. The north Indian heat will be on us soon. Power outages will be extremely common. Ice will be the most used commodity from the refigerator and the streets will have a deserted look in the day. Dust storms will swirl up and people will get thinner and wearier. We will be praying for the rain and clouds and cursing global warming.

The year started off on a quiet note. The worst seemed over but noone was expecting a very quick upturn in the state of things. The world seemed a mess, with China becoming a capitalist sweatshop capital ( funny how the communists ended up exploiting the workers ), Russia getting scarily organised and authoritarian, America muddling along with George Bush and not really caring anymore, Europe not really looking outwards, Africa suffering from catastrophe overdose, the Muslim world trapped in a hobsons choice or either dictators or religious leaders and Australia having its taps run dry. Still everyone felt that it couldnt possibly get worse and maybe computers, education, internet and globalization would start moving people into more sensible endeavors.

got tagged...so here goes

had an attack of the killer tomatoes....and they tagged me ..

so here goes....

There was a young businesswoman in a bar in brazeel,
I got close but she said it cost five dollars just for a feel,
To get more you have to pay more,
she winked at me as she closed the door,
These are hard times and this is my only marketable skeel!!!

suggestions for further stanza's are welcomed. If you get tagged..well you know what to do...write one...and tag someone else

world cup starts....

well the cricket world cup is about to start....and 15 out of the 16 teams participating have been part of the british empire...with only the netherlands being the non colonial team... Its not a big thing for most of the world...but for Indians...this is the world series cup, the fifa world cup and the olympics combined into one long awaited sportsfest.. Its happening in the west indies...and this promises to be the best world cup ever, as it plays out in barbados, in jamaica, in port of spain and all the other beautiful sunny islands in the carribbean...

Google today had this logo .... pretty nicely done...

party on!!

The Times of India reports - Among those arrested were call centre and IT firm employees, children of affluent businessmen, air hostesses and college students. The police seized seven bottles of phenylfine hydrochloride, two-and-half-kg of marijuana (ganja), 100 gm of hashish (charas) beer cans, cigarettes, music systems, 45 cars, 29 two-wheelers and an unspecified number of mobile phones were seized from the spot.

The revellers had come for the party from Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Belgaum, Chennai, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. They were charged an entry fee of Rs 500 per person to enter the party zone.

Nangre-Patil told TOI that 50 per cent of the names and addresses given by the suspects turned out to be fake. Some addresses were correct because they were taken from credit cards and driving licences. Interestingly, at the (badminton hall) court, friends and family members provided cigarettes to the suspects from windows. As soon as the judge left the court room, a few youths started singing, clapping and dancing!

the indian hell

An Indian dies and goes to hell. There he finds that

there is a different hell for each country. He goes first to the German hell and asks "What do they do here?" He is told "First they put you in an electric chair for an hour. Then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour. Then the German devil comes in and whips you for the rest ofthe day." The man does not like the sound of that at all, so he moves on.

He checks out the USA hell as well as the Russian hell and many more. He discovers that they are all more or less the same as the German hell.

Then he comes to the Indian hell and finds that there is a very long line of people waiting to get in.

Amazed he asks "What do they do there?" He is told "First they put you in an electric chair for an hour. Then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour. Then the Indian devil comes in and whips you for the rest of the day." But that is exactly the same as all the other hells

Why are there so many people waiting to get in?" Because here there is never any electricity,so the electric chair does not work, someone has stolen all the nails, and the devil is a Govt. servant, so he comes in, signs in the register and then goes to the canteen!"

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

I look at this woman and I can’t feel anything but rage. What did we gain? I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate. They’ll feel pity and maybe some anger, but she’s one of us. She’s not a girl in jeans and a t-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor third-world countries- that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone. We consoled ourselves after the war with the fact that we at least had a modicum of safety in our homes. Homes are sacred, aren’t they? That is gone too.

read this post by the riverbend girl in baghdad.

quote of the day :)

Never have more children than you have car windows.

America

Now that three months have passed since my return from America, I find myself able to look back upon visit there with more perspective. So here goes, " A beginners guide to America - The north eastern part "

Disclaimer - I only saw a few cities and towns. Bits of Boston, Manhattan, Baltimore, DC, Pittsburgh and Buffalo. I saw a lot of Air Tran and also travelled by Greyhound, Amtrak, Chinese Bus Service, Taxicabs, Cars and on foot. I had never visited this country and my first visit was if not an eyeopener, but definitely a fresh experience.

Ever since my return from the US of A I have been trying to put a finger on what exactly it was that struck me as different. What was the character of the place that I visited. How did it make me feel.

As always when I cant think of a one word answer, I settle for 10. So there goes - 10 words that describe what I felt -

1. Scale - I felt everything was a bit out of scale, or atleast in a different scale than poor old india. The cars were bigger and so were the people. The buildings were bigger and so were the styrofoam cups. It seemed like everything had 10% extra, to make it bigger and better. Coming from a place where a lot of people share less resources and can't really afford to waste anything, the feeling of being in a place of plenty was exhilarating. It however did feel out of place, and not in sync with its users. The scale was not really so firmly linked to the Human Scale and sometimes one felt out of place in some settings, as if we were preparing all of this for some super being who would come and occupy the world we were creating.

2. Rumble - This was the soundtrack of America. The deep rumble of rubber on tarmac. No horns honking, no whistles blowing, no voices arguing, no brakes screeching, no birds twittering. Just the steady sound of rubber purring over the roads. Wherever one went, one was followed by this steady buzz and hiss. The roads were smooth, the cars in good shape. So no creaking sounds, no bumping sounds. Just a smooth steady rumble all day and all night, everyday and everynight, everywhere.

3. Sugar - This was the taste of america. Specially corn based fructose. Sweeteners. Additives. Sweet stuff everywhere. On donuts, in milkshakes, in fizzy drinks, sweets, candy and desserts. Some cold drinks had so much sugar, that if you let them stand for a while and then take a sip you felt like you were drinking syrup.

got tired...will continue later.

back...

4. Alchohol - Alchohol was everywhere. Socializing means drinking alchohol. Having a good time means drinking lots of liquor. Amazing variety of wine, beer, whiskey, rum, vodka, tequila in the stores where one would almost get giddy drunk just browsing through the displays. Favourites- Sam Adams, Guinness, Jim Beam, all varieties of tequila. Put on lots of weight and developed a curious dependency on the divine spirit. Gradually returning to normal and drying out.

5. Sterile and Fertile - These two words kept popping up in my head when i roamed around america. Sometimes it seemed so cut and dried. So antiseptic and so squeaky clean. Sterile means

Not producing or incapable of producing offspring. Not producing or incapable of producing seed, fruit spores, or other reproductive structures. Used of plants or their parts. Producing little or no vegetation; unfruitful: sterile land.
Free from live bacteria or other microorganisms: a sterile operating area; sterile instruments. Lacking imagination, creativity, or vitality. Lacking the power to function; not productive or effective; fruitless: a sterile discussion.

It did seem like the last generation. There didnt seem to be anything new springing up, any new directions, new movements, fresh growths. America seemed stuck in the mould of itself. To grow is to change. To change one must shed some part of the old. Thats where I felt the society was a bit sterile, since to shed some part of the old now might get called Un-American. There was a bit too much predictability in the experiences one had there.

The land was fertile though. Very fertile. Lush turgid rivers, fat green trees, huge overfed squirrels and enormous quantities of food. The human layer which has been laid over the earth layer seemed incongruous, a sterile icing on a rich nutty cake. I kept hoping to find something organic, something that grew out of the earth and grew according to the constraints of nature. Instead of that, one could feel the heavy machinery and the imposing human will that had leveled mountains, flattened hills and build huge boxes of concretes called malls everywhere.

6. Smile - I never saw so many smiles in a day as I did in America. I felt happy thinking that the sight of me was making people light up with a big smile, but later I came to realise that its the default facial expression. Everyone had great white teeth, perfect dental work and the ability to keep smiling for longer than I would have thought physically possible.

7. Color - Black and White and the shades in between - For the first time I was living somewhere where most of the people didnt look like me, not even in the shades of their skin colors. I ended up sharing a house with a pale gentle commercial artist and a stocky grinning tanned engineer. It was nice feeling to see so much variety around. African origins, Asian origins, European origins, Middle eastern origins and the various other types were all mixed up in the malls and in the streets. DC was pretty nicely mixed up and I missed that when I travelled to Boston. Somehow there was less variety there. I saw a west african pub which was filled with the sound of reggae and shook with energy while besides it was a cafe pub with classic rock playing and white folks sitting around conversing. Parallel worlds which met and separated and met and separated again.

8. Sex

die tv

TV is unique in the EEG activity it summons in the human brain, and unique as well in that it drastically reduces the metabolic rate of the human organism. When you sleep, you use more energy than when you watch TV. When you stare at a painting or read a book or knit or fart in bed, you use more energy. EEG activity during television-watching is marked by alpha waves, those dreamy, spacey waves that also exist between sleeping and waking--a passive state in which sustained intense critical thought is pretty much impossible. Alpha waves are also associated with coma.

the above was from a nice article i read. Read it here.


-- Disclaimer - I never owned a TV except for once in 2004 when i bought one as a package deal from a guy leaving town. After a few months, I realised my mistake and promptly gave it away to a pal who got married.

indian team for the world cup?

I feel the following pick themselves.
The 11 member team would be -

uthappa
ganguly
dravid
tendulkar
dhoni
agarkar
kumble
2 out of - yuvraj / kartik / sehwag / mongia
2 out of - sreesanth/powar/munaf / Pathan / zaheer

All these names would be in the final 15 member squad.


I would go with

Uthappa
Ganguly
Dravid
Tendulkar
Yuvraj
Sehwag
Dhoni
Pathan
Agarkar
Kumble
Zaheer

new post #2 of the new year.

2006 was not such a bad year after all. It was also a very interesting year. It marked the peak of the neo-conservative, american imperialist ideology and the latter part of the year saw the climbdown from the lofty peaks of righteous rhetoric.
As Nostradamus predicted, it was a man in a blue turban who rose in the middle east and threw down the newest challenge to the rather confused american war machine. In fact there were many men, and lots of differently coloured turbans which flickered on and off CNN throughout the year. Muqtada Al Sadr managed to become an increasingly important figure, while Nasrullah came from behind to capture the hearts and minds of a fractured middle east like no one had done before.

Sometimes the west forgets that the east is not different. Just like the pioneers in the west preferred to die in glory than live in slavery, so does the Arab. Nasrullah and hezbollah gave some pride back to the Arab world, and the arab world was ready to forgive the destruction of beirut and the loss of homes and infrastructure, just to be able to see someone at least stand up to the war machine. With the kidnapping of a few israeli soldiers, the destruction of an Israeli ship and the grim dogfight to the end with patched together katyusha rockets, Hezbollah at least managed to keep the hope alive in the hearts of ordinary arabs and served as an inspiration for others struggling to assert their independence.

In personal terms it was an interesting year too. I roamed around the country a bit and also started to throw my weight around work and home. After years of living in silence, exile and cunning, the combined effect of a months vacation and two months regular swimming made me sit up and demand more. So off I went to the US of A to see for myself what god and mammon hath wrought. The three months I spent there were very interesting. I didnt see much except the north eastern corner, but what I saw was fascinating. I still havent been able to figure out how to write what I felt and observed about the land of the native american, and maybe I will attempt something in the next post. I saw the summer and fall in the area between washington DC to Boston. I saw halloween weekend in manhattan and drove to the canada border to see the niagara fall. It was a lot of fun, but I couldnt wait to get back home :)

a new year..a new post...a new beginning or a new direction

hi there.... hope you read this..because this is written for you. Hope you are having a great start to the new year and hope everythings going fine. I never thought when I started to write this blog a year ago that I would actually have any readers. I put links to it everywhere, in my emails, on my IM status messages and on my profiles in orkut, linkedin, ryze etc etc. Some time ago I started to monitor my site traffic statistics and found that there were actually a lot of people who landed up here while searching for the hundreds of little things that google is so useful for. There also were some regular readers who even came back to read this blog when there were no new posts. I would have stopped writing and lost interest soon enough if it was not for your constant encouragement... thank you!!!!!!

Now that I finally kicked the holiday rust off my typing fingers, I wonder what I should post about. So many things have been happening in this world. Technology has hooked us in its electric embrace and we are all connected, but now we come to the next question.....what do we do after we connect?

The last year was quite eventful. I had just moved into a new house, was about to complete a year in a job ( a first ) and was just starting out this blog. Looking back at the posts I find that the original purpose of the blog, that of a diary for myself got left behind somewhere and it ended up being more of a scrapbook of odds and ends which somehow got stuck in my head. I found I wasnt too comfortable writing personal entries like - I bought a new toothbrush and X didnt like it. She told me to get an electric one, but I went and bought a shaver instead.

Also I found that I read more and discovered more about the internet since I started blogging. Its so easy to research something on the internet and you can do your writing, communicating and research on the same machine, so really theres no excuse for not getting your facts right. Just a quick google search, a peek through wikipedia, some copying and pasting and there you are , with all the information at your fingertips.

The last year also saw me return to the pattern of my yearly vacation. I used to take a months vacation every year ( usually after quitting my job ), but had stopped doing so for the last couple of years. This year I did it in style, taking advantage of the low cost airlines launched in India, to spend three weeks roaming around south and east India. From the ridge of Bangalore to the coast of Pondycherry, to the delta of Kolkata to the valley of Guwahati to the hills of Shillong, it was a lovely mad swing with just a backpack and it was great fun.

This was also the first year after quite some time that I found a convenient and big enough swimming pool in the neighbourhood and I spend the summer happily splashing away. It helped clear the head, tone the body and get rid of the toxins and cut down on smoking. The lungs opened up, the complexion cleared, energy returned and life was fun again.

happy new year

happy new year everyone.......have fun :)