The Boom Paradox

Wherever we go nowadays, whatever be the topic of discussion, everyone ends up talking about only one thing: India is booming.
Yes, India is booming enough for the rest of the world to take notice. It has one of the highest GDPs, its an upcoming superpower, Bush is advising his citizens to learn Hindi, the word 'crores' is common vocabulary, standard of living has risen, every international company is looking to expand their operations in India, now when you need to buy a car you do not need to choose from ambassador or fiat- you can opt for a Toyota or BMW, if you are 30 years old and have been in the IT industry you comfortably own a luxury car, live in a posh apartment and have traveled all over the world multiple times, the stock market doubled in the span of a year, cellphone users are growing by leaps and bounds, India is zipping ahead on the development highway. Yes I am proud to be an Indian.

Now let us broaden our horizon a little more, lets peek outside our window, look beyond the corridors of air conditioned offices and five star restaurants, lets look at some stark reality:

50% women in India are still uneducated.
Female infanticide is so high that for every 1000 males there are as less as 750 females in certain states. In some states the situation is so bad that girls are sold for the purpose of marriage because there is a dearth.
26% of Indians are still below poverty line. In some states its almost 50%.
There are over 40% villages in the country where the children are deprived of education. They are either forced to work with their parents, as more hands to work would mean more money to bring home; or there are just not enough schools providing primary education.

A young child laboring all day in the field, without shelter and protection, sleeping on an empty stomach, hoping for a cool breeze at night for a peaceful sleep and dreaming about going to school someday- you think he cares about India being a superpower? Does India's fast growing economy affect him?
There are villages without pure drinking water, where women queue up early morning in front of tubewells with buckets and pails to ensure their children do not go thirsty. They still light lamps in the evening in their small earthen huts unaware of an approaching storm that could sweep away their thatched roof.
A girl child is killed lest her father has to pay dowry in order to get her wed.
A rickshaw puller loses his wife to malignant malaria since he could not afford the treatment. He then spends his savings to buy a mosquito net so that his children can sleep without being attacked by mosquitoes at night.
An average tax-paying middle class government official still rides his scooter through bumpy roads, satisfies the financial needs of policemen, waits for water supply, sleeps in 40 degree centigrade without a fan because there is a power cut and strives to educate his children and support his aged parents whose pensions of course never reach them. He has not seen Disneyland or sat in BMWs. And this kind of person constitutes a majority of the population. Ask him and he will laugh at the thought of India being a super power.
Even if you want to look from your angle, the angle of a mid twenties successful software or finance professional who pays 30 bucks for a cup of coffee, wears Tommy Hilfiger, watches movies in multiplexes, sits in cool offices of multinational companies, travels onsite to earn in dollars and makes his family proud....even from his angle, he still has to ride through potholes, stay stuck in traffic for hours, bribe government officials to get a simple work done and pay taxes which in turn pays for abroad trips of his elected minister's children.
And you still think we are heading towards being a super power? Yes we have the potential, we have brains and the advantage of being English speaking, we have good primary education, we have a huge population, we also have extremely intellectual president and prime minister and I will never deny that. But there is a long way to go.
Infrastructure, education, disease control, poverty control: these are primary issues to be taken care of. And the root of all these problems is one: corruption!
If only our politicians were honest enough, all the incoming money and our taxes could be utilized for benefits. For providing free education, for improving roadways not only in the four metropolis and Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad but also in the rural areas, providing pure drinking water and electricity, providing medical support.
Education will in turn take care of other problems like aids awareness, population control, female infanticide, dowry etc. Education will also lead to choice of better political leaders. Its a cause-effect relation.
Unless the growth brought forth by the booming industries is channeled towards the majority of the population in rural India, the growth will only serve to create a huge social and economic imbalance and inequality.
The common man who lives off his daily wages needs to be reassured with care.
Every citizen has to have faith in the government, in the law. To build this faith there is the need of commitment, sacrifice and honesty. And who is willing to dedicate that?
Its good to dream but its important to contribute to achieve this dream. Lets think about it.

Cross promotion at its best

Apple surely aces marketing. Check this out.

P.S: Cross promoting is when two or more businesses promote their products or services together. It works better for businesses that have the same target audience, but are not in direct competition with each other.

Finding my way...

I have a bad sense of direction. Whenever I reach a junction I am confused whether to take a left or a right. Sometimes I go with my intuition. Sometimes I don't think, just drive. Most of the times I am wrong and then I have to look for an appropriate place to take a U-Turn. If I don't find an appropriate place I keep driving, knowing well that I am headed west when I am supposed to go east. Soon I am lost. If I am alone, not queueing up other cars behind me, I make a call to my GPS service (A on the phone with google maps :D) . Yes I need a GPS but they can also be out of date. I get worked up and begin to fret and then terribly miss my country , miss the Indian GPSs.
You know what I am talking about: the autowallahs and rickshaw-wallahs or shopkeepers or any pedestrian...just simply stop the car and ask "Bhaiya yahan se X tak kaise jaaun?"
There will be enthusiastic replies with detailed gesticulated explanations.
Bangalore autowallah:"Madam, left maari. Next circle right maari."
Calcutta rickshaw-wallah:"Didi, shaamne giye baandike jaan. Tar por crossing'e daandike ghurben"
Mumbai taxi-wallah:"Pehle left maarne ka hai, phir aage signal se right maarne ka hai"
Chennai autowallah:"Madam english. No hindi"
Then you reach till wherever they have guided you and repeat the same question with a new bunch of people.
I like it :) and I miss it :(


While writing about junctions and directions my mind began to draw an analogy of the situation to decision making.
Yeah I am always at a junction when it comes to critical decision making. There are invariably multiple paths to choose from and each looks equally likely and prospective to the other. Some paths can be ruled out with little effort but ultimately there is always a bifurcation to choose from. I try to take a more professional and analytical approach: weighing out pros and cons on excel sheets, color coding the choices,assigning them weights and sorting the columns. There is almost always a tie. Then there are calls to help services: A, mom-dad-B and sometimes friends. That leaves me more confused. Since now I have 3 for the matter, 2 against the matter. Should I try another couple of people? Its like tossing a coin in the hope of heads; if heads appears stop else toss an odd number of times till you get the maximum occurances of heads! Silly I agree, the fact that I opted for a second toss itself indicates what I am inclined towards. The risk in this case however is that there are no autowallahs and pedestrians and shopkeepers whose directions I can blindly follow. In this case there is no opportunity of a U-Turn. In this case if I am lost I have to find a detour. Myself. With the aid of my gut.

Isn't making a decision for equally prospective untrodden paths always a gamble? Maybe not for many, but for people who belive that good and bad coexist and that there is no such state as utopia it might be a little more confusing. Yes we can estimate consequences, make a few future predictions, look in the blind spots, have a hind sight and foresight but how accurate can we get? If we choose path 1 today it could lead our life to a completely different track. In just a split second if we had chosen path 2 where would we have landed? How would it be if I could trace back my life to the split second decisions that I have made, opt for the other paths that I rejected earlier and see what life had in store for me. It would be an opportunity to prove or disprove the "grass is always greener on the other side" myth/fact. No, I am perfectly happy with my today...just curious.

Not equal to equality

A medical student died in protest of the increase of quota for higher education admits to Indian institutions and the media is not willing to cover it. The quota is for backward classes (supposedly people who belong to a lower caste in the social structure and who are minorities)

Are these so called backward classes really backward? They study in the same schools, eat the same food, work in same organizations, earn the same money, get promotions based on their performance, have similar social life and are treated equally (Yeah, wake up this is the 21st century. We don't believe in untouchables!). How many times have you mistreated your friends because they were OBCs? Have we not shared lunch in school and studied and played together? Do we not interact with them freely and openly without any biases? At least if we are going for higher education we are wise enough to surpass this discrimination.
Then why this inequality?
From personal experience:
I remember distinctly: two friends, with the same background, same social status, same 14 years of schooling in one of the best schools in town, attended the same coaching centers, aspiring to be engineers. A gets a rank of 200 and B gets a rank of 370. A always wanted to do Computer Science from the best college but doesn't make it in the counselling session. Why? The cut off for CompSci seats was at rank 175. But B belonged to a minority community so he happily sails into Computer Science in the best college. A is disappointed and forced to take up Electrical in a less ranked college. Surprisingly B's family's household income and financial status was way better than A's. Her wish: I will marry a person from a minority community, at least my children will not have to face what I faced.

Why should a person who has not worked hard enough for an examination or maybe is not sutiable enough, get a better admit than someone who is much more capable than him just because the former's surname catogorizes him as a backward class. Aren't we losing out on better professionals?

Is this *equality* that the government is trying to portray or is it one more of their strategies to win the minority votes?
I don't think they are doing away with discrimination by raising reservations, they are encouraging it. They are provoking people to continue their belief in caste and stratas.
This is the defeat of merit at the hands of discrimination.
This is a hindrance to a well developed nation.

Thrills and chills

Back after a long vacation...

Theme park thrills
Rides that sent chills
Shamu's splashes
Dolphins' dashes
Penguins and seals
In control of fast wheels
Simulated earthquakes
Twister - so not fake
Shark attacks in Jaws
Eaten by dinosaurs
Loony toons
Scary goons
Back to the future
Islands of adventure
Haunted mansion
Magic kingdom
Shrek in 4D
Laughter and screams
Alien encounters
Dangerous roller coasters
Revenge of the Mummy
That feeling in the tummy
Fairy tale parade
Fireworks in the end

Thank you Walt Disney for 4 days of unadulterated fun!

(That was some effort in trying to rhyme! )
Walt Disney's contribution to humankind is magnanimous. Just the fact that his creations can bring a smile to the faces of so many of us irrespective of age, can distract us from our thoughts and worries is an achievement in itself.

On our drive back we were discussing the fact that all these rides, roller coasters and simulations do manage to thrill us but the fact that we know from deep within that we are safe and nothing can happen prevents the completion of the adrenaline gush. So, the question is what kind of an *aritificial* enviroment can actually arouse real fear, the spirit of real adventure like say falling into a lake of crocodiles, unarmed, feeling the movements of their slithery bodies in the water, being able to see the sharp teethed open mouth of the animals at an arm's length knowing that there is nothing that can save you other than yourself or being actually pushed from the top of a tall tower without any seat belt or rope protecting you or pulling you back, where you know that in a few seconds you will land on your face on the ground below, smashed, your bones shattered or maybe enter a deserted haunted house alone without a torch or a weapon, hearing eerie noises whose source you can't trace back, feeling a sudden gush of wind on your neck, where you have to feel the walls to move forward or being in the middle of an 8.3 richter earthquake where you have to run to save yourself being buried under concrete, the walls collapsing an inch behind you, people screaming.
The conclusion derived from the discussion was - induce an artificial nightmare. Hypnotize the adventure-seeker and throw him into those situations in his dreams. There he has no seat belts or weapons or the knowledge that its just a ride and it will end in sometime. He is alone facing his worst fears. That should be a spine chilling!

Geekily cool

Ok, looks like I am a nerd, haha. By the standards of this quiz anyone who has spend 4 long years in engineering school and is into a software job now will be a nerd. Stumbled upon this from a friend's blog and because I had nothing better to do, I took it. So if you are finding ways to kill time, go ahead and check it out.

I had always associated nerds/geeks with messy-haired, bespectacled middle aged men in laboratories working on rats and gas emitting colorful liquids. But in recent times the scenario has definitely changed. Gates, Page, Brin, Jobs etc have raised the bar and set a new trend. Now its cool to be geeky.

Ok here are a few questions that I think, if one can answer correctly, is into geekdom, at least in the computer world.(No I dont know some of them myself but have seen people around me do it).
Before you proceed if you do not know who all the people I mentioned above are, lets talk about something else.

1. Do you know more than 4 languages (if you are thinking of hindi, english, french then....well proceed if you want to pass time)
2. Do you know how to read a core dump and debug it?
3. Can you create your own smilies and use it on an instant messenger in about 5-7 mins?
4. Can you explain Eistein's theory of Relativity to a 7 year old?
5. Have you contributed to a wiki?
6. Have you gotten your hand dirty in open source?
7. Have you been on Ruby on Rails ?
8. Given a Windows desktop and internet connection how can you transfer songs onto your ipod which are not on sale and can only be streamed? Time limit to implement: 5 mins
9. Are all your gadgets synched? address book,calendar, to-dos etc on laptop, cell phone, palm
10. Have you explored into home automation?
11. Do you still use Mapquest and Yahoo finance and IE 6?
12. Can you explore Mars anytime?
13. Can you build your own Tivo?
14. Have you printed documents or sent videos through BlueTooth?
15. Have you worked on more than 3 different operating systems?
16. How many utilities have you written for your own convinience?
17. Design the next generation photo album and photo frame. Time limit: 3 mins
18. Do you know the PS3 release dates?
19. Do you know how to keep your web page safe from web spiders and spambots?
20. Are you in the habit of solving cryptic crosswords and playing Sudoku?
21. Do you read Engadget and Gizmodo?
22. Do you shop from ThinkGeek?
23. Do you listen to concertos?
24. Do you think PI was a cool movie?

Yeah thats geekdom!

One of my favorites: (brownie points for decoding the message)

Aromas

Recently I discovered that smells influence my mind more than I thought.
For example the fresh smell of the new pot pourrie that I have kept in the wide mouthed vase on my bedside table soothens me when I settle myself in bed with a book at the end of a long day.
Or the fragrance of sandalwood incense sticks in the house arouses a pure and clean feeling. I can almost hear the sound of conch shells from our little "thakur ghor" (small temple in the house) at home in the evenings.
I love the smell of wet earth. It is the identity of the elements, of Mother Nature. Nowadays the same smell makes me miss India. For some reason I cannot associate that smell with any other land.
The aroma of a freshly baked cake, right out of the oven reminds me of childhood birthdays with family.
The smell of strong, freshly brewed coffee links to concentration, late nights and deadlines.
The crisp smell of the pages of a new book excites me. I associate it with adventure, wisdom and collection.
The smell of washed and ironed linen transports me to the hospital bed where I had stayed for 4 days during my surgery last year.
The smell of petrol, I associate with the Iraq war somehow.

There are several other smells that mean more than just a smell to me.

Of course I will write only about fragrances.

Survival of the Fittest

David Blaine survived after being immersed in water for 177 hours and attempting to break the world record for holding his breath underwater.They said he was doing this to test his physical, mental and emotional endurance.
This morning while driving to work we discussed the possibility of the evolution of a more tolerant species if the likes of David Blaine united and gave birth to a new generation. Is evolution too in our hands?
What would the evolved species be called? Still couldn't think of a good scientific name. From Homo-Erectus to Home-Sapiens and the subspecies Home Sapien Sapiens to ? That means a few centuries later we will be considered a primitive species with a less developed brain and our fossils will decorate museum shelves with a sign: "Home Sapien: The Ancient Man" !!!!!

Another interesting fact discussed- the current population of the world is 10% of all the humans that have ever existed on this planet. Now thats a big number. Are there enough resources to support this ever growing population? Will we face a global oxygen crisis someday?

P.S: To-dos: plant a seed every year

The theory of the Alien God

Aliens - do they exist?
God - does He exist?
What if God = Alien?
Possible?
I think so....
I am quite certain that we are not the only privileged lives in this universe. There has to be other stars that has given birth to life ...maybe in some different form....maybe the elements that sustain lives there are beyond our knowledge or imagination...I mean every life form does not need to survive on Oxygen and water. They could be surviving on something entirely different. Something we can't fathom.
Maybe they are way advanced than us.
Maybe they are way behind us and we could teach them a lesson or two.
Maybe they are having fun watchin us.
Maybe they have given us a time period to establish ourselves on our own.
Maybe they are running some kind of an experiment on this planet to see how far this living race goes.
Maybe one fine day they'll come out and tell us we did well, it just took us 4.55 billion years to get to the internet age whereas some other planets are still inventing the wheel in that much time.
Or maybe they ll come and tell us we are losers, our competitors are capable of flying themselves, communicating telepathetically, controlling weather and disease, have supercomputers instead of brains, have discovered other forms of life on many other planets and toured the universe - all in 4.55 billion years. We are slow and stupid. We have to surrender to the superior race and learn from them!

If this is happening and we are being controlled by one central alien race, then isn't God= Alien?
He sees us, controls us, decides our destiny by scribbling some lines in our hands and sends us here to this planet. Then he puts us through some tests to see whether we survive or not. Depending on how we do he sends us on our next mission. If we are good we are sent on a better mission maybe even to a better planet which we humans have decided to call heaven. If we are bad we are sent to an inferior living race. Thats called hell.
He ensures the planets don't collide and that the magnetic field is just right to keep everything in place. He deviates dangerous comets from colliding with this ecosystem. He distributes energy from a central repository to different stars. After all he is experimenting. The universe is his laboratory. The planets are his testbeds. The stars are his resources. We are indeed nothing but the equivalent of lab-rats. So much for our superiority complex! We the homo-sapien-sapiens ( I m not sure whether I belong to the homo-sapien-sapien species 'cause when I was in school we were called the Homo Sapiens) should give this a thought and work harder towards advancement.

I think I can use this theory to justify a lot of things that have mystified me earlier :D
Wow!

P.S: I am not drunk or haven't seen a sci-fi recently. I like to imagine.

For every mood....

Sunshine, a balcony facing the ocean, paints, an empty canvas and "If I were a painter and could paint a memory"
Early morning,the warm blanket, post dream confusions that provoke a mischievous smile, a shower, hot breakfast and "Sunrise sunrise looks like mornin' in your eyes",
Rainy afternoon, coffee, sound of water drops trickling down the leaves, old albums with black and white photos and "Don't know why I didn't come"
In the midst of a sunflower field, bright blue sky, chirping of birds and "A little girl with nothing wrong is all alone"
Moonlight, riverside, a bonfire and "What am I to you...."

Whats the common link?
Norah Jones rocks!!!