Provoke some...

After 65 years, we still look forward or sincerely wish to gain independence from at least these 65 things, not in any specific order and some might seem repeated, but what the hell: Ageing politicians (thank God they didn't understand IT industry) Servile mindset (Still Ghulam) "Gora" is superior (Colonial hangover) Cows & dogs on the road / dirty congested dilapidated Roads Untrained drivers Encroachment "Chalta Hai" attitude Female foeticide Strikes Cricket as the only sport Corruption (that was easy) Fear of entering a police station (dichotomy) Crime against women & children Child labor Babu creating education system (Where are the enterpreneurs?) Khans in Bollywood (All touching 50s) Public urination / defecation (Never a good sight) Government run companies (esp Railways, Airlines) Total lack of mobile phone manners Inadequate places for orphans, invalids, elderly Insufficient po...

It was 15 billion years ago when the Big Bang happened and I have no intention of getting into any debate involving the scientists and the theists and whether the Big Bang originated from Higgs Boson or was is the initial blasting of the furnace when God started His manufacturing process. Compared to that, human race came into existence just yesterday, about 500,000 years back. So, God (or whatever anyone calls Him), took 14999.5 million years to manufacture the universe before dropping us on this planet and the effort shows. Since then, the Sun has continued to do its job with, I am sure, better that the six-sigma standards, planets have religiously revolved and rotated and closer to home, our good old Earth continues to produce natural resources to ensure our survival. So why was God in so much of a hurry to create us? Actually now I know where we got this trait from? Straight from God. Don't we also, while executing a project, spend more than the required time on the first ha...

“What is, Was not. What is not, Will be.”                                                 -    Me ________________________________________________________________________________ Just as a man giving up old worn out garments accepts other new apparel, in the same way the embodied soul giving up old and worn out bodies verily accepts new bodies. ·          Bhagwat Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 22 ________________________________________________________________________________ It was in 1931 when Jainulabdeen’s wife Ashiamma gave birth to their fifth child in Dhanushkodi village at the southern tip of the Rameswaram Island , at the eastern coast of the Tamil Nadu state of India . He rented...

So how does your world look like? You work 10-12 hours a day for a reputed company in one of the big cities. Your kids study in one of the better schools and attend evening classes to learn tennis / karate / mental maths / dance / music / golf. On weekends, you hit a multiplex or get together with your friends over a drink. At least once in a year you take a holiday, international if you can afford. Every passing year, you yearn to earn more, save more and increase your assets. Each day you get up in the morning, read the newspaper, drive to office cursing the traffic, have the daily battles in the office cursing your boss and pushing your subordinates, drive back to home cursing the traffic yet again, watch television or read an occasional book and hit the bed only to start over the next day. Sprinkle a little here and there with some garnishing but this is mostly how your world looks like. Right?  Yeah, OK, so what? Isn't that how everyone's life is? Well, ...

So now all of us are on FB. Well, yes, almost all of us, leave aside the underprivileged, the uninformed, the unwanted and the unwhatever. Most of us have a potpourri of friends from our various phases of life - school friends, college friends, colleagues, parents, children, in-laws, siblings, cousins, distant relatives, neighbors, spouse's friends' spouses, children's friends' parents, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends and then some complete strangers. When we receive a friend invite irrespective of who has sent it, it is considered rude to reject it or not accepting it for a long time so whether we like it or not, we end up adding everyone. While we might not be interacting with most of these 'friends' yet, consciously or sub-consciously, we get exposed to 'their' activities - status updates and photos & videos. A study of the entire melange of the varied personalities that I have as my FB friends, I have been able to group them int...

Definition of “Villain” as per dictionary.com: 1. a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel. 2. a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot.   Let me repeat some of the words mentioned above – Cruel, Malicious, Wicked, Crime, Scoundrel, Evil. Now can you imagine someone who is all these words and still be “adorable”? Isn’t it a dichotomy? How can someone be “evil” and “adorable” at the same time? Well if you want an answer you need to watch Shahrukh Khan in Don 2. Here is a villain whom you would love to love, a villain whom you don’t want to be killed by the protagonist and a villain whom you want to woo the leading lady.   There are some more examples of such villains whom we adore. Lalu Prasad Yadav is a loving character and will always be notwithstanding the fodder scam or the total collapse of law and order in Bihar during his governance. Then there is Charles Sobhraj, a seri...

Pick up any gadgets magazine and you will have scores of pages dedicated to new products, their features, specifications and comparison to other similar devices. Similarly, any new technology product launch boasts about the "revolutionary new" features, enhanced specs, first-in-the-industry functions... Amoled screen, Carl Zeiss camera lens, Dolby sound, capacitative touchscreen, turn-by-turn navigation, 3G/HSPA, faster processor... to name a few.  Off late a few products have started talking about what these features can do for you... never lose your way, take notes in your handwriting, edit your videos, check your email on the go, upload your photos to Facebook... Just two years back no one wanted a tablet device, knew what it was or what it could do. The select few in the technology world who had heard or read about such a device had anyways written it off stating what would anyone do with it? So when Apple launched iPad in March last year, doomsayers touted it as the ...