Ambush at 32 Vidyanagar ...

Trickery, treachery, back stabbing even ...
I was ambushed today ...

Today, was supposed to be the festival of colours - Holi ...
A perfect day to get drenched, drench people ... be the very hated practical joker ...

I hadn't played holi for many years ...
Actually, I hate the dry colours ... the pain in removing them .. and the very chemical wet colours .. when, once your clothes are drenched with, you can use them as mops from the next day onwards ...

So, I hadn't played holi since many years ...
The joy that one derives from the festival has taken a quantum shift from drenching people to the good food that accompanies the special day ....

So, today, like the so many years before ... I went to my granny's place for the customary holi greetings and also to devour all the goodies ...
However, my uncle ( my mom's second brother ) is visting ... who is also a member of the Indian Army ... and is notorious from his childhood days for all the pranks he played ...

So, after all the greetings are done with ... I settle with a plate of food watching Sehwag clobber the Pakistanis ...
All the cousins were at my granny's place ...

So, my uncle comes in ... catches hold of my other cousin ( who is just 2 years younger to me ) and drags him outside ... with a lot of effort and pulling and resistance .. he finally ejects him out of the house ...
My cousin held on to dear life ... clinging onto 3 door frames on his way out ... before my uncle ... finally pulled him out after 5 minutes of resistance ...

Finally outside .. all my younger cousins pounced on him ... and gave him his worth ...
He finally came in sometime later ... drenched ... and his tail between his legs ... cursing me as I had my hearty share of fun ... at his expense ...

I was high and dry at this point of time ... though not for long ... read on ...

I had just finished with the food .. when another aunt of mine came to me and asked me to come out for a photograph ...
I smelt a rat ... ( my family members are pretty bad actors .. can't help smiling ... )
Anyways ... I thought what the heck ... she had a camera in her hand ...

Took off my watch and kept it on the table ... just in case ...
Peeped out and to my surprise, no one was in the vicinity ...

I couldn't believe that she actually wanted to only take a picture ...
No sooner I stepped out of the door ... I got it ...

It was an ambush ... I was trapped ...
All the kids who had been conveniently hiding in all the possible corners ... came rushing out with water guns, balloons, buckets of water ... all led by my uncle ...

In 20 seconds, I was drenched head to toe ... dripping with colour and with a face that would not have been recognized had I been on a coroner's table ...

I just stood there ... let the kids have their share of fun ...
Then, when the time was right, charged on my other two cousins who were in the range of my age group ... and had my share of fun ...

After getting one with a bucket of 'hard-to-remove' coloured water ... I got the other 'running' one with a carefully executed balloon lauch ...

Good times :)
Feels good to be back :)

An idea can change your life : Part 1

This blog comes in the wake of me having seen the movie : "Pirates of Silicon Valley"

I wouldn't say that the movie is brilliant, but I liked it just the same, for the entertaining manner in which it tries to teach us - from a chapter in History ...

The movie takes us from Steve Jobs' ( founder of Apple ) and Bill Gates' ( Microsoft ) college days to their current Industry Domination and how it all came to be ...

For those who don't know ... it was the researchers at Xerox who invented the Mouse and the Graphical User Interface ( GUI ) - which is the basis of any popular Operating system seen today ...

The Board of Directors at Xerox made a decision - which can easily be, the worst business decision ever made ...
They turned down the mouse and the GUI ... stating that - "No person in the right mind would want that ... "
They later, dug their own grave ... when they allowed Jobs and his team to take a peak at their non-feasable product and dissect their invention ...

The apple team goes back .. reproduces what they saw ... steals everything ... and releases the Macintosh ... with a mouse and a GUI ...
Then comes Bill Gates, convinces Jobs to let him have some Macintosh prototypes ... while they were still in development ... takes them home, dissects them ... and comes out with Windows ...

Apple steals from Xerox, Microsoft from Apple ... and today, both Jobs' and Gates are billionaires .. and Xerox is still there ... where it was a decade ago ... making Photo copying machines ...

Just makes you think ... if the Board of Directors at Xerox would have agreed to go ahead with the product, Apple wouldn't be where it is today ... and Microsoft would still be a 2 bit company in Albuquerque ...

How just one idea can change your life ... or ruin it for you ...
Being at the right place at the right time ...

Take the case of Sabeer Bhatia ... free email ...
The Ambanis, the Gulshan Kumars ... the perfect 'rags to riches' story ...

Was talking to my dad earlier today and narrated to him the story - about the Microsoft and Apple thing ...
At the end, I mentioned that ... it's all about being at the right place at the right time ...

To this my dad said that, the right time will come eventually ...
You just have to keep trying ...

I kinda agree with him ...

People don't fail ...
They just give up trying ...

Banner Banters ...

There is this thing going around in Pune ... which I had been wanting to blog about ... for quite some time now ...

Its about the amazing number of advertisement boards coming up ... all over Pune ... with guess what ... Birthday wishes for politicians ...

The board will be a pretty big one ...
And will be strategically placed at the corner of an intersection ... so that whatever view we got of the traffic coming from the left ... is blocked ...

The entire board will contain a huge picture of an ugly politician .. who looks like he's stepped out of Satya ...
The message will read something to the tune of "Heartiest wishes for so and so's birthday on such and such date ..."
The poster will then contain the photographs of the 3 to 4 people who are wishing him ... in bottom right ... which actually look like mug shots taken from the Tihar Jail ..

If the entire poster didn't look gooney enough ... the pictures of these 3 dumb-asses would complete the picture ...

Saw in the newspaper sometime ago ... about this dude from somewhere in the city ... who put up an equally sized poster with his Alsatian dog's picture on it ...
Below, he conveniently puts the pictures of a pom, a doberman and another dog ...

The caption reads ...
"Heartiest birthday wishes to my dog - Rocky ... from his fellow dog friends ..."

This deserves an applause :)
Bravo !

A new project ...

We're working on a new software project for this contest ... and have decided to keep an online blog for the same ...

Will be posting updates and whats new and progress made there ...
If you're interested, you can check it out at : http://citypulse.blogspot.com

Whats with the lights ???

Am actually pretty peeved right now ...
We didn't have lights for the entire day !!!

Ever since Congress has come to power ... we're having 3 hours of load shedding everyday ...
And ever so often, on top of that ... lights aren't there for complete days ...
Like today ... there was load shedding from 3pm - 6pm ... and then no lights from 6:10 - 8:00 and then again 8:10 - 11:30 !!!

I mean, whats wrong with these people ???
And on top of that, they are planning to give free power to the farmers !!!
From where is it going to come ?

Maybe, they should pick up some efficiency on the way and check out power thefts and do maintenance work more often ...
And whats with the street lights being on most of the time during the day ??

We people pay all our bills ... then why should we have power cuts ?
What we need is a system ... in which, our bill gets reduced by some amount every minute that MSEB is cutting power ... load shedding or otherwise ...

That way, either they will get efficient ... or bankrupt ... opening the doors to private players like TATA Power or similar ...
Either way, we should benefit ...

Bombay apparently never has power cuts ...
And the profit it generates, it will be suicidal for them to even cut power for a couple of hours ...

Pune on the other hand, also generates a lot of income ... but these really dumb politicians ... give away free power to farmers ... by cutting down on our power ...

Hows the country going to progress ?

Those darn spammers ...

Actually, the title should have been ... "Those spamming bastards ... " ... but I thought it'd draw a lot of attention ...

I don't really get it ...
I mean, what is with these people ?
How can anyone in their right mind, send millions of emails to people daily and expect to sell a product ?

I've been using email regularly since the time I knew Internet existed ... and still have my very first email address at yahoo ... which is n...

I get about 50 junk mails a day on that account ... which Yahoo mostly filters out ...
But, Yahoo's filtering rejection ratio is pretty high ... and sometimes, legitimate messages get thrashed out ...

I primarily use gmail now ... which is an awesome service ... with tonnes of free goodies ( which I hope stays that way ) and also another service called myrealbox ...
Both give me POP access ( which lets you download messages to your Outlook Express )

Sometime ago, when I had my own domain name ( tidesigns.com ), I would get about 170 spam messages a day ... that too in a mailbox which I was paying for ...
Had to use a filtering software and most of the time, was just deleting all the email ...

I cant believe, people still post their complete email addresses in posts or websites ...
If at all necessary ... put your email up like : abc_at_yahoo.com ...
This way, there are less chances for email reepers to get your mail and you to get spammed ...

Also, report spam if your mail service provider allows ... so that everyone is benefitted ...
And the best precaution is to use a completely different email address for signing up ...
Sigh ...

Some CD Flak ...

Have you ever wondered ... why the Principal is the dumbest guy in the college ?
He never seems to make a right decision ... atleast not from your POV ...

In my entire life, I've had exactly 3 principals ... 2 at school and 1 now ...
The problem with Principals is that they are very, very old ...

Talk about the generation gap !!!

I didnt have much problem with my school principals ... its the college one who is bothering me a bit ... mostly on the CD issue ...

Firstly, I was pretty much forced into making the CD Magazine ... which I knew from day one ... was going to be a pretty crappy job ...

Then the changes ... thousands of it ...
Actually, it took more time implementing the changes than making the actual CD ...

Throughout the entire process ... I always updated a few fellow companions with the CD .. how much it was done ... and they all gave me the ok tag ... just to make sure that I wasn't getting carried away ...

And, when we give the Princi to see the CD ... for one whole day ... he doesn't ... and then last minute ... more changes ...
And very, very stupid ones at that ...

And in my college ... the second you have to do something for the college ... you are completely screwed ...
You go to play for the college, take part in a contest ... even if you win ... no attendance ...
On top of that, they expect you to have completed all the assignments on time ...

The biggest burn was when we organised an Inter Collegiate Event ...
People who went to put up posters and announce the event in other colleges ( which is a necessity for any event ) were conveniently put up in the defaulters list ...

Too much restriction and the staff want to get involved in everything that we do ... even though it does not really concern them ...

When recently, we were at MIT-WEC for a game development contest ( which we won ... :) ) , the vice principal actually came, sat with the participants and asked us for suggestions as how the contest should have been and areas for improvement ...
Now, thats how staff should be ...

Story of my life ...

Phew ...

Finally the CD Magazine thing is over me ...
Now, have a race against time to finish up lots of college submissions in the coming 3 days ...

The CD Magazine took up a major chunk of my life, for the past month ... about 5 - 8 hours a day ...
Had to learn a totally new application - Director ... along with a bit of Lingo ...
Just crossing my fingers now ... that everything goes on well ...

Coz, most of the time, I really jinx myself pretty bad ... so ... I hope this time its all done properly ...

Also, noticed that it is better to blog smaller blogs ... more often, than larger ones rarely ...

So, from now on ... will write *try to write* smaller entries ... and now that all the CD crap is behind me, hopefully shall have more time ...