Umm ... How bout a few billions?

This post comes as a result of some musing after watching the movie - Notting Hill recently.
Apart from being an extremely well made, highly entertaining romantic comedy which I thoroughly enjoyed - an incident from the movie struck me ...

If you have seen the film, it's at the dinner (William's (Hugh Grant's) sister's birthday party) at which Bernie (Hugh Bonneville) asks Anna (Julia Roberts) how much she made in the last film she worked - and she says "15 million dollars".

Hmm ...
So I pondered ...
How did it all start? I mean - how did movie stars start getting paid so much.

If you think about it, every job comes with an upper and lower limits of payment - which are pretty much well defined for a period of time.

Like, for example, it is an accepted fact that most of the bigger movie stars make millions of dollars for a film. If you think about this a bit more - you can say that this is justified as the distributors of the film eventually rake in enough money which justifies them being able to pay their actors.
This finally brings us to how much we end up paying for a movie ticket.
Here in Pune - a night show in a decent enough hall costs anywhere from 150 bucks - 200 bucks ($3 - $4) a ticket which even though is kinda on the higher side by Indian standards - I don't think people seem to mind paying it nowadays (by the number of shows running housefull even on weekdays).
And finally again, people don't seem to mind because the standards of living have gone up.
So indirectly, the more money we tend to make, the more money those actors tend to make :).
I know this is a dumb metaphor - but there is a definitely connection there (I can sense it :)).

In the end if you think about it, (even though I haven't got the faintest idea about acting) - does it warrant a sum of 15 million dollars to be paid for a film?

I will consider the next case - that of a software developer which I can more relate to.
Again, in India - it is a well known fact that software developers (or Computer Science / Engineering graduates) tend to make more money than most of the other faculties when they start off.
Even further down the line (couple of years), a software developer is likely to make more money than a similarly skilled mechanical engineer working in an automobile company.

And if you think about it - all software developers do is sit in front of a monitor all day long and type code. You don't actually need to be a genius to do it - just about any human being with a normal level of IQ and will power can do it.
Furthermore, in most of the projects - major parts of the code which you need, can be found somewhere on the internet by careful searching - which makes it more of a jigsaw puzzle assembling job than actual, smart work.

So what do software developers do - which results in them getting higher salaries, air conditioned offices and the like?

Where did all this trend start?
And how do we go about accelerating it ... ? :)

Just a small heads up ...

Yes. I am still alive and kicking.
This post comes almost a month after my last one - and though I have been pretty lazy in not blogging as much as I would like to, I will still go ahead and blame the weather ...

Somehow, even though the colder months bring with them the promise of sitting by a nice fire in the garden, curling up on the couch under a blanket with a nice book - and many such activities that one can indulge in when the weather is so cold generally, the winters have always brought a lot of stress and difficult decisions to make for me ...

One way or the other, I manage to get myself into these really cascading depressing situations which takes the bright and warm (nowadays exceedingly hot) summers to get out off ...

In the meantime, I have read this book - Freakonomics - which I will recommend.
Even if you don't agree with many of the controversial topics of debate that the authors have chosen (I somehow agreed to 99% of them), you will find yourself looking at things from a more economist's point of view once you have gone through all the pages.

The other very interesting book that I am going through right now is - Games People Play - a book which deals with transactional analysis and social psychology in general. Though it makes for a pretty interesting read, it does tend to get technical at places ...

Does cheering actually help?

We're having a table tennis tourney going on in the company with lots of people participating in both the singles and doubles matches.
This is directly proportional to the reduction in the amount of work done by the people - those who are participating and those who come to watch the matches and cheer their friends.

In table tennis, unlike outdoor sports, you are not allowed to cheer / jeer while the game is in progress. Therefore, except the occasional "wooos" and "ahhs", there is nothing going on during the game play.
However, when a point is won, people do come out and encourage their friends.
The more popular you are, the more support you have during the games.

However, even though we are a very small company (the numbers in the range of 40 - 50), we do not know everyone well.
It's more or less like a typical office.
You have a few close chums, some people good friends and others acquaintances whom you share a very casual greeting relationship.

Anyways, the point I am trying to make here is that you don't know everyone decently well.
During one of the matches in which a friend of mine was playing, it got pretty close - even though she had just learned to play recently and the other guy played decently, but looked somewhat nervous.

At that point, I wondered, that if we all got behind our friend and cheered her (she had more support definitely), it would break the other guy down and she might win the last round - and thus the game.
However, the cheering actually never happened and thus we will never know - but this sparked a debate between me and my team mate whether cheering actually makes any difference.

I was of the opinion that it always definitely helps and he was of the opinion that it doesn't - and sometimes even is detrimental to the player.
After countless minutes of debate, we finally agreed on two points - which I definitely feel does not do complete justice to the entire topic of "Does cheering actually help?"

One point was thus:

I'd like to refer to my previous post here "That moment of giving up" in which my boxer friend told me that he gives up sometimes when he's fighting it out in a god forsaken place where no one cares about the result of the game - he wonders whether getting all beat is really worth it.
Thus, the point here is - that when you are down by a few points, having no support whatsoever, makes you wonder whether it is worth it - and you end up not fighting back as best as you could.
On the other hand, if you have people behind you egging you on - no matter what the result, you atleast fight till the end - which is a good thing!

The other point made was:

This takes the case of Indian cricketers who enjoy the status of demi-gods in the country.
Many of them comment that playing a game in India, draws huge crowds, and thus an awesome support which can create quite a lot of pressure to perform. Many players feel that they enjoy and play a more natural game when they are abroad as they don't feel the heat of the pressure the crowds bring in. So in this case, all the cheering and support is a bad thing.

So, in what conditions is cheering a good thing or a bad thing?
Is it always good? Always bad?
Does it always depend on the individual in question? Does it depend on the way the crowd is cheering you?

Do players who are trying to be something they are not, fear the pressure that crowd support brings? And do underdog players thrive on cheering and perform that extra bit because of it?

A very open ended debate and I'd really like to hear your thoughts on it!

CampusCombine ...

http://www.campuscombine.com

Hey!

We (The ActiveCiti Team) just wanted to inform you about the new initiative we just started - CampusCombine.

How many times have you felt the need to know what was going on in other colleges - from which questions were asked by the external examiner during the viva to which companies are coming for campus placements to when that inter collegiate event is going to take place. How do you know if the college/stream you are entering is the right one for you?

How many times have you felt frustrated while completing an assignment which even the staff members had no idea about? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could ask people from other colleges for help - those who had completed the assignments you wanted...

How many times have you got stuck due to lack of ideas and guidance while working on a project and had no one to take help from or turn to...

Well, trying to provide a solution to all these problems and thousands more - which students face, we give you "CampusCombine".
CampusCombine aims to bring students, ex-students, companies and interested mentors - all together on a common platform so that they can help each other out.

So, if you are a student and the next time you are wondering how a particular problem can be solved, or what questions were asked by the external examiner in other colleges, all you need to do is log on to CampusCombine for your particular city and get your doubts and queries cleared.

And if you are someone who has gone through the rigors of the Indian education system and wants to lend a helping hand to people still stuck there, you can log on to CampusCombine and help out the students and make their lives a little easier.

So, please head on to http://www.campuscombine.com and be a part of this revolution that we're trying to start.

Aao banaye education behtar :)

- The ActiveCiti Team

PS: As we are very short on our advertising budget, please could you forward this email to all the people you know who you think could use this service?
Thanks :)

What you just read up there was the pitch to a new site that we started a day before called CampusCombine.
As this is a non profit venture, with no revenues whatsoever and no venture capitalists or angel investors backing us up, it gets kinda difficult to sometimes spread the word.

So we have to resort to emailing friends, asking them to forward the link and hoping that they will do. We had already done this for ActiveCiti - and the initial response was great - but once you run out of people to email, the number of people signing up everyday slowly dwindles down.

The important thing then, becomes to get as many people as you can email to actually join the site and hope that you did a good job with the site - so that people can refer people and so on ...

The very difficult and thus quite interesting part of this job becomes to word the email.
You have to keep it somewhat short and get all your ideas in place - worded properly so that your readers can empathize with what you're doing.

However, this time I think we're working with a more serious problem than we were with ActiveCiti - coz the response has been fairly decent.
Not to mention these are very early days and the student population of Pune is monstrous.
So only time will tell ... :)

Observing people ...

Its 2:30 am in the morning and I have gotten back (a while ago) from a friend from work's surprise birthday party.
It was lots of fun and I for one, had a good time.

Anyways, I realised something about myself and people in general today.
Most of the party, (actually for all part of it), we were just sitting around in a living room and talking (there were 16 of us and her folks).
Maximum of the conversations that took place involved the entire group with one or the other person narrating a joke or an incident.
At one particular point of time, we were made to go in order and narrate one joke, incident or just amuse the large gathering of people.

Anyways, firstly, what I noticed about people was that listening to what people have to say (or not) at a party or a social discussion tells a lot about them - if you notice that is.
The second thing that I realized (about myself) is that I tend to observe people a lot and am sub consciously analyzing them.
I dug a little deeper (into my conscience) and this is what happens.

When a person is going to speak or narrate something or do anything at all, you form a sort of prediction of what he is going to do or how he is going to do it - depending on all the knowledge you have of the person.
Depending on how much the person sways from your prediction, you assess them and fine tune your understanding of the person.
If your prediction was spot on, you kinda know that you know the person decently well.

I probably haven't even gotten close to the level at which I can be dead on right about a person, but I feel that I am getting there slowly - but steadily.
Just observing how people behave in a social group, what they say things, how they say it, how much effort they are applying, how conscious they are tells loads about a person - and I just felt that I got to know almost all of the people present there - a lot more even though I hardly spoke to many of them.

The point I am trying to make here is that its is sometimes more interesting in observing the reactions of people to a particular interesting situation than observing the situation itself.
Like for example, I have caught myself (and am very disturbed by the fact) that many a times, I actually observe how people react when say, a very pretty girl walks into the room instead of looking at her.

Very disturbing, I know.
But right now, at 2:45 a.m - I am pretty much at my twilight zone and really cannot say that I am talking sense ...
So you cannot hold anything said on this particular post against me.
So there! :)

That moment of giving up ...

I was watching the Australia, West Indies match tonight in which West Indies actually pulled a surprise when it beat Australia.
I was favouring Australia to win till the last minutes of the match, when the wicket of Clarke fell and I knew then, that the Aussies had given up on the match.

It's a very funny feeling this ... giving up on something.
Knowing that no matter what you try, what you do, you aren't going to make it.
The thought of it is actually very depressing - who would ever want to give up on someone or something that they want real bad, but life is ruthless and more often than you'd like, you end up 'giving up' on the thing that you were chasing.

I have faced this situation a lot while playing basketball back in school and junior college.
We had one of the best teams while in school and we lost very rarely, so I was not hit by this feeling that often.

However, once we moved into junior college, people went in different directions, our team shrunk, and the 10 good players who'd play the 40 minutes shrunk to 4 or 5.
More often than not, we'd lose closely contested games in the dying minutes due to the sheer exhaustion that we'd experience towards the end of playing time.

I am guilty of giving up on many occasions, but all of them, as much as I can remember were due to physical (and fitness) reasons.
The series of events would be such ...

You've been playing for 35 minutes continuously and you don't have the stamina you had back in school. You are barely just able to run.
The other team is leading by 2 points. There are 5 minutes left in the game and you can easily win it.
At precisely this time, some random guy from the other team comes around, takes a three and makes it. Your heart sinks with the ball and you trail by 5 points now.
You are completely exhausted, panting, and want nothing more than to crash on the ground and lie there for eternity.
You are pushing yourself to run all the way across court to get in position for the pass. Somehow your team loses the ball, the opponents are on a fast break and you are chasing them.
At precisely this moment, a couple of thoughts will flash in your mind.

1. That you can't take this anymore and you are going to die soon.
2. That this is just a game ... is it really worth it?

I think the entire game turns around depending on the answer each player gives himself.
If everyone (or the majority) push themselves harder, your chances of winning increase a lot. Any rational person would definitely say that people need to push themselves ... and stick with it – giving themselves a good chance.

However, nothing seems rational at that particular point of time. When you can hear your heartbeats distinctively, but not the voices of those around you nor the crowds cheering insanely.
More often than not, people give in ... and the rest is history!

I was speaking to a friend of mine who recently took up boxing and did exceptionally well at it (he represented the state in his first tournament).

I asked him what made him give up sometimes, while he was boxing.
He thought for a while and said that boxing is a very tiring sport (and painful and very risky too). So while you are out there, fighting this random guy from another never heard of city, in some small town where nobody cares, you come to a point where you ask yourself whether it is worth it ...
And there you get your answer ...

I feel the trick here is to postpone the "Is it worth it" question as much as possible ...
Every human being has a break-in point - and so, everyone can be broken ... the question is to find that point and somehow avoid, postpone or hasten it depending on which side you are on.

Anyways, experience tells me that once you give up, there is no way even a miracle can save you ... What I'd really like to know is why people give up in other life scenarios and what drives them to it ...

The difference between understanding and thinking that you do ...

This is one more of those grey area posts - where I am myself not so certain about anything - and in the end it turns out to be - just some sort of general loud musing actually ...

The story begins with my brother (with no prior computer programming experience whatsoever) turning up to me two days before his IT exam and asking me to teach him javascript programming.
The task was pretty much uphill from the beginning itself, as he had no experience at all - and he gave me so much little time to teach him in.

So anyways, I thought of giving it a shot and got down to teaching him.
After a couple of hours of tutoring and assignments, he told me that he had understood whatever I had taught him and seeing that he was getting the hang of things and actually doing the assignments right, I thought he had too.
So, I left it at that and decided to continue with much more advance topics the next day.

However, when I did start the next day, I realised that he had not understood a thing - had got all his concepts wrong, but still somehow, was able to do the assignments that I had given him.
He had found some vague similarity and a coincidental method by which he was able to solve the assignments. His method, though not entirely incorrect, was a one off thing and actually ended up being a series of (coincidental) flukes which made him think that what he had understood was correct.

Hence, in short, what had actually happened was that he "thought" he had understood, whereas he clearly hadn't.

Which brings me back to the post ... the difference between "actually understanding something" and "thinking" that you understood something ...
This boils down to some sort of a paradox, because how can you say you understand something unless you "think" you do, and vice versa ...

Also, even though you think you understood something because your application worked using the principles that you applied (which you thought were correct), how will you know for sure whether what you "think" you have understood was the exact same thing the author / teacher was supposed to make you understand?

You can probably run a larger number of test cases but then again, there is no limit to how many different cases there could be and for how many your theories would fail ...
Which kinda brings us to the thought that nothing in this world is absolute - and everything is relative ...

Or then maybe, we just need to invent some higher means (or forms) of communication by which we could eliminate all these paradoxes and come to absolute conclusions ...
Here is me again wandering off into the oblivion ... :p

The acid test ...

If you have seen the movie "Finding Nemo", there is a scene in the aquarium (at the dentists) in which the aquarium fish put Nemo through a test of courage - at the great Volcano (or something) before they induct him into their group ...

Maybe what I am talking about here is not exactly the same thing, but the above example is the closest reference I could find.
I again don't know whether this happens between different cultures, age groups, genders (with respect to groups of friends) or maybe we are just a plain weird bunch of people, but here is something I have noticed that happens in my group of friends ...

I shall hence call it the acid test and this phenomenon is very peculiar because it performs a function completely different to what it would seem to many (in fact most) of the people witnessing the events ...
I must admit, I realized the significance of it just sometime ago, and so have decided to put it in writing ...

Here goes ...

When we are with our own groups of friends, we put on a show for everybody.
We don’t behave in the same way when we are all alone, or are with our families (or a different group of friends) ...
Everybody, has a persona which he or she tries to maintain - something which gives the person substance and more importantly, (probably) a reason why the person was admitted to the group in the first place.

We start relating to each person in our friends circle by their default behaviour.
For example, one of my good friends plays the part of a completely indifferent, 'couldn't care less', 'don't give a rat's ass about anything' non conformist very well.
To someone meeting him for the first few times, he will come across as a person who couldn't care less about anything or anybody - and you could not for the life of you extract any sympathy or help from the individual no matter what you try ...
Over a period of years that we have gotten to know him well, we have learnt what a nice guy he is and no matter how much he will abuse you and make fun of you and act all haughty when somebody asks for help, he will eventually help the person - sometimes even going way out of his way to help them.

So, here is the acid test then.
When someone from a group, actually tries to do something good for a change - basically try to change an age old bad habit into something radically different, he is made fun off - by his good friends.
They will go to the extent of bugging you for days about it -

For e.g: "What happened to the I don't care, I will not wake up before 11:00 am attitude?"
Or
"Weren't you the one who said, reading is for nerds?"

Anyways, basically what happens is that when you are trying to do something good to yourself for your own sake (or possibly someone else's), its your friends who come in your way and try to dissuade you from it - making fun of you and basically embarrassing you till you've had enough.

Now, if you are thinking that this is a really sorry thing to happen, and that the person with such friends has something wrong with his taste ... you won't be very wrong ...

But then again, if you look closer, you will realize, that even though it is happening sub consciously, what your friends are achieving here is that they are making sure that whatever you are really doing, is something that you really want to do.
Going ahead and changing your character (or habits) is a difficult thing to do - not to mention majorly huge.

With all the nagging and laughing, you tend to think about the situation a bit more - and then you make up your mind.
Once you realize that this is exactly what you want to do, your friends automatically seem to shut up and nobody else's opinion matters much anyways - so you go ahead and do it. And more often than not, you are successful.

If on the other hand, you succumb to your friends' taunts and fun insults, you were not going to do the thing anyways (cause you were not enough mentally prepared) - and in the process save a lot of time by not going ahead with this ...

So there !

However, the downside of this is that if you have a really bad group of friends, and either they always get the better of you or vice versa, the probability of you succeeding in changing a habit or yourself reduces drastically ...

So basically, the moral of the story here is that it is always good to have good friends.
And no matter how much your friends taunt you, make fun of you or use your self consciousness to their advantage, its always a good thing to have friends who do all this :)

-----------------
As an end note would like to mention that this is just something that I thought about ...
Don't know how much of it is psychologically correct, but would love to hear other opinions on the issue...

Two donkeys ...

I received this story via email recently and would like to share my musings on it ...
Please excuse the english, because it has been a percolating forward ....

Anyways, here goes

A good story for all of us to follow in our careers and social life............ very true
Once upon a time a Washerman was bringing up two donkeys.

Let us say Donkey-A and Donkey-B.

Donkey-A felt it was very energetic and could do better than the other. It always tried to pull the washerman's attraction over it by taking more load and walking fast in front of him.

Innocent Donkey-B is normal, so it will walk normal, irrespective of the washerman's presence. After a period of time, Washerman started pressurising Donkey-B to be like Donkey-A. But Donkey-B unable to walk fast, got continuous punishment from washerman. It was crying and told personally to Donkey-A "Dear friend, only we two are here, why to compete with each other?
We can carry equal load at normal speed ".

That made Donkey-A all the more energetic and next day it told to washerman that it can carry more load and even it can run fast also.

Obviously happier washerman looked at Donkey-B.., his BP raised and he started kicking Donkey-B. Next day with smile, Donkey-A carried more load and started running fast. But it was breathtaking for Donkey-B and it couldn't act that way....But the washerman was frustrated, so he harassed Donkey-B terribly, and finally it fell down hopelessly.

Then Donkey-A felt itself as a supremo and happily started carrying more load with great speed. But now the Load of the Donkey-B is also being carried by Donkey-A., and still it has to run fast. For some period it did, finally due to fatigue it got tired and started feeling the pain. But washerman expected more from Donkey-A. It also
tried best, but couldn't cope up with his owners demand. The Washerman got angry with Donkey-A also and started harassing to take more load... Donkey-A was crying for long time and then tried its best...

But it couldn't meet the owner's satisfaction.

Finally the day came when due to frustration the washerman killed Donkey-A and went for searching some other Donkeys.

Its an endless story..........

But the moral of the Story in Corporate and social life is......

"Think all colleagues are same and that everyone is capable.... Always Share the Load equally..... Don't ever act smart in front of your Boss and never try for getting over-credit. ..

Don't feel happy when ur colleague is under pressure.. "

It doesn't matter if u r A or B, for the Boss u shall be always DONKEY

I don't know who really started this email - I have heard this kind of story before - something that encourages you to be average (or even below average) so as to not get killed by your boss - or more importantly, give your weaker colleagues at work, a chance to survive.

Somehow, I have never been able to relate this story to actual human beings.
The first impression that you'd get after finishing the story is ... "how true" ... and ... "yeah ! this is what happens to people who act smart ... "

But if I'd permit myself to be a little cynical, I'd say - that what we are talking about here - are donkeys - and not humans.
Donkey's don't get paid by the amount of work that they do - nor do they ever get promoted for doing better or efficient work.

I guess what I am trying to say here is that - if you are doing the work of a donkey, then:
1. You are a fool to be doing it anyways
2. You should probably not try to show off - coz its basically not worth it

However, if you are working in a 'REAL' company - where your intelligence, talent, ethics and determination (and dedication) are merit to success, the earlier story is just pointless and baseless and I for one, cannot try to get into the mind of the person who must have created it.

Trying to be average - and just flow with the crowd is probably the most dangerous thought that one can get - and yet people do it - day in and day out - diminishing the difference between people and sheep.

This is in short, how a similar situation would go with 'REAL' people - and not donkeys

There are two employees - Employee A and Employee B
Employee A is always energetic while Employee B is just another average guy who is happy to get on with his work.

Employee A being the more enthusiastic and energetic of the two, finishes his work much before time and hence has time to take up some other initiatives.
He does his work to the best of his abilities.

Now, after a period of time, two things could happen.

1. The boss is extremely happy with Employee A.
He gives him a promotion and a big fat raise.
Both the employees A and B work the same hours, however, employee A makes 1.5 times the same amount as Employee B - even though they both started at the same time with the same qualifications.

2. The boss thinks he can take advantage of Employee A and starts loading him with extra work.
Now because Employee A is human (and not a donkey) and because he is not tied to a rope around his neck - and also because he very well knows his worth ...
He tells his boss to kiss his ass, quits the job and gets a better one (because he is good and can get another job)

Either way, the better employee wins.
In the end, I guess, its the attitude which makes all the difference - no matter how talented you are or whether you were born with an IQ of 220. Unless you have the attitude and actually want to go ahead and do something, nothing is gonna get done.

This might be only slightly related to the original story, but I'd like to end with some very powerful lines that I came across in "Atlas Shrugged"

It goes something like this ...

"I swear by my life and the love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine"

Comments ...

I am very fortunate to have a very good set of readers who contribute a lot to my blogs by way of comments and discussions ... so much so, that it ends up adding more value to the blog than the blog itself ...

Of late, I have been receiving some really good comments which throw more light on the topic and just prove how you can never analyse a situation or a particular event from all angles and how it is so important to do so ...

I have been so happily made to eat my own words on my blog by people who look at things from an entirely different (and better) point of view ...

Thank you all so much for teaching me something new everytime ...

As blogger lacks a feature by which a person cannot choose to receive an email indication after someone last left comments after his, and just because many people do not generally read the comments, I have decided to put down a list of my previous posts in which the comments have really added a lot of value to the blog.
Thank you once again ...

The links are as follows (in reverse chronological order)

1. Indian Movies ...
In which Rishi and Shantesh gave more dimension to my view of why Indian movies suck in some respect compared to Hollywood flicks.

2. Choice, the problem is choice ...
In which Rishi and Ashwin point out that everything to do with choice is connected to your Karma in some way or the other (sorry, my knowledge about this is very poor) and then Id tops it off with one of his brilliant poems ...

3. Being Prejudiced ...
I feel, all the comments added a lot of value to this post - and especially the brilliant one by eshuneutics which hit the nail, right on the head ...

4. Remember Remember ...
This post had some really nice comments from Rishi, Id and Yuvi with totally different points of view ...

This may have sounded somewhat like a "Comments" Oscar award, but it really isn't.
I guess what I am trying to say here is - that its always good to know someone else's point of view (We all have only 1 brain .. right?)
And reading a comment always feels nice, you know that people are reading the stuff that you are writing and always encouranges you to write more ...
Not to mention the richness it adds to a particular post.

So, if you do have anything to say on anything written here, please feel free to do so ...
A small investment of time ends up serving a lot of purposes ...
As a matter of fact, lot of people's blog that I check out often, have been the result of comment following ...
So more the reason ... eheheh ;)

Voices in my head ...

I really don't know whether this happens to a lot of people, but I have been noticing that there is a constant monologue running through my head ...
Either I have flipped the lid, or have been watching lots of Scrubs lately, actually a bit of both, coz only a crazy person would watch 5 seasons of scrubs within the span of a month !

Anyways, getting back to the voices in my head ...
Actually, for all you know, the voices are typing this blog out ...
As a matter of fact, they are ...

I am not complaining though, most of the wise cracks that come out of my mouth, are via these voices and they keep me amused (and sane??) for most parts of the day.
My co-workers would beg to differ though ...

Nothing much to write now, I guess the voices have stopped !
OMG ... I've lost it :p

(PS: Sorry for making you read this ... I thought I'd go crazy for once ... If you want to use explicit words in the comments, I'd rather you email me your comments.
This is a family blog and rated PG-13)

Indian Movies ...

Today being Saturday, I sat and watched a movie in the afternoon - Silent Hill - which is a game inspired movie. And me having played (and loved) the game earlier and having seen brilliant promos of the movie, I was pretty excited to watch this.
However, expectations were not that high - considering how other games related movie turn up (Tomb Raider, Resident Evil)

However, when I started watching the movie, I was shocked and astonished at the level of details which the director had taken care of very painstakingly.
The sets and creatures were right out of the video game and even the shops on the streets of Silent Hill had names from the game.

It felt like playing the game itself.

The two hours that I spent watching the movie, made me feel squirmish, eerie, sad, confused, grossed out and lots of other things which you generally don't go through during your normal life (and thank God for that!)

Anyways, that made me wonder, why no such movies EVER get made here in India.
Mind you, India makes the maximum number of movies in a year (compared to any other country), but if you ponder over the number of gold medals a country of a billion produce at the olympics, the fate of most of the movies is very cliche'd.

Here, most of the directors rarely give any attention to details and if you were to start writing goof ups on movies made here, you could end up writing books on a single movie.
Basically the order of priority of Bollywood movies is:

1. Have good songs
2. Dress all women in such short clothes that they qualify as belts (almost anyways ;))
3. Raise a lot of hype
4. Get the best stars
5.
6.
.
.
.
.
1354. Write a good story
1355. Make sure everything is technically and logically correct.

Very few people here, make movies out of passion - most of the movies are made to just make money and they dont care what crap they put into it as long as the general populous buys it.
The 'chalta hai' attitude of most of the people is highly annoying ...
This fact can be affirmed by a statement which a popular producer of commercial (gaudy) films made.

He said, "If you make movies for Rickshawalas (people who drive Rickshaws), you will travel in cars, but if you make movies for people who drive (and hence can afford) cars, you will have to travel by rickshaws"

The general quality of production and acting of the movies is so pathetic that most of the times, I would not even consider spending that much time watching the movie.
Actually buying tickets and spending money on it is out of the question!

I have never seen any 'out of track' movie ever become hugely successful.
There have been a recent spurt of movies which have swayed a wee bit off track and become hits, but they too have lots of content which is downright impossible.

This entire revolution may still take a million years to come, until more and more of the masses get educated (and stop buying crap) or we get more passionate and talented film makers inside ...

However, till that happens, it is three cheers for Hollywood :)
The biggest plus point of a hollywood flick (a carefully chosen one) is that at the end of it all, you don't regret the time you spent watching it.

*Update - My review of Silent Hill is up and can be read here.

Choice, the problem is choice ...

If you are wondering where you have heard the above statement before, it is from the movie "Matrix Reloaded".

The movie, apart from being a huge treat for the eyes with the brilliant special effects, action sequences and acting, delved deeply into yet another very intriguing subject - that of choice.

I have tried many times writing on this topic, but it has turned out to be so complicated (more often that not) that I have had to delete the post everytime - even before I got midway.
But if you are reading this, I was successful in putting my thoughts into words (not very well, but it should be just good enough ...)

Anyways, this entire film revolves around the concept of choice and whether we have a choice - if at all.
The very interesting character of Merovingian has this to say during the movie:

Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without.

And then, there have been so many situations in my life which have made me feel exactly the same way.

For instance, how can one know whether something that he or she did was a result of a choice - they had taken, things happening beyond their control or just plain fate?
How do you know - that once you have taken an option, that you were not meant to take the other one anyways. Either way, how would you ever know ?
It forms a huge paradox.

"But if YOU already know, how can I make a choice?"
"Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand *why* you made it."

Whatever we do in our lives, is because of the choices we make, and (I feel that) every little event that happens around us, is responsible in some way for the events to happen in the future. Its like a domino effect.

However, I have seen people make choices which have doomed their lives and I have known about it and the moment of them making their choice. So many times have I advised people against it, but to no avail.

Like, I have this friend of mine who took up the branch of ENTC (Electronics and Telecommunications) in Engineering against my better judgement and is suffering for it now.
But then this is pushes it more towards the argument of fate, doesn't it?

However, though we may never know whether we actually have a choice or whether Merovingian was right - what we should probably make sure is to *really* think about what path we choose at the cross roads and make up our minds, never to regret it later in life - come what may...

Umm .. blogging !

A non - blogger friend of mine, specifically sent me this cartoon a while ago.
And as I have nothing to blog about today, or maybe I am just tired and suffering the after effects of playing a whole day of basketball yesterday (I realised that I am getting older ...), I could not agree more with my good chum ! :)

[Please click on the image to see the actual size]

Why nerds are unpopular ...

I generally don't link to other posts, but really couldn't help myself on this one.

Its by Paul Graham and the title reads "Why Nerds and Unpopular"
It IS definitely a long essay but is very, very insightful and well written.

The links here : http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Being Prejudiced ...

Each one of us has been prejudiced sometime or the other in his or her life and regretted it later.
I know I have ...

But I guess its more like a human emotion than a process which everyone experiences and something I really hate doing ... but it happens at a sub concious level nevertheless ...
The one thing worse than being prejudiced is voicing strong (and loud) opinions based on your (prejudiced) opinions ...
Its something that really ticks me off ...

People cannot help being prejudiced, but atleast they should save others the trouble of perceiving them as complete idiots when they go announcing that this thing is bad and I really hate that stuff ... and oh that is so gay ... even without having given the thing a try ...

I have come across people reacting very strongly to things that they have never tried ...
Like, take the famous Harry Potter for example ...

I had never read any of the books till just about some months ago - that too out of curiosity, because basically the fantasy genre was never my type.
But when I did read the first couple of books, I really liked it and realised what all the hype was about !

Recently in a conversation with a person about books, this topic came up and I enquired whether he had read Harry Potter ...
To this, the guy gives me a very weird looked (cocked eyebrows and all) and says : "Puh-lese ... I don't read such crappy children's books ..."

Whoever did say they were for children only?

People generally have a tendency to be rebels and NOT do things that the entire world is doing at the moment.
They want to stand out of the crowd and "try" to be different.
I know because I do it many times ...

They form false opinions about things just to defend themselves as to why they aren't doing something which everyone else is doing ...
And then later, these opinions turn to convictions and then they start despising the people who form the herd ...

How many times have I heard "Oh ! You love the Lord of the Rings movies? Man ... you're weird"
Or, "How the hell can you like Batman Begins? That sux dude ..."
And the latest has been ... "You listen to Celine Dion ... Umm ... are you gay?"
Can you believe this?

It's amusing actually ... and, after you have come to terms with the fact that people will continue to be prejudiced about things and form opinions about you from the things that you like or dislike, you can have your own fun by disgusting them even more with harmless things like ...
"Oh ! By the way, I also listen to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and N'Sync !"

Hehe .. Good times :)

Stop, start, restart ...

I don't know why ... but I just tend to stop doing things for no reason at all - take blogging for example.
I won't give reasons that I am too busy working nowadays and stuff ... because, I can, if I want, take some time out for blogging everyday ...

But then, every now and then, I just tend to stop it - and it takes a great deal of effort to start back - but once it has started, I am sure it will go the distance...

This did not really prompt me to write the blog, but its worth talking about anyways.
The story is about a little 6 year old boy who fell into a very narrow well type structure and was stuck there for more than 50 hours before the rescue team managed to dig a tunnel from a parallel larger well and rescue him ...

The child was going to be saved eventually and would be unharmed - everybody knew that, but what was really sickening was how the media made such a fuss about it with all the sensationalising, that it was worse than the hundreds of soaps doing the rounds on air these days.

A couple of news channels, showed nothing else but 11 hours of continuous footage of the scene while the army was trying to rescue the child.
The child was ofcourse rescued eventually and as I had predicted, got quite some amount in cash ... and I do believe, will get all his education and stuff sponsored eventually.

Then there was the other thing recently about the Govt. banning quite a few blog sites in the wake of the Mumbai terror blasts.
They originally wanted about 17 sites to be blocked, but as the technology to do this does not exist, the ISPs ended up blocking the entire domain and so, all the blogger sites ... this one included.

Apparently a couple of blogs were being used by SIMI activists to plan other attacks.
In my opinion, all this mess happens due to pure idiots existing in the Govt Technology dept who would not know the difference between an operating system and a web browser.

On the plus side, it turned out to be great business for proxy sites (esp. kproxy) and a lot of people ended up learning inadvertently, about proxies and how blocking of sites is just not possible in most of the cases ...
So much for sheer stupidness and tonnes of revenue loss ...

Anywho, this was just a wake up post for me ... nothing to really muse about in that sense ...
But now that I am up and atom, should have better things to muse about soon ... :)

Job and life as it stands !

Today was the "big" day - apparently - when you go to work on your first ever job - and all the works.
At home, everybody except you is excited - calls keep coming from distant relatives who are all like - "Your first day at work? Best of Luck !!!"
And though you were pretty excited at one particular point of the time in the distant past, you fail to see what all the big deal is about.

So there, amidst the worst rains of the season, I stepped out of the house to go to - where else - WORK ! (Sounds pretty funny now ...)

So, in as few words as possible - this is how it went ...
Well, reached there almost on time at 9:07 a.m (can always damn the traffics and the roads!) but nothing seemed to be happening till 9:30 - thats when we have our Day Start meeting.
Being the first day, all the freshers had to come out and introduce themselves and also tell a funny to make everybody laugh.

After everybody had their turn, the day kicked off officially.

Lots of stuff was going on today - from setting up your workspaces to tonnes of meetings in which each of the project leads came and explained the projects they were working on.
Couple of forms to be filled up - setting up of company email accounts, working environments and stuff like that.

We also had an interesting coding challenge - which I managed to figure out partially - which was followed by an excruciating open book C# test - which I must admit was extremely difficult.

This test took most of the day - along with the occasional meeting and some formalities to be completed. And the pace of answering the test questions came to a crawl towards the end ...

Towards the end of the day, there was a birthday party with two awesome cakes - so it was fun. Then we helped out going through some papers before finally heading home at 9.

But even now that life has taken a huge turn with 10+ hour working days under artificial lighting and temperature control (with no bunking possible whatsoever), the place where I am working at is a darn good place to be.

The thing that hit me just as I was leaving was that - I have to go home now, hit the sack, get up and come back - aaaaarghh !!!!

All said and done, this is probably one of the coolest places to work.
All the people are young, in our age group and extremely friendly.
You don't have to bother about wearing a T Shirt which does not have a collar or that your jeans are blue in colour.
You can walk in wearing floaters and steal one of the many bean bags lying around to work on.
You can have all your instant messengers running throughout and even catch up with friends elsewhere - as long as you get your work done on time.

So it begins ... I guess :p

Finally done and over with ...

Today probably marked a pretty important day for me - college is finally done and over with !
I know this has been said before, but we had our project demonstration today, and so (considering I clear all my papers), I should not have any official reason for going back to college ever (except for collecting my marksheet)

Anyways, even though all these past four years have had many pleasant memorable experiences, I would be leaving with sort of a bad taste ...

The only requirement for our project demonstration that we had off the college was access to a decent internet connection - we were carrying our own notebook (mainly because the college computers would not be able to support our development environment :p)

Anyways, our project guide from college called us personally a day before and informed us that the college was having some trouble with their internet lines and asked us if we could make some arrangements ourselves.
We ended up carrying a CDMA Wireless phone which gives dial-up speeds internet connectivity. It did get our job done, but was painfully slow and frustruating !

Anyways, on reaching college, we realised that the internet connection had been down from a couple of days and no one had many arrangements to fix it - or even call the customer care support for that matter, even though many teams needed an active connection to demonstrate their projects.

Moreover, all the computers were infected with worms and viruses which caused unexpected behaviour on the systems - adding to our misery.

The final 'real' downer - was that the examiner who came to check out our project was very, very unqualified to do so ...
I'd go as far as to say that he was a complete idiot and had no idea at all about software development.

The college is not to be blamed for it - because the University sends these people - but c'mon, there has to be atleast some level of competence!
The guy who came to us, asked us questions like:
- What are the number of classes have you used in your project?
- How many tables are there in your database?
- How many pages does your site have?

It was very apparent that the guy knew nothing at all within the first five minutes, and to save his blushes, he had to ask us questions - many of which could clearly be termed as 'stupid beyond belief'.

The demonstration did go past 60 minutes and he kept interupting us with his moronic questions throughout - half of which we had to strain to make sense off in the context of our demonstration!

It actually hurts when people spend months in completing a project - with the time, money and energy spent - and the person who is supposed to assess the project turns out to be a complete moronic idiot and does not even make an effort to understand what you have done.

With everything said and done, my other project partners feel that we did the best we could with this sort of a guy and we should be happy that its gone well.
I guess so ... but the Pune University really needs a wake up call !!!

Out for a while ...

Should have put this up sometime ago ...
Exams going on till the 9th and as such, have substantially reduced the time that I generally spend on the PC - so there wont be to blog for a while till the exams have passed ...

ActiveCiti goes LIVE

This post is coming after a fairly long time - and for good reason too...
The last week was pretty hectic - I was very busy studying for my exams and more busy in trying to get our Final Year Engineering Project done and released.

Well, I am happy to inform you that we went live today at 5:30 pm (thats when our faulty registration page got fixed) :p

Presenting ... ActiveCiti
(clap clap clap clap ... )

Unlike so many other Final Year projects that we had seen - which mostly are very, very niche and no one ever seems to use them, we decided to go and do a complete product from scratch - however insignificant it might be, or no matter how many people use it.
We wanted to go through the entire site of developing a product ...
So we wrote our own spec document, did our own database designs, did all our own interface designs, chalked out flow diagrams and made our own mistakes (which are quite a lot actually)

And to tell you frankly - the feeling is brilliantly awesome.
At the other end of the road, seeing the number of registered users increase by the hour is damn awesome :)

As of writing this - 7 hours into launch, we now have 50 registered users.
I know that this will now decline exponentially, but we hope that we make 100 atleast.

Something about the project
The entire project is a web application which makes planning a piece of cake.
It removes all the hassles of calling so many people back and forth while planning anything - a movie, a trip or even just planning to hang out at a local coffee place.

Though the content on the site is Pune Centric - that should not be a drawback and everybody anywhere should be able to use it - as we let users customize and add to the already existing content.

The entire application is done up in ASP.Net 2.0 with SQL Server 2000 as the backend database.
It took us about 4 months to get this done - working part time, managing college and stuff.
But it feels awesome now ...

We did have some anxious - adrenalilne pumping moments when 2 hours into the launch (we actually did it at 3 pm) we found out that the register page was not working.
Then later quite a few pages started acting up and were not working as expected ... but we managed to fix them and as of now everything seems to be chugging along nicely (touchwood)

We still have some way to go before this is finalised and polished.
Have got tonnes of feedback and our list of todo's has already gotten filled.

Anyways, please do visit the site and register there.
The address is : http://www.activeciti.com

Any feedback would be deeply appreciated and you can drop it off at : http://www.activeciti.com/contact.aspx

Yay ! ActiveCiti is LIVE :)

Windows Media Player 11

I've always used Windows Media Player 11 because it has got awesome library management capabilities.
Yes - it may not be the lightest or the fastest players - but its library is plain, simple, clutter free and very effective.

I got to try out Windows Media Player 11 beta for Windows Xp - for a couple of days now and here are some screenshots.

In short, it is much sleeker, looks a lot better and takes its library management duties more seriously.

This is the main interface screenshot.
As I said, it is sleeker and more pleasing to the eye.

Different things to notice are the controls in the bottom of the screen and to the bottom left, they have some sort of graphic equalizer display kinda thingy which looks cool.

On top you will notice a button called URGE - which is an online music store that microsoft has tied up with. Something that iTunes is to the iTunes Player.

This shows the Albums that I have on the player - it displays any album art very nicely and looks damn nice.
The albums are categorized alphabetically with each letter getting its own group.

This is one very nifty feature.
You can select an album, right click>Update Album Info and it downloads the album art and album details from the internet and updates the stuff on the fly.
Damn cool.

This is another interesting feature - the artiste view shows CDs stacked for artistes having more than one album.
And the number of CDs depicted here equals to the number that actually exist on your PC.

Very nice.

I heard the Vista version allows you to fly through the stack - though I could not manage it on the Xp Version.

And finally this is the mini player which comes onto the taskbar.
Its all black.





Though the installation was smooth - it installs over your Windows Media Player 10 and updates the library - it took a hell lot of time (maybe coz its still Beta)

Also one main feature that its missing is the Auto Playlist feature from Media Player 10.
Hopefully it will make a comeback in the final release which is scheduled for the June 6th.

Surprisingly, the player was just taking 7 MB of RAM in the minimized mode and 13 MB in the full screen mode while playing mp3s.

The beta version was a 23 MB download.

Another first time feature in this release is a "Search as you Type" feature.
Overall, its worth an upgrade if you are a Windows Media Player fan.

Remember remember ...

Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent to blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.

Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah! Hip hip hoorah!

"V for Vendetta" is an excellent movie.
Apart from the brilliant acting, direction, cinematography and everything else which made it such a treat to watch, it had a very, very strong message ...

"People should not be afraid of their governments ... The governments should be afraid of their people ..."

PS: The following blog contains references to the movies "V for Vendetta" and "Rang De Basanti" ... Though the references might be obvious to the plot of the movie, it may turn out to be spoilers for the majority of the people who haven't seen the movies.
So, if you do intend to watch the movies, I must sadly ask you to skip this post ... else, please carry on ...

Though, we as Indians cannot relate to the movie a lot, I think most of the americans will be able to ...

Michael Ironside who does voice acting for Sam Fisher - an NSA agent in the game "Splinter Cell" says that there are only two primary emotions that every animal understands : more so human beings - "Love and Fear"

What America is going through or went through (atleast from what we hear or see here) corresponds in some way the Britain in the movie "V for Vendetta" is going through ...
I remember - after the 9/11 attacks, people were petrified beyond belief ...

In the movie, "V", which is an analogy to the Guy Fawkes incident, V (Hugo Weaving) successfully bombs the parliament building (without killing innocent people).
Though actually blowing up a building does not solve much of a purpose practically, it does bring hope and faith to the people and shows the government that people are not to be taken for granted.
According to him (V), its not the act of destroying a building, but the ideology behind it and what it (the building) stands for that you are destroying.

Strength through unity! Unity through faith!

Anyways, the problem with the government in the movie was that it was bullying its people and using fear as a method of controlling them.
That got me thinking whether a similar scheme of things would work for our country ...
The problem with India is that its not bullying its people in a way that blowing up a building (parliament maybe?) would solve .

The problems that India faces (from its government) is mainly of corruption and apathy and having incompetent fools who don't know what they are supposed to do.
Unlike the U.S, there is no restriction on the number of times someone can come to power, so the main agenda of the politicians is to please the majority voter bank before the elections so that they can be elected again.

A prime example is the government trying to impose another 27% reservations for the OBC (Other Backward Classes) (taking the total reservations to 49.5%) in the Education sector. The main reason for doing this, as blatantly mentioned by many of the politicians is to please a section of the society.
Thanks to the election commission, this matter has been halted for the time being and now the government is giving thought whether the move would be politically feasible for them.

In such a scenario ... another movie comes to mind which I recently caught - "Rang De Basanti".
In the movie, some college students go and assasinate the defence minister of the country because he was corrupt.
Again, the movie was brilliantly made and a treat to the eyes.

In the movie, after they have knocked off the defence minister (which is a relatively easy thing to do) - and not get caught, the government puts the assasination blame on terrorists (India has plenty of them to pass the blame around) and work of Pakistan's ISI.

However, our protagonists go to a radio station and broadcast saying that it was them and not some terrorists who knocked off the minister - also giving complete reasons as to why they did it. This is the best part of the movie and apparently brings the government down to its knees.
However, unfortunately, these unarmed students are gunned down by the special task force with orders from higher authorities that there should be no survivors left.

Again, though going and knocking off corrupt politicians one by one may seem to some - an excellent method to rid the country of idiots, it will take a very long time and is not at all feasible. (because India has just so many politicians ... we are the largest democracy in the world)
Besides, you also run the risk of getting killed soon...

This actually got me thinking and being the conspiracy theorist that I am ... what if ... just what if ... the Parliament Attacks on Dec 13, 2001 were not actually done by millitants, but a couple of kids who just wanted to change something ...
(some sort of a Rang De Basanti meets V for Vendetta)

But the bottom line is ... change by the constitutional means ... going to vote, electing a new government, etc etc ... takes a very long time ...
We need a V ;)

Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

Of education and jobs and you know ... money !

We had our final practical exams today - which went relatively well.
The external examiner, apart from being a jovial fellow, turned out to be pretty much entertaining also ...

Anyways, I did finish my program (assignment we are supposed to code in 3 hours) well before time and was left musing on some issues, which finally resulted in this post.

A recent news article flashed through my memory - one which in 4 ISB (Indian School of Business) graduates were offered jobs which paid salaries of approximately Rs. 10,400,000 - the highest that any MBA graduate from the country.
Now, ignoring the fact, that the salaries are actually in US Dollars (USD 233,800 to be precise) and these students will probably be abroad (where it is much more expensive to live), the salaries ARE pretty high. More so, when you are starting in a company.

Now comparing this to the salaries that we (Engineering graduates) from the Pune University make - which is more or less in the range of Rs. 200,000 to Rs. 450,000, it would take us approximate 20 years to make the same amount that one of these ISB guys make in 1 year.

Which in more harsh and simpler terms means that one of these 4 guys will make more in 15 days of working compared to what we guys will make in a year of working.

A pretty compelling reason to do an MBA, ain't it?

However, IIM-Ahemdabad, which is considered one of the toughest schools in the world to get into and which is also one of the better IIMs in the country, has a national average package of Rs. 1,000,000 (10 lacs) and their highest Indian offer was Rs. 3,400,000 (34 lacs). I'm not aware of their international packages.

Makes you do some thinking ...

Doing some more research on this subject, brought me to this very interesting artice by the Hindustan Times - titled : The Jobs Paradox

A quote from the article states:

They are qualified engineers and MBAs, but they have no jobs. India had more than 60,000 unemployed graduate engineers at last count, according to government figures. No official figure for unemployed MBAs has been published yet.

And yet, India also has a shortage of skilled technical manpower. The country will face a shortfall of 1,50,000 IT engineers in 2010, says a Nasscom-McKinsey report released four months ago.

The article further goes to say that though India produces a LOT of Engineers and other graduates - many of them are "unemployable".

The only standard body governing technical education in the country is the AICTE - which sadly cannot maintain standards ... Most of the institutes certified by them are not upto the standards at all - and it does not take an expert to notice this.

Another problem (which the article also states) that there is big shortage of good teachers. The main reason being that teachers don't draw a big salary in most of the colleges. Freshly placed students tend to make as much as the teachers - if not more ... one reason, why teaching is not such a lucrative option and why there is such a dearth of good teachers.

Even in my college, though we always tend to get good overall results every year, barring a few teachers, others don't make a case for joining the college.
This is the case with most of the colleges around Pune - even the so called better colleges.

A good teacher is recognised instantly and respected by all the students - so we do get to hear accounts of "good" teachers - but these have been too far and few ...

This finally brings us back to the question of how the results tend to be good irrespective of the teachers?
There are two points to the answer - students who are sincere and/or brilliant from the beginning who carry themselves through and a very redundant and predictable education system - the latter of which I'll leave for discussion on a different article.

Hence, this creates a catch 22 situation.
Colleges, in order to do well, need to pick good students from the starting -- and good students only go to colleges that are doing well.

The case with our college is slightly different - its more of a proximity thing.
Our college is located in the heart of the city - and thus is more or less close to every corner of the city. ( The average time of getting to college is about 15 mins)
This draws more or less the good students from around who probably don't want to spend their lives travelling to colleges - and hence, the college is doing well.

But at the end of the day, all the colleges are failing to produce engineers which companies can use - so much, that the companies, given up all hope of finding good people, have started picking up good students early (before graduation) and training them on weekends - so that, by the time they pass out, they can start working immediately.

Then there is the question of reservation - and with it now poised to reach 50%, I pity the students and more so the companies - because finding good talent will become even more difficult.
One of the recruiters who came to our college mentioned that they prefer "a particular college in the city" over others - because they have no - or very low reservation policies.
Hence, the probability of finding brilliant students is much more there.

Other colleges do have brilliant students, but they are more difficult to locate and generally lost because of such reservation policies.

Something for everone to ponder about ...

By the way, do give the original article a read. Very worth it ...
Links here : The Jobs Paradox - Hindustan Times

Social Networking ...

What started off sometime ago as just filling out a large form for kicks ... (it was quite a novelty back then and the term social networking was probably not coined) has become a huge phenomenon today.

I never really went back to my orkut account for quite some time actually ... probably a year atleast.
For me it was just something that would help some old classmate find me - if ever the need be ... I did not feel the need to even update my profile ... except for some very rudimentary contact details ...

I even forgot I had an account there ... I had friends on orkut in single digits and no one really cared about the site.

And nowadays, I'm hitting the site almost everyday ... sometimes more than four to five times ... and everybody I know is on orkut ...

Over the past few months, orkut has just propelled into a the next big "2 point O" thing on the web - so much that google bought it - and now you log in using your google account.

Honestly speaking, Orkut is very poorly implemented - but its a great idea.
The reason it is so alive and kicking even today - and after the gzillion "No Donut For You - Bad Server" messages, people are still using it.

The conditions have definitely improved, because at one point of time, I remember people would not sign up, coz Orkut would keep rejecting their registrations due to server problems ... and filling out those huge forms was a pain in the rear.

Saying all this, Orkut is still much better than the many other sites that have sprung up in its wake ...
Google has a huge task on its hand - cleaning up a lot of bugs and getting a more stable release out. Orkut has had its share of security issues ... which is even more scary considering the large amounts of personal information stored out there.

I had recently read a movie director saying that a good story generally sells even though it may not be very nicely shot ... which I think is the case with Orkut.
Good idea, bad implementation.

But with google now in the picture, things have already started to look bright (slightly though)

In the end, you love it or hate it ... but you find yourself being drawn to it so often ... and this will probably be something which would help us friends and classmates communicate more easily once we're on our own and the common college grounds cease to exist ...

Goodbye college ...

Today, unfortunately (for some) or fortunately (for most), was our Engineering College Farewell to all the final year students ... Something to explicitly tell us - that its now officially over - end of student life for the most of us ...

Most of us who have been placed, have to join by the first week of July - so its a big step, moving onto a job and whole new world ...

Anyways, as I turned up for the farewell at 6:30 - there was the usual, the boring principal speech and the yada yada ... Something which nobody enjoys ...

As the evening progressed, the motley crowd of students that we are - some were enjoying it thoroughly while others were getting bored ...

After the speeches that were given by members of the staff, there were some contests organised by the juniors ... of which some were fun, and some weird ...

I was dragged into taking part in two contests - one which involved recognising a junior student and being able to give out his full name - these guys brought in front of me, a guy - whom I had never seen before - and thus guessing his name was way out of the question - much to the embarrasment of both of us.

The only solace was that the best anybody got was one guy guessing the last name of his junior.

The second contest which I was dragged into - which I would never have gone into - on my own free will was the Mr. College Contest ...

Here things got a bit awry ...
The guys who got called up (there were about 12 of us there initially) did not like the fact that the compere was dictating rules very sternly to the participants ...

The contest was supposed to be a fun contest - nothing was at stake and the rules could be bent a little.

Added to the fact, that the Final Year students of our college (and a good percentage of people on the stage at that time) are NOT the most affable, the guys decided to screw up the event.
So one common line was thought, and everybody introduced themselves as : "Hi ! My name is so and so ... and I'd like to be known as XXXX" (XXXX being a common joke that we have amongst us)
So, basically - the Mr and Ms. College Contest got completely ruined

Anyways, what struck me at that time was that farewells are pretty difficult to organise ... especially in colleges like ours where there is not much interaction between the juniors and the seniors at other times of the year.

The thing that screwed up the last Mr. and Ms. College contest was that people thought that they were being dictated rules - rules to a party which was being thrown for them.
This is the difficult part in organising such a thing ...

I have organised a couple of things, but never a farewell of such sorts - nor have I thought about how I'd do it ...
The difficulty comes in drawing the line between doing it well and over doing it a bit ... and mostly in catering to the people whom the party is for, making the rules - and at the same time pulling it off without making the people think that they are being bossed over.

Then again, we have a pretty rowdy crowd - which makes it even more difficult to organise such an event. But at the end of it, it was fun nevertheless and people should probably be grateful to the organisers for atleast taking the initiative to hold such a thing.

Anyways, so long MESCOE ... sort of mixed reactions for me ...
Technically, still a long way to college "officially" being over - there are submissions, and exams and projects to demonstrate - so shall write an "official college over post" once all those things are taken care off ...

Haaaave you met Ted ?

There is this new comedy on air nowadays - happened to catch one of the episodes, thanks to a good chum of mine, and now have fallen in love with the series.

The series is just in its first season as of today, with about 18 episodes aired.
Sadly, the show has not come to India (and I pretty much doubt it will) and we generally get to see it due to the magic of bittorrents :)


Anyways, the show is called - "How I met your mother" and tells us the story of how the protagonist - Ted (Josh Radnor) falls in love. The series is kind of a flashback in which he is telling this story to his kids - and hence the weird sounding name.

Anyways, the cast also includes Neil Patrick Harris - Ted's friend Barney - who I feel would be the primary reason for watching the show.
His character and the way he portrays it is brilliant - something that Chandler was to friends - but with no ethics ... which makes it so much more enjoyable.

The second reason to watch the show would be the utterly cute Cobie Smulders - who plays Robin - Ted's on and off love interest in the series.

The other two people who make up the team of five are Jason Segal - Marshall (Ted's best friend from college) and Alyson Hannigan (from American Pie) - who plays Lily - Marshall's fiancee.

The chemistry between the five is very good which eases you into the show at once and makes you feel right at home.
The show is like Friends in some ways, but still very different in its own way which is very refreshing ...

If you're a fan of friends, you'll love this show ...

Anyways, what prompted me to write this blog today, was that I came across Barney's blog : http://www.barneysblog.com

In the show, Barney talks about blogging many times and all those incidents are right there.
Its nice to see that the producers take that extra effort to do these things which gives the show a more real feel to it and makes the characters a bit more believable.

Be sure to check out Barney's Lemon Law (even if you haven't watched that episode)

Aeon Flux

Was unfortunate to have ended up going for the movie today.
What could have been our only solace that it had Charlize Theron - wasn't worth it ...

Spending a hundered bucks on the film still hurts and will do for sometime now ...

Will have to watch a couple of good movies just to wash the bad taste down ...
Just goes to show that even Hollywood can churn out utterly crappy movies ...

This one, just had a lot of budget to add to it the slickness (and also Charlize Theron)

Which makes this movie, in one sentence - "An utterly crappy, slick flick which also happens to have Charlize Theron" :p

Catch my review of the movie here.

Life comes a full circle ...

For all those who wanted to know, we didn't make it to National Finals of the Imagine Cup this year.

Now, unfortunately (or fortunately) the BE Project that we guys were doing and our IC submission was one and the same thing (for the sake of our sanities) - so atleast we will be seeing this thing through (hopefully)

Our theme and ideas were kept somewhat hushed up (which feels kinda stupid now) but anyways, will be letting the cat out of the bag soon enough.

In other news, came back from an awesome two day picnic to Nagaon (which is about 8 odd kms from Alibaug) and it was awesome fun. Will be posting pictures of the trip soon.

Perhaps the last with the guys from college - everything went off nicely and everybody had loads of fun.

For starters, here are a couple of images that I took on the beach ...

Low tide at the Alibaug beach at sunset - small kid with his dad

A family of four moving towards the Alibaug fort which is accessible by foot during low tides

The Constant Gardener

I caught this movie recently, after a friend of mine "highly" recommended it to me ... and I'm glad that I caught it.

This is one more addition to African Centric movies - though this is of a different nature.
The last african centric movie that I had watched was Hotel Rwanda, which to be frank, was brilliant.

These movies paint a very sad picture of Africa, and honestly, even India, with the gzillion problems that we face everyday, seems like heaven compared to what some people out there go through.

Some parts of Africa, are really, really bad - which results in the more well to do countries treating them like expendable guinea pigs - a premise on which the Constant Gardener is based on.

I've heard that the promos of the movie are very misleading and you'll be better if you've missed them completely - and if you have not, don't go according to what they say.
But a movie very well worth watching for its underlying base.

BTW .. the movie has Rachel Weisz (Mummy, Runaway Jury) who is brilliant and won the best supporting actress for her role in the movie.
Also has Ralph Fiennes (Schlinders List, Maid in Manhattan, The Prince of Egypt) who is equally brilliant.

A definite watch.

My review on the film : Here

Gdrive ...

I was surprised to see a pretty big article in the Indian Express talking about Google's GDrive. For those of you who still haven't heard about it, GDrive is supposed to be google's entry into the online file sharing business.

This news however, was not supposed to be released to the public, but as the story goes, a presentation made by Google for its investors on GDrive, got placed on Google's investor site by mistake and was downloaded by many people and the news spread like wild fire - thanks to the blogger community.

The presentation, has since then, been taken off the site and Google has kept a "no comments" policy on the entire thing.

Anyways, the GDrive is to offer its users, unlimited file storage - including many different file formats.

I did some lookup and found out that GDrive was infact a product of a thrid party company which had created an app by which you could store files of a max size of 999 MB in your gmail account using their tool.
They even had the domain name (http://www.gdrive.com) registered with them.

The version 0.6 of the tool can be found at this site : http://www.puremango.co.uk/cm_gdrive_109.php

Now, the reason why I am posting this is that all this thing about gDrive and unlimited storage being awesome and all, does bring up the entire issue of privacy and security.

How many people will trust google with their files?

In recent events, the Bush administration had forced google into giving them (anonymous) data on user search patterns.
What if tomorrow (though this is very unlikely) they make them give them access to files and stuff? After all Google IS a U.S based company.

Google is slowly, but surely, growing bigger and bigger - and they are becoming for the internet, what microsoft is for the personal PCs today. Even as of now, Google is pretty respected - with millions of people trusting its search, email, Earth (Google Earth) and many other such services.
All it will take for all this to end is one teensy weensy mistake ...
For my sake and everyone else's, I hope that this never happens ...

People are like ... crazy man !!!

While doing some webdev work today, I wanted to know what are the best methods to get rounded edges on layers, images etc ...

I know I am not very brilliant googling (it generally takes me some effort before I can zoom into the stuff I was looking for) but I was shocked beyond belief today.

I use firefox (which rocks by the way) and it has the google search bar with the auto completion feature turned on.
( for those who don't know, the google auto completion feature is something which fills in your search query by the most popular queries which other users have used - it is quite helpful when your brain is not working and you need to get a proper query in)

So, I start by query with "methods of ..." and before I could type further, the list gets filled up with suggestions.

(my actual query was : methods of getting round edges using CSS)

But these are things which google filled up:

methods of suicide - 3,410,000 results
methods of abortion - 1,210,000 results
methods of execution - 5,370,000 results
methods of mayhem - 29,000 results
methods of torture - 1,450,000 results

I mean - what the hell are people searching for?
There was an actual page in the "methods of suicide" search result which would be about 40 pages in printed pages - which talked about all the methods of killing yourself, along with tips, tricks and also an advice column.

Freak ... some people are just plain crazy (which is an understatement - it should be more like retarded !!!)


Please dont read the links above and kill yourself - not that I care much, but I don't have time to attend funerals :p
Hehehe ...

And if you're still wondering if you can get rounded edges in CSS, it will be supported in CSS3 - which does not have a proper spec - so will have to wait a while.
Till then, images are the only way to go ...

Education thingy ...

This semester, the college attendance for our class has been pretty low.
On a good day, the class attendance has been about 60% at best.

I think this stems from the fact, that nothing much is happening in college, we have crappy subjects and people are basically bored having attended the last 3 and a half years of their lives coming everyday to college -- so they want to cut it short.

Not to mention project work !!

Besides, we have only 4 subjects this semester and our time table has been put up in such a way - that we have Thursdays off for project work and then again Saturday and Sunday (which is normal college holiday too) - so we're basically working only 4 days a week.

On top of that, we have no practicals on Friday - which makes it the juicy day to bunk on - something I did this friday - with disastrous effects.

It turns out, that more than half the class had the same idea which resulted in the only the other half turning up for class which eventually resulted in a very, very *angry* (read pissed off) Head of the Department.

So in order to get us back on track, there was a long lecture (I heard about it via many people who actually were present) and we're having a test tomorrow on 2 chapters -- in which, if we score less than 75% (which is again a pretty impossible result to achieve), we will be chucked out of the class.

Also, there were a lot of warnings about us getting very, very poor grades in our projects (which make up a good 150 marks) and term work if we didn't attend sincerely enough.
Warnings also on "how what we do for projects does not matter", as the marks eventually come from the internal and external examiner - whose good books we need to be in.

Using this logic, people who spend more time doing credible and decent work (and who happen to miss classes due to this reason) will end up getting less marks than other people who come up with some half baked projects BUT attend sincerely.

So, why should we bother at all?
As sad as it seems, this is how most of the places work - I think.
You need to suck up to the higher authorities to get anything done at all.

Luckily in our case, this fact has just been more "explicitly" mentioned.

Reports from a Bank ...

I don't know how many people will agree with me, but ICICI banks, generally, suck !

All the money they spend on the Amitabh Bachan ads and the stupid "Bharosa hai" campaign could be put to better use, buying some sense for the people running the bank.

My dad and grandfather both have an account at the Shangrila Garden ICICI branch which is quite near my college - and to my great misery as well.
The proximity of the bank to my college, accounts for my gzillion trips to the bank - mostly to deposit cheques and stuff.

These guys have installed a cheque accepting machine, which, hardly anyone knows how to use - and most people are afraid, would eat up their cheques.
If you want to withdraw money, you probably have to wait in line for 20 minutes atleast during anytime of the day - at the ATM adjacent to the bank - which most probably is out of cash and is being refuelled.

Many times, I've had to deal with their not so helpful employees who'd give you the "Oh - why the hell did you ever be born" look everytime I made a minor mistake filling out a form or something.

Once, they refused to make me a demand draft to pay my fees ( which I had to do in about 4 hours time ) because apparently, their central server was down.

So, basically, ICICI is one of the banks in my "I will not bank here off my free will" list and atleast for the time being, plan to keep it there.

So, today, to my awesome luck - I was to go and deposit a couple of cheques ( 4 actually ) in the bank.
I was already late for my first lecture at 8, so I decided to bunk it and go and deposit the cheques first. ( the bank opens at 8 am )

So, I enter the bank at 8:30 - and I learn that I cannot use the machine to deposit the cheques and I need to do it the old fashioned way off the counter.
Then to my surprise, I learn that they have changed the system and I now need to take a token to even do that ...
Agony !!!

Anyways, I do that and wait .... and wait ... and wait ...
With about 10 minutes left for my next lecture and still about 20 guys in front of me at 8:50 in the morning, I throw my token in the bin and decide to come back later.

Fast forward to 1:15 pm
I enter the bank again - and it seems like the entire population of Pune had decided to bank at the same time.

There is total chaos at the bank - with about gzillion people running about, with no place for a guy like me with his big college bag to even stand.
I knew I had it !

Luckily, the token generating machine crashed - and all the token numbers of the gzillion people there got mixed up.
When I went to get my token - the guard asked me to just go directly and give the cheques to the person at the counter.

There was a line out there - surprisingly consisting of only 5 people. I blessed the guard for having some sense and headed for the counter.

Now here is where the surprises start.
The female at counter number 5 - inspite of all the chaos and rush and madness was pretty chilled out.
She was actually genuinely smiling and thanking all the people for banking there.
She actually apologized when she asked another female to fill out another form which the other female herself had screwed up!
Hmm ...

When my turn came - I gave her the entire pile of 4 cheques - she flipped through them - and found that the last cheque slip did not have my dad's cell phone number.
The horror !
At other times, I would have gotten a look from the employee which would make me want to kill myself and everyone else in the room - but this time, this person at the other end of the counter, just smiled - and said "Sir, all the cheques will go separately - so you need to fill the cell phone numbers on all the slips."

I was dumbstruck! I just took the slip, filled it up, and returned it back to her which she promptly stamped and returned the counterfoil back to me.

I slowly made my way out of the maddening crowds - the counterfoils in my hand - wondering what was going on ...
Maybe ICICI got some employee etiquette program going on - or maybe she was just a nice person.
Anyways, need more such service around.

Even though I still don't approve of ICICI, just want to give credit where it is due ...
So there ...