Overreporting on Indian media

Easy question: What are the two most over-reported news items in Indian media in recent times?
Easy answers:
1) Shilpa Shetty's misadventure on English television. I never imagined that some websites and TV channels will follow the results of Big Brother just like they track cricket scores. Pray tell me, why on earth is this so interesting?
2) Abhishek-Aishwarya's marriage. I knew this was going to be big, but I'm still annoyed at how much newsprint and air time is getting spent on this. Every day there is either a new speculation that they are already married, or else, what they are going to wear on their wedding. Either way, this never fails to make it to headlines every single day. I wish they marry soon so that this madness ends. Also, I don't care if they wear jeans and t-shirt or even a lungi on their wedding day.

Looks like our politicians are not creating enough news to feed the newspapers and TV.

My prediction comes true!

One of my technology predictions has come true within a couple of months! If there is a career in predicting technology trends, I guess I am ready for it now :-)

Wish you all ....

... a wonderful new year 2007!

Vaikuntha Ekadashi

Today is "Vaikuntha Ekadashi", a holy day for most Hindus. It is believed that one must visit a temple of Lord Vishnu/Venkateshwara today because doing so will fetch a lot of 'punya'. It is also believed that the doors of Vaikuntha are open for everyone today, so if a believer dies today, he/she will get a free entry there. So it is common to find long queues at all Venkateshwara temples, from early morning all the way till late night. Luckily people don't commit suicide on this day to get their free pass into the Lord's kingdom!

People seem to believe that the God, who is most willing to grant you your wishes on this particular day, won't be so forthcoming for the rest of the year. Is the God going to hibernate for the other 364 days, or what? My beliefs in religion are a bit different from the mainstream. I don't usually get sucked into standing in those long queues at temples on this day.

Today was an exception to this rule. I accompanied my parents to the Venkateshwara temple in J.P.Nagar at six in the morning, mainly because I had to drive them there. To my dismay, I found that the queue for general entry (dharma darshan) was already winding past a few cross roads! We were in a 'special' queue, having paid a fees in advance. However, the special queue was not too short either, reassuring me that J.P.Nagar had no shortage of rich people. What disappointed me was the way people were behaving.
People just did not follow the queue. Everyone felt he/she was special enough to break the queue and walk straight to the entrance. Even when we were moving in the queue, there were people who tried to overtake me - as if I was not moving fast enough! Many did not think twice before throwing garbage on the road. Petty quarrels were breaking out between the devotees as they waited in the queue. I was thinking - these are some of the best-educated, rich people of this city. If these people don't possess basic civic sense, what can we say about the rest of the juntaa?

I think Hinduism should have included a couple of rules about civic sense. Like, "if you jump a queue, you go to hell" or "if you throw filth on road, the doors of Vaikuntha will be closed for you, even on Vaikuntha Ekadashi". Sheesh!

Power of procrastination

My inherent ability to procrastinate has reached an all-time high this December. I can't seem to be able to do anything without putting it off for weeks. I must find out why it turned out to be this way. But I will do it tomorrow. or day after ;-)

I seriously hope things improve starting with the new year.

Bad boys of cricket

Indian cricket team has finally won a match in South Africa. Going by the way they played the one-day series, everyone thought they would have to buy lottery tickets if they were to hope to win anything at all in the tour. However, miracles do happen.

One of the positives of the first test, in my view, was the attitude shown by Sreesanth. I have read somewhere that some of his team-mates don't like his extravagant mannerism and "I don't care shit" attitude. However, ever since Saurav Ganguly was sidelined, there was nobody with such a colorful personality in the team. I really liked the way he responded in kind to Nel, when he hit Nel for a six on the very next ball after being taunted by him. Contrast this with the way Dravid had responded to Allan Donald a few years back in a similar situation. What a difference!

We really need some bad guys in the team to keep it vibrant and colorful.

There is a girl...

who brings a smile on my face in the morning. I see her almost every day on Bannerghatta Road. When I start from home to office, I am always anxious, wondering whether I am going to see her or not. If I don't see her, I know that I am going to be less happy throughout the day. She never smiles at me, hardly even notices me, but I feel reassured the moment I see her.

Well, she is a traffic warden. She stands at the junction of Bannerghatta Road and N.S Palya main road where I take a right turn towards BTM Layout. Without her being there, our moronic drivers create a traffic jam at that junction within a few seconds. A messy trafficjam there affects my commute time to office and puts me in a bad mood. She is very diligent in her work and ensures smooth flow of traffic at that junction. Unfortunately on some days she does not show up, so all hell breaks loose.

Hard disks vs flash memories

A few years back, when the dot-com craze was at it's peak, when the need for storing large amount of data was growing by the minute, everyone thought the hard disk and storage manufacturers were going to have a wonderful time ahead. Nobody could think of any other technology that could pose serious threat to hard disks. Today, less than a decade since then, hard disk manufacturers are alarmed by the advances in flash memory technology. Fuelled by robust growth in digital cameras and other hand-held devices, flash memory manufacturersare seeing unimaginable growth. With every passing year, flash memory cards are almost doubling in size and prices are dropping. Today I saw that Toshiba is coming up with an 8GB SD card. It is now believed that very soon, 40GB SD cards will be common. Hard disks have traditionally provided larger sizes, faster data rates and cheaper storage in comparison to other technologies. But how long will they remain ahead in this race? It is clear that flash memory sizes will eventually catch up with hard disks in size. Will disks continue to have faster data rate and cheap storage advantage?

I predict that notebook computers will be the first to adopt flash memory. Since these memory cards don't have any moving parts, they will be best fit in notebook computers. If flash memory cards improve their data rates, operating systems could use them instead of a disk partition for hibernating. If they improve the reliability, they could replace the ROMs in computers. It could make it much easier to re-flash the BIOS and other such non-volatile storages both in computers and embedded devices. Whatever it is, I think flash memories have much better future compared to hard disks. Sandisk, Kingston, etc will do much better than Seagate, Hitachi, etc!

The Financial Expert

I just finished reading "The financial expert" by R.K.Narayan. I don't read all that much in English; I prefer to read in Kannada instead. Whatever little I have read in English was all written by western authors. Hence reading a story in English by an Indian author, with the story set in India was refreshingly different. I cannot say I liked the story all that much, but the people in the story, the way they talk, the way their surroundings are, everything is so very different and nice. I think I should read more stories of this type.

Planning my day

My employer allows me to work from home (WFH). I am proud of that, because not many companies in Bangalore give such a facility to employees. It greatly enhances flexibility of planning my day. For example, I can leave office at a fixed time in the evening, irrespective of how much work is still pending, because I can always work a few hours after reaching home and get the work done.

Unfortunately all good things come with strings attached. I have recently realized that WFH facility is slowly making me inefficient in planning my day. I no more have the pressure to finish off all my work by the end of the office day! Invariably I push some of the work to later in the night. So now-a-days I _plan_ to work the entire day - the hours I spend in office as well as the hours I spend at home. I am working from home later in the night on pretty much all days, irrespective of whether there is a requirement for that or not.That is definitely bad. I must get back to planning my work only for the office hours and work from home at night only if it is inevitable. I wonder how successful I will be in doing that.

Helmet rule

After postponing it roughly 200 times, the state Government has finally made it compulsory for all two-wheeler riders in Karnataka to wear helmets. Err... except if you are in Bellary. This concession for Bellary is apparently because the weather is too hot there. I would have accepted that argument a couple of months back when the CD politics was at it's peak in Bellary and it was generating a lot of political 'heat'. But now, I don't see how Bellary is any more hot than Raichur, Gulbarga or even Mangalore. Bangaloreans can't claim any such concession unless Mallika Sheravat visits the city. (No, in fact I don't find her hot.)

There are obviously many advantages of wearing a helmet. I have at least 3 friends who are alive today only because they wore a helmeton a particular day in their lives. However, I am seeing that helmets are now helping not just the rider, but everyone else on the road. It is normal now-a-days to see youngsters talking on cell phones as if their life depends on it. In a few years, if Darwin's theory is any true, we should start seeing kids being able to use cell phones the moment they are born. Now, you don't expect people to stop talking on their phone just because they are performing, in parallel, another activity like riding a bike or doing a brain surgery. So they hold the phone between their ear and shoulder, bending their head completely to one side and continue riding. Obviously, we can't expect such people to ride attentively. Heck, I have seen pedestrians hitting poles and parked vehicles on the road because they were engrossed in talking on cell phone. I am always scared to see such people riding a bike in front of my car. You never know when they are going to do something very stupid and end up under your car. Now, with their helmets on, they cannot talk this way while riding the bike. So it is a simple solution to this problem. Of course, people can still hands-free, but that is better than before.

We need helmets to come with built-in head phones. Then we could use hands-free and FM radio on our cell phones while riding, without having to carefully wear the earphones. Hey, this could be a patentable idea right here!

One of my recent pictures

Not bad for a point-and-shoot Canon A520?

Harangi dam

I had been on a tour of Coorg last weekend. On my way back I visited the Harangi dam. It is a relatively big dam near Kushalanagar with hardly any villages nearby, so it is a nice, isolated place. Approach roads are quite good, so it is all nice and good till you reach there. Admission tickets are only Rs.2 per head. Then come the restrictions : Photography not permitted. Public are not allowed on the dam proper. Reason? Security. I was told that these measures started last year.

I find some of these restrictions pretty ridiculous. Especially the no photography one. We are living in an age where you can see an aerial photo of your home in Bangalore using Google Earth. Within a few years it may be possible to tell the brand of the ice cream sold at Harangi sitting at your desk in front of your computer. The other restriction about not lettting people on top of the dam was also quite meaningless. Especially considering the fact that they allow people at the base of the dam, right next to the wall of the dam. We could also go into the water on the other side of the dam, right upto the wall of the dam. You just don't get on the dam wall and you are fine :-)

When will the authorities realize the futility of such measures? The only purpose these measures are serving is to discourage tourists from visiting the place. That shows in the state of the garden around the dam, which appears to have been quite good once upon a time. The wisest thing to do would have been to develop the dam into a nice tourist place (garden, restaurant, water boats, the works) and provide basic security measures to ensure people don't walk in carrying any bombs/rocket launchers/artillery tanks! They could then bump up the entry fees to Rs.10 or 20 and people would be happy to pay that.

Nationalized bundhs

The 'bundh' called across Karnataka today is (kind of) supported by our own state Government. This is funny, because when the economists are calling for privatizing everything, Government wants move in opposite direction and take up conducting of strikes/bundhs in it's own hands! What next? Government-sponsored BMTC bus stoning?

Digital generation gap

Well, it had to happen one day. There sure was going to be one day when there would be a cool new thing on the web and I was going to be too old-fashioned to pick it up. After all, how many new tricks can an old dog learn? What surprised me was that it happened so soon in my life. I am talking about the digital generation gap. The eerie feeling that creeps up your mind that you have started belonging to the previous generation and the next gen is ready to run you over.

I started using the Internet while the so called dot-com bubble was building up - mid to late nineties. So I was among the early users of many things on the Internet we take for granted now - web-based e-mail, web-based storage space, e-shopping, online chat, egroups (this was before Yahoo bought e-groups and named it Yahoo groups), etc. In the recent years I had transitioned well into a blogger's world, so I had blindly assumed that I had kept pace with the speed of the digital revolution (what exactly is that?)

I had heard about Orkut once in a while, mostly from people who are fresh out of college or who did so a couple of years back. I had conveniently assumed that it was one of the 'fringe' apps on the net I won't have to bother about. But eventually when I got an invite to join Orkut from Manju, it was time to really explore what it was all about. And what did I see? Everyone, their grandmoms and their dogs already seemed to be members of this online community! Many of my classmates from SJCE, many of my old friends living all around the globe were already on-board! There were communities that I really cared about and readily wanted to be a part of. It was as if I wokeup one morning and found that it had _snowed_ extensively in Bangalore and I did not even know about it. I was left wondering "Hey, how did I miss the bus?"

Now that I have caught up with it, I feel much better. However, I know that similar things are just waiting to happen again and one ofthese days I won't keep pace. So even though an actual human generation is around 25-30 years, a generation in the digital world will be much shorter. My guess is that people who are 10-15 years younger to us will belong to an entirely different generation altogether on the Internet. That is not a pleasant feeling, you know!

About FM radio station

With another FM radio station, Radio One opening up, the competition in the air is heating up. I keep switching radio stations while I drive (all males are genetically programmed to switch TV and radio channels at the rate of 1 channel about 5 seconds, sometimes just 2 seconds) and I have noticed that I am more often stopping at this new station to listen to a song or a conversation. So for now, Radio One is my favorite. But my loyalty can change very fast.

I wonder how people in Radio City feel about new stations coming up. They once had a share of 90+% of market, but I guess they don't have that much anymore. Radio broadcasting must be a very difficult field to innovate and stay on top of the heap.

Mad rush on Aug15

This year on August 15th, I committed one of the gravest mistakes that can be committed by a Bangalorean - Visiting Lalbagh flower exhibition on a weekly holiday, that too on the last day of the show. When I arrived at the gates of Lalbagh after several minutes of painful waiting in the traffic jam outside, the authorities there snatched Rs.50 from me and told me that I could park my car inside the bagh. They have a crooked sense of humour, I now think. Let alone park the car, I could consider myself lucky if I could just drive my car through the dense population inside! Once I (miraculously) found a place to park my car, I found that people pulling and pushing each other, cursing, grabbing each other by hair and so on to be able to make their way through the thousands of trying to do exactly the same! All this was not even inside, but on the way to the glass house. Situation inside the glass house was much more grim. Once we managed against all odds to get in, the only thing my wife wanted to do was get out of the glass house! Once we did that, the only thing she wanted to do was get out of Lalbagh!!!
To give credit where it is due, flower show was probably very good. I don't know exactly, because all I saw were the heads and backs of other people who were trying like me to see the flowers. However, being a person who allows some time to smell the flowers, I did snatch a couple of pics on my camera before we left.


You would think that we learnt our lesson by this time and headed straight back home and spent the rest of the evening in frong of TV, but no sir, we don't learn so easily. We went straight to the new Big Bazaar just half kilometre away. They were running some sale that was ending on that day, hence large crowds eager to buy anything in the store were thronging the place. This place seemed to be an extension of Lalbagh as far as crowds are concerned, but with more spending opportunites. But it took us just a few minutes to learn our lessons this time. We decided not to venture to any such places on any such day ever again and headed back home.

The city is now filled with people who desperately want to have a good time and are ready to spend for it, but the infrastructure is not catching up.

Duh!

First, South Africa pulled out of the triangular cricket series in Srilanka and the series was reduced to 3 matches between India and Srilanka. Next, the rain gods decided to pour cold water on the excitement and the series got washed out. This is probably one of the most disappointing cricket series for cricket lovers. But was this the right time to hold a cricket series in the island nation? I don't know, but it looks like they decided to hold it bang in the middle of their rainy season. Wasn't it like holding a world ski competition in Chennai in the month of April or a golf tournament in, say, northern Canada in January? I guess we need to tell the Srilanka cricket authorities: "See guys, if this is your rainy season, it probably _will_ rain (surprise!) and it probably _will_ affect cricket matches adversely. What you need to plan is a swimming competition in your Colombo cricket stadium during this time of the year" How can we pay back the Lankans when they tour India next time? Plan some matches in Chirapunji? Or probably Jayanagar Swimming club? ;-)

A new blog!

It has now been a bit more than an year since I started this blog. As an anniversary gift to 'devout' followers (I hope at least one person other than me is reading this blog), I am presenting, hold your breath and control your excitement, a second blog! The only thing better than having a crappy blog is having two of it ;-) I hope two bad things cancel it out. The second blog has been in my mind for a while now, but I was not sure how it was going to take shape. Now that I have decided to take it out of wraps, why don't you have a look at it and give your suggestions?

Please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please have a look at it :-)) http://v-chitra.blogspot.com

Angry weather gods

Don't you feel the weather is turning out to be too extreme, too often in the last few years? In the last couple of years, I have heard about record-setting weather conditions all around the world. Last year, it was the deluge in Mumbai and Bangalore, the kind we had not ever seen. We also heard that the US had a record number of hurricanes last  year, highlighted by Katrina. We then heard about the unusually heavy snowfall and cold in eastern parts of US and Canada. This year, there has been a never-heard summer in Europe and North America. I read that weather reporters in Europe have been forced to get new thermometers because their existing ones were not designed for temperatures this high. Many countries are recording all time high temperatures. The evergreen England too is drying up!

Is it just my imagination, or am I seeing far too many such incidences in the recent past? Record rainfalls, record heats, record deaths, especially in the more 'advanced' northern hemisphere of the Earth. Is it all a part of global warming? Or are these the early signs of the impending obscuration/cataclysm that Hindu mythology describes as "Pralaya"?