Beach trek!

Probably the biggest adventurous thing I do on a day-to-day basis is driving through the BTM ring road between 9 and 10AM. However, every now and then, a deep voice within me instigates me to to something really adventurous. I usually ignore it as an indication of indigestion. However, once in a while I lose my sense and decide to indulge in something like going on a trek. December 15-16 weekend was one such time. It was going to be a 'beach trek', which meant, instead of climbing mountains, we were going to walk tens of kilometers along a beach. Not that it is any less insane.

We were a bunch of software engineers at different levels of physical fitness. There were some who had done a Himalayan expedition in the last couple of years, whereas there were some whose most physically strenuous job in the last few months involved a walk from a distant outdoor car parking lot (gasp!). My own glorious trekking past had ended a number of years back. Hence it was like putting Schumacher and a M-800 driver in the same car racing team.

We set out to Bhatkal in a bus, from where our trek was supposed to begin. It is a town approximately 500Kms from Bangalore, along the western coast of Karnataka. Our journey in a KSRTC bus lasted just about 14.5 hours at an impressive rate of 35Km per hour. By the time we reached, it was 9:30 in the morning on a hot and sunny day. By the time we were at the beach, it was what experts call the right time to walk on a sunny, hot beach for hours: 12 in the noon. Our plan was to walk till Byndoor on the first day and on the second day, walk till Maravanthe, which is probably one of the most beautiful beaches anywhere in India.

It took approximately 30 minutes for our initial euphoria to dry up and realize that the day was going to be harsh, hot and sticky. We quickly learnt a valuable lesson that walking a long distance on a surface that inclines from left to right can be bad for your left ankle. There were hardly any people on the beach, leading us to wonder if the population density of coastal Karnataka had come down drastically in the recent times. (I thought Tsunami hit the east coast of India, not the west!) We stopped at a coconut grove for our lunch, the best planned activity of our trek. After a while, we stopped for a dip at a fresh water lake right next to the beach. The vast sea seems like a powerful salt water empire, against which the little fresh water lakes seem to be trying to hold on to their own identity. Some more rigorous walk ensued and we eventually reached Byndoor. Success for day 1.


(Pic1: Sripathi, Chandra, Hariharan, Bharadwaj, Prasanna, Naren and Bharata. Pic2: Same folks + Chandru)

On day 2, after carefully considering all the factors, like the heat factor, the sweat factor, the strain factor and the i_prefer_AC_rooms_to_beach factor, some of us, specifically the M800 types, contemplated skipping the beach and catching a bus to Kundapura. After all, the road runs close to the beach, so we could still enjoy the beach from up close, without actually interacting with it's 'factors'. However, Bharata, our team lead for the trek, dangled the carrot of doing most of the walking early in the morning, before it got too hot. So we set out on day 2 and by 8AM, we were at the beach. The weather was quite pleasant and the beach was much flatter than the previous day, giving our ankles much needed support. Within the first hour, we had walked almost 5 kilometers. By noon, we had pretty much walked the entire distance.

We saw a lot more people on the beach early in the morning. It confirmed our suspicion that the area was in fact pretty well populated, but the native people had much too common sense to be walking on hot sand in the noon. Tens of children were playing on the beach and _all_ of them wanted us to take their photos. It left me wondering "These kids are not going to see these pictures _ever_ in their life again, why do they still want to get their picture taken?"


We had to cross 2 river mouths in these two days. We took help from local fishermen for this. What surprised us was that on both the occasions, the boatman refused to take any money from us for his efforts. Especially on day 2, a boatman invited us to use his boat, did 2 trips across the river, but flatly refused any money. All I can say is these people have not gotten in touch with the auto-rickshaw drivers of Bangalore.

By around 1PM, we had entered Maravanthe. Bharata proposed that, since we had met the objectives of the project, we call the trek over and and travel onward to Kundapura in a bus. Not surprisingly, the proposal was approved with 100% votes by the team. We checked into a lodge in Kundapur for the rest of the day and took the night bus to Bangalore.

PS: The 'official' travelogue should appear on Bharata's blog soon.

Ironies of life

Recently I became a father of a baby girl. We were in a hospital in Jayanagar and there were scrores of my relatives and friends visiting us, to see the baby and wish us. We had kept some sweets ready in our hospital room to offer to the visitors. What I observed was that most of the visitors were reluctant to pick up a full piece of sweet, either because they were diabetic or because they were trying to lose weight. Most just ate a small piece, that too after mentioning that they should not really be eating it.

Later, I went around the hospital floor to offer sweets to the staff there. Their approach towards the sweet was in stark contrast to our visitors. While nurses picked up a full piece of sweet without any qualm, some of the the cleaning staff (ayahs) actually asked me if they could take a second piece as well. I saw one of them preserving the second piece which she said was for her son.

This had a profound impact on me. While we go around offerring something to people who already have too much of it or don't want to have it, there are others who want to have it, but probably won't even be offerred. I then took out a box of sweets and left it at a desk where the hospital staff can take from at will. At the end of the our stay in the hospital, the box I left at the desk was empty, whereas the one I had kept in my room was not :-)

Controversy about honoring sports persons

When India won the T-20 world championship, everybody, including the state Government, PSUs, BCCI, media and private companies showered the winning team with praises, money and endorsements. This was widely publicized in the media and the Governments which did not reward crickets from their state (TN, Gujarat) were hounded and criticized until they too succumbed and announced cash awards. This resulted in other sports persons raising serious objection about the step-motherly treatment they are dished out. Hockey players had recently won the Asia cup, others had won world championships in snooker and billiards. The media and eminent persons of the society joined the uproar. Hockey players wondered why Sahara group, which sponsors the cricket team as well as the hockey team, treats these two differently when it comes to shelling out money. Quickly, the state Governments were in defense mode. Some of them hurriedly announced cash awards to these sports persons too. The controversy is not dying down fully yet. Vishwanathan Anand, after winning the world chess championship, has wondered what kind of reception he is going to get from the people back home, considering that they showered their love on the winning Indian cricket team.

As I think about this episode, some things are clear in my mind. First of all, it was wrong on the part of the Governments to go over the top in honoring the cricketers while neglecting other sports persons. In fact, the Governments could have done away with giving any cash to the cricketers, because they are getting a good amount of money from Sahara, BCCI and endorsement deals. They could have instead spent the money on other sports and that would have been a genuine encouragement to these sports. Finally, rewarding sports persons does not make our politicians any great. After all, it is the public money they are spending, not money from their own pockets.

Secondly, corporate sponsors like Sahara. They are a company engaged in making profits. They should and do think of their profits all the time, hence they are going to spend money only in places where they believe they have a good return on investment. It is not that they have a special interest in cricket. If hockey (or, say, Kabaddi) was the most popular game in India, they would have spent the money on hockey, not cricket. Hence, why blame them? We don't care to even watch a hockey game on TV, so how can we expect corporates to shower money on the game? There is no use forcing anyone - Governments, corporates, media to give more importance to other games. If we watch these games, these things will happen automatically.

Third, some games are inherently not as enjoyable for the general public as others. For example, there is no way whole India is going to sit at the edge of their chair and watch Vishwanathan battle it out for the chess world championship. So Vishy, please don't expect a massive gathering of people along your victory parade from Chennai airport to the city in an open bus.

Why thank (just) Muslims around the world?

At the presentation ceremony of today's Twenty-20 finals, Shoib Malik said: "First of all I'd like to thank people back home and the Muslims around the world." I really don't understand why he has to thank people of a religion particularly. Does he think people of other religions never support Pakistan? Why is that so? BTW, India is home to nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan itself!

South Indian = Madrasi

North Indians have always been poor at differentiating between the people from the four southern states and appreciating the difference between their languages, cultures and ways of life. Any south Indian is referred to as a "Madrasi". With the vast movement of North Indians to cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai in recent times, I was expecting that the situation would have changed by now. I was expecting that at least TV channels would be able to make this distinction very well.

A few days back I was watching a discussion on CNN-IBN. English news channels live on hype and they had a mouth-watering topic that day - the controversy related to the Sethusamudram project. One of the participants was a historian from Tamilnadu, I don't remember his name now. The discussion was moving on the lines of "Is Lord Sri Ram only popular in the North India? Is he relevant in the south?". The anchor asked the historian if he could elaborate. The historian said something on the lines of "Ram is not worshipped in Tamilnadu. There are hardly any temples for Ram in Tamilnadu. In fact many believe that worshipping Ram brings ill fate" At this stage, the anchor concluded something like this: "So worshipping Ram is limited to North India. Since South Indians don't worship Ram, we can't say that Ram is an integral part of Hindus in India." These are not the exact words she used, but pretty close.

Now, I really don't know whether Lord Ram is worshipped much in TN. This is a far too controversial topic to write about. What irked me is, how can Tamilnadu represent South India completely? Of course Ram is worshipped in Karnataka. Of course there are temples for Ram in Karnataka and AP. We surely don't believe that worshipping Ram brings ill fortune. Ram may not be as popular a god in South India as he is in the north, but saying nobody worships Ram in the south is too much of stretch. Come on folks, South India is not just TN. While at it, every South Indian is not a Madrasi!

My ADSL modem and router configuration

I bought my Linksys WRT54G wireless router in the US. It is a bit sensitive to voltage fluctuations. On some days the quality of power supply in my area is poor, which results in the router rebooting all by itself. When this happens, I am forced to remove the router and connect directly to the ADSL modem. The modem, having been made for Indian conditions, is much better at coping with voltage fluctuations.

Typical modem-router configurations recommend setting the modem in bridge mode and using the router to talk PPPoE language. However, in my case, when I remove the router and connect directly to the modem, I will have to change the modem from bridge mode to PPPoE mode. This is a surely extra work and is not nice. So I needed a setup in which I could either connect to the modem or to the router without making any change to settings anywhere (except of course restarting networking on my laptop).

Now I have got a setup that does exactly this. This is how I have done it:
As you can see here, I have my modem in the default PPPoE configuration. Modem's IP is 192.168.1.1, which is the default. I have enabled DHCP server on it, giving out IPs between 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.33.


Moving on to the Linksys router, I have configured it to be in "Automatic configuration - DHCP" mode. I have set it's IP to be 192.168.1.36. This can be any IP outside the DHCP IPs provided by the modem. I have disabled the DHCP server on the router, because I don't want to have 2 DHCP servers in my network.


I have connected the ethernet cable from the modem to the one of the router's 4 regular ports, not the "Internet" port.

I have enabled DHCP on my laptop. It gets it's IP from the modem. The router acts just as a router, forwarding all packets to the modem. When I disconnect the router and connect directly to the modem, it still works perfectly fine without needing any configuration changes anywhere.

About Twenty-20 cricket

I watched parts of the first ICC Twenty-20 match yesterday. I believe it is in line with the trend of the time and is bound to succeed. It is good that ICC has formalized the rules of T-20 to make it a mainstream game. I don't know if the dresscode of cheerleading squad is 'official', though :-)

As batsmen get used to the T-20 format, they will learn that it is possible to score runs of many balls that they used to just defend all these days. This will have an impact on the one-day cricket as well, just as the one-day cricket had an impact on test-cricket. More and more one-day games will see scores above 300 now.

The idea was simple. People don't have patience to spend a whole day watching a game of cricket, so the game has been shortened to meet people's tastes. Purists obviously don't like this experiment. They argue that T-20 makes the game lose it's character, skillful batting becomes irrelevant, the game is demoralizing to bowlers and so on. However, when one-day games were introduced, a lot of people opposed this 'dilution' of the game, but slowly got used to the idea of a game that finishes on the same day as it begins. Of course, there are people who still believe test cricket is the only 'pure' form of cricket, but such people are bound to be extinct in a few years.

Been a long time

It has been four and a half months since I blogged. I don't know how it started, I guess I became very busy for a few days and slowly blogging ceased being an important activity. However, I have started missing it, so it is surely time to get back to it. Hopefully I will keep up to it from now on.

Demise of Poornachandra Tejaswi

Poornachandra Tejaswi, one of the best known Kannada writer and novelists, passed away on the 5th of April. I have read some of his books (Jugaari Cross, Karvalo, Abachoorina Post Office, Chidambara Rahasya come to my mind immediately) and thoroughly appreciated them. I liked the suspense that used to be a part of his novels. He came out of his illustrious father Kuvempu's shadow and created a unique impact on the Kannada literature. It is unfortunate that we won't get to see any more of his writing. May his soul rest in peace.

First rain of 2007

Bangalore saw it's first rain of the year on 11th and 12th of April this year. Last year, it was on 4th March. Not a good sign, considering the serious water shortage in the city.

Living in a construction zone

I live in one of the 'upcoming' layouts in Bangalore. It is coming 'up' really fast, considering all the apartments coming up all around my house. Within 100 metre radius of my house, there are at least 100 new houses coming up! Living in a completed house with so many under-construction houses all around is very unique experience. I have lived here for almost 2 years now and it has not been easy!

Coming to think of it, this area has been like this ever since we came here. First, it was the telephone guys digging up the road to lay the underground cable. Then the electricity guys decided to lay underground cable. Then came the Kaveri water folks (no, we don't have water flowing in our pipes yet, but we have pipes ready so that rodents get a breeding place.) Then came the asphalting folks. After this, many people started constructing houses.

Beginning phase of every new house has been very painful to us. First, they drill a bore-well (there is no water supply yet!). This involves a couple of huge trucks entering the area and making enough noise to drive away all wildlife from Bannerghatta national park, very late into the night. The next phase is digging for foundation. They dig carefully place all the mud on the road so that it causes maximum inconvinience to people using the road. This phase lasts 1-2 months and is the most dusty one. After this, a lot of sand, cement, bricks and metal come in, all of which is carefully laid out on ... you guessed it... the road! I guess they consider any land outside the road to be impure, not to be used for dumping construction materials. After a few months of dusty development, the house is almost ready and the road is almost completely destroyed! Any construction waste is left behind exactly where it was, without anyone bothering to clean up after the act. As a final punch, they conduct a 'Grihapravesha', the day when they block the road completely with a shamiana. Meanwhile, my house has lost it's original color, I hardly remember what it was. It is now covered in a fine layer of dust.

The other nuisance of living in a construction zone is the construction labour. These are floating population, typically families of a husband, wife and 4-5 children. Children, instead of going to school, specialize in throwing stones at electric lights. Husband and wife together earn around 200Rs per day, which should amount to around 6000 per month, which is not very bad considering their spending is so less. But alas! most of this money gets spent on liquor, so it is common to see the whole family engaing in a high-pitched, foul-mouthed quarrel at 10 in the night.

I have to suffer this for at least another 1 year. Hopefully things will get better after that.

Ubuntu Linux desktop

Some of the so called 'experts' predict in January of each year that this year is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. I remember people declaring that 2003 was going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. They kept on revising their targets at the beginning of each year. It has now become so common to see such articles on tech websites that nobody really takes them seriously.

A positive development in the last few years is the rise of Ubuntu. Those who have not been bitten by the Ubuntu bug wonder what is so special about it. Those who use it swear by it. There is a lot of buzz around it all the time. All the code and binaries shipped by Ubuntu are readily available for any other Linux distro to see and copy (due to GPL). So what does Ubuntu do that others don't?

The simple answer is, things work on Ubuntu. Things work as they should. Things work as you expect them to. Here is a Linux distro that cares for the average joe. It doesn't expect you to understand tens of configuration file formats and edit them using 'your favorite text editor'. Ubuntu has been designed with desktop in mind, not just the back-end server. There are tons of software packages for Ubuntu. It has a wonderful package manager. Once you have all the correct repositories set up, you can install pretty much any software without bothering about dependencies, all from a nice GUI called Synaptic. I have been using Ubuntu on my desktop for weeks now, but I have not learnt any debian package management commands yet! Your best chance of getting your wireless, suspension (to disk, to memory), etc working on Linux is on Ubuntu. It is possible (almost) to live without opening the text mode terminal on Ubuntu. There is also a vibrant community around Ubuntu, so things will only get better in future.

If you are hesitant to make the jump, try out the Ubuntu live CD/DVD. I'm sure you will love it.

Customer support and the credit unions in the US

You get to really measure the quality of customer support of a company only when something has gone wrong and you expect them to fix it. For example, you will get to evaluate the customer support of your mobile phone service provider when you are trying to get some error in your bill corrected. I am writing about an example of good customer support that I have received from a credit union in the US.

I am not sure exactly how credit unions in the US are different from the regular banks, probably they run on the same principles as co-operative banks in India. I have been a customer of two credit unions - the first time when I was in Salt Lake City a few years ago and again in 2005, when I was in Austin. It was always nice to interact with them - they created a friendly atmosphere and I was always able to get all my work done with minimum or no hassle.

Recently, I had a bit of trouble while closing my account and getting my money back from IBM-TEFCU. My account had been closed, but my last check went missing! Meanwhile, the credit union had been rebranded as Amplify and it's website design had changed completely. Hence I suspected that it may be difficult to solve the problem and get my money back. However, they responded to my every e-mail promptly and did everything they could to ensure that I get my money back. Today my money has reached me and I feel very satisfied when I send them a thank-you note.

There have been other such incidences where credit unions have given me exceptional help and support. Hence I recommend anyone who is going to the US, especially for the first time, to open their bank account with a well known credit union in their area.

Update: Here is some crisp information about how credit unions differ from regular banks. Now I know why they used to call me a member of the CU, not a customer.

Strength of unity (and virtues of social living)

I normally sleep for some extra time on Saturdays and Sundays. But last Saturday was different. I woke up to a loud noise created by a bunch of crows outside my bedroom window. When I peeked out of the window, I saw a bunch of crows on the electric wires and nearby houses. They were looking down at the ground and crowing as if their lives depended on it. They used to take to air every few seconds, scoop down to the ground, then fly up into the air and settle again where they were sitting. This activity was drawing the attention of other crows nearby and they were quickly descending on the scene of action to join this activity.

For a minute I could not figure out what was going on. When I looked at the ground, to my surprise, I saw that a crow had fallen on the ground. It's legs were entangled in some rope, making it unable to fly. It was twisting and turning in the dust, trying to free itself from the rope. Meanwhile, a stray dog was eyeing this rare opportunity to lay it's teeth on the crow. That is when it struck me what exactly was going on there. The crow population was making all the noise to encourage the fallen one and they were hovering close to the ground every few seconds to scare off the dog from going too close to their friend. The amount of noise they were making and their intimidating behavior was enough to keep the dog at bay.

After a while, the crow had freed itself from the rope around it's legs. Now it's friends were even more enthusiastic in encouraging it to take to the sky. But it was just sitting there motionless, making me wonder if it had been too hurt to fly. However, after taking a few more minutes to regain itself, the fallen crow finally took off into the air! This was an incredible sight to me. Because of the single-minded, selfless, dedicated effort of the crow community, one of their own escaped what could have been definite death and flew back into the air. The stray dog, which came back after a few minutes, must have been disappointed to find no crow on the ground, no crows hovering around, just a rope lying in the dust. Unlucky day for him. I started my day being impressed about the unity and mutually helpful nature of the crows.

Ooh!

That must be my longest post till date!

Normalization of India

When somebody goes to US for the first time, he/she is obviously very excited. There are so many new things to see and do, everything there seems to be very exciting and nice. This was especially true of me when I first landed in a small city called Salt Lake City in Utah in the year 2000. During then, Food-World was only just starting off in India, malls and multiplexes were still a few years away. Four-lane roads almost didn't exist either. Hence everything I saw in that small US city seemed to be wonderful. But as time progressed and I visited other places in US, I realized that all cities of the US were very very similar to each other. Similar freeways, similar roads, similar road names (Cedar street readily comes to my mind), McDonalds, Burger Kings, Mixican food joints, Wal-marts, 'Target's, down-towns with high rises. If you had seen one city, you had seen them all. Unless of course you were visiting a national park or other such tourist attraction.

India is not like this. Every city has it's own character and uniqueness. This is especially true for cities in different states, but towns within a state too are never a replica of each other. Compare Hubli and Mysore, you get the idea. The people in US speak about 'cultural differences' between various states/areas of their country, like east coasters and mid-westerners. They have no idea how much diversity can a country can possess until they learn about India.

I have observed a trend recently that is just a trickle now but I expect it to speed up in the coming years. Indian cities are slowly losing some of this diversity and becoming 'normalized'. This trend can now be majorly seen with higher middle-class and high end of the society in bigger cities, fast spreading into smaller towns.

I was in Chennai recently and since I had a few hours of free time during one evening, I roamed in and around Spencer's plaza, the most famous mall in Chennai. Outside the mall, I saw a billboard for 'Fitness One' and I exclaimed "Hey, they are in Chennai as well". In fact, most billboards were of national brands. Inside the mall, I got a sense of deja-vu when I saw outlets of so many familar brands Ihad seen in Forum Mall or Garuda Mall in Bangalore. Cookie Man, Samsonite, Pizza Hut, Subway and so on. In fact I returned from the mall being kind of disappointed, because it felt like I could have seen all that in Bangalore. I should have go to Marina beach instead, that is something that will never come to Bangalore :-)

I had believed that people in Chennai just can't speak Hindi. So I believed that anyone who doesn't know Tamil should try to speak in English. However, to my surprise I found that I was able to get more mileage out of speaking in my broken Hindi (theirs was worse!) than with English. I had found this to be true in Cochin too an year ago. So I am now convinced that within a few more years (or a decade), it will be possible to converse in Hindi almost everywhere in India.

As brands spread their wings across India, they will slowly erode the uniqueness of all places, making them look more and more like each other. It is already possible to go anywhere in India, transact on your ATM card, continue to use your cell phone, visit a cyber-cafe, buy your favorite brand's bottled water, eat your favorite food, buy a flat built by the same developer and feel at home in many other ways. As time goes by, this trend will only increase, making all cities and towns 'normalized' across India. We are miles and generations away from making our cities replicas of each other like it is in the US, but the trend is definitely in that direction.

Chennai is wonderful!

I was in Chennai last weekend. While returning, I was sitting in an auto-rickshaw to reach the airport. It was going at approximately at a speed of Mach 2, with it's wheels barely making contact with the road, narrowly missing other similar autos and cars by a distanceof approximately 2 air molecules. My mind, when it got a bit of respite from being scared to death, was thinking about this wonderful city.

Chennai has always been a fascinating city to outsiders for various reasons. This is the city where if temperatures drops below 20 degrees the entire population could go on hibernation due to cold weather. Due to this weather, air-conditioned cinema halls were common here long before PVRs and INOXes came to Bangalore. I am a native of Udupi district, which is also on the seashore and is approximately at the same latitude. But Chennai heat is different.
An outsider who is not overcharged on a Chennai auto-rickshaw is yet to take birth on Earth. I have once paid Rs.20 for a rickshaw journey and Rs.80 for the return journey on the same route.
This is a city where most restaurants are very strict about their timings. If you enter a restaurant at 1:30PM and ask "What is there to eat?" the only answer you will get is only "Lunch". It is quite likely that they don't even sell idlis during lunch hour. If you go at the right time, you will get to savour a very tasteful Sambhar in most of the restaurants. I don't like their Rasam, though.
This is probably the only state where almost all advertisements, popular TV shows and Hollywood movies are translated to the local language.
Chennai is the headquarters of the strange Tamilnadu politics. A politics where every movie star worth his/her salt dreams of becoming the Chief Minister of the state some day. Of course, the only qualification is that his/her fans should have built some temples for this star. A politics where the leaders, often called Amma or Appa, are literally worshipped by their followers, often by prostrating in front of their leader in public gatherings. A politics where electorate always gives a clear majority to one of the political part
ies, as long as the name of the party contains the letters D, M and K.

Chennai is interesting and fascinating.

Gautham, on my previous post.

Gautham's take on my previous post. I decided that it deserves more limelight than what it can get in an obscure comment in my hardly-read blog. Hence I'm posting it here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Jobless that I am, I ended up composing this verse.
[Should be sung in the tune of Yankee-doodle-doodle-do!]

Shilpa Shetty goes to london
With her chicken curry
They call her paki, dog, poppodum
n' Shilpa ends up merry.

Yank-the-media out of town
Yank-the media into ground
Thrash the media once for good
And let them lay there buried.

Salman, Vivek and Abhishek
Ash is on a date-fury.
Media goes to hotels and temples
To tell us she'll marry.

Yank-the-media out of town
Yank-the media into ground
Thrash the media once for good
And let them lay there buried.!
-------------------------------------------------------------

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!