Crackers-Diwali

The moment we hear about diwali celebrations, no doubt crackers add charisma
to it. During my childhood my sis and myself have had enough enjoyment and have had loads of fun burning crackers.
I usually chose burning the lighters ones. I am still quite scared about the noisy way of celebrating diwali.

It’s been close to 10 years I totally stopped burning crackers because I took an oath not to encourage child labour. I have a strong feeling that any social change does not happen all over a night and its tough for a single person to fight and put things to an end. So if every individual bring in a change and contribute for it there can be a change in the society. Though I was interested in burning crackers I took an oath and followed it till day. But today when I read krishashok’s blog where he had mentioned about crackers being sold with a label “Made without Child Labour”, I was little excited on reading it. I was taken away for a moment that probably there were some changes being implemented for social reformations.

But then I realised this is no less than “cigerette smoking is injurious to health” kinda label when cigerettes are being sold.

Mere marketing strategy!

Second Concert

Few months back my Sis and myself went for a near by saibaba temple kumbabishekam. Whenever we went there we sang songs for baba. The temple is actually in a devotee’s house. The aunty who runs the temple like both of us singing together and she often blessed us for the same. The first time we both sang bhajans for 1 hr during the pooja at kumbabishekam. Aunty blessed us and we got good applause from everybody.

Now its navrathri time and usually our colony temple trust organizes concerts in the temple. We both nominated for a 1 hr program. The evening was shared by some kids and the next 1 hr was our concert. We both prepared around 12 songs. The concert went on very well. The crowd enjoyed. We were given a 2 hr slot for a different occasion.

I think its all Sai baba’s blessing that we got a chance like this.

Driving Chronicles

Part III Concluded

I was finding comfortable time to learn car driving. I joined in a school last month.

Initially I was quite not comfortable. Initial classes were in mauriti. Then there was this master who thought me santro. He was very strict and kinda typical master who would scold for any mistake that I did. He used to tease me that I cannot learn driving successfully. The analogy that he had derived from his past experiences was that a software engineer cannot learn anything other than related to software. They are like dumbos and their brain is tuned to a selective frequency. He gave me enough impositions when I made mistake while I changed gears. But I learnt fair enough and finally booked for license test. I was under the impression that mostly everyone would get a license if we went through a school. I took it very easily and I also cleared the test. But I learnt some were also failed. Anyways I have to explore my learning’s in days to comeJ

God save the roads!

Driving Chronicles

PART II

Well, how long will I think of cycling??

I started learning to drive a two-wheeler. My childhood friend had a sunny. She was an expert since our school days. First time without knowing how to raise the accelerator and applying a break, I drove her sunny. To my dismay I raised the accelerator at the maximum and hit hard on a dead end wall on the road. The front part of sunny was into pieces. Our faces went pale. I was like a frozen frog in a heavy rain. I was blemished to look her up, as the sunny could not be even moved. She was answerable to her father and I was thinking what next. We ran to a mechanic shop near by. The mechanic came and picked up the vehicle and got it repaired.

My friend then bought a TVS 50 a year later. She then thought me some basics and helped me in learning. If I am right might be I took 2 days to learn.

When I started working in Chennai, my father bought me a sexy black colored pep. Preity was the brand ambassador then. Even otherwise I felt scooty pep was going good.

My uncle trained me enough to clear the license test. I first drove in the busy roads of T.Nagar. I thought I was confident enough. I used to be so rash while driving and had fun driving that way. Once when I was back from a conference in Tidel Park, I was heading towards my other office where I had to attend another conference. I just had half an hour to reach my office and I was the host of the conference. I did not leave any message to my colleagues before when I left from the office. I was under the impression that I could reach easily. I drove very first in the traffic roads near Tidel without wearing a helmet. I noticed an unusually bigger speed breaker. There was a lorry towards my left and a car near my right. My PROM was fused and I lost control and rose over the speed breakers. I flew above like a super woman and my pep was into sparks and got skidded terribly. I was rolled out like a paper flying on a windy evening towards the corner of the road. I was lying on the road like a pathetically hit cockroach still trying hard to get back to its state. I slowly opened my eyes and realized that there were no injuries on my face. I thanked my stars as I escaped from plastic surgeries and all the above I was alive. I then found three of my left fingers were crushed and it was bleeding badly. My left elbow and knees were bleeding and my shoulder skin was peeled like an onion cut for a sandwich.

There was a huge crowd gathered and the mass was trying to lift me up. I had tremendous will power and my PROM asked them to clear the place to let cool air come. Imagine such a statement from an injured person would have made the people ferociousJ

Never mind, they told me the hospital location.

I then managed to go to a clinic with my colleague. The lab assistant was shocked to see me injured badly. I was very confident that I was not fractured anywhere and could be alright in a month’s time. The doctor then came and gave me the first aid. It then took me close to six months to become alright. The incident did not deride me and it only improved my confidence.

to be continued......

Driving Chronicles

PART I

Learning is a great experience for anyone. I have had many adventurous learning experiences since my childhood.

During my school days I used to dream of cycling up in busy roads. I was a protected child during those days. But I had loads of interest in learning cycling. Every year I used to go to my cousin’s place during summer holidays. I was parallely enrolled into few classes throughout my academics. So I was generally left with hardly 10 days of summer holidays at my cousin’s place. It was during my ninth grade completion when I had my first cycling experience. My cousin and few of her friends thought me. I never fell down when I learnt and I learnt it fair enough. When I was back home, my father bought me a Hercules. That was the stepping-stone of my learning. My grandfather used to accompany me in the mornings to have a better practice.

I did not gain the confidence of cycling until my eleventh grade. But I practiced when I usually went for special classes. I had to go to the special class on a Saturday evening. I cycled up very fast till the road end where it meets the main road. I did not know that I had to wait and look on the turnings. I casually turned left when a bus came very fast. There was hardly any gap between the bus and me. My right hand was bruised as badly as I drove to the pace of bus. I lost my balance. But my PROM(Presence Of Mind) helped me to immediately drop my cycle towards left of the road and I fell towards my left. Imagine had I lost control totally, I would have gone under the bus and would not be now to write this. I was really really scared to go back home. I was sure I would get a big bash from parents. I went straight to the special class. Blood was whoozing from my right hand. I managed to get it dressed up and when I went home told my parents that I fell down, without even letting them know what happened in reality.

Each time when I went wrong and got hit badly, I gained confidence to overcome them. I then started going to my high school in cycle with my other friends.We used to have loads of fun on the way to school.

to be continued.....

To A Friend

I got a call from her on my b’day. It was a surprise. We spoke for more than an hour. I relish those hours. We exchange emails once in a while to know that both of us are doing well. I am happy for her good married life. Couple of days back when she had mailed me asking if I was doing well and all at home were fine, I wrote her an email mentioning that things are fine. I was so happy to see her email. My hands went off to typing “de, things are not good. I am perturbed cuz sis is suffering from high fever. Am so worried she has both jaundice and typhoid.” I just wanted to pour out to get a consoling reply. But I decided when she lives so far away, do I have to really write this and worry her? Well, friendship is for sharing and caring. I care and so I did not want to pour out.

Funny explanation yet thoughtful

Note:
[I wanted to publish this post a month before. But some how I was not comfortable about it. When I read the post for the first time, my tone itself brought out a feel of sarcasm. But my intention was not that. The conversation in the post made me really laugh but at the same time pity about someone’s aspirations being shattered.
I hope the real epitome of the lying fact is rightly delivered.]

A newly joined employee sits in my bay. Initially when she joined she used to be so quite and V used to tell me that she never talks. Slowly S and I got acquainted to her. She was mapped to a project as a shadow resource along with her other new joined friends. Almost whenever we get to talk to her, she speaks about her manager how reluctant he was about even talking to them. Almost everyday she came late to the office (After all flexi timing has to be availed at the maximum possible extent, no sarcasm meant). Poor she claims that she gets bored sitting like a dumb at office (but she plays games, go for long coffee and lunch breaksJ)).

We once had following conversation.

Me: Hi X! So early to office?
X: They said, am gonna be given challenging work.
Me: Good. That’s why you seem to be so brightJ

After few days:

Me: Hey X. Back to square 1 is it?
X: Am tired. We are thrown out of the project again.
Me: Hmmm. But why do you carry such a huge bag to office?
Started off with any preparations or what?
X: Hahaahhaa. Smilie, you know I have 2 novels and many color pens and magazines
in the bag.
Me: What do you do with color pens? And when do you get to read novels?( I could see the latest Harry Potter and the deathly hallows on her desk).
X: I read them during travel and also sometimes at office. I do keep scribbling pics with my color pens.
Me: Generally I have seen people carrying huge bags for bringing tech books for reference.
X: You know smilie, I would be proud to bring such books without a bag at least to show that am occupied at office. Now that I have all junk I got to cover them up.

X was giggling and said she is avid fan of harry potter and so gonna take a day off to complete the last book in the series.
X might be accepting the situation helplessly but I feel the thirst of knowledge at work place is diminishing in many such X I come across because of over recruitments and also they are derided mostly.

Disclaimer: The intent of the post was to bring out the fact that the career aspirations of many such X are deprived.

Black Forest

I always claim I am not a food lover. I don’t know why? That’s how my cerebrum has got it registered. . But I have some food preferences. One cannot believe that I can cook stuff in right proportions with lip smacking taste. I also have a sharp talent of identifying if the food is cooked properly from the savors. I have some foodies which remained and will remain my all time favorite. Never mind even if its not prepared at its best, still I can hang upon for the sake that I like them.

S and I are very very health conscious. We count calories when think of junk food. We avoid junk food to the maximum possible extent and plan out for a day when we can have it. Black forest, one of the yummy cakes that I love all time. I have many times discussed about black forest and the kind of pleasure I get trying out at different outlets. We had planned for a day when we can have black forest together and enjoy it. My office pantry was selling them quite sometimes back .But when we wanted to try out, many times they were all found to be soldL

Couple of weeks back I left S and had enrolled for a training program. You know the funda of life is when you dedicatedly plan for something, only then many things happens unexpectedly. All these days, she used to accompany for any thing in the office. Unfortunately when I was not there, S was recognized and was awarded as best performer. I missed to see her getting the award in front of everyone. The worst part is S said she missed me, when she had black forest all aloneL Looks like all were served with black forest on account of birthday buddies for the month.

Anyways black forest at hot breads is really really yummy. Well, when it’s served with two scoop of vanilla with little of hot chocolate poured on it and when topped with crunchy nuts, believe me, its heaven on earth.

Healing therapy for a crying soul

After having spent the day slothfully watching all the movies on T.V, we both decided to spend the evening peacefully. We headed towards the temple and had then planned to go to a supermarket near by.

Though we are grown up kids, still the kid dish activities, feelings, fear pops up now and then. My sis is quite afraid of that pet dog particularly when it’s let free. Coincidentally the dog always wanders around when we get to start from home anywhere. She held my hand carefully when we were walking, knowing the dog was there. I told her we would take up a different direction and be safe. But on seeing the dog she became mentally absent and started screaming. Who knows the dog might have gone cranky when she screamed and it starting chasing her. She let my hand free and started running around. The owner of the dog then came and caught it. Poor soul started crying all the way till the supermarket and lost interest in shopping.

When we were back from the shop, we could still see the dog roaming around and so we took a different direction to our home. Mom was pretty worried seeing we got scared. We have been telling our parents about how daily the dog was a disturbance to us since the owner always sets it free. The stray dogs never scare us but pet dogs are really ferocious.

Mom and dad went about consoling my sister. Mom went about explaining do’s and don’ts on seeing a dog to her. She then affectionately feed thachu mammam to both of us. The crying soul was rest in peace forgetting the incident all together :)

Experiences with kids I came across

Today I met one of my coworkers after a long time. She was feeling bad that, she could not get to meet me of late.

It was during 3 months back when a bunch of freshers came near my bay and were waiting to meet the manager. They were bit nervous and were waiting to meet the manager. Soon after they heard something from him, they were giggling and happily sat in their allotted cubes. I was drowned into the last phase of my previous project then and never even had time to have a look what were they up to.

It was one fine morning when they were busy talking about something. I did not know that they discussed if they can approach me for clarifying few of their doubts. One of them started talking to me friendly saying they were a bunch of freshers and were quite happy for being together. They got introduced and one of them was asking me that they were clueless about the company processes and requires guidance on how to go about on few things. I had no problem explaining them and was trying to put them in comfort zone. They said they felt very comfortable talking to me. They were not allotted to projects and were on the business unit bench for quite sometime.

It was once when they asked about how to use time effectively as they were bored of the initial thrill of emailing on company email ids and talking over the phone unlimitedly to their friends. I was guiding them because I felt they were kids and really got to be nourished with some real good points. I spoke to them with great care and provided them few tips on strengthening the technology in which they were trained up. Soon after that, they started getting allocated to projects one after the other. Each time when one of them was asked to meet their reporting managers, they would make a point to inform me. Finally when one of them was placed, she made a point to come and meet me to inform that she was into a project and she finds it good. Today the young women whom I met told me;” hey you know I cleared my certification and thanks to you”.

I was really elated to hear it from her.

I was so happy. They were no way related to my team but still they recognized me as a good guideJ

I would like to share another incident about two kids. Few years back when dad’s colleague and friend asked dad that, if I could teach both his kids. Dad said they were very naughty and aunty felt very tough to teach them. I said” no problem, ask them to come to our place and I shall take care”. R1 was in his 8^th grade and R2 was in 2^nd gradeJ then.

They usually came home in the evening. R1 was very naughty and R2 was a silent yet naughty kind. I used to teach Maths, Science and Social science to R1. I easily managed R2. But many times he went off to sleep once he was done with. Initially R1 never listened to me but slowly he gained interest and liked the way I thought. Aunty used to tell me that R1 scored good marks and he really liked the way I thought. I used to take great care for those kids. Almost daily they had their snacks at my place and I made a point that I don’t hold them back later than 8P.M. I thought them for 3-4 months and slowly they were comfortable enough to manage on their own.

Few days back I was pretty excited to see R1 with his father. He had completed his schooling and was waiting for the results. I am not sure what he is up to now, but believe he would have done his best.

Sometimes in life it’s so nice when people come back and tell us how good they feel about us. I have not even expected any kind of reciprocation from them but they really made me feel good.

Namaste Middle Class

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/life/2007/07/27/stories/2007072750020100.htm

The article was bliss in the morning.

The article emphasised on the fact that educated middle class is a widely spread secret of the present society and in its many social forms. I was thrilled to know the fact that being a chartered accountant, a person like Pai could boldly accept his career path as HR where he is still a bud though backed by enormous Industry experiences and suffice knowledge. The benevolent attitude of the interviewee in the article would be a bench mark for many individual to grow up as a person and also in his/her career.

I fathom that passion would lead to unbelievable success like what an individual like pai had gained in the Present.

I was moved by the lines:

“we remained steadfast and said we’ll not succumb and people respected us. For example in a North Indian city known for corruption, the officer said: “Infosys ko de do, donR 17;t waste time!”

This line in its tone reveals many factual about the people in the board and how they care for each of their beliefs.

What's in Google????????????

I remember search engines like Alta vista was rocking few years back. But slowly I could see how Google gained its popularity. Google is not merely moving towards “owning” the Internet but has also created a crazy dependency. But I truly feel it’s worth such dependency. I have wondered many times about various aspects of Google. At the same time, the little professor in me has raised so many technical questions.

Presently I am in the process of developing a website that more or less works like a search engine, but all together for a different purpose. I have found many practical difficulties while developing it. Like each time when I look up a huge repository, the Remote Method Invocation Interface that I use is pretty costly for every single hit .I wonder how efficiently the Google team would have worked to make it so fast and give us results in fraction of seconds. I was once discussing about this with my coworkers and happened to gather little information on the pigeon Algorithm that Google adopts for such adoring efficiency.

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

I am quite not convinced with the pagination aspect of it. As far as I have learnt so far, pagination is a concept of dividing the entire contents into several buckets where each bucket holds a defined set of contents. This means, Imagine I have 15 contents; I would prefer paginating it as 5 contents per page leading to 3 pages.

Observation from Google:

Imagine I get search results as 1-10 of 1,50,000 records in (0.03) seconds. Any layman would understand that he/she would land up with 1,50,000 links. But once I tried to traverse and found pagination gets stopped after 50 such pages. Assuming each page displays around 50 occurrences, a max of only 2500 records are shown to the user at a given search. I don’t question why it gets stopped there. I assume its not quite user friendly to provide till that last one and also as a matter of fact that the user would not have enough patience to look till the last search. Psychologically, after few page navigations, one would eventually start to use better combination of keywords to narrow down the search.

But the little professor in me raised these questions.

Does Google give the top frequently visited links? If so, does it have any metadata information for each such link regarding its number of hits based on which it decides the priority? Because for a keyword search, at any arbitrary amount of hits, it gives the same sequence of search results.

The other aspect of Google that I am fascinated about is, its refresh part. I read Google adopts AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) for this.

For those of you who are new to AJAX, it is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.
(Description courtesy: wikipedia)

AJAX is nothing new. Though the name was coined in 2005, the technology that enabled AJAX started a decade earlier.
I once had a requirement of auto refresh functionality where in a particular action would be constantly called in a specific interval of time. I used java script in JSF initially. But then it was very costly and behaved little crazy too. Later I found AJAX is trendy in its very kind providing tags like JSF, struts and also its easier to use AJAX tags with JSF with any web/application server. My job was pretty simple just to configure AJAX and just use the tags. It has polling feature as part of the tag itself and helps refresh a specific part of the page.

Google has of late got tie ups with many web sites and they are buying up the best really

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions

). As far as I have learnt so far, I know they are linked to bloggers, orkut and may be some more. Apart from that, is its wide variety of add on like maps, Google news, earth, mail. I realize single sign on is implemented as soon as a user logs into a Google related site or any of its associated sites.

This means when I log into the blogger site, a method of access control enables a user to authenticate once and gain access to the resources of multiple software systems. In plain terms when I hit the gmail in a different browser in my system, I am straight away taken to the inbox page since I have already logged into the blogegr site. If I logout from my maibox, I am also thrown out from the blogger site.

Single sign on is an excellent authentication mechanism that’s implemented in any giant organizations where a system is dedicated to a user. But this concept does not hold good and is not effective when a personal computer is meant for a whole family. Imagine I log into the blogger site to post something, quite sometime later when a new user happens to check his/her gmail , the user eventually lands up to my mailbox.
The security is ultimately lost and the very purpose of it is defeated in the first place.

I just wrote all that striked me when I think of Google. I would welcome anyone to share any ideas on the questions I have raised.

Children of Heaven – wonderful movie with subtitles!

One of the most beautiful farisi movies that I happened to watch over the last weekend.
The director is Majid Majidi. The story line is based on two sweet kids who shower love
and affection for each other.

Ali is the elder brother who is just 9 years old and zahra happens to be his sister. Their parents are financially not sound and struggle to run the family. Karim, the kids father works in the masjid(mosque).Ali works hard and helps his father apart from his studies.

Ali looses zahras sneakers and the poor sweet kids manage to go to their schools with
Ali’s sneakers. Ali darling takes every effort to get a new sneaker for his sister. The story revolves around this and there goes the movie like an itune.
The movie will remain my all time favorite and I would watch it few more times.

Here is the link for the movie and thanks to my lovely friend who sent me this link.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?num=10&so=0&hl=en&q=%22children+of+heaven%22+duration%3Along&start=0

Updating Children of heaven.

I gave quite a good description about the movie to S. I know she is a kind of
Person who would love to watch one such movie.
Some of the beautiful things that S and I relished were:

1. We both liked Zahra very much. There is a scene where the mother calls Zahra to peel the potatoes and take care of another baby. S imagined Zahra would be a girl in her teens. You know, she was surprised to see Zahra was hardly 7 yr old.

2. There are so many fascinating small lessons that the movie brought out. When karim is so tired, he asks for tea. Zahra being the most responsible kid, who takes care of small chores, prepares the tea. Karim immediately praises Zahra that there is nothing equal in the world to the tea that zahra prepares.

Small appreciations are great boostersJ

3. Though the family struggles hard for money, still there is a kind of divine understanding among them. (Like “Mugavari” family…. yet another good film), they care for each other so well. Each time when Ali says he cannot join the other children for playing just because he has to take care of his mother who is ill, shows the profound love that the kids have for their parents. Imagine at the age of 9, a child can empathize so much. Money can never compensate unconditional love, empathy, basic humane qualities that one should possess. A small family yet very sweet.

Whoa Ali and Zahra are really children of heaven. S felt one such movie should be played to children of current generation. But then I was thinking, could children really understand the minute thoughts in the movie? Certain qualities that children possess are from their genes and also by their brought up. Parents ought to take every care in enriching good thoughts. Beyond all that, it’s a blessing to have nice parents and children.

S and I have discussed about this numerous times. We share similar feelings and have discussed about each other’s childhood memories and about our loving parents quite often.

Shall update this post as and when I get comments from others.