Environmental consciousness begins at home

Roads with green trees on either sides, refreshing breeze blowing on to your face, serene drives to work in the mornings without smoke around you ,beautiful and immaculate sea shore, office canteens without traces of coffee cup marks , apartment complexes without plastic stuffed garbage bags lying around - are these all so difficult to have in our country ? Environmental pollution is not only about global warming, ozone depletion, but also is about our own surroundings. If each of us can think once about the ugliness and damages brought on to our environment by the smallest things we do and re-do , I am sure we would feel guilty enought to stop them. My office commuation service takes us through a big mountains (literally mountains!) of trash that have been dumped since a long long time and we guys just cant stop cursing the people doing it. I say , think about the problem you might be creating by spitting/attaending nature calls on a public footpath - its no better than the former. Environmental awareness is not worrying about oil spills or nuclear wastes , but also about our small day to day habits that add to the existing pollution.

Riding through the way

On my way to work in the morning I noticed this kid, a boy aged 12-13 years, riding his bicycle.
On a normal scene I wouldn't have looked again, but this guy ! oh! he was riding confidently
in huge traffic on the Velachery road , that too so close to the yellow dividing line !
I was rally impressed with the way this kid
i) maneuvered his bicycle in the middle of the road
ii) followed traffic rules
iii) didn't get down from the bike and kept his balance all through the ride
Well ,I for one, would have stopped or would have rode along the far end of the road in
this case.
Anyways, that made me think - how should one raise one's kids - to turn them into fearless ones or fearful ones?

Listen to this amazing song

This song is called "Hey there Delinah! The guy sounds so genuine , cos this is truly a song about a girl he loved it seems!"
http://www.alfy.com/cool_stuff/music_videos/watch_free_music_videos.aspx?videoID=893&name=HEY+THERE+DELILAH

Why blog at all?

I started thinking what to say when a friend of mine asked me this question. Well why does someone blog at all? Is it to improve one's writing skills or is it like a journal?
I have come across different blogs(not many) in the past 1.5 years of my blogging....some were just to scribble one's thoughts(a little like my own)....some were definitely meant to send some message out there, some were for people who wanted a community of their own and some were just for the heck of it!
Coincidentally a couple of days later I saw an article in USA Today which speaks about 2 bloggers whose hobby of blogging turned into a business.Well as much as you guessed they were the "send out your information" kinda ones. In fact these guys are started earning so much from their blogs with people wanting to advertise there that they had to make their part-time hobby as a full-time profession (Check out http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/industry/2007-06-19-tech-bloggers_N.htm?csp=34).
And there are these few kinds where you get to hear lots of interesting things - well I infact came across a blog which I followed quite regularly sometime back , just because this guy had all these interesting things (of course not the headlines - I can go to the news for that) , from as small as a business mag. article to a new car, on his blog.
Well I guess I got my answer now - Whether it be for fun or for fake - people just wanna say what they feel like and if you are lucky others might buy your ideas and make you rich and ofcourse you get to socialize too.
So get going !
Happy day!

Agassi's speech !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_eU-J99HU&mode=related&search=

Experience of its own kind !

buzzing off from work too early (at least for Indian software industry standards!)...
driving 40 miles all the way to Boston.....Arriving at the venue a hour and a half earlier
than the take-off time, just to get a better glimpse....cries of madness watching him
run and jump...guess who I am talking about....The Tamil Superstar Rajanikanth....
It was my first ever experience watching a Rajani movie the first day on the first show!
And yeah it is definitely going to be a memorable one...not because I saw some great cinema, but because of the way I was amused by the captivity the idol had on the crowds....
Men jumping with joy at the sequences on the screen and girls whistling ... Well to me it was proved that when it comes to entertaining the crowd and catching the pulse, Rajani has his "Style"....
I am not going to talk about the move because I am going to leave it to you to enjoy that experience!

The beauty of misery

I got to hear this song after a gap of nearly 4 years (am not sure if it is correct but it feels so)...My friend who drives us to the office in the morning started playing some Pak songs and this was one amongst them.....The song’s memory in my mind was so haunting that I couldn't help but searched for it on the net. It was when I saw the video that I recollected the times I first saw it. Khamaj by Fuzon is one of those typical songs which have a strong air of sadness associated with them but nevertheless you like it...Its strange how we always like to be happy, like to be surrounded by happy people but still go back to those that are heartbreakingly forlorn and fall in love with them. A friend of mine once said "Hey I like listening to that sad number in 7/G when I feel low". I thought "How the heck will a sad thing help you when you already are miserable". I don’t completely agree with her but these melancholic tunes are something that I go back to and listen just for the emotion and melody they have in them.

e-mail on paper - What difference would it make?

While logging into gmail today I noticed the announcement of Gmail going onto paper to support those hard-core handwritten letter champions.See more about it on http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html.I really didnot understand the idea behing this.I respect Google for its ever creative internet services it provides to its mammoth sized,ever increasing user pool.But this particular product that they have come up with doesnot make sense to me.After all if I need a paper copy of my e-mail wouldn't I send one myself.The only advantage that I might have with Gmail Papar is that I get this copy free of cost(if I don't mind advertisements on my letter pad that is) , but then how much legal credibility can I claim to this....anyways I hope to get more points of view on this, provided you care to express it here in the comments.

I wish it was just a story

More than a day has passed and I have not been able to completely come out of that haunted state I was yesterday. The reason - Water. This Oscar entree of 2007 is sure to leave every set of its audience spell bound - not just with the grief imbibed in the story but also with the magnificent performances of Seema Biswas and Sarala and as they say the best of performances are they that make you cry and laugh with them (the latter though happens less frequently compared to the former).
Based in India of late 1930's,with the national movement in full swing, the movie begins with portraying the innocence of child widow Chuiya who is too young to remember she was married and cannot understand what marriage and widowhood are all about.On teh other hand you have the beautiful Kalyani(Lisa Ray) who inspite of being forced(by her own Widow Ashram's big head!!!) to do the Forbidden is typically one of those characters who can inspite of beinga hand's distance away from happiness can still not touch it. You can't stop exclaiming "Please God anything but not that!" when Kalyani and Narayan (John Abraham) are crossing the river to Narayan's house. Alas! Couldn't it just have been someone else!!
Seems Biswa's role as the Didi of the Ashram is one who wants to be protective,but is helpless, strengthless but still has hope, in spite of having long passed her chances of reaching the destination(having a family of her own).But when she listens to Gandhiji and realizes that God is not whom she has been worshipping every morning but is the one she has been subduing all the time, she doesn't delay time in doing the best, not for herself, but for Chuiya who is too young to be destined to a fate like herself.
The scenes where Chuiya's childhood is thrashed in the bungalow across the river: Chuiya's humanity in fulfilling the last wish of Dadi(which after all was to eat a laddoo!!) a risk; Chuiya's repeated questioning about when her mother is going to come back to take her home are definite to leave your eyes wet.
As for me, I only hope there are not any more of these characters amongst us and as I said at the beginning I hope it is just a story!

Aren't we all selling ourselves?

Its been nearly 5 months now that Ravi messages me daily around 1-3 in the night to say that he finally reached home from work(!!).And I guess it is quite common with most of the IT work bees.But I am sure this is not the case with those who work in other countries.If you take the same person and send him to the parent company,for instance in the US, he will be surprised to see people leave at 4:30 PM daily and he would surely get a minor shock on the first Friday when he sees everybody leaving as early as 2 pm !And I am sure soon he would himself be used to that work culture.Hence I see that the basic problem is with the attitude of the people along with whom you work...You see this is something pertaining to group psychology...You tend to behave the same way the group does.I would trace the root cause for the expectations of the Projects Managers,asking us to stay back, to our own induced working hour patterns.If you are clear from day one that you have to work not later than x PM daily and try adhering to the same, things would work much simpler and organised.We should come out of the state where the sincerity towards ones work is measured in terms of the # of hours spent by the person at work.I feel it is high time We ask ourselves if we are selling our personal lives to the salary that is paid to us every month!
Imagine a situation where everybody comes to work,leaves at a time to ensure that you have atleast 2/3rd of the day to yourselves!!!Don't you see so much scope for your personal improvement,better health and better relationships!DOn't you think we have missed a lot evening tea's with our loved ones on pleasant evenings,reading the morning newspaper in the morning,having good home made food not just on the weekends and oranising stuff on normal days instead of waiting for holidays??Of course there are people who manage all this on a normal working day extending for 12 hours!But alaS!Not everybody is excellent at this thing called time management!