I discover that we Indians have devised a new way of mourning death. Apparently,following the death by heart attack of the Kannada film icon Dr. Vishnuvardhan, grieving fans shut down the nation's knowledge capital. Bangalore's streets, which usually imagined as paved with hi-tech gold, but today it turned into a place that seemed like Baghdad!.

To a bemused world, this fiery convulsion triggered by the death of an old actor was just another example of Indians' idiosyncratic, borderline-religious love for their movie stars. But what is it that actually triggers these kind of behavioural patterns in people?!.

Is it that the fans are angry because he died a natural death?!. Or is it that they are ithching to get involved in some sort of a throw-stone activity since the city is full of glasswares?!. or is it that they assume that the government and the IT companies are responsible for the actors "heart-attack"?!

What actually makes these people get satiable by rioting and savaging and breaking the public properties(buses),stoning companies and ravaging hotels and shops?.

A little introspection+retrospection makes me IETise that all this is a bi-product of a jobless and sadistic being, who always feels angry,angry at this world; Angry for being miserable and poor; angry for not getting a 'fixed and heavy-paying' job,angry because "I am lazy",angry because "cigarette costs 3 bucks", "paan costs a whopping 2 bucks", "teasing girls is an offence", and simply because "there is no way to end 'my' anguishes on the Govt. and others who are enjoying a lavish lifestyle".

I do agree Vishnuvardhan died, we will all miss him, we'll miss the great actor in him. I will miss him too and in fact, everyone should miss him. Its unfortunate that its happened but, what is it that can be done? Death is a part of life cycle after-all..

The explanatory power of the 'two India's drifting apart' theory is limited, however, by the fact that 20 years ago, years before the economic reforms that unleashed India's current uneven boom, the Karnataka film board opted to edit out a scene depicting the dramatic death of Vishnuvardhan, for fear that it would spark riots.

Whatever peculiarities of the riots arise from the Indian cultural politics and the resentments of Karnataka's left-behinds, few deny that Indians generally have a deeper, more complex and more personal relationship with their film icons than Western audiences. Few years ago , when Bollywood heartthrob Salman Khan spent three nights in prison on charges of illegal poaching, thousands of his fans spent nights outside his jail cell. In 1982, when iconic Bollywood leading man Amitabh Bachchan was injured on a shoot, the nation practically came to a stop. (But not for the Bachchan fan who walked half of the length of India backwards as a show of penance.)

Why do such gruesome practices occur more in India than in other country?

Is it the low literacy level in the country?

Is it a desperate cry for mental help?

Is that the only way for the people at the lowest rungs of the social and economic hierarchy to draw attention of the top political leaders/actors to their plight?

Frankly speaking, we have no clue.

Well, I often don't mess up with intertwining the personal blog to a "personal" blog. However, today I thought I should just linger on the contour a wee-bit. I was 'eventually' feeling 'void' today, well, no introspections on that as yet and I don't think that it would last longer enough to whip in a probe. On the other hand, I developed an IET [Thats "Idiotic Emission of Thoughts" For those who know not what that is *Its my invention by-the-way*;-p] of other sorts.( actually it was an IET with Introspection sorts)

Ok, seems like I am beating around the bushes. Hmm, let me come to the IET- I had a short chat the today with a friend of mine over the phone and that triggered some sort of an idiocy in me and made me go bong over "what actually missing someone means?". Is it like you are having a deja vu and amnesia together? or is it like the past suddenly oozes out of your grey matter and stings that portion between your eye and the brain- causing unplanned patterns to hover over and towards your eyes?!. Or is "missing someone" just a matter of some mere hoaxical illusion which was a result of either you having a good memory-unit or a bad processor pipe-lining. But,what I felt was that missing doesn't always relate to "missing someone/something" neither is it a some sort of a "yearningness" or "craving". Its something else. Something more than all of these.

I was wondering if my feelings like "I am missing my 'hi' and 'hellos' with a friend with whom I am hi-bye types" or "Thinking about some chick in my class who never seemed to be one when she was around me" or "Just a lame voidness over someone" is a inference of the "Real Missing feeling"?.

I actually felt that I badly missed being struck with those millions of "hi" and "bye" that were thrown upon me during my school days-*from a few of them specifically ofcourse :P*. I felt like I wanted to talk to that little girl from the other school who only said "Hi" all through our facial bombardments and I missed hearing a simple hello from her again. And now sitting here, I am just thinking as to how many people have crossed my life and somewhere all of them have left an impression. Some are the ‘best things’ happened to me. Some have made me to cross the road, taken my hand and then hidden somewhere...where? I don’t know !. And some of them who have been the limits of my para-emotional integration and derivatives of my ortho-emotional derivations. But,the best thing is that I hardly remember even a handful of them at this point ,but, I do miss all of them.

So, what started as a voidness, then turned into a "IET" ,finally turned into a nice little blog post :P and a nitty conclusion which says

May be the purpose of the entire process of "missing" and "voidness" is a well wrapped element of higher order 'process resynchronization' with each of their entry into your life being acknowledged by you missing them. May be they have taught us what you needed to learn, may be they have nothing more to give…and so they leave.May be they’re moving on to be part of a different plan, just as you and I move and influence others.But, at the end of the day its all a kind of a realization behind a simple one-liner --
“You can never replace anyone because everyone is made up of such beautiful specific details”

Its been raining marriages around me over the last 7 months. Lolz, to continue to the beating started by Pooja and Padmav --> My Bro and Manni --> Doggy and Sana --> Price and Sharon --> Sherry and Flaunty --> My cuz and his girl --> Choms and R... The journey has been fascinating and absolutely awesome.. I'd previously shared a piece with my emotions painted when my Bro sold his stake to my manni; and now, to follow it up- I just want to paint an another parchment of emotions of how it feels to have you "chaddi-dost" and "best-pal" get knotted..:P..

Ever since I’ve known Chomy(Yup!, thats 18 looooooooong years now! :P), she'd always wanted to find the man of her dreams and get mar­ried. I’ve rarely met some­one with that objec­tive so clear in their mind! I remem­ber She and me watch­ing the movie "Life in a Metro" together and me telling her how much Konkona’s char­ac­ter reminded me of her.

Over the years and our 'sin­gle­hood', Chomy and I have had many dis­cus­sions on find­ing "the right one". One ques­tion she often had was how she would know for sure when he came along! How does one know, really? Much air­time has been wasted (or not) in dis­cussing the lack of good 'ones' (really, where are these lads and lasses?!) and the fact that our good years were slowly fad­ing away.

I mostly enjoyed play­ing an elder brotherly role and (in my infi­nite wis­dom!) usu­ally tried to impart, what I hope, was good advice. You will know, when you meet him, I said. Things will fall into place. When the stars align every­thing will work out! And so on and so forth. Through our heart­breaks and set­backs, I often told her that things that are des­tined to hap­pen, will hap­pen and surely they would hap­pen to her too. Very soon. "You can’t rush things", I said, they will hap­pen when the time is right. I even remember Shylaja Aunty(Chomy's Mom) took us to the some tem­ple and had gotten our futures read to assure both of us that good things were in store.:P

Over the years, despite all my out­ward reas­sur­ances, I must admit that my own belief in love and romance, the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage, in hap­pily wed­ded has received quite a knock­ing. Much as I would like to believe I have also seen so many signs to the con­trary, result­ing in cyn­i­cism creep­ing in and the rose coloured spec­ta­cles I wore when I was younger get­ting clouded. From being let down, from expec­ta­tions not being met (and what is life with­out some expec­ta­tion?) and from a lot of dis­con­nect. Do I expect too much or are peo­ple just not inter­ested? :-p

I would, of course, like to believe in love and romance, in find­ing "the one", but it’s dif­fi­cult to muster that blind faith any­more. When I was eigh­teen and starry eyed, yes. But older and wiser, as they say, and things don’t quite seem the same.

So despite it all, it gives me small plea­sure that even­tu­ally "Chomy-Dumbo" did meet the man of her dreams and now is about to tie the knot. While I watched — some­times in admi­ra­tion and some­times in fas­ci­na­tion at how fast things can move in some­one else’s life (at least com­pared to mine!), I was thrilled to see Soumya's and R's rela­tion­ship develop, mature and go straight to the altar!

I for one, am so glad that she is finally hitched. At least that way we will now be spared of her exis­ten­tial ques­tions (and mul­ti­ple smses) like, "err..bw does it happen in fairy tales..?", "Where's my man?!" and "when will I ever meet him?" and "ho!-c'mon- tell me Bags!"... These kind of ques­tions, as you can imag­ine, are quite hard to answer ;-p

Through these years, Chomy never gave up hope though. She went about her mis­sion with admirable enthu­si­asm despite the many road­blocks! I think one thing I admire her for is her sin­gle minded focus about what she wanted. And maybe that worked in the end. She did find the man and she did make every­one includ­ing her­self happy.

Mean­while, I still won­der some­times about life and love and its related com­pli­ca­tions. Infact, one thing that Padma Aunty(Poo's mom) com­plains con­stantly about the "sin­gle sta­tus" of both her daugh­ters, I jok­ingly ask her "why change what is work­ing fine?" I try and con­vince her that at least we’re happy. But I real­ize that her goal is not our hap­pi­ness, but of chang­ing our status.

I still remain unsure about mar­riage and wed­ded bliss. (Or it might be for the sim­ple rea­son that no one’s actu­ally asked :-). Have I been on my own for too long now and got­ten too used to it? What I do miss though is some­one being an intrin­sic part of my life and shar­ing and doing things together. And that is a part­ner­ship that is so much harder to achieve.

But a friend’s wed­ding always makes me happy. It’s a time for cel­e­bra­tions, for love, laugh­ter and friends to get together. And to rein­force some of those faded beliefs.

For Choms & Mr R, wish­ing both of them loads and loads of hap­pi­ness and good times together.

Chomy babe — the sin­gles club will miss you! *Hugs!* :-)

Mr. R : I’ll be there when you need a shoul­der to cry on dude:-p

I was inspired to write this blog after reading a news feature in today's (11.12. 09) Times of India. The fast undertaken by the TRS Chief, K. Chandrasekhar Rao that led to deterioration of his condition, causing threat to his life, made the Centre to take a late night decision of splitting Andhra Pradesh to carve out a separate state,Telengana.


Let us first have a look at the history of some "fasts" that had taken place in the past. Apart from being called "The Father of The Nation", Mahatma Gandhi may conveniently termed as the "Father of Fasts", who used it as a weapon. Of course, before him, it was the revolutionary, Jatin Das who gave up his life in Lahore Jail as a prisoner of the British Government, after going on a hunger strike from July 13 to Sep 13, 1929. His death left a deep impact on the minds of the Indian youth to start a new war of violent protest against the British government.

In 1932 Gandhiji went on a 'fast', protesting against the "Communal Award" of colonial British rulers to give separate representation to the "untouchables" in Provincial Legislatures, that led to Poona Pact which made the untouchable leaders to renounce separate representation. In 1943, Gandhiji undertook a fast for twenty one days as a "penance for deadlock" between the Viceroy & Indian leaders. It became a turning point in India's struggle for freedom.

After independence, the first person who gave up his life in a hunger strike was the Gandhian leader, Potti Sriramulu. He began his "fast" on Oct 19, 1952 protesting against the Centre's indifference to the demand for a separate Andhra Pradesh & succumbed to it on Dec 15,1952. His death led to violent turmoil resulting in the creation of Andhra Pradesh.

In the recent past, Mamta Bannerjee's hunger strike for 25 days against land acquisition in West Bengal, changed the colour of Bengal politics forcing the CPM to see red.

It is a well known fact that Mahatma Gandhi mostly used this weapon of "fast" as a means for self purification. He was magnanimous enough to hold himself responsible if anything went wrong & took it unto himself to atone for it by undertaking a "fast". But can the leaders of today honestly claim that their "fasts" are that, what appear to our naked eyes or there is anything more to it which we, the general public are not capable enough to perceive? Can they honestly say that their "fasts" are not less for the "cause" & more for scoring a point or to gain political mileage over their political rivals? How is it that, if there is no problem in creating a separate state now, what prevented the Centre to wait for decades, until a certain K.C.Rao staged an indefinite fast unto death? Honestly, I don't know. Can anybody among my friends, please tell me? .

I don't know why "the sixth sense" refers to something paranormal, since there are a lot more than five normal senses.

I think the problem is that whoever started out numbering these things somehow confused the senses with the sense organs. There are five sense organs that I'm aware of: the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the skin. And there are five corresponding senses: vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

But there are a lot of senses that don't have a corresponding sense organ, or at least not always a very obvious one. And I'm not talking about subjective or non-quantifiable senses like a sense of humor or a sense of style or a sense of obligation or a sense of self-worth or a sense of right and wrong -- I'm talking about senses that detect measurable physical phenomena.

For example, you probably have a sense of temperature, which allows you to tell when it's hot or cold outside. The skin is the sense organ here -- it does double duty as the organ for both the sense of touch and the sense of temperature. But despite the organ in common, those are two very distinct senses, so it's not clear why the sense of temperature never made it on the list.

You've also got a sense of size. You can tell if one thing is bigger than another. This sense doesn't have a sense organ as such, but it relies on some of the other senses that do, like vision or touch, since you can tell the size of something by looking at it or by holding it.

You also have a sense of weight, of course. You can tell if something is going to be heavy or not by looking at it or by trying to pick it up.

You also have a sense of quantity or amount. You can look at two glasses and tell which one has more fruit juice in it, for example, or you can look at two bookcases and tell which one has more books on it. This relies on your sense of vision, or your sense of weight, but it's distinct from either of those senses.

Okay, what else? Well, how about your sense of speed? This one isn't very well-developed, since we can't tell how fast we're going when we're flying in a jet, for example, but still, most of us have a pretty good idea if we're going fast or slow.

And then, of course, there's the sense of time. It can be fooled as well -- when you're bored, time seems to pass much more slowly than it does when you're having a good time -- but you can still probably tell the difference between a minute and an hour, no matter how bored you get. And the interesting thing about the sense of time is that as far as I know, it doesn't rely on any other senses or any sense organs, which technically qualifies it as an extra-sensory perception.

So, here's our new list: vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, temperature, size, weight, amount, speed, and temperature. That brings the count up to eleven, and there are probably some that I missed. So what we commonly refer to as "the sixth sense" and which we somewhat confusingly label as "extra-sensory perception" would more accurately be called "the twelfth sense."

But even that's not a very good idea, because if we're going to include paranormal senses on the list, we should probably include things like sense of humor as well. But maybe there shouldn't even be a list. Or maybe we should have three lists: one for the physical senses, one for the subjective senses, and one for the paranormal senses. I don't know what the best thing to do is, but fortunately, it's not very important. That's another sense, by the way -- the sense of importance. You can add it to the list of subjective senses if you want.

Apparently I'm not a big fan of posting "Thoughts for the day" as such, but, today as "class I threw ExceptionOfTotalOutOfOrderness ;" I just wanted to throw it out..:P
And here we go!...

Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But, it ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that!

I have to admit — since HackU ended, I have been struggling with how to contextualize it. It’s hard to put a nice neat wrapper around something that was so profound for me. For the people who were there (and you can read for yourself), it felt like a defining moment. The best way for now is to point out some of the people who made it happen and tell some of the inside story. In some later posts, I’ll probably go through some of the principles that guided us in planning Hack Day (e.g. who we invited and why, approaches to making such an event work), but for now, I just want to provide some backstory and point out some of the people who helped make this happen. There are literally hundreds of people in the mix, so I apologize in advance for those who I have missed. This will be my first attempt “official recounting” . Like all good stories, some things will be left between the lines, of course.

Before I get into the narrative, if anyone out there is wondering how we pulled this off, I offer one clue: total pros rolling up their sleeves to do whatever needed to be done. I’ve always been surprised at how intelligent people ascribe self-limiting qualities to organizations that they don’t really have to accept. Large companies are “slow.” Small companies are “agile.” “They” would never let us do this. What happens when you work in a large company and you are able to leverage the size of the organization to form a lean-and-mean ad hoc team with broad expertise (technical, management, legal, security, networking, etc.) on a moment’s notice? Something pretty powerful — you turn the cynical “they” who won’t let you do anything into the unstoppable “we” that won’t take no for an answer. I learned that inspiration might be the world’s only renewable energy source and it scales like a bank's interest rates!!.

Now, getting into the world of "thank yous" and the world otherwise. I feel that it’s an almost impossible task to get this right, but there are some specific people I wanted to thank. First, there's my team mates Madhan, Smitha and Spoorthy. It was such a great team to work with that, when we moved over to begin , we started talking about our goals almost immediately and the ideas started crystalizing no sooner than late. I honestly don't remember exactly how the "crazy" Mail Template+GreaseMonkey idea crystalized, but when it did, it was Madhan who gave us that patented Brad Pitt look that said, “dude, this is TOTALLY POSSIBLE!” and quietly lit the fire under us and himself(!) to make it happen. I’m hoping that everyone out there has a boss like this one day. Then Smitha well she's a full-swinger!. She has the most versatile brain, she used to flip her thoughts to sync the ideas that popped and parally thump in her understandability of the APIs and how they could help us move ahead(Infact, her duties also involved handling of the entire event as a volunteer too!- Man, that was real tough one!).Finally, Spoorthy- err!, this lady was the one behind the ideas, she'd generate the ideas faster that you can sync them in!!. Some of our fondest ideas of this whole process were her brain-child(ren);

Then once we got the verbal commitment done on our events, the lads and lasses were gracious enough to pick up that ball and run with it, dealing with the production issues, the code, the debugging, the betas, the alphas and anything else related to the hack, smack and crack of the code!. It was a gargantuan task that had never been done before. One of my favorite moments happened about half an hour before the show actually ended when I bumped into Arun Raghavendar and Tom Praison for a last miniute buckle-up tricks on the final hack that involved combining the hover-effect of the YUI into an Y-BOSS image search. And there it was- "Phew!" Tom and Arun got the lids shined and placed a crystal on it!. Imagine, they just ran through a 400 liner in about 5 mins and got their acts together and cracked the bug in just about 20 mins! (Where as I took a whopping 12 hours to get the code done! :P).

And last but not the least can we forget Paul Tarjan(Head Technical Monkey :P),Mr. Nagarajan, Rajesh(He's my super senior at UVCE too!),Jayasurian and the entire bunch of the Yahoo R&D team put the whole excellent Saturday agenda together along with other classmates of mine at IIITB. In one of the key roll-up-your-sleeves moments in my and perhaps our lives!.

To the extended HackU organizing team,well, you guys totally rocked — all several tens of you . And a gigantic thanks to all of you who cam over and made this developmental spree a great fun to cherish for several years to come , if not life time.

As a chorus, i would love to thank my team,yeah the team that I am so freaking proud of you. Its was a real fun time with you people out there!.