Sunday, November 23, 2008

Tongue Wagging – Australian For Defeat

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There have been quite a few news articles about Australian cricketers that, according to me, were quite funny.

1) Ricky Ponting complaining about the former players behavior and because they behaved bad, they cannot criticize his behavior.

2) Mathew Hayden complaining about the facilities in India after he went back to Australia.

3) Funniest of all, Symmonds takes to drinking because he was disappointed that Cricket Australia did not support him enough in the “Monkey Gate” incident.

Disgrace! You jokers!! Its a shame that you guys cannot take a defeat gracefully. How disappointing.

Yes, the media has been unnecessarily harsh on the Australians questioning their capabilities of being world leaders in cricket. But, none of these is reason enough for them to talk nonsense like this.

Symmonds!  He must be a really silly guy. Someone who takes to drinking for a silly incident that he should have thrown off his mind and let his bat do the talking goes binging. Look at his massive figure and what he talks, you would end up laughing for an hour.

The next huge figure, Mathew Hayden. Despite getting a special assistance from Assistant coach Greg Chappell and a very special treatment from the Rajastan Cricket Acadamy, despite getting additional facilities for practice, despite his captain publicly admitting in one of the post-match ceremonies that the hospitality in India has been wonderful, he goes back and calls India, a Third World country because someone stood in front of the sight screen.  If that person has not stood in front of the sight screen for a few seconds, Australians would have won the test series 3-0. Gentleman! if you cannot accept defeat gracefully and bounce back with your game, you are Third Rate!!! We hope you are not one.

Ponting, one of world cricket’s best captains. This must be a joke. It just took 2 players to retire to prove that he was not one. He has been talking too much non-sense. He once sarcastically said, “A third test match may not be required!”. It turned out to be true, Australians lost the first two.

Great going Aussie boys. We are learning the Aussie Language everyday. Now we know “Tongues Wagging”  means Australian for defeat.

A Melifluous Morning….Well, almost!

Its 6:15 AM in the morning. I am standing in my balcony with my cup of tea, biscuits and a good book. The weather is just perfect. Its gloomy, not warm, not cold, the right amount of chill in the breeze and the gentle breeze that touches you every few seconds and makes the skin feel Goosebumps.

The crickets or whatever insects are hissing like kinder garden kids in the last bench whispering to each other in the presence of a teacher. The birds have starting tuning up and are slowly starting their orchestra. Each bird has a unique sound. One whistling, one cooing, one crowing, one sounding like a flute. A couple of women are going for a walk. The sound of their heals going “churk” “churk”. At a distance, I thought I could faintly hear Skanda Shashit Kavasam, a tamil religious song. I am not sure if the song was my imagination. But, in all, the sounds were slowly coming together to make a perfect symphony.

My mind waking up slowly enjoying the morning raga. Ah! the freshness of a beautiful morning.

The dogs started barking at a distance and then it happened. A van that came in to the EMPTY street but the fricking driver blaring the darn horn putting a full stop to the crickets, birds and every sound of nature. The peace in me vanished and my mind started foul mouthing that Ba*****. It just took a couple of seconds for that fool to spoil the happiness of so many souls.

Damn the dogs and God Damn the stupid, brainless human beings that cannot, for a moment, enjoy the beauty that is all around them. As Calvin says “The surest sign that intelligent life exists outside earth, is that they never tried to contact us”. True! I guess all the intelligent life exists outside the earth. Mother Earth! you are an unfortunate soul!

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Hindi films come off age

Finally, I am beginning to see some sensible cinema in Bollywood. From the same old boring, illogical crap that has dominated the Bollywood movie scene, there has been some refreshing change.

Thanks to the young minds in bollywood that have decided not to follow the "Super Stars" crap with Sharukh, Amitabh, Abhishek etc. and doing some sensible stuff. It was so good to watch

1) Mumbai Meri Jaan

2) A Wednesday

Neither movies with the so called super stars and extremely sensible. I hope the trend continues and films get better and better.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Section 377 - Homosexual Law and Moral Policing

On the 9th of August 2008, Dr Anbumani Ramdoss, the honorable health minister of India had said that Section 377 which makes homosexuality a crime in India should be removed. His intention - AIDS is becoming a big threat for India; suppression seems only to increase the problem. Kudos Mr. Ramdoss, it is a good approach to solve a problem that is gravely threatening the country.

While Mr. Ramdoss has taken in to account the general well being of the nation, he has unfortunately forgotten to think about the plight of people who live their lives on depending on and misinterpreting to convenience, certain laws like this. These people are also known as the Moral Police. Moral police may be policemen or any body else who has the right to hit any body whoever he or she believes is not behaving according the moral/cultural values of the country. Now, you cannot ask me where these laws are written or who governs these. You can decide these laws on your own and beat anybody you feel like. All you need is a group of people who are jobless enough to join your jobless act and there are quite a few in India.

Anyways, this blog is not for me to explain how moral policing works but to help all of you understand the problems that the moral police are going to face just because we were concerned about the general well being of the country as against the specific well being of these people.

So, here is a scene that happens in a public park. There are few benches in the park and enter, the moral police (let us say a group of 5). Few benches where couples (man and woman) are sitting and talking. The others has 2 or more people of the same gender sitting and talking.

As of today i.e. with the law being there, the people who entered would go and harass the man and woman couples for misbehaving in a public place, beat them up and curse them till either the police intervene and take them away or the group (moral police) have had enough fun for the day.

When the law is repealed, the same park, same people. The group naturally suspects the man and woman couples.
  • But the couple say that they should not harass only them since the 2 guys sitting in the next bench could be homosexuals since they are sitting as close as this couple are. So the moral police has to act against them too.

  • The guys in the bench say that the 3 women sitting in the next bench could be homosexuals and the group has to harass them too.

  • The women in the next bench get upset and ask the moral police to prove that they are not a group of homosexuals since they have all come together into the park.

Did anybody think of the gravity of this problem before thinking of repealing this section. We are creating a circular reference problem here just by correcting a law for the common good of people. Even the policemen cannot come together and harass a couple (man-woman or man-man or woman-woman) since if the policemen come together they have to prove that they are not a couple who came to the park to misbehave.

Gosh! I can keep writing on the impact of removing this article, on the entire society. It is natural in India for friends to put hands around the shoulders and talk. Women to hold each others hands and talk. Now all these have to be eyed with suspicion by the moral police and police. Maintaining Indian culture anywhere in public will be very difficult and now, the tables turn to the moral police to prove themselves innocent too.

Boy, oh boy!!! what are we getting ourselves in to?. Should we really eradicate AIDS by creating such a difficulty to all the guardian angels of the country's cultural values. Well, I guess some smart person in the moral police would have the answer. Any thoughts, anybody?

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Real Madness!!!

Today, the name of my blog site made a very uneasy sense to me. I named the blog site thinking i am crazy but it is more than that. The entire world is so darn crazy!!!

So, i go in to office on Friday afternoon after lunching with some friends. I had heard some rumour that there had been bomb blasts in Bangalore. Once i get in to office, i come to know that there have been 5 explosions around Bangalore and 2 of them in less than 3 kms radius from my office. The first thing that was said was "Man, where do they get these bombs..in the petty shop outside??". There were jokes flying in the air and little bit of tension.

It made me feel very uneasy that instead of shock and panic, there was little fear and jokes flying around about the bomb blasts. The only reason is that we hear about so many of them every day that we have come to accept these as a normal occurrence. We have come to accept all of these madness!!!

The other thought that struck me
1) What is that these guys who plant these bombs hope to achieve?
2) What do these politicians and public (police/intelligence) achieve by being lax in their anti-terroris operations.

Do these people even know that all that they are doing is putting an end to this planet called earth? Do they even understand that their actions affect their own families which they dont seem to stop producing. We are killing planet earth in so many different ways everyday. Why do we need bombs and wars? To end the world faster. One tsunami and one earth quake killed thousands of people in a few minutes. As if that is not enough, these guys go around throwing bombs. Does any of these officials/politicians understand that these idiots who run around with bombs are going to kill their own families soon and they have to take an action to control these idiots soon?

Do such questions every get into the minds of the guys who run around with bombs or run the country? I wonder if i am too dumb and i am the only one asking such questions. Can i do something to put some sense in to the heads of any of these guys??

Hmmm.....may be i will write another blog when the whole country is dying in bomb blasts!...By gosh, this is darn real madness!!! I am sure we will succeed in putting an end to this planet soon and then, PEACE WILL PREVAIL!!!

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The Cricket Blog -1

Its always interesting to see almost everybody in India being hyper active when it comes to cricket.

The audience cannot take anything peacefully be it a victory or defeat. Victory  and immediately some cricketers become demigods. Defeat and immediately the demigod is reduced to a useless weasel.The amount of hype a media gives some cricketers has spelled the players' doom. In spite of a number of doomed cricketers the experts (who probably have never played cricket) commenting on strategy, analyzing a player's mind and capabilities.

The current captain of Indian cricket team, i think, is the result of one such hype. The poor chap seems to be a nice guy but the way the media is treating him, chasing him and writing him, it would be a time for him to worry about his career in cricket. A couple of failures everybody will write him off.

And finally, it is the team by itself. I wonder if it is the public and media pressure, they keep trying to do something new to win a game and end up in disasters. The current series with Australia proved this.

a) There was verbal aggression which ended up looking silly and childish when it was not backed by substance. Suddenly, when they realized there is no substance, the aggression ended abruptly.But there was no display of aggression in what mattered the most, the game.

b) There were desperate changes in the batting order without allowing any batsman to settle down in one slot. This was also pointed out by a senior player in the opponent team. The surprise in this was that a batsman who had proven himself for over 10 years in a particular slot being shoved around in the order and finally even dropped for one game.

c) The team's thoughtless use of bowlers in not using the bowlers who have been the best on the day to bowl their full quota of overs.

All this proves one thing, the team is run by a bunch of unprofessional people who also lack common sense. Can someone take their brains back from their home and start using it please. The need of the hour, from a common-sense perspective, seems to be professionalism, confidence and mental strength which should automatically increase the aggression in the field.

It is not a big deal to lose a match or a series as long as a professional outfit displays their competitive capabilities and gives the opponent a run for their money. Neither is it a big deal to have one or two bad days at work but it is important that people get to see a consistent good effort.

Wow!!! another long blog that nobody but me is going to read :)

The Search Scare

I read an article in Reuters which talks about what are top search topics by country. This article is based on statistics published by Google. This has increased my recent fear about Internet and privacy. The more you search in some search engine, the more the search engine, the more they know about you. It is possible for the search engines to know more about yourselves that you yourself do.

One of my friends called me and told me that he tried to use windows xp's "Find" feature and one of his monitoring software reported that the search is trying to reach some IP which belonged to Microsoft. Strange, I thought!!

With the increasing use of Internet in almost every walk of life like shopping, banking, food and searching information, it is inevitable that our privacy will be completely compromised.

As in everything there are both good and bad in Internet but it is possible for any of these popular search engines to compromise your private information. Even if they put in a small program in your machine which tracks your daily work and reports it to their database, most of us casual users are not even going to be aware of this.

Scary!! But I guess we will probably have to live with this unless we take some small steps like not using the same search engine over and over (at least scatter the information till the search engines merge and share data), using some security tools to know which software is trying to send what information outside your computer etc.

Gotta go now..i have a to google up some information :(

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Insha Allah

I am in Dubai on work now. I had a conversation with one of our vendors regarding some work that he had to help me finish. Just to give the readers (if in the unlikely scenario of someone reading my blog) the context, there was a part of my work that depended on he completing his part. So, the conversation was simply about when he would be able to come and complete the work.

Literally in every sentence he spoke, he goes like "Insha Allah, i would be able to do this", "Insha Allah, i would be able to come there tomorrow". It is not just this gentleman but also a few other people who I spoke to spoke the same way. Two things stuck me on this, one on a serious note and the other a funny part.

Let me write the funny part first. Btw, if you are a Muslim and you are reading this blog, let me first assure you I am NOT making fun of the religion nor am I making fun of Allah-The God.

So, here goes the funny part. If someone was incompetent at work but always said "Insha Allah, i will be able to do it"; I wonder if the person would be blamed for his incompetence and removed from his job or would that be, Allah did not so desire and hence the work was not done. I would probably say "Insha Allah, you are fired" and close the story.

On a serious note, it was amazing to see how he believes in that supreme power. If not for HIM, nothing would happen. If HE so desires everything would happen. The consistent stress on the fact that anything he does is because Allah makes him do it. I am simply amazed by the belief these people have in God and their respect to God. Awesome, truly awesome.

HappIness

It was fun watching the celebrations of India's victory over England in the cricket test series. It was really nice to see the happy faces of the poor cricketers who have been bashed so much by every Tom, Dick and Harry. I have noticed, in my career in the IT industry, how a team's victory brings joy to everybody. In that moment of victory, people forget all their interpersonal issues and just savour and enjoy the moment. Some victories also end long standing animosities.

A team's victory is a great feeling overall and the happiness is clearly reflected and while relishing the team's happiness I forgot some Indian cricket bashing questions myself, which is a good thing.

To me, it was another realization how someone's happiness, even if it was on a stupid TV screen, made me happy. I like being around people who are happy. I want to be happy so that other people around me can feel my happiness and become happy themselves.

The goal, finally, is to try and be happy as much as possible and keep everybody around me happy. Most of the times it is in hind sight we realize mistakes or inevitable circumstances which create unhappiness. But the only way I think is to move ahead just seeing what positives you can take out of it. This Indian team seems to have managed to do it after an almost certain defeat in Lord's.

As the script writer aptly points out in the movie "In Pursuit of Happyness", there is only an I in happiness, there is no "Y".

Thursday, August 02, 2007

The Simpsons

I watched this movie "The Simpsons, the movie" yesterday. Outrageously hilarious movie is the only way i can describe it. My incompetency in English vocabulary limits my capabilities to explain it better.

The movie starts with making fun of the viewers, calling them idiots for watching something in a theatre that they can watch in TV everyday and that is the start of the Homer Simpson's outrageous antics.

From there on it takes us on a laughter filed 1.5 hours. Simple comedy and with good message. And, be careful, watch every scene and listen to every dialogue carefully lest you miss some of the wonderful subtle comedy.

I recommend it highly for a 2 hours of stress free time, the last 30 minutes to recollect the movie and laugh again :)