Last day blues?
Today is the last day of the Year and all of us are at work. To make things worse, its a Friday. As an unwritten rule, all offices should be closed on 31st! To lighten up the mood, I've decided not to "work" (in the literal sense) today and just hang around the office for a while and then get back home! huh...now I feel a lil better.
I've been fishing for reasons on why I haven't been blogging lately and couldn't come up with anything reasonable :(..so I guess its just a bad habit.
We've been seeing 2 movies every Sunday for the past month. These are the ones I liked:
"Musafir" (means "traveler" in Hindi): If you liked "Kaante" (remake of "Reservoir Dogs"), you would like "Musafir". Sanjay Dutt rules with his Harley. Dialogues are really good.
For once, the dialogues relate to the actor playing the role. Sense of humor is quite different and very sarcastic of all the Hindi movies. I enjoyed watching the movie. They could have done better by not having Sameera Reddy and Koena Mitra.
"Saw" - a chilling movie and very articulately directed, well-crafted thriller.
Oceans's Twelve was a disappointment and didn't live up to the expectations of Oceans' Eleven. Nevertheless, George Clooney is awesome as always.
Happy New Year 2005!
Nature's Fury
Nature at its worst. Terms such as tsunami, tornadoes are generally unheard of in India. So when such a calamity struck, it shocked and surprised everyone beyond words.
The tsunami that hit South Asia on Dec 26th morning has claimed over 20,000 lives in Sri Lanka and 13000 in India. It was chilling to read the experience of a family from Bangalore that was on a speed boat ride in the Bentota river that fateful morning. As they sadly reminisced the experience of how they got back to the shore when the boatman deserted them midway, I was reminded of memories of our ride at the Bentota River 2 years back. That was one part of our trip to Sri Lanka that we enjoyed. I received a few pictures now ..the zip file is named "what happens when death is near you". Every picture has a huge body of water chasing people desperately running for their lives. What an irony - nature chasing mankind just when man thinks he is the master of his own destiny, nature reminds us that we are helpless.
All my coworkers are out on a picnic today. Can't believe it is so hot in Bangalore on a December afternoon. Another coworker and I are at work struggling to get even with Java Server Faces. Damn JSR 168 Portlets, Inter portlet Communication and JSF! Precisely the reason why I hate the first version of any new technology. Whoever makes the draft claim to have not addressed certain key factors deliberately (or otherwise ?) in the initial version. It is left to those unlucky few in the initial months of release to live with the bugs and figure out the drawbacks. "Google Programming" is not helping either. Well, everything has a way of working out, so I'm not worried.
I was all set to leave home this morning, when I realized I couldn't open my front door. I checked if I had opened the latches again to ensure I wasn't sleeping. Didn't take long to realize that someone had locked me in. It took a good 15 mins to get my neighbor to unlock the door. As it turned out, there were a few kids playing outside who remembered later that they had locked me in. Funny!
Broadband has arrived finally. One vendor has agreed to provide Internet connection. So I should be connected from next week which means more frequent blogging.
Tapping the potential of Technology - From wheat to Aashirvaad
India, the largest democracy in the world, held its 14th Lok Sabha elections in 2004. Of the 675 million registered voters from the 1 billion strong nation, a whopping 378 million exercised their franchise. Despite this overwhelming turnout, thee election results were declared within a span of 24 hours. Thanks to the technology revolution in India. Every government in the past decade has not lost an opportunity (despite the lack of development in other sectors) to tap the IT potential that is available in abundance - the Indian brain power. Examples of the same are e-governance, online Railway tickets reservation (book a train ticket was a nightmare until 5 years back and required planning), and paying electricity bills online.
The reason I mentioned technology is because of the article in India Today about how it has revolutionised the agri-business in rural India.
V reminded me to read this week's edition of India Today. On the front cover is Yogi Deveshwar, ITC chairman. I was very impressed about the concept of e-choupal when I heard it for the first time a few weeks back (more of an up close and personal version).
Its achievement - 5050 choupals, 29,500 villages, 3.1 million farmers.
Ambition - to reach 1,00,000 villages, 10 million farmers by 2010.
--from India Today
To me, this initiative by itself is a big deal. Selling technology to the uneducated and gaining the confidence of the farmers on a machine (a computer) that they would generally look at with awe only from a distance. The real potential of India lies in the villages where more than 60% of the population lives. Educating farmers and making Internet connection accessible to them and other information in their local language is an appreciable deed.
Let me explain what this initiative is all about in a few words. ITC sets up one e-choupal for a number of villages and appoints a sanchalak (the person that operates the computer). The farmers then approach the sanchalak for information such as weather forecast and what would be the right time to sow a crop, prices in the markets etc. ITC steps in by selling the concept and educating every farmer about good cultivation techniques and sells seeds and fertilizers at competitive prices. Upon harvesting, the farmers have a choice of taking their produce either to their traditional mandis or getting them to ITC. The article says that the farmer’s prefer to sell it back to ITC because of competitive prices and no malpractices and they get paid without any delay (as is usually the case in mandis). This is the story of transformation of wheat to Aashirvaad.
However the concept that appealed the most to me was recognizing the buying power of the rural India. Though the buying capacity of every individual cannot be compared to that of an Urban Indian, the volume is so high that FMCG products are fast moving now in the villages. The farmers have hard cash with them on selling their produce and they don’t hesitate on spending the same in consumer goods. For more on this read this week's India Today.
Phir Milenghe
I saw Phir Milenghe (read: We'll meet again) on December 1st. December 1st is World Aids Day.
Phir Milenghe, a Hindi Movie adapted from the English movie,Philadelphia, is the story of a highly paid ad executive (a woman in this case) of a creative agency who is fired from her job when her boss learns that she is diagnosed HIV-positive. Tom Hanks's Oscar winning performance cannot be compared with that of Shilpa Shetty's. But I liked the movie. Phir Milenghe was released in 2004 while Philadelphia was released in 1993. As one would expect, this movie did not perform well at the box office and was telecasted on Sahara within a couple of months. AIDS is still such a taboo topic and is not spoken about openly. There was very good dialogue in the movie that said, "when you don't talk about it, you promote ignorance." This is true and we believe in the saying "Ignorance is bliss". I imagine most of us believe in the misconception that being HIV-positive means the same as having AIDS, which is not true.
Well, anyways, the purpose of writing this post was, it troubled me knowing that people didn't like this movie but they like movies such as Hum Tum (read: we and you). Yes, it is a personal choice and perhaps they offer the kind of entertainment the masses look for but don't that doesn't mean you demote meaningful movies either.