Tea - One of my weaknesses (and as a consequence a bad habit too) is craving for good food and having large portions of it. I start my day with a cup of strong tea made with lil cream and a lot of sugar. My taste buds are averse to tea that doesn’t smell good. I must admit that the regular leaf tea available in India doesn’t taste great, so what we usually do is mix about 50 grams of 5 popular brands. It has been a while since I did this.
We had bought this box of Strawberry tea from Sri Lanka. I added a teaspoon of Mlesna flavored tea to boiling water, brewed it for 2-3 mins, added a dash of sugar to it and drank in peace – there’s something about it. Hmm..what can a better start to a Monday.
On a totally unrelated note, chk out this site www.wordcount.org
This was picked by Yahoo! as one of the favorite sites of 2004. Out of curiosity I searched for a few words to determine how they fared and here are the results :
Bush -2629
Diana -3876
India -2143
Bangalore - 47226
America -992
Ferrari -12531
Java-18892
Tea
Monday, January 10, 2005
Baleno – surprising performance
Thursday, January 06, 2005The only sound you should hear in a car is that of your pulse pounding.
The search for a car began 2 months back. For over 2 years now, V and I were sure that when we decide to buy a car, it would be none other than the Maruti Zen – a small family car that fit within one’s budget and navigated easily through the Bangalore traffic. However, when we began our search 2 months back, we entertained the idea of going for a ‘long’ car (the ones with a boot) – it may sound funny but until 6 years back there were very few long cars in India. So Zen didn’t figure in the list. The first choice was Esteem – the esteemed car in that segment for years now until Ford and Hyundai came in. Maruti Esteem supposedly had a sleek look compared to the Contessa – the one with a 50-50 front back).
We saw the Hyundai Accent GLE, Hyundai Santro, Hyundai Getz, Ford Ikon 1.3/ and 1.6, Fiat Petra, Honda City, Esteem Vxi and Baleno. With so many options and prices ranging from 4 Lakhs to 7 Lakhs, we decided to get our priorities right that would help in making the right choice. I wouldn’t go into the technical details that we considered. The elimination process began and Hyundai/Ford were out of our consideration radar mainly because of their looks. I have always disliked the looks of a Santro and surprisingly Ford Ikon didn’t appeal to both of us. The so called high ground clearance perhaps doesn’t make the car look so great. But I must admit that striking out Ford Ikon was perhaps the most difficult decision as it kept haunting us until the last. It is apparently a steal at that price. The 2 cars that I liked the minute I saw them were Honda City and Fiat Petra. Honda City was not affordable and Fiat Petra we felt as the autocar reviews said that it was a great value for money.
It was a daily ritual for V for the last 2-3 weeks. He would go down every morning and walk from one end of the basement to the other carefully observing the 90 odd cars parked – a great variety, There was one car that was a showstopper – the black Baleno and it captured his attention from the minute it rolled in on Sept 17th. The family that lives upstairs had bought it. A great offer on the Baleno that couldn’t have been more appropriately timed made us consider it. So the final showdown was between the Baleno and the Petra.
Until 2 weeks back, we had more or less decided on the Petra when an unfortunate incident happened with one of our neighbors and their bad experience with Fiat service center influenced our decision against the Petra. This again proved that Fiat doesn’t have a good market share because of its poor customer service in India, which we knew all along but wanted to intentionally overlook as we loved the Petra.
And Baleno won….
Today was the D-day. I was so nervous this morning that I felt like a kid appearing for a difficult exam. But it feels good that it has come home… And I came back home all excited like a kid waiting to play with the new toy..oh yes I don’t know how to drive so I just came back to see how it was…
Welcome home Baleno…
Violent Programming
The frustration levels at work soared today reaching a climax at 5:45 p.m. The culprit being JSF. The infamous term "Value change listener" got to our nerves that we started throwing bottles of water at each other. Huh..I'm giving up now and leaving for the day!
Six Apart to buy Live Journal - If this is true, then this could really change the blogging space. Time to wait and watch how Google responds with blogger!
Adieu 2004, Welcome 2005
Saturday Morning 7:30 a.m. I'm blogging! Last evening's New Year Party was quite different from what we have ever done on New Year's eve earlier. Last year we were at the Navy Pier to watch the fireworks in freezing cold. Thhis year it was watching kids' dance and sing ..though it felt more like a going to an annual day function at a school than a New Year party, it was fun.
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.