The Immortals of Meluha

I now have 3 books in my shelf to read: The Immortals of Meluha, The secret of the Nagas and Breaking India. Reading books is not what I do when I find time. Even though I like to do that, somehow I couldn’t make it a habit. I rather browse internet articles.

I started reading the first one. It is an easy one. But, I should admit it is not up to its hype. Although a fiction, I don’t like the way facts have been twisted. IMO one shouldn’t give wrong definitions to suite the story. To give you an example, word pandit doesn’t come from word Pandya. But the author says “In fact the word pandit comes from Pandya …”. Fact?? It is a lie. And I couldn’t stop laughing when I read – ‘Har Har Mahadev’ means ‘everyone is Mahadev’. Joke of the century! The author messed this by mixing Hindi and Sanskrit. There are a few more like these.

I know you can create your own fiction by saying Parvathi is god-daughter of Parvateshwar, create your own stories of Ram, Nagas etc., but I don’t like the way author is fooling people with these wrong definitions.

Yet to complete this book. Lets see how many more to come.

The Immortals of Meluha

Interesting RTI questions

We know that Right To Information Act in India is getting popular these days. People are more frequently asking questions and making the concerned people more responsible. If you have questions and think someone need to respond, just ask it.

The questions could be as serious as the ones which put A.Raja to jail. Or, it could be as trivial as ‘who currently heads the Indian PMO? Manmohan Singh or Sonia Gandhi’ 🙂 (although irresponsible/funny questions should be avoided, i thought this question is trivial but not funny)

Sometimes kids ask some simple questions to which we adults don’t have answers. Most of the time we try to avoid the questions or tell something we think could be right. Recently came across an article about a 10-yr old girl from Lucknow, who had some basic questions, filed RTIs and got back interesting facts.

1. Who officially declared Gandhi as Father of the Nation (since we always read it in our text books)
Ans: No official declaration done till now.

2. Who declared Gandhi Jayanti, Republic day, Independence day as national holidays?
Ans: Such orders were never issued.

Yes, I agree that you could simply Google it, and the net is full of it. Probably she wanted more authentic information.

“All-india Adivasi Kongress And Sonia Handheld” Device

Today I had a hands-on ‘Aakash‘ tablet in our lab. It has our processor. The performance is not bad when compared to its price. I don’t want to talk much on its features, as many have already talked about it. The tablet response is relatively slow, but I was able to browse through internet. The other draw back is old resistive touch screen, which was obviously chosen to achieve low cost.

The '$35 tablet'

For some reason, which I don’t understand, this tablet was not named after Rajiv/Indira Gandhi. Who knows? May be the name Aakash is an acronym which has not yet been revealed. I gave a try, “All-india Adivasi Kongress And Sonia Handheld” tablet. Oops! couldn’t get crappier than that.

Today’s TOI blooper

Today I found out this blooper on our own good-for-nothing TOI newspaper. It is about IPL match result. Video headlines suggest Pune Warriors won over Deccan Chargers. But the other headlines says DC won over PWI.

I know this paper is junk, but somehow I end up atleast once every day here 😉

TOI Blooper : PWI Vs DC

‘I am the Eagle of birds’

This shot was taken at Goa in 2009 when I was on vacation with my friends. I like the grandeur of  eagle captured in this shot. For no doubt it is rightly called ‘King of birds’

Lord Krishna says in the shloka 10-30 of Bhagavad Gita:

… वैनतेयश्च पक्षिणाम्।

(I am the Eagle of birds)

‘Hi’ mails …

After about 7 years from graduation, i got a ‘Hi’ mail a few days ago from one of my classmate (Karthik K). It was on Friendship day!

There were so many other classmates in the ‘cc’ list. Many were added to the ‘cc’ list later by others. Sorry to say about this, but I had almost forgotten a few of them.  The best part of the mail chain was that many replied back to it with their work status, marital status and wedding invitations. This mail was so refreshing though nostalgic. It was very good to hear from old pals. The mail chain is still continuing with more that 40 conversations.

Thanks Karthik!

I suggest you can try out this too and for sure this would be a very good way to get in touch with friends.

just arrived….

At last I moved to wordpress officially. It took me almost 3 years to finally move here. I had many hurdles like, how to import old posts from vintage blogdrive, how to get the old comments here, what should be my blog URL ….

I could get all the older posts here, but not the comments.  I’m really sad about it as many of my friends had left their impressions and it is very nostalgic for me if I revist my old posts.

I still see some errors generated due to export-import process. I may take some time to correct them. Lets see how things work out.

Anyways, ‘change’ is always good.

So many videos online …!!!

I have always been a lazy guy when it comes to reading books. I have been reading some books since years!!! Reading books online is even more difficult for me. I’m more comfortable in watching some videos rather than reading the same matter on books.
I’m seeing that the power of internet is unleashing with so many kinds of education and entertainment materials going video online for people like me. Most of them are on entertainment front, I mean to say that there are so many free movies going online legally, cricket matches on youtube, you can watch some movies online first-day first-show at some minimal cost. But you can also listen and see some of the lectures by people who have excelled in their fields, and lots more. Youtube has been streamlined very well these days.
Most of you might know some of these. I personally like these. Have you observed these things?
1. Movies on Youtube? Even full length bollywood movies for free? Youtube -> channels -> Movies
2. TED Talks – it is filled with awesome lectures.
3. iTunes video podcasting. Free videos on so many things. Yes, you might need to install iTunes.
4. Videolectures.net – another good site to pass time on plethora of things.
5. Many more..

A rare time stamp

On August 7th 2009…

At 34 minutes and 56 seconds past 12…

the time and date will read…

12:34:56 07/08/09

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

This won’t happen again for another thousand years !!!

Courtesy: Fwd’ed e-mail

Mockery of ‘Jai Ho’

This is an election campaign video mocking Congress. LOL!!!

 the original video has been deleted. here is the shorter version of it…