Its not exotic dishes that you crave for. When you have been having rajma and dhal every day for close to a month now… its the humble rasam that you are dying to have!

If some one stays near Bannerghatta Road, and knows how to make rasam - the south Indian way, can you please have me over for lunch/dinner please.

When the prime minister of the country stands up in parliament to give his concluding speech on the Motion in the Lok Sabha, and he is not allowed to speak, How badly does it reflect on our country? The man in his weak voice, stands tall and continues his words, legislators from the opposite side have now come into the well of the house and are shouting chants against him personally. Hell! This man is supposed to be the leader of the nation. Isnt it our prerogative to respect the man who is supposed to be the face and voice of our nation’s billion people? Are our opposition legislators above all respect? Is dignity such a difficult virtue to possess?

The leader with the weak voice continues into the second line. “Honorable Speaker ….” and then his voice is cut mercilessly by the boisterous and unruly voices from the opposite benches. The speaker is trying to plead with them now. “Please, sit down. Please take your seats. Please remain silent. Please allow the honorable prime minister to complete his speech”. Why should the speaker beg for discipline and decorum in the house. I am reminded of my schooling days, and would help if you could recollect the same too. Which school teacher ever pleaded with you …”please stay silent children. Please listen to me children. Please sit down at your seats. Please dont come near the teacher’s table, children”. Ofcourse not. No school teacher worth her salt would ever do that. Out of no where would emerge a 30 cms wooden ruler(scale), or in some ourcases a cane. Thwack! Thwack! Merciless blows would fall on you. You would take them on your back, on your shoulders, on your palms outstretched, and in some cases on the knuckles. Why should we spare these legislatures who cant maintain order and dignity in an institution like a parliament! Cane the Bastards!

By now the leader with a weak voice has given up. The hundred odd students who had gathered at the cafetaria to listen to the leader speak, are filled with a sense of grief and an overbearing feeling of guilt. If the nation’s prime minister cant be heard. What voice would lesser mortals have. The prime minister walks up to the speaker and hands over sheets of paper that held, what would have been his address to the parliament and hence the address to the nation. A moment of great shame!

PS: And running inside the house with one crore of stacked currency notes? Whom are you kidding where is the remaining ninety nine crores? You think you are wise to just turn in 1 crore, and keep the rest for yourselves. And yes do you think, we dont know that the average price for the 5 independents who chose to support the Karnataka BJP Government? The truth is we know it, and frankly we dont care, if that money is going to get us a stable government, and when we can shut up… you can shut the fuck up too!

If you were from Bangalore, you would have seen this phenomenon - Students from upmarket schools, having lived close to 23 years in the city, when asked to speak a sentence in the local language would claim ignorance and cry murder saying that they never had the need to know the language.

I always would wonder, how difficult would it be to learn a few basic sentences in a local language?

Nitin, a batchmate of mine here had an interesting take on this issue. He says…

“The number of people evincing interest to learn/speak a language is directly proportional to the GDP of the Language.”

In one sentence, he had managed to drive home an issue, that the Kannada Rakshana Vedikes and Maharashtra Nav Nirman Senas of this country would never understand.

Can you think of any exception to this rule? Maybe French… My explanation is that French is generally perceived to be an extremely Amorous language, and people have the propensity to consume anything amorous!

You wait in the class, in between those lectures, and a pretty woman slides into the class. Tries to be inconspicuous, moves to the last row behind the class. Ofcourse the entire class cant help but notice her, but they continue, pretending to be busy in talks about the previous night at the hostel; of stories more inane; of how difficult it was to wake up, or stay awake.

The pretty woman is now sitting in the last row, hidden from the rest of the class. She doesn’t have the course material with her, she seems to be taking notes of something onto the small scribbling pad that she has brought along with her. Her eyes follows every speaker in the class in a mechanical manner, but you are sure she is not paying much heed to anything else. The scribblings on the pad seems to continue, you can make that from wherever you are seated.

Every speaker, after indulging in a few words in the class discussion looks back at her. She is still scribbling something onto the pad.

You tell yourself. This is counter to everything that education was supposed to be. The lady is marking class participation on that pad. 5 percent of your overall marks are going to be decided by the contents of that pad. You look away, and towards the white board.

PS1: CP=Class Participation
2: No, I dont think any of the guys have hit on the pretty lady so far. But I think its just a matter of time.

Sometimes, I feel the role of Gandhi in our struggle for independence is slightly overrated. I dont agree when people say that he was amongst the most influential persons of the twentieth century. If he really was as influential as our doctored History textbooks claim him to be, we need to question ourselves - If the world was really influenced by MKG, has there been a reduction in armed rebellions world over?

Read for one such (slightly extreme) view…

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/2000/0214/india.godse.html

So whom do you think is the most influential person of the twentieth century?

Good Night!

Have you ever asked yourself this question, “What is that one piece of software without which my computing experience, is just incomplete?”

I bet, if and when you ask yourself that question, one of the answers would be a popular browser like Mozilla Firefox(Flock, in my case) and much above anything else in that list would be Microsoft Office. A computer just seems incomplete without Microsoft office. To this day, I would say that Microsoft Office is the best thing to have come out of the Microsoft Office(pun definitely intended).

And since moving to Ubuntu over the last month, I didnt have many reasons to miss my Windows XP, which lost its position as the primary operating system to Ubuntu Hardy Heron(8.04). Everything I wanted was available on Ubuntu. Browser of Choice - Flock. Video Player of Choice - VLC Media player. Audio Player of Choice - Amarok, plus rhythmbox.

Office Software - _______________________? I know many of you would jump at me at this stage and say - “What about Open Office?”

Well lets face it guys, the guys at Open Office have been doing a good job no doubt, but nothing can replace Microsoft Word for me. Google’s Online Documents are great for collaborating editing, but still an offline utility is a must I feel. Google Docs can just not replace Microsoft Office.

Amongst utilitarian Software - Adobe Photoshop is another that ranks high on the list, due to sheer utility rather than frequency of use, and sad - PhotoShop CS2 is available for Windows, and also for Mac, but not for Linux.(Clearly because of the proprietary nature of the software - point taken).

So my computer experience, was sans Adobe Photoshop, and Office. And then I got hold of WINE, and installed the Wine windows emulator for Ubuntu.

Well, for those who are hearing wine for the first time in a context other than what involves tall greenish tinted and corked bottles, WINE is a windows emulator, and to cut a long story short, provides a middle layer between your application and the underlying unix, which leads the Application(designed for windows) to believing that it was actually running on a windows machine, rather than a linux one.

Thanks to wine, I installed the emulator and then installed photoshop. For more on how to go about doing the same, read the instructions at this lifehacker site.

http://lifehacker.com/396590/run-windows-apps-in-linux-with-wine-10

All things fine so far, and photoshop installation goes on like a charm. And then I click on that photoshop Icon and I get this weird error, saying there is an error and Adobe PS CS2 needs to be reinstalled to continue. So if any of you gets this error, on Ubuntu hardy heron, its a simple tweak suggested by this site that will help you

$sudo sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0

Site: http://wiki.winehq.org/PreloaderPageZeroProblem

More at the site.

Well thanks to WINE, now I have photoshop running on my Ubuntu Machine! Hurray! Now, if someone helps me install Microsoft office on Ubuntu, in addition to words like gratitude, thankfulness and appreciation, I would also give away my windows XP cd gleefuly.

Cheers!

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Well in other news, I went to the hostel office today and picked up the lot for my room. Was hoping pretty hard to get the K or L block, which would mean new blocks with balconies, ceramic tiles and designer wardrobes. Well that was not to be - yours truly landed up with a old block. H 110 is the room number, a dusty old room - but the window opens to a land which I in my usual exaggeratory tone could call - FOREST, so might be I might have good stories to tell about that place.

Did I ever tell you, that it was always my dream when in Surathkal to have a hostel room overlooking the woods, with a trail running throught it - Might be a few birds thrown in to add their sounds,there is a possibility that H110 could offer all that.

Good Night,

Its strange, the first post that I have to post at this new site is my good bye post from Yahoo! People tend to be excessively sentimental about their first job, why should I be an exception? More so because I have had an awesome time here over the past two years(Oh! I take that numerical liberty! I actual am falling short of 2 years by 10 days)

When I listen to the tales of numerous coding monkeys who jump from one coding assignment to another, from one company to another - I hear tales of Sucky Jobs, tales of Sucky Managers and sh**ty jobs - I wonder if I have been too lucky. An awesome Company! Brilliant People! Great folks to work for! It wouldnt be an exaggeration to say that it was a Dream Run! This is the stuff dreams are made of!

Straight out of College, this place gave me new love - PHP and Free and Open Software! To see people whom you had previously seen only wikipedia - easily amongst the best things I would say!

Work wise - I worked for Yahoo! HotJobs. To be frank when I joined Yahoo! and was told ‘HotJobs’ - I too really didnt know about that company/product/portal, and even I wore that surprised look that some of you would be wearing now. But then enter into Yahoo! and all my misgivings and initial apprehensions set aside, loved every bit of the time that I spent here, learnt things that an university could never teach.

Made great friends here, was mentored by some real cool people, and worked on some of the coolest stuff with some of the brightest minds - The merits of working for in Internet Company. How many of you can see your work live being used by other people - This is something, that I truly love about the internet.

How can I end my post about life at Yahoo! without mentioning about the fun here! The foosball games, bowling , Ping Pong, Cubicle Cricket(which we later moved into a Breakout Area) - some of the best times. The fervour that foosball games produced can not be summarized in words here!

Today is my last working day here, Monday would be the day the formalities would be complete, so technically wouldnt be working on Monday. Thanks to all the folks I ever interacted in the past two years - you guys made life here fun.Too many things that I would miss to be enumerated here.

Bye all! Keep in touch! Yahooooooo!!!!

Good Night and Good Luck!

You can mail me at sathyacrt84@yahoo.com

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