Written by Mahasweta Devi at the heart of the naxalite movement in West Bengal(somewhere in the late 70s). Read the English translation by Samik Bandopadhyaya . I have never read a HindiBengali translation, but this one was totally in a different league.

Spanning a day in the life of a Bengali mother, it traces her reconstruction of her son’s life and the revolution he had been a part of an died for. Anything that I write here can not substitute for what you would go through as you share Sujata’s journey – a journey in which she goes through her own life and of the life that she had planned for her son and more importantly to piece through facets of her son’s life that her son had so effectively hidden from her.

Along the narrative, the author stays clear of glorifying the revolution and yet at the same time questions the right of society to be dismissive of these young men and women.

Do this. Buy yourself this book.(Not available in most of the crosswords and Oddysseys of the world – atleast not in Hyderabad, I got mine ordering it online from http://indiaplaza.in). I promise you, it will get you thinking.

Thanks Austere(http://austereseeker.blogspot.com) for introducing me to Mahasweta Devi through a blog post.

PS: There also is a movie by the same name by Govind Nihalani starring Jaya Bachhan and Nandita Das amongst others. Read that it had received quite some crititcal acclaim as well.

Children are funny things…they laugh in mirth at others’ tears

I buried my face in the sun warmed hedge and smelled the flowers and pain…

This is a test post. Posting from Windows Live Writely to evaluate how it fares. Regular programming will continue shortly.

First to begin with - a clarification. The subject of the previous post wasnt me. Much as I would have loved it, Two years of wait it would have to be.

Back to this post.

Years ago, when I was in 11th , I would watch television - news channel to be specific all through the day. Those were the days twenty four hour news channels had made their advent. A pretty lady would appear in one of those breakfast news shows. I would watch her, all along assuming that she was talking only to me. There is something about the news anchor that you would almost assume that she was making a conversation with you.

Waiting until the news show was over, I would head to college; Assured beyond any element of doubt that after such a start the day could never go bad.

Years passed the anchor moved from morning show to prime time. I moved through periods of prolonged TV depravity(thanks to hostel life) and out of adolescence. Today back in the airconditioned confines of this guest house, the lady appears on the news channel. Prettier than ever. You wonder where those years went by? You smile and watch the pretty lady paying almost no heed to the news item she is talking. Draped in a saree - she looks just like those long gone days. I know its easy to jump and say “Beauty is often just skin deep”. Try telling a 15 year old teenager….

Ms Razdan, wish you well.

At one of those new age coffee shops(Italian SPA if I may add). A table outside. The boy, his mother, his sister, his brother and maybe his father too. The other side a girl, nervous and apprehensive, her father by her side. The sister makes conversation with the girl. The sister is all smiles, she tries to make the girl comfortable. The boy from the other side adds a few words. Parents seem to talk by themselves. The brother heads to order something at the self serve counter.

A pause for sometime, where we immerse ourselves over laughter and self made scrabble rules. A quick trip to a hindi short story read way back in tenth standard.

Back to the table. The crowd seems to have thinned down to different parts of the coffee shop now. The boy and girl are alone in the table. Intermittent and halting conversation is on. The guy seems to be initiating them. The two of you smile across each other.

Indeed a lot can happen over coffee.

PS: Its bad manners to listen to others’ conversations or gawk at people across coffee tables.

Its strange … the first post that I am posting from Hyderabad comes almost a month after I reached this place and more importantly, when I am locked out of the house … one of the other roommates has the key and yours truly returns back from a hard day’s work to find the room locked while the others are having dinner elsewhere.

Hyderabad has been a nice experience this far. There are places named Hitech City and Cyberabad(I am not kidding this place is actually called Cyberabad). After using Hyderabad roads for a few days - you start falling in love with the place. Bangalore seems decades behind - atleast while comparing the state of the roads, the flyovers and the other stuff. And the traffic - makes riding a bike fun all over again. Something which Bangalore has totally lost it. At times like these you actually begin to wonder, whether you have been living in delusion about Bangalore being the best city(And considering the manner in which Royal Challengers Bangalore have been playing there is hardly anything to cheer about). That and beyond the only thing that works against this place is the weather. Blazing hot sun through the day.  But except the weekend, we hardly get to see the same. As Prof. T would say back in college…we are a part of the cold chain now. We step from Air conditioned homes to Air conditioned offices to Air conditioned malls back to Air conditioned houses. The only thing missing from the cold chain mentioned was Airconditioned vehicles to ferry us around… something which has been replaced by the ingenious ‘Share Auto’ where there are 5 passengers in one tiny bajaj auto, two on either side of the driver and three behind. Anything as long as the auto fare is split. Well, on a related note Auto drivers are still canny … if you dont speak the rough telugu + urdu combo…be rest assured you will always pay a couple of 10 rupee notes above the going price.

House seems to be a good place, but we pay a whooping 35K in rent for a 3BHK…aint it scary about the kind of times that we live in? But luckily we can divide the rent by the 5 inmates and it seems affordable then. And yes, before I forget you need to add 5K for the AC’s electricity bill and 4K for the broker and 2K for maintenance. Yes, the math indeed gets murky.

But wait, why am I typing all this here…well, for starters I am still locked outside and these guys show no signs of being anywhere nearby and mosquitoes are making life miserable for me. But thanks to the wireless connection that seems to be coming out of our room, I still am connected to the internet.

Ok, now about work. Work has been decent so far…but surprise I have to wear a formal shirt and formal trousers and formal shoes and head to work. After being accustomed to Yahoo!’s informal work culture this does come as a shock and more so as a pain - but well, things could be worse like few folks in Mumbai who have to wear a blazer everyday as well. So no complaints there.

And yes, did I tell you I played cricket(the leather ball kinds) here for the company team. Playing after leather ball cricket after 10 years(last played in circa 1999 - Cottonian Shield, Bangalore for Presidency School). Well the experience was extremely forgettable given how draining Hyderabad heat can be on a Saturday morning. So no more cricket for me…

And finally how did I even remember that I had a blog? The name.com domain registration cames for expiry this month end. And if I am going to be paying $14 I might as well type in something occasionally.

More later…

PS: No sign of these guys yet….

When it was time to buy a bike, I had to make a choice between Bajaj Pulsar and TVS Apache. My dream bike was an Yamaha RX135 though, which unfortunately Yamaha had stopped production. I chose TVS Apache, simply because every Thiruchelvan, Deepak and Harish around me had a pulsar! The quest for choosing something different lead me to buy Apache. An Awesome bike btw…

Today, somone had this question … “Would you buy a Tata Nano?”… I said Yes, if I had the money…Where did that quest for uniqueness go?

In the past few days, thanks to the weather here at Bangalore and thanks to the bad insipid food all around me, I have been consuming lots of lassi. Yes, the curd based chilled sweet lassi. Every dinner or lunch I go outside and people start their meal with a chilled beer(Child Bear for those upwards of New Delhi) or end it with an aerated cola - I have been steadfastly loyal to ‘Sweet Lassi’.

It then occured to me that I could start a site(or maybe here itself), where I would review the Lassis available at different restaurants. One thing I have realized after consuming God knows how many glasses of this drink is that a lassi tastes different at different places. So I thought I should review, rate and rank all restaurants around this place for only one product. The Sweet Lassi. Some of the parameters for evaluation include speed of delivery, taste, consistency, and value for money.

And then I thought..I should name this review section - “Lassi-ez faire”

Good night…

Requirement: As I had mentioned in one of my earlier posts - Url Shortners and redirectors are in rage these days. However they can easily be used for malicious reasons. i.e. Masking the end site and fooling you to believe that you are going to a good site while it takes you to a bad site and does bad things to your litle PC.

Solution: Enable Previews on Tinyurl. So this takes you to an intermediate page where it shows the url where it is redirecting you to and then on a mouse click takes you further.

Problem: Most of the links that you click on, usually are from your immediate friends’ circle and can be trusted. So ideally you dont want to be taken to a middle preview page for these good sites.

Solution: Tinyurl.com should ideally have a white-list of domain names, specified by you, which are deemed safe and no preview should be needed for these domains. For e.g. when a request for redirection comes to http://kaisertalk.in you might want to let tinyurl know that Sathya is a good guy and I can trust my browser on his domain. Disable previews only for http://kaisertalk.in/*

Implementation: In the absence of such a feature at tinyurl.com, I want you to write a simple Grease Monkey script which examine the intermediate page and upon finding that it redirects to a list of good urls - Allow you to visit that site without a new click being made.

Your time starts now…

Update: Done…Have created a simple greasemonkey script. You can install it from http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44283

How do you customize it? Edit the user.js file and add lines for every site that you want to bypass… e.g. whiteList[9]=”ibnlive.com”

Update 1: Thanks Mohan, Balu, Vishwa, Sahil and Priya for your comments…Thanks to those who suggested workarounds(or may be the work-straightlines to begin with).

Anyways my point is this - The big G uses Chrome as a device to pump search queries onto itself at the cost of not giving its users(save the tech savvy, uber cool Vishwa - May his tribe increase) a real choice between a multitude of engines.

And to think of it…this is the same G which cried foul against the big MSFT when they combined their desktop search and MSN Live search in Vista….remember?

And regarding me…shall always remain a passionate flock user… If I have any problems with flock all I do is shout out to @evanhamilton

Also do read this article from WSJ to understand why Firefox is posing a threat to the number of searches at G.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123655166177765433.html?mod=yahoo_hs&ru=yahoo

This article basically says that the number of searches at G or maybe any other place… is so high because people dont remember site names and are comfortable searching google and landing there…FF changes all that.

Have you tried Google Chrome? If not, download it from downloads.google.com.

Now I will tell you why I hate google chrome.

If you are using Firefox(or Flock) to browse this page, can you see that searchbar on the top right? Yes the same searchbar with drop downs where you can search from multiple search engines at once? For instance you can choose Wikipedia and directly give your search term there, or search directly from yahoo or maybe youtube.

This had become such browser standard(unwritten) that even Apple Safari provided it … and hold it … the big evil boy of Sofware Competition also provided it. Which meant you could search from Internet explorer directly on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft’s own Livesearch.

Now circa 2008. Google comes up with chrome and does a total UI redesign of the browser.(Looks neat, ok) but then look to the right top…Where is that search box?

OK, now the “DO NO EVIL” folks tell you to directly key in the search term on the url bar and they would search it for you. Wait do you give me the option to parallely search from multiple places? Nope..You tell me to choose a default search engine and ask me to use that. Very good, and you have chosen it as google for me. Now what if I have to choose wikipedia for the odd search, and say youtube for that even search, or flickr for that prime numbered search. No. I cant do that you say. You tell me type it on the URL bar, either way it will search the big G and give me my results from wiki amongst the the first few links.

Thanks Big G…but why should I search you to reach Wikipedia or any other place for that matter. FF used to allow me everybody else allows me…Why not you?

Of course, every redirection from you is counted as one search and in this game…the metric for comparison is number of searches! Voila Big G…