Saturday, June 12, 2010

Phoenix

With this post I bring back my blog into life. What better occasion than resuming it from where we left...

MESSI is back! and this time with 4 more years of mesmerizing performance added to his name. The wonder kid has turned into a seasoned professional and who is standing by his side (though inches off the sideline)... the magician himself MARADONA. So, any guesses, who am I supporting in this "world coming to Africa" edition of FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010? Oh c'mon you know it by now.

Campaign started with 1-0 over Nigerians where Messi had at least 3 sure shots on the goal but the only one was scored by Heinze pretty early in the match. As always, Tevez remains most hard working and impressive on the forward half of the field. Veron lacked the luster in midfield and after 4 years also, defense still is the weakest link. No more comments on performance as its just the first match, but what pleased me is their good old style and strategy and no drastic experiments. Pleasure to watch ingenuity instead of ultra-trained players perfected to handle all moves by opposition.

Go Argentina Go!!!

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Friday, June 30, 2006

It's OVER !!! :(

Argentina lost to Germany in Penalty shoot-out.

At the end of the first quarter final match between Argentina and host Germany, score was 1-1(2-4). This was FIFA Worldcup, Germany-2006 final for me. Once again physical fitness overpowered skills.

Now we have to wait for another 4 years to see Argentina coming back in the flagship of Messy.

There were so many factors contributed to their defeat, to list a few:
a) The main goalkeeper getting injured to force newbie (just 4 international appearances) Franco to come and face that superb header from Klose and then penalty kicks as decider.
b) The forced substitution eliminated the chances of seeing Lionel Messy coming in to play and show his magic.
c) They had to go into penalty shotout without Riquelme and Crespo.
... and many more...

Whatever, but I am still in awe.
Long live ARGENTINA !!!

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Srishti

Srishti? Doesn't it mean a new life ...a new world?
Yes... they are really creating a new life not for just one but all the underprivileged children around here. The mission is to bring or instead taking the quality education to all those schools who are not so classy.

Who they are?... Visit Srishti to find out.

Monday, June 06, 2005

World Environment Day

Yesterday was a big day and our office is running an awareness campaign today to commemorate this day. A NGO "Greenpeace" is helping us in this noble cause, by the means of banners, posters and face-to-face interaction. When I was stopped after lunch by one of their volunteers, my first doubt was... will this talk... just talk can have any lasting effect? I was almost sure, not on me atleast... I am a tough a**. But within 2 hours of that submissive introduction from that volunteer, here I am writing this blog after reading thru almost 5 articles from "publications" section of their website "http://www.greenpeace.org".

I am impressed by one of the project report "http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/india/press/reports/solar-lantern-income-generatio.pdf" . Can't we do somthing like that? Your comments are welcome...

Well, I was just thinking that, whenever the topics of these kind of initiatives... (lets take an example of solar energy)... comes, we generally and unknowingly associate their applicability or effectiveness to the rural or under-developed areas. There is a small point to be mentioned, while doing this we somehow make a proposal less economically viable. Lets accept this fact that without any reservations that any means of renewable energy will be costlier in installation and the break-even point of your investment will be a bit longer. I am not denying the very high ROI (return of investment) interms of saving the environment here for some time. So, when we say in a village the residents or the government or a NGO should setup solar enery panels, it means a big investment, little training and some amount of maintenance.... please take motivation and literary status of a typical village into consideration, which makes these implementations a big deal and even more costly. There is one more angle to this picture, do we know how much electricity consuming devices are being used in a common household in a village? I do not think many, compared to a typical urban household. Remember, nearly 80% of power consumption of a village would go in running tube-wells (for irrigation) and thrashers (A farm machine for separating seeds or grain from the husks and straw) and the machines used to accomplish these two tasks need hell lot of power, which cannot be generated using solar energy (I am talking about a typical installation). Ok, we will talk about improving these practices (specially water management) some other time....

Ok, so I was about to propose that instead of targetting rural population for these initiatives, why shouldn't we concentrate more on urban well-offs? Big offices, huge houses and want-to-do-something-different kind of ppl. They have money to spend, they are well aware of its positive impact on environment and they can set it as a new trend in their social circuits. Believe me, power consumption of my office alone would be many times of that of my whole village. And the good thing is there big range of devices right from low-power consuming to high-power consuming, and there are ppl to maintain it.

Yeah, its pretty vague and initial thought of mine, but looks to have some potential, what you say? How can we direct our energy in this direction?

I hope to continue this thread with some more posts...

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Bijli yahan bhi jaati hai.

Believe it or not, but it happened twice in past 12 hours. Power outage in Phoenix.
 
Suddenly, all your electronics gudgets will be ringing alarms or blinking on being reset. Life becomes hell and you helpless. You can't wake up coz your GE radio-cum-watch is hung, even microwave's watch is blacked out, yeah but without AC the heat outside due to rising Sun will not allow you to sleep any longer. Even if you woke up, neither you have cold water in shower nor your fridge and electric stoves are working... that time you appreciate the low-power consumption keyword of "Centrino" from Intel and neighbouring hotel's free wireless connection.
Its an irony that, you are connected to the world thru most latest technology inspite being in miserable condition caused by the habit of living in technological world !!!

Sunday, July 18, 2004

How long to wait...

After a long time, atlast my hands clicked "create a new post", and to add to earlier listed reasons of weblogging, this time the motivation is very different. Sat to write my thoughts, or say to capture my ideas to get myself reminded of it in future. Unlike many people, I do not write a diary, instead my thoughts flow thru e-mails, sms, talk, or penning on the last a few pages of nearest found notebook, but the problem with that is its hard to retrieve and that doesn't serve as reminder. Yeah, I have tried outlook "task" mechanism too but that works only in office.... ok, whatever after this background and justification of my log I shall come to the point.
 
As told by the title of this blog, sometimes I struggle with myself to get the answers to this question, that how long can we or should we wait to start doing something meaningful for this society? When I say society, its scope varies widely which starts right from the people around me and upto the thought of this whole world as society. Very recently for past couple of months I have extended my current scope to global society. :-) Well, but this idea is not that wide scoped, instead it has a boundary of a village or a town in India, specially not around Bangalore.
 
Yeah, so I was thinking of establishing some kind of school level science lab for my village. More specifically, my idea is not to make a school style lab instead to bring up a workshop which has basic scientific principles demonstrated in practical and meaningful ways. It will also have basic machine tools and ofcourse a x86 computer dabba. The ultimate purpose of something like this is to bring-in the awareness of science and nurturing engineering thinking in people right from the beginning and in the way which will be useful to them. Yes, it would be open to all and will have all the motivational fundas those are needed to pull the people inside the structure. There won't be any fee, or may the minimal fee which is generally needed to inculcate discipline. I have no great expectations from this, other than just making people aware of the things what they generally don't see, or get scared to when see in a city. Its like just giving information and once they have information eventually (though with very slow pace) they will start developing interest in it. But, I am not looking forward for some great breakthru or something like this, I just want to create some fumes and lets see how everybody reacts. By now we all have realized the fact that access to infomation is the key to growth and interest, otherwise how each of you started this blog thing, or why anthropologists try to lobby against MTV and other channels like that? When information is available, it takes up some cells in your brain and as the brain does a brute-force search at times, these cells happen to get refreshed and influence the results of queries, and then slowly becomes significant enough to influence your interests and decisions. Pardon me for my own crude explanation of "how brain works", atleast do not tell it to Manik. ;-)
Ok, so now its time to think about the logistics. Well, the first thing I do whenever this kind of idea hits me is to pick the phone and talk to my father and trouble him to go to our village and then talk to people there and then come out with a appealing proposal with cost and feasibility, BUT... this time its not possible, coz I am in different time zone and he should be asleep by now. So, I have sent a mail to me to serve as reminder for taking this thing forward after coming back to Bangalore (ah, one more week).
 
Its strange that I get so much of impulse of doing something like this and most probably once I am back to Bangalore, I would be far too busy in other "more important" tasks and all these stays in blog or task lists. There I have to convince my girlfriend to marry me, have to stay in office for long hours (though without much productivity), worry about food and accomodation (as if I do not have those already) and do all the other things those "sound" more important to me. Then I'll think that, let me get settled in life properly then I'll do all this... and the life goes on without reaching to a "settled" frame of mind forever and the wait never ends....
 
Will there be any moment in our life which will bring up the priority of this thought above other ever-lasting worries of life? How great we need to be to start doing something for the people who live hundred times below our so called greatness?
 
I salute people like, Dr. Devi Shetty, Dr. V J Kurian and Anna Hazare.
 

Friday, May 21, 2004

A new beginning...

Today I had enough time to spend some on creating this new weblog. Inspired by Gary and Piyush Sarode, I decided to open my mind in public. Coincedentally, last night i was watching a movie or some series "Ed TV", in it that guy Ed has signed a contract with some TV channel to allow them to live telecast his day-to-day life...and how this whole stuff turns into a nightmare for him and his family.

I was just thinking, isn't this weblog a kind of very initial stage of the same mentality? I am seeing how making personal things public is in trend nowadays, specially in the advanced countries. I will not criticize it, but would try to understand the psychological process behind that.... oh oh yes, you got it right. I have an inclination towards psychology and always try to find a rational behind each and everything happening around me, related to human behavior in particular. You won't believe that I with one of my friend Maneesh spent days in identifying and quantifying the factors affecting human behavior, and as you can imagine very soon we realized that its beyond our scope, and with that realization the modern civilization had to continue without a biggest breakthru in this field. Don't get disappointed its there in my todo list after my retirement. ;-)

Now, lets bring our focus back to the rational(s) behind the weblogging. I am trying to list a few very obvious ones first, with the course of time we'll get many more.
1. To see my name in the website.
2. Get an hit while searching in google. (though it doesn't happen currently)
3. Time pass
4. Displaying love to latest trend
5. Showing off my writing skills
6. Showing off the breadth of knowledge
7. Sharing my thoughts with known friends
8. Nobody listens to me, thatswhy I have to write it somewhere
9. Oh man its boiling inside me, better I flush it otherwise it may burst.
10. This world deserves my opinion to stay in place....

blah blah blah...