mere funde

Gaping Void always brings a smile to my face. Here is yet another example. Reminds me of Infosys Orientation. They said, “When in doubt, don’t.” I think I like this one better.

India bowed out of the Champions Trophy, humiliated by the Ponting & Co. Sachin did not kick Aussie ass, and without him firing I do not think India can beat the men from down under. I think that (the overhyped) Team India is yet to bury the ghosts of World Cup 2003 finals.

Over the weekend, I bought one book and got another. First is PHP Cookbook, for learning PHP. Second is Beyond a Boundary, one of the finest pieces of sports literature, written by CLR James. Review will be posted once I am done reading.

I love Geoff Boycott for three things. HIs love for Dada , his accent and his kick ass comments. Ruddy balls and a nothing shot. Here is a piece from Siddharth Vaidyanthan (Cricinfo), in almost similar tone, taking pot shots at the injury Yuvraj has picked up before the all important India-Australia match. Check it out here.

Cricinfo – ‘There will be no excuses’ – Ponting

Best part:

Typing in kho-kho gives you 3,040,000 search results on Google. “Ancient Indian sport”, “running and chasing”, “chariot race in the Mahabharata”. Crucially, “it does demand physical fitness, strength, speed, stamina, and a certain amount of ability”. Yuvraj can’t be faulted for the first four attributes, after injuring himself this morning, but maybe he was a bit short on ability.

Ponting admitted Australia were “desperate” to win the Champions Trophy. Can India go on to stop them? Sri Lanka and Pakistan couldn’t stop their respective opponents and if India end up losing tomorrow, it will be the first time in 31 years – since the 1975 World Cup – that a subcontinent team has failed to make the semi-finals of a major tournament. Maybe they need to start mastering kho-kho.

But I do wish that Sachin kicks some serious Aussie ass.

Mike Arrington thinks that Yahoo! Bookmarks has reinvented itself with its latest launch.

I however, beg to differ. I mean Yahoo! clearly has issues to sort out for itself. del.icio.us is clearly a better and easier to use service that Yahoo! Bookmarks and it would make things easier for itself by just integrating both. Clearly people do not like Yahoo! Bookmarks (despite its 10 million strong user base) as much as del.icio.us. I personally signed on to Yahoo! Bookmarks and used to create some 80 odd bookmarks but gave up due to the cumbersome process of bookmarking (that is taken care by the new toolbar) but have added 400 pages to del.icio.us in under 5 months, not a great number but shows how much easier it is to use del.icio.us.

What I like about the new service is the folders option and the snapshot view of the page cached. I wish Yahoo extends the folder feature to del.icio.us and maybe the snapshot view also while retaining the ease of use of del.icio.us. Tomi Poutanen (of Yahoo! Social Bookmarking) says that the major difference between del.icio.us and Yahoo! Bookmarks is that one is for social bookmarking and the latter for personal use. Excuse me!! Why not allow such an option in any one of the service itself. I mean del.icio.us already has an option to not share any bookmarked page. Keep it simple guys.

However, I must say that Yahoo! team is doing a great PR job by answering queries on a blog (not run by them) . Hats off to you guys!! You rock!!

It also highlights how companies take blogs as a serious platform for PR management. I hope a few people (who I know won’t understand) understand the value of blogs.

I would always prefer a bike to a car. I mean I would always prefer an Enfield to any other Indian car or a Harley V-Rod to any other car. Given below is the reason.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene not just watching it, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

For those who know me, this is from some book you can easily guess. Others, go Google it!! The book was given to me by Nawani. Thanks. It is just great.

Unfortunately, a few people (who matter), think so!! I wish they realised the value of blogging.

I mean people like Jonathan Schwartz (President, SUN), Jeremy Zawodny (mySQL Guru, Yahoo), Robert Scoble (ex-Microsoft, PodTech.net), Matt Cutts (SEO geek, Google), Om Malik (GigaOM), and Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) are most famous because of their blogs. Ok, not Schwartz. But you get the point!! Google, Yahoo and Microsoft use blogs as a PR tool and even use it to communicate with developers and uers of its services. A lot of Indian (I know about Infosys for sure) companies use employee blogs to enhance communication between its employees.

I hope some people update their views on blogging. And soon. Meanwhile, I leave you with another Gaping Void cartoon.

Update: An estimated 8% of Fortune 500 companies have official blogs!! You can check out the list here.

This is from Gaping Void – a blog that feature “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”. Though it features excellent cartoons from time to time, this is one I particularly liked for some reason.

This is to all whose trust I have ever lost. I am sorry.

I have believed that over the years the quality of the Oasis website – a starting point for other colleges – has gone from bad to worse.

Though no expert at website design, I do have a few points to make about this year’s website. One important aspect of a good website is that it should be easy on the eyes of the viewer. Sadly, the website this year, falls very short on this standard. The colours used are garish and unpleasant. Black with pink. Yucks!! Seems like a webpage of those days when people experimented with geocities. Flashy and very odd. Light backgrounds and gentle colours are expected nowadays.

Second. I do not yet get the BITSian fascination for flash and shockwave objects. Any page designed at BITS has to have a dash of embedded flash objects. Could someone please tell me why??

Third and probably most importantly. Please do not copy and paste text from somewhere. “If you are going to BITS on an assignment, BITS will send you a complimentary car” (from the section on getting here.) I am sorry but I could not believe that this was written by an on-campus BITSian for Oasis website. As Google later revealed, the entire section has been lifted from the BITSAA website, without any attribution whatsoever. When did things become so bad? Could they not find a decent writer within the batches on campus? Come on you guys, before claiming the material as your own with that misused copyright symbol, did you check that BITSAA already has a copyright on it?

A simple website, probably based on some blogging platform like Wordpress, would have been recommended by me. Very professional and neat. But then, I am not at BITS and can only do so much.

I have a wish to make here though. I wish that someone from EPC/HPC/Junta takes it on himself/herself or collaborates to get a blog going and provide real time posts from the scene as an when it happens.

It was the last F1 race in Suzuka for some time to come. It was definitely the last race of Schumacher here. And everyone was out to see the Red Emperor score a big victory.

It was a race he was supposed to win with ease. And, till the 36th lap today, nothing happened to the contrary. Schumacher qualified second on the grid, just behind teammate Massa and 3 places ahead of fifth placed Alonso. He passed Massa on the third lap and after that remained comfortably at the top of the group.

Alonso, however, drove with a lot of passion and quickly overtook Jenson Button and Ralf Schumacher to come up to the third place and drove like there was no tomorrow. At no point of time did he let the two Ferraris out of his sight. He overtook Massa after the first round of pit stops and drove great laps in and out of the pits to exit just ahead of Massa. The difference in their stops being a mere 0.3 seconds.

Michael was the last of the top 3 to pit and that erased all doubts of a lightly fueled Ferrari for qualifying and the rumors about the tyres not being suited well enough for the circuit. He drove in his usual calm and composed manner, and looked all set to win. Disaster struck, however, on the second Degner Curve on the 37th lap and fumes came out of the red machine. The circuit looked on in stunned disbelief as the Ferrari of Schumacher retired for the first time since Spain 2005 without a crash. Schumacher, however, got out his car calmly, waved at the crowds and shook hands with all he passed, to show that he was the true Champion.

Alonso then drove a very calm race to take his Renault home, for a first victory since June. Massa came in second and Fisichella third. Button and Raikkonen completed the top 5.

Only a miracle can now see Schumacher win the championship. What is needed is a victory in Sao Paulo and Alonso finishing out of points. Will that happen? Well, with the fortunes changing as it has this season, I would definitely not bet against it but I agree that it is only a slim chance.

On another note, I have always been a critic of Alonso, not because of his driving skills, but because he does not have enough grace. That came to light again last week when a frustrated Alonso blamed his own crew and mate Fisichella of letting him down in the last race at Shanghai and even said that there were people in the Renault pits that did not want him to win. I hope Alonso has watched how Schumacher behaved after his blown engine in this race and has picked up a tip or two.

Another trip.. another get together.. another blog!! From where the title has been flicked will be clearer in a bit.. the most relevant thing about it is that unlike other times when I’ve been to Hyd, there were no set plans made this time. We did things as and when we felt like it.. just about anything yaar!!

Anyways, to get to it.. I reached Hyd early morn and buzzed Sudeep and Thax.. who took their own sweet time getting to that “Paradise” place (Like lakdi ka pul usually, this time around, this drop-off point became the “we pass it every one hour place”… we kept going around it all the time!!) the bus had dropped me off. They came, I sat in the car after the hugs and we were off.

The first stop was Prasad’s where we wanted to get tickets for Woh Lamhe.. Goyal had said he wanted to watch it.. 2 reasons.. coz the review was good and coz he likes Kangana.. I suspect the ordering of those reasons was reversed though .. there weren’t any night shows, so we picked up tickets for 3:30 pm. We headed off to the airport after that for Goyal’s scheduled arrival but his plane decided to go around in circles for a bit. We didn’t wanna spend 120 bucks on the high-priced-as-usual airport parking and so we ended up in a bylane. The time here was spent mostly watching the tight security at a nearby ICICI bank building stopping anyone and everyone from entering. We also went for a small walk during which Sudeep commented, “gaon jaisi smell aa rahi hai”.. Thax interjected, “yeh gobar ki smell hai”.. we sheepishly smiled, us 3 nalaayak-city-waalas and turned about ..

We had a discussion on whether we should leave this dude and push off.. all our points were in favour except for one vetoing factor.. he was getting sweets!! Thax tried calling Goyal (for the 17th time) and actually got through now. Goyal’s plane had just landed and we drove into the airport to pick him up. On reaching the terminal, we found that we were much faster than the slow, ambling, lazy-assed Goyal (I’ll be killed for this adjective-filled description!!).. we obviously still didn’t wanna park (things don’t change in 15 min!), we went about for a round again.. 5 min later, we returned and he still hadn’t gotten out of the terminal (see the description above).. but this we decided to stop in one of the outlanes (not the parking lot, mind you!).. after a search for Accenture/HSBC billboards and a stare from a passing police van, Goyal finally reached.

For obvious reasons, we were more interested in the dodha and the laddoos.. Goyal made some phone calls to meet some junta and Sudeep ended up fixing his plans for him. Can you please also add confused to the list of Goyal adjectives.. coz he really was at this point. Which is probably why we later found out that this particular phone call person (if you ever get to this blog, you’ll know who you are!!) was more interested in meeting the “shayad maine life mein thodi jaldi kar di” Sudeep . If I may add here, we’ve also found out that Sudeep is major eye-candy for all the babes in his CAT class in Hyd (oh wait, that’s an oxymoron.. there are no babes in Hyd.. the only good looking women are up on the billboards!!).. This was the first time any of us had flown IndiGo, so we wanted Goyal’s feedback on how the airline was.. “The air hostesses are quite pretty” (He’s a smart (ok ok, you can add that to the adjective list too) chap, comes to the point quickly ).. in particular, he liked one named Madonna.. he didn’t quite explain what he liked though.. the name.. or the name-tag!

Let me take a diversion here.. coz there are a few things to point out.. first of all, Ankit, you’ll be very sad to know that the revered Stanza billboard no longer exists.. in Sudeep’s words.. “dekhte sab the khareedta koi nahi tha”.. the second thing is that I haven’t even made it past a couple of hours of the trip yet.. this is gonna be one long blog.. and finally, one of the pleasures of writing a blog is that you get to trip everyone else without a chheeta on your own kurta ((Mu-wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha (The evil laugh!)) Remind me to turn off commenting on this blog once done!!)

Also.. the roads in Hyd are really screwed up right now.. Though Thax says, “har saal aisa hota hai monsoon mein and har saal ban jaati hai”.. the Civil engineer in me rightreously asks, “Why don’t they fix it such that monsoon has no effect?!!”.. The Comps engineer smirks and asks, “Reeaaalllyyy??!!! Why don’t you help them with it??” That shuts the Civil engineer up and the Comps engineer goes back to wondering what he should do about the kickass salary some people seem to be getting in Hyd!!

Anyways, let’s get back.. we now drove over to (Sudeep and Thax)’s place (with a stopover at a place where the rest of us had juice without ice and Sudeep had ice without juice!).. Hi-hello with Varun happened.. and after about an hour of laccha, Goyal headed out to meet junta while we decided we’ll write CDs.. (every trip has it’s own music and it’s own songs!!) 2 audio CDs were compiled.. one Hindi and one English.. and then the time came for naming ceremony.. My “kya title daaloon” query was duly answered by Sudeep’s “anything yaar”.. and so we have it.. 2 CDs compiled on 30 September 2006.. called “Anything Yaar”.. as apt a title as there ever has been!!

We had plans to go out for lunch.. but we were too lazy to get up and bathe until it was too late.. so we ordered in Pizzas.. Thax was pretty sure we won’t be able to finish ‘em but we did. And then a quick plan was made to buy speakers for Sudeep’s comp (it also needs more songs dude!!).. we headed for this place called Computer Market, which is on Park Lane, behind MG Road (Quite a search happened for it.. as can perhaps be guessed by the detail with which I remember the location!!).. anyways, it was totally worth it.. coz Sudeep got himself this really SEXY Altec Lansing sound system.. totally cool.. and absolutely brilliant for blasting music

Quite the driving happened after that.. and we reached for movie just in time. Goyal wasn’t there yet (he came in about 20 min into the movie) and so we entered the hall without him. The movie is decent though all of us agreed the end spelled out too much. And we’d really have liked it to be more subtle.. By the end of it, we had quite a few names for lead actress.. Kangana Oh-The-Eyes, Kangana I-Don’t-Like-Pants, Kangana Weird-Accent and KPS Thakur (yeah right!!!!) are a few examples )

The next one hour was spent blasting Kya Mujhe Pyaar Hai at full volume in the car.. all of us agree that Hindi movie music is moving up in this world.. and we ended up at Eat Street. We wanted to take a fast boat ride (the weather at this point was awesome.. very windy and chindi-chindi bearish once in a while) but things got screwed as they were only allowing 3 people per boat. So we went to this rooftop seating area and put lachha. The period here was marked in particular by flying menu sheets!! Thax warned us that the food is very crappy.. so we just ordered a paav-bhaji and a masala dosa to be shared between all of us.. and it ended up being awesome!! Which was very symbolic of Thax’s opinions the whole of this trip. Whenever he told us that the parking lot was on the left, it ended up being on the right. Even the law of averages fails when it comes to Thax!!

We had an are-we-or-are-we-not-hungry discussion after that and ended up at Ohri’s for chaat. The dahi-vadas and aaloo-tikkis we ordered were absolutely awesome and we had our stomach full. We also met Mehul in the meanwhile and convince Fundoo to come over with us to our place for the night. He carried his laptop along and we spent sometime watching his IIM pics and videos. As we were scrolling through the videos, the “Sutta” tune was heard. We were all obviously very curious to see if some dude actually sang it on stage. So we rewinded to figure it out.. Well, he did.. but all the X-rated stuff had been replaced with “na-na-na-na-na”..

Least Count followed (with beer in hand for Goyal and me).. though we didn’t play much thanks to Sudeep’s “I was just taking risks”.. a show of Hyderabadi Nawabs movie followed and I fell asleep some 10 min into it. The big contribution as far as the movie is concerned, is the word “mastan” which has entered all of our vocabs.. the last 2 letters phonetically resemble “wahan” and not “mahan”.. Hindi becomes a phunny language when written in English

The next morning, I was woken up by a phone call from Ankit.. the most interesting part of the call occurred when he asked Thax whether he wanted anything from the US. The quick reply back was “Victoria’s Secret” =)).. I’ve no idea what he’d do with that but the rest of us just settled for catalogs!! We went off to Dundigal after that.. it was an eventful drive, with one truck almost killing us and us almost killing a truck driver .. but it was soon forgotten as Aunty served us a brilliant lunch.. we had lots of cake.. Schumi won an action packed race.. it was a very satisfying afternoon. Uncle took us on a round of the Airforce academy, we clicked pics of MIG 25s and SAMs and other whatnot.. very very cool!!!

As we headed out of Dundigal, we had no idea what to do next.. following the anything yaar philosophy, we decided to go for a show of Fast & Furious – III.. there was some time to kill before that, so we thought we’d pay a visit for the Birla temple. After major honking in the parking lot, we began our Birla centric expedition in the Science museum first. It was quite bad, especially when compared to the gem we have at Pilani .. the journey from the parking lot here to the museum was highlighted by the major honking as well (some shouting too this time!!).. and finally we ended up at the temple. Beautifully made, the temple was very neat.. and quick tour that we took was totally worth it!! To the movie now, and it was very crappy.. the drifting was cool initially but when we realized that the movie had nothing other than the drifting, it seemed stupid!!

Dinner happened post the movie at “Our Place”.. a joint treat Sudeep and Thax that Sudeep conned Thax into .. the ambience of excellent. We somehow ended up at a crappy corner table.. Goyal and I were still ok with it, but Sudeep and Thax weren’t.. I also have to mention here that Goyal definitely doesn’t deserve the wingman position.. my cry of 12 o’ clock was met by a “Huh? Whoa? What?!!”.. we did end up changing our table however.. the food was very good, especially the daal.. though the service was crazy and the waiters a little eccentric!! Though Sudeep said that they were better than most places, so I’m just wondering if Hyd has lower standards or something..

We hit a pub near our house post dinner.. dhik-chak music but the DJ was mixing well.. and there was a Sachin masterpiece on ESPN.. we just got in a pitcher of beer that Goyal and I piled on.. we spent about an hour and a half there.. and then headed home.. we never reached there as Oracle beckoned.. we went straight to the games room.. I was all for a BITS (Beer In The System) vs Non-BITS doubles match but Thax wasn’t in the mood for TT. So the other 3 of us alternated in singles matches.. I won both my matches (beat Sudeep more by fluke though) and both of us took sometime figuring out Goyal’s funky serve.. but in the end, Goyal was down a 0 – 2 score.. not that it mattered, Thax beat all of us at pool (I can hear lots of “yeah right”s!!!).. we headed out, took a drive around the tech city and reached home.. in the next 15 min, Thax and Sudeep had crashed.. Goyal and I dug into the couple of beer bottles we had left over from yesterday.. TV, lachha and beer.. at about 3, we both too slept off.

The next morning was a very lazy one.. characteristically us!! Sudeep’s b’day treat had to happen at lunch and venue had been pre-decided. Though we got lost on our way there, the usual parking-was-to-the-left-when-Thax-had-said-right happened.. but we finally did reach the place. The start was bad as they served the crappiest hot and sour soup I’ve ever had.. but the veg kabab was really good.. and everything after that was pretty nice too. They added some sort of rose flavour to the lassi but that too wasn’t like the now-famous Mirinda experience!!

We decided to spend the next few hours bowling. The first game was very keely contested.. the pendulum spun everywhich way.. and it came down to the final shot. Needing 8 of the last frame to overtake Sudeep, I scored a spare and won it .. as addictive as bowling is, we decided we wanted to play again. This time I was on fire (if I may say so myself ).. two strikes in the 2nd and 3rd frames gave me a comfortable lead.. Sudeep was particularly unlucky in this one, he bowled 3 gutter balls after all 3 of his spares.. I ended up with my all-time high score of 134.. this was a good sports weekend for me

(Thank you Wikipedia for all the bowling terminology!!)

We got Sudeep’s cake from Deli 9.. it was abso-f-ing-lutely rocking!! These guys have a cook who had made dinner.. had that while watching Mummy – 2 and India Blue vs India Red.. cake cutting happened.. some face-putai and the usual.. and it was time for me to leave.. these guys dropped me off and the journey to the bus pickup point was the only time that the “shotgun” call was vetoed by the driver (i.e. Sudeep). Goyal had called it and Sudeep said he didn’t want him up there. This followed a particularly interesting argument between them on a previous occasion where Goyal started doing too much sideseat driving and Sudeep got irritated.. Following Goyal’s gyaan speech, I wanted to quote Shakespeare and his “It is a good divine who follows his own instruction. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the twenty to follow mine oen teaching” but decided to refrain. Sitting in the backseat, Thax and I exchanged grins and then Thax cheekily passed on the water bottle to them both

Anyways, the time to leave had arrived.. the Raj Travels bus was punctual.. and I was off.. stuff must have happened after, Sudeep/Goyal/Thax.. maybe one of you can add a comment to this post..

Till next time.. seeya!!