Punch the keys

Yesterday I got the below message from Tata Photon about my internet connection.. Dear Photoner! Balance on your Tata Photon+ No: < my number here > as on 24/11/2010 -Avbl. Bal: Infinity MB, valid till 15/12/10.Now also recharge online at www.ichoos# Obviously they made an error. But just imagine if I would have a balance of infinity MB. Wouldn't that be simply wonderful ;)

I had been looking to take screenshots on my android for some time now. But couldn't find a way out without rooting the phone. So it was great to find another way, although a round about one. It suited me because I already had the java and android sdk in place on my work laptop. Yes, its a work around. And you can read about it here . Have also read that the next version of android, i.e 2.2 froyo, is supposed to have built in support with key combination press. Don't know how much of it is true.

Today I happened to notice a "Call Phone" option in the browser version of google chat. I was under the impression that the call option was available only in US and not in India. Even now am not sure if Google has rolled out this feature in India or if some bug caused it to appear on my screen. I am on a slow bandwidth and had to do a lot of browser refresh to get the gmail to load. Need to check this out once I am back on a proper internet connection.   Update: Ah! Just as I thought, it was a glitch. As soon as I went into the option for add credit, it told me..

I have been trying to get my content from www.mdominic.com , which is hosted on blogger, over to the posterous site. But after an initial euphoria, I realized that all my posts were truncated. Only the first few sentences have been imported.  Have sent a mail to the posterous support team. Lets see if i get any help to this problem. 

Yesterday, the weather decided to change it plans. From a bright and sunny morning, it quickly turned cloudy and was pouring heavily by 4 pm. Looking out of the window, it was very easy to visualize my plans of leaving office early getting soaked and flowing down the drain! Of all the days why did I have to come to office on my scooter! Not being one to give up so easily, I made up my mind to get the taxi from just outside my office and go home anyway. I could always pick up the scooter the day after. So on the dot at 5:00, I rushed out to the line of taxi's hoping that there would be one, it being such a rainy day. Thankfully there was one still in the taxi stand. Taxi driver is busy cleaning the moisture forming on the insides of the glass... He does not see me as I approach. He turns his attention to the other window. I hesitate thinking he may be on hire, waiting for someone.. But since I am getting wet, I persist. I knock on the glass. He does not turn. So I go to the ...

One of the most sort after items while looking at a new OS or a new computing device is the boot up speed. The faster you are able to get the machine up and running, the better. The new OS, Chrome OS, being developed by Google is especially keen on being the fastest to start up. I mean thats one of the most talked about items on their videos or posts.  The mantra being, get as quickly online as possible !  The demo they showed already had the machine up in 7 seconds and ready to login. Where as a "normal" system may take from 20 seconds upwards to boot up. I say normal, because the more you use a system, chances are, the slower the machine boots. The fastest boot times are probably the times where your system has just been formated clean and a fresh installation of the OS done. There may be tweaking options to keep the system from slowing down, but then again I am talking about the general case here. A couple of weeks back, I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my home desktop and wa...

One of my favorite on screen characters is that of Captain Jack Sparrow essayed by Johnny Depp. He is such a natural at it that you don't see the actor at all in the movie. Anyways, today he was in the news for having dropped by at a school near the place where he was shooting. The story has it that he went to the school because he had received a letter from a girl asking his(Captain Jack's) help in a mutiny! And voila, he appears at school in full costume. Thats one wish granted :) More about it at -  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11498980  

It seems like everyone is waiting for the verdict by the Allahabad High Court on Ayodhya. The topic is trending on twitter worldwide, politicians, media, tweeps, etc are calling out for peace and harmony. The troubling part to me is that behind all these plea's, from the common man, is the fear that something horrible would be unleashed on the nation. And more depressing to me seems the reality that, no matter what the verdict, the problem is still not going to go away. It is going to come back one way or another. Don't really know why, but have been feeling down looking at the tweets since yesterday.

The Common Wealth Games 2010 has been in the news for quite some time. I went to the main site and found a ticker marking the beginning of the games. 11 days to go it says. Hope for the countries sake that things go well. By the looks of things, it seems as if the CWG 2010 will continue to be in news after it is over too. I personally do not expect anything to great to happen. But is it too much to hope that the games go off without causing an embarrassment to the citizens? Pink:   This colour has also been introduced to the palette adding an element of surprise and luxury to the Games look programme. It plays to the crowd and truly reflects India in all its resplendent glory.  Thats the statement for the description on colors in the logo.

I used to remember a time when anybody and everybody hailing from southern India was called a Madarasee. This was rampant during my parents generation. But even in my own, I had to inform at least one aquaintance that it was an incorrect usage. In recent times, there are more references to the Malayali and I find that in general, more people have become aware that there are actually different states down south and not just one city. Is it because there is no more a place called Madras that has brought about this transition? I don't think such triviality would bring about the change in generalized nomenclature. I am more inclined to believe that one factor is that the the Malayali has made a mark and the other being that, more and more people are refusing to continue to be arrogantly ignorant. I hope anybody reading this blog and feeling that I woke up to this fact pretty late, would forgive me. In my defense I would like to mention that I do not usually think along lines of...

Just saw in yahoo.com that they released a new service called yahoo Pulse to, yes you guessed it, share whats important with your friends! From the quick look that I had, I could see sections for contacts, profile, photos, blog, apps and of course the status area to share news with the friends who have "connections" with you. Another attempt by Yahoo to get going. But folks need to come up with something more if they want attention. As it is, there are a lot many more services that are available and its getting really challenging "keeping in touch" with all my friends on different services. The service which was released in Jun, is the  Yahoo profiles that got re-born as pulse . You can find the Yahoo! service at http://pulse.yahoo.com/

I got myself a domain name afterall! Here is my new address ! A few days back I read about an article on domain names and remembered that it was one of my old "wants" to get my own piece of the world wide web. So I went ahead and registered it. In the earlier days it was techies who could put up web-sites and domain hostings. Now thanks to google and other sites, it is childs play to register the domain name and point it to your blog or other site. You don't even need hosting space. As in my case, I just pointed my domain name to my Blog! Don't remember what other "wants" or even how many I had. But lets just say, one down!

In recent times the browser usage has increased considerably. For me, most of my time is on the browser. Some small things are really irritating. Like the placement of the below actions. On every browser, the back button is on the left and next on the right. It is very irritating to find the reverse behavior on the blogger page. My mouse pointer automatically moves to the left when I think "past" and only then realize that on blogger it is the reverse. I guess my behavior has been tuned because of the repeated use. But it would definitely be great if the similar behavior is maintained.

Today I came across this article about,  Apple’s Magic Trackpad Signals The End Of The Mouse Era . The author has rightly pointed out the switch in direction in interaction patterns with the computer. The author has also followed it up with another article, The Mouse Is Dead. I Just Killed It. Now Can We Move On? , because of the huge response in comments in the first article. Some of the comments are downright hilarious. Didn't know people were so passionate about the mouse! I think the end of the mouse has started some time back with other alternatives in interaction pattern being explored. A project that I have been very impressed with is Sixth Sense . And Pranav, who is the lead of the sixth sense project, has come up with mouseless . Looking forward to the success of these projects.

The "first-ever web browser for India, the world's only antivirus browser" read the banner on the site  http://www.epicbrowser.com/ . Since it was based on mozilla, I quickly tried it on to see what the browser was about. The first impression was good. The layout, although a dark setting, was impressive. The shortcuts to various settings at the left side, the short-cuts to sites on the new tab page and also the resize anchors at the four corners were different from the other browsers. Overall the content of the browser, as the claim goes, is centered around India. Right from the logo, which is tri-colored to the font support for various Indian languages, there are a lot of skins also pre-loaded to chose to customize the look. The first claim of a "browser for India" is definitely right on. Will be trying out the browser more in the coming days to see how it goes. Update: Here is a news link to the release on The Hindu

Today the cabinet of India made up its mind on the symbol that would represent the Rupee. Detailed information on this can be found at the site link  India picks symbol to rival the €£¥$ . So many associated stuff would be needed to be done with regard to this.. Wow! the enormity of it is super. Right from getting this print on the notes and coins, to getting a new key on the keyboard. Operating systems and other softwares would need to support the new character and hardwares where the printer is dependent on this too would need to be adjusted. It is sure to take time to be absorbed into mainstream usage. Maybe I can start of by practicing to write (or is it draw?) the symbol properly. A new character is introduced! Picture courtesy: from http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2010/07/15/62286/

Whats the plan on the way back? That was the thought on my mind during our 5 hour transit halt in Suvarnabhumi International Airport at Bangkok. And that too it was a 10 hour wait. So I decided that I would go out of the airport and see as much as possible during the return journey. The Thai flight reached Bangkok at 11:00 am in the morning and I looked up the place to get a transit visa. The visa is free for Indian Passport holders(free till 31 Mar 2011 as of now). The Visa is valid for 15 days, single entry and is non-extendable. Unfortunately, I had only 10 hours to spare to go sightseeing. I filled up the form at the counter, stuck the passport size photo(you can also get your photo taken at the counter) and took my place at the end of a long line. After about 10 mins and the line not moving an inch, I saw that there was an empty express counter adjecent to the normal one. Apparently there is a 200 Baht fee to get it processed there. Having limited time, I quickly got out of th...

Others may have celebrated Fathers day on 20th of June this year according to the Gregorian calendar. But Father's day for me is today! The day I became a father for the first time. I can still feel the bliss I felt when I looked at my daughter for the first time and got to hold her. It has been 5 years now since the day but the thought of it still gets me smiling and all warm inside. Mashaallah. I was a little tensed up that day with some confusion going on at the hospital. (Well, that's another long story) And the doctor was moving my wife to the operation theater. My wife, as she is going, tells me that we should name her Taheyya if it is a girl. She just had that name pop in her mind and she liked it since it rhymed with my mother's nickname/ "ommana peeru". After about an hour and a little more, the nurse came out with my daughter wrapped in the white sheet. She was looking wide eyed and held a steady gaze at me. She was all pink and looked heavenly. The nu...

Giving a demo to an audience always requires some preparation. Even if it is only one member in the audience, it matters a lot because the impression the person would have depends on how you are doing. As it is, it is difficult to give a presentation or market an idea to another person. Add to that the language barrier and the mix gets interesting. Well, I had my first experience with such a mix a couple of days back when I gave a presentation of the proof of concept that we were working on. My colleague from China acting as the translator for the presentation. He had already instructed me to go slow since it would otherwise be difficult for him to keep up and translate. Having no experience in this and  no chance for a rehearsal, we dived in. The important thing for me was to keep track of what I was saying. Speaking slow and having to pause in between, I needed to keep my attention on where I was more than usual. My colleague would say the gist of what I had said and then te...

Some of my friends who had traveled east, told me how difficult it was to have food in these parts. Either it was the lack of vegetarian food or the different crawling or other creatures on the menu that were the point of contention, the gist was that food was going to be very very difficult here. So I was mentally preparing myself for a big diet which would have been good for me, I believe. But fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, it was not to be. I find the food here at Shanghai quite to my liking. To be fair to my friends, they had not come to Shanghai. They had visited the southern parts where, my Chinese colleague tells me, the menu has a lot of crawling creatures. Of course I am sticking to vegetarian and sea-food only. But still liking it. I don't think I have had so many vegetables in a single meal. Hmm, come to think of it, possibly only with the exception of an Onam Sadhya! There is a choice of spicy and non spicy food and the cooking style is ...

One of the must visits, that my friend here told me about was the world expo that has been going on at Shanghai from 01 May till the 31st of October 2010. You can see the theme of the expo "Better City, Better Life", the logo and the mascot, Haibao, all along the streets, on the public transport and billboards. According to the Wikipedia page for the expo , this is the most expensive expo in the history of world fairs. Around 90 odd countries have pavilions in the expo. During conversations about the expo, we never had any inclination of the mammoth setup of the expo. I imagined that it would be a grand fair, one we could spend about 6-7 hours and finish off. When another of my colleagues suggested that three days may not be sufficient to see it completely, I attributed it to an exaggeration. On Tuesday 15th Jun 2010, I understood that it was not so. We spent about 5 hours there at the expo and could cover only one pavilion completely and about 10 percent of the Ch...

It is just my luck I guess! I could have watched the world cup matches at a very nice timing this edition but then my luck had to play. I had to come to Shanghai for the month the World cup is to start. I just cannot watch all the matches because I need to wake up the next morning for office. Still hope to be selective in watching the matches.  But in some ways this is better than the US one I had to watch at 2:00 am or 3:00 am in the morning :) 

The first weekend in Shanghai was a working weekend. The following week had a couple of holidays for the Dragon Boat festival and so the client was working to compensate for that. At the end of the day on Sunday, my colleague took us to see The Bund . It was an amazing view of the Shanghai Skyline from the Bund. You can see the panaromic view on the wiki page. The lighted up buildings are really an amazing sight. There were a lot of people visiting the Bund. It seemed as if there were Chinese tour groups too visiting. Most of the people had cameras and flashes were going off all around. Many had superb SLR camera with tripod too. It was totally understandable. This side of the Bund has all the older architectures. The Peace Hotel, which is supposed to host the foreign dignitaries and important personalities on state visit, is also on this side of The Bund. The Bund is along the Huangpu River, on the other side of which we could see the Shanghai  Pudong ...

The Shanghai Experience till now has been a great one. I really liked the place. It is very clean and planned. Thats the short of what my time here till now have been. Now getting into the details. :) The First day We landed at the Pudong International Airport on time. The local time being around 4:15 pm. The first act being to find the baggage. That was easy. All basic stuff which have now kind of become standard at international airports. After collecting the baggage, we went through the queue for the immigration check. The police officer on duty went through the documents and had only one question. "Where is the hotel address?" Locked safe in my baggage I told him. And he was kind of fine with that. Apparently, the hotel would have to register my passport number with the local police within 48hrs of my checkin. Hmm possibly the reason why he was asking for the hotel address. The next was to get a cell phone. I had heard that it was possible to get a pre-paid card at the ...

Our itinerary was from Hyderabad to Bangkok and then from there to Shanghai. There was a six hour break of journey at Bangkok so we were thinking of a short visit of Bangkok city too while we were at it. The flight was pleasant, but the time being 11:50 at night, the only thought in my mind was to get some sleep! We had comfortable seats in the Thai airline, and were treated to a nice meal. The colors of the airline are pretty vibrant and the seating and all accessories reflected the same. I could manage a couple of hours of sleep. The flight was not too crowded and I could see a couple of folks in the middle set of seats converting 3-4 seats into a bed. Do not know if that is comfortable or not! Overall a pleasant flight. Anyways, the Bangkok airport is a huge airport. We went to see if we could process the tourist visa to go into the city. The problem being that it was 5:00 in the morning at Bangkok and we were wondering where to go. The tour operator counter had not opened up ye...

I shall be jotting down some of my experiences of my trip to Shanghai and/or other places in this eastern part of the world in these posts. I don't want to put up everything in one post since it would become very long and I would tire of writing it. My journey to Shanghai started out because a customer of the company wanted some features to be demonstrated as a proof of concept. So my colleague and I were sent in to perform the duty. The first part of the journey started when we took the Coimbatore to Hyderabad flight. The flight was en-route to Delhi and was almost full. The monsoon provided its fireworks in the form of lightening and the turbulence scared up my colleague, who is still trying to get used to air travel. He was thankfully able to find another seat away from the window! Our papers were being processed from Hyderabad and so we would be waiting here for 3-4 days for the Visa to arrive and our journey to begin. Although it fe...

There is an advertisement on TV that I saw of Spicejet. They said, Why spend time wasting in the airport, when there are other things you could be enjoying! Well this is exactly what I was not doing! I was waiting at the airport for the flight which was delayed. Incidently, I saw this add while travelling. More than anything else, I was really pissed at the way the customers of Spicejet were handled. That too for a flight that was delayed by 2 hours and more. Do keep in mind that the passengers usually arrive an hour early to the airport for the check-in/security formalities. We cleared all these and went into the waiting longue. After we were seated, an attendent came over and asked all spicejet passengers to move out of the lounge. We thought that the flight had arrived finally and moved to the counter. Only the flight had not yet come. Thats when we understood that the longue was blocked for some other airliner. So much for hospitality! So we waited for another 45 mins before w...

Its been a few days since I opened up wave. Got a mail notification about a wave from a friend and so headed there. Noticed that the icon on my google wave page was missing the "preview" sign and had the "Labs" sign instead. So I looked up the wave's blog site and found that they had released Wave to general use . Now if you have a google account, you can use Google Wave. You don't need a special invitation (which had created all that hype) as earlier. Really interesting to watch the terminologies change. Some of the change is because of the companies that are promoting these. Earlier we had terminologies like alpha, beta, pre-release etc. For gMail, after being in beta for five years, it possibly would have been a choice to name wave differently. So they had it as preview. Which I thought was kind of like pre-beta at that stage. Wait a min wasn't that supposed to be named alpha if it were before beta? Oh.. what ever! Whats in a name right? The b...

Don't know if you are a user of Tumblr which is a platform somewhat similar to that of twitter. But differnt in many ways. Anyhow, they allow users to post content to their accounts in various formats like pics, links etc. There were a few posts that I had read earlier this year which described tumblr to be a direct competitor to Twitter. And one which predicted that Tumblr was one of the things to watch out for this year(2010). I don't have these links with me immediately, so I will try to search and update later on if I find it. Anyways, what was curious, is the level of interaction I find among competitors nowadays. They are often willing to use each others services and have no problems coming to terms with that. Contrast that with the followers of these services!! As one of my colleagues put in to intervene on a Linux Vs Microsoft fan tussle. He said, "You know,possibly Bill Gates and Linus would be sitting together and discussing business over coffee while you gu...

Just came across a funny thread online . It was posted quite some time back and is basically a few newbies asking the java experts for help. Some folks just seem to be demanding that "someone" hand over their assignment, most probably school or college assignment, to them on a platter. Amusing answers by some experts. Background: We had a new batch of freshers joining our company recently and I was pulled into giving them some basic training on Java. For this I started off with a basic library management assignment.

On May 4th when Sachin Tendulkar joined twitter , I added the first celebrity onto my following list. Yesterday on 18th May, was my second when Mr. Amitabh Bachan too joined the twitter band . I am not one of the kind who likes to know all the details about celebrities and glitter stuff. Thats the only reason I did not want to have their tweets showing up on my timeline. I didn't think they were worth it. I used twitter to more or less interact with people I know, since this was what I am comfortable in. But Sachin's entry changes things :) I still don't think I would be following others, other than these two. hmmm.... maybe if Federer were to join... :) But thats what I use my celebrity list for. I have added all who I might want to know to my twitter list. Anyways, it was pretty amazing reaction the day Sachin joined. I saw many of my friends, who had earlier only created accounts on twitter or only posted the first "Hi", "Hello World" kind of mes...

Whoa! Just received a mail from Airtel Telemedia Services. The contents of the mail accuse me of not paying up my dues! What the heck! I paid up all my dues before I left Mangalore. What is this weired amount of Rs.579? I never had such kind of amount pending. So I called up the customer care number listed on their site for Mangalore. Call does not go through! Tried again, same results. Now I called up the local 121 and ask them. They are kind enough to give me Chennai Customer care number for the landline department. The executive is very cordial and confirms that I have no outstanding on my account. I had taken special care, especially after knowing about my friend's experience when closing connections. But a few things in the mail irritated the heck out of me. " In spite of several reminders " - What reminders??? This is the first time someone mails me saying that I had some imaginary outstanding amount due. " Kindly ignore this email if the outstanding is...

Yessss... I am back online at home. It has been now 4 weeks since I was waiting, thanks to the professionalism of Airtel Broadband Coimbatore! The Airtel folks still do not have any idea when they can give me a connection!! So, I decided to contact a local operator, who's advertisement I saw hung up on the electricity post on the road leading to my apartment gate. That was on 11th may at 7:00 pm that I called. The guy on the other end took down my number and request for details and promised to have one from his sales team contact me. Within 10 mins I got a call back and was given some preliminary information on some of the plans. The guy who contacted me said he could reach my house in 15 mins if that was ok. I was only happy to! They promised that I would have the connection in 48 hours and they kept their word. Now I wonder how much time the landline from airtel is going to take. Thanks to mobiles, I can now afford to wait. But internet was something that I really wanted at h...

Sports is one of the biggest business areas now in India too. Thanks to IPL(Indian Premier League), the Indian edition of Twenty20 cricket tournament, there is a huge focus on sports. This, along with all the other sporting activities like Team India in F1, Hockey and commonwealth in India, has certainly got the common man into sports. It was a bit difficult to imagine earlier that sports could become such a huge business. IPL, in its third edition, has added 3 more clubs and the tenders drawn were more than the existing 8 teams' bid combined together just 3 years back. You can imagine the amount of money involved. And believe me, this business is indeed profitable. If not now, surely in the near future. Else all these big names would not be putting these huge sums onto the table. The main intention for me to start of this blog was not to talk of money, but what got me thinking on this topic was a conversation dialog from the movie Invincible . I love movies based on sports and...

An year or so back, I had seen a video of " Dying 47-Year-Old Professor Gives Exuberant ‘Last Lecture’ ". The video was an awesome watch. There were so many things that you could learn from the lecture. So many insights, it was great. Last week, I re-read the transcript of the lecture, forwarded by my friend and I was again filled with an urge to take down "notes". Below are a few points that I noted down from the 1 hour 44 min lecture given by Randy Pausch. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. Have something to bring to the table , because that will make you more welcome. Be good at something. It makes you valuable The brick walls are there for a reason .  The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people! Experience is what y...

I am not an ardent follower of cricket, i.e to the extent of remembering statistics or players from bygone eras. So apologies to all those who reacted to the title question with "Duh! Is this guy from earth?" or an equal response. I did not actually hear about Jack Hobbs until I came across this article on cricinfo. A super article by Gideon Haigh I must add. The article also enlightened me on the apparent class divide between the "professionals" and the "amateurs" of that time. To appreciate Hobbs' full significance, however, we must contemplate the class rigidities of his time. The discrimination that placed amateur and professional in separate dressing rooms and hotels, and had them enter the field by different gates and travel in different railway carriages, now seems as remote from our experience of cricket as sectarianism or McCarthyism. Awesome to know about him! Many of the great players are great not just because of their skill but b...

Recently I came across an article ( Can you justify your job title? ). I am quite sure that you would have had this discussion among your friends or collegues on the various titles that seem to be spawning. The comments in the above mentioned article itself gives some very super listing. For example, Global Troubleshooter , Head of Knowledge Creation , Reputation Manager .. etc are quite colorful. But it would really be interesting to meet the guy with the title Rocket Scientist Many of the organizations, at some point in time, need to streamline the roles and responsibilities that are given to their employees. I am sure with time the number of titles that would have spawned out would become un-manageable for various reasons. I have heard from HR managers themselves that they have no clue as to what a particular title was doing in their organization. I would seriously love to have the title of Global Troubleshooter or Rocket Scientist! It sounds so cool, irrespective of what the ...

I came across this article today Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to protect Palestinian homes. Her family has been met with hostility while pursuing a civil suit after calling the investigation a 'whitewash.'  source - http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-israel-corrie-lawsuit30-2010mar30,0,3914948.story I remembered getting forwards about this incident and this being on the forefront of the international news for some time. But didn't know that this was still on until I read the article. During a search over the net , I came across various articles on Rachel, including ones that call this case does not tell the truth. Amazing how everything is twisted till anyone trying to follow it later is thrown off track by all sorts of material on the net. Hope there is some outcome from all this for the sake of her family.

The Oscars seems to have started off an interesting discussion. The angle being that of the ex-wife being one up on the ex-husband by winning the award were both were nominated. Yes, dear folks, people have been discussing the James Cameron/Kathryn Bigelow and Avatar/Hurt Locker relationship angle. By default, it seemed like people just knew that they were plotting against each other. Does divorced mean by default that the ex-partners now cannot stand the very sight of each other? Does mutual consent not figure into these people's mind at all? If they had at all bothered to read the interviews of Cameron or Bigelow, they would see the respect each shared for the other. They both have acknowledged that they had discussed their respective moves with each other to get feedback. Thats how mature(and open minded, I must add) people behave. Well it sure is not going to stop people from forming their own opinions and cases in this matter. And I am quite sure many are not even bother...

It has been quite some time since I have watched or followed the Oscars. Thats what I told my friend while picking him up on the way to the office. We then went on to discuss some movies and awards for the rest of the journey to the office. I was telling him the truth. It was indeed been a long time since I had watched the awards. But maybe it was this conversation that prompted me to open up the Oscars site for the next couple of hours and keep refreshing it in between work to see who was getting the awards. It was nice to see Hurt Locker winning the Best Picture and Kathryn Bigelow get the Best Director awards. It was not that I had any favorites till that moment, but somehow when the awards were announced, I was pleased. It was especially good that Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win the Oscar for the Best Director right on the International Woman's Day! That would have been special. Or was it just a coincidence. I remember I was totally pissed off when Titanic won ...

Today we celebrate the 60th anniversary since the day India turned into a Republic on 26th Jan 1950. This is the day the constitution of India was adopted. Reading through Republic Day page on wikipedia , the following quote caught my eye. "During recent years, it has become fashionable among some citizens to disparage the founders and their document. These individuals disappointed by the developments in the country since 1950, have called for changing the constitution explaining that it has not 'worked'. Such thinking, in my view, is misguided. Constitutions do not 'work', they are inert, dependent upon being 'worked' by citizens and elected and appointed leaders" Wishing all Indians a wonderful Republic day.