Infinite thoughts

It was time to meet one of Meghana's classmate - Deven - while we were in Bengaluru. We decided to meet at CCD in Jayanagar. The store was easy to find and nicely located on a first floor at a junction. When we entered the store was almost full except for 2-3 tables. We occupied one that was comfortable enough for three and close to the main door so that Deven could locate us very easily. Within few minutes Deven reached and we got involved in conversations varying from Meghana's school to Deven's profession (Merchant Navy) and shopping in Bengaluru and many others. In due course, we ordered some coffee and snacks for ourselves. While enjoying those snacks, something very weird happened. Suddenly two kids - one boy and a girl - entered the store. No, they were not customers. Each of them started approaching every table and started begging. Being very close to the main door, we were the first ones to be approached. The boy was not so persistent and at a wave of a hand ...

After not so satisfactory trip to Bandipur (more about it a little later), we returned back to Bengaluru to my sister's place. We had 2-3 days at hand and were wondering what to do in those days. Conversation led us to two interesting locations in Bangalore - Nehru Planetarium & Science Park and Snow City . A quick search on google informed that there is a English show at 12:30 PM. Unfortunately there is no provision for online booking and some reviews suggested to reach the venue at least an hour in advance as there are limited seats per show. The trio (Meghana, Mrunmay and myself) didn't want to miss the show and hence rushed to the Planetarium located in Vasant Vihar.  The booking was yet to be started and there didn't seem to be much rush. So we decided to take a stroll in the park in the same premise. It turned out to be science park and that too well designed!! We started with the principle of lever and Mrunmay was amazed to see the difference in the force...

After a long time, Meghana and I decided to go to Barbeque Nation @ Deccan on Saturday afternoon. And unfortunately it turned out to be a not-so-great experience.  We felt really lucky when we were given a table in just 5 minutes as against the usual unavailability at Barbeque Nation , both at DG and at Sayaji. The seating was on the outside covered area, but at least they had those overhead sprinklers for cooling the air. The kebabs included 1 Mushroom, 1 Soya, 1 Pineapple, 1 Paneer along with a Tikki and some preparation of half-baked potatos. The peel of the potato wasn't cooked enough and was spoiling the entire taste. Salt was overriding the taste of pineapple kebab. Paneer had gone hard. After having eaten the Paneer dishes at multiple places, it was obvious that the Paneer that was being served wasn't good and we had to tell it to the staff there. The staff asked their chef to talk to us. We told the experience to the chef and he said he'll get us better prepa...

With so many vehicles on the road, parking is ought to become a problem for city like Pune. It is no surprise that the old part of the city has huge problem of parking space, but it is surprising to see that even the newer localities are being developed without much consideration towards the parking requirements in coming years. Nevertheless, here are some points which would be applicable to almost all the areas: Need explicit marking where the parking starts and where it ends. Board like "No parking 15 mtrs on both sides" makes no sense to me as it is very difficult to know where 15 mtrs start and where it ends. Better way could be marking the no parking area using two boards indicating start and end of the parking/no-parking slot.  Wherever there's dedicated parking for four wheelers, marking the space for individual vehicles. It is not so uncommon to see haphazard parking, which ends up wasting the valuable space in between the two parking spaces, adding to the p...

Set in the beautiful islands of Bali, this movie is meant to entertain the kids. But unfortunately adults may not find it that interesting.  As usual, when Bheem along with his gang and King of Dholakpur reaches Bali, they find that Bali is in danger. Apparently, Bali's Queen is King of Dholakpur's sister and were invited for crowning ceremony of the prince Arjun. Upon arrival, Bheem and the team found that everything is devastated in Bali and there's no trace of Royal family including Arjun. After much of a search, Bheem finds the Rajguru (Royal Priest) who had helped the prince escape the wrath of the invader - Rangda.  The story line is pretty much predictable and there are no surprises till the end. Bheem needs to be the ONLY savior and it turns out to be that way. (This actually is a problem for children mentality, but I'll save the thoughts for some other time.) Overall animation is similar to the serial and there didn't seem to be any attempt...

Pedestrians form a huge chunk of Pune's traffic. You'll see all kind of people walking the street - students, college crowd, working men-women, senior citizens. It's time to support them with right infrastructure. Pedestrian Crossing (Zebra Crossing) At many signal junctions these are present, and at others they are missing. Wherever they are present, most of the times the vehicles stop on the crossing and hence leaves no place for the pedestrians to use the space. It is rare to see a policeman at the junction enforcing this, although there's a recent drive to put up the signboards across major junctions to keep the Pedestrian crossing unoccupied. A frequency of the pedestrian crossing needs to be defined on long stretches where there are no signals. If there are no accessible zebra crossings, pedestrians tend to cross the road wherever they feel like, causing much of a problem for the ongoing traffic.  I believe crossing the road needs to be simplifi...

While driving through the city, I keep on thinking about the changes those could help improve the traffic in various localities. Some are generic thoughts, while remaining are very peculiar to a specific location - road, junction or a combination thereof. By no means this is an expert opinion, but simply is a wishlist of a person who follow the traffic rules and would like to see various things facilitating the law-abiding citizens!! Today's listing is about traffic control signals. The signals at the junctions seem to be having varying patterns and there's little consistency.  There are places where there are specific signs for allowing U turn, at places there are no such signs. It gets confusing when right turn is not allowed. Does "No right turn" means "No U Turn" as well? Many signals do not have the countdown timers. It becomes impossible for a driver to know if the signal is about to change or not. Moreover, it would help the conscious citizens...

Finally, he chose to speak. Albeit, nothing to offer. But he spoke. He spoke in front of the businessmen and the corporate tycoons.  Here is the full speech.  BTW, I couldn't watch him beyond first 12 minutes. However reports say he was okay during later part of the speech and Q&A. Number of questions after watching just first 12 mins of the speech: Who has made the people in Gorakhpur to travel to Mumbai? Who kept them away from the vocational training and education? Who was in the government when the "express" which takes 36 hours to reach Mumbai was named as "express" and still calls it "express"? Who has made the migrants to stay in slums and thus add to the problems of already crowded city? A young fellow says he will go to Mumbai, and if nothing happens he'll go to Bangalore. You call this the optimism, you call this the spirit of India. Is it really so? That young fellow has lost faith in the governing body in his home stat...

A day well spent!! It was an amazing experience to be part of TiECon Pune Event held at Hyatt Regency on Saturday Mar 30, 2013.  The event started with keynote from the legendary Mr. Narayana Murthy who faced the questions from three young Entrepreneurs and was facilitated by Mr. Pravin Gandhi . With very straight forward statements made the audience applaud more than once.  Be it country or a company, it should have only one boss. In our country, everyone should retire at 65. Post retirement, one should give advice only if it is asked, not otherwise.   This event observed a full house, with quite a few folks standing along the walls. This followed by a session on Women Entrepreneurs, but many of the attendees were found to be networking outside the hall. Immediately after this were 3 breakout session.  I witnessed the reverse pitch by the VCs to the Entrepreneurs, excellently coordinated by Mukund Mohan , CEO-in-Residence for Microsoft Ac...

This is interesting. Read this article from TechCrunch - the shop owner is charging the patrons for looking at the items in her shop. I believe this was long overdue. Most of us (including myself!!) visit a store, check out the item, ask numerous question, look at the comparable models, negotiate and step out with shaky promise of coming back for purchase. Then go online, check out the lowest price available and order. Boom... there goes the profit of the brick and mortar store.. Not just the profit, but it also cost him/her the time, probably the salary of sales person, rent of the place, inventory cost and what not!! The amount of $5 is not important. It may not really be the cost associated with each onlooker. What is important is that the shop-owners are facing very different problem which they have not yet solved and trying to find out ways to monetize the physical shop that they have setup with huge investments. While it doesn't cost the Internet savvy customers to do ...

It was time to celebrate Meghana 's Birthday and after much deliberation we headed to Southindies - a high-end south indian restaurant in Pune. I had visited it a while back but decided to visit it again to cater to Birthday girl's with :) We started with Thakkali chaaru i.e. tomato soup flavored with ginger and curry leaves and Kaya kooralu chaaru which is mixed veg soup flavored with coriander and garlic. Kaya Kooralu Chaaru was very tasty and brought good taste for the dinner. Along with soup we also ordered "podi tossed idlis" which were essentially small idlies tossed in gunpowder; "Mokka Junna miriyalu fry" made from babycorn coated with bason flour. Gunpowder being very strong in taste, the idlis were tasting only gunpowder and unfortunately it also made the babycorn taste bland. We decided to try standard veg stew ( Kai Kari Stew) and appam as a safe option along with "mirapakaya pattani curry" along with Vishalakshi Roti. Veg Stew an...

You use Google for searching quite a few things. Thanks to the browser feature where you type in some name in the address bar, if it is not a FQDN , it simply uses default search engine to search that term. So when you type in "google" in the address bar, it will search for google . And if you search for "bing" it will search for bing . Now if you search for a website using Google, which also uses the adwords, it will look like this:  I wanted to visit SurveyMonkey.com and instead of using the shortcut (ctrl+enter) I just pressed enter in the address bar, and this is what google search threw at me. If SurveyMonkey is going to be displayed as the topmost result, does it really make sense to also display the ad for SurveyMonkey on the same page? User invariably tends to click on the ad displayed, which means revenue for Google and actually loss for the company using the adword service. Couldn't and shouldn't this be changed? Is this a problem with the...

Jolly LLB - Nice story line, but wasted.  This movie is about an aspiring lawyer from a small town, who wants to make it big in some or the other way. Jagdish Tyagi aka Jolly ( Arshad Warsi ) is a small time lawyer from small town in U.P. who is struggling to get established. With a strong belief that he can settle down Delhi, he reaches the capital, but there's no change. As part of his presence in the court he happens to attend a high profile case of hit-and-run, represented by a well known lawyer Mr. Rajpal ( Boman Irani ). The case gets dismissed due to the usual reasons of no eye-witness, no evidence and all similar *t. Mr. Rajpal was expecting a huge fees from Mr. Diwan, whose son was the main culprit in the hit-and-run case. And Mr. Diwan makes a mistake there. Rajpal is given peanuts as his compensation since the case gets closed in just about 6 weeks. And this hurts Rajpal's ego.  Jolly sees an opportunity in his attempt to get established, and files a PIL (...

After spending awesome 15 months at mSauda , I have decided to move on. The destination is not decided yet, but I think I have some idea about where I want to go.  It has been a roller-coaster ride and I enjoyed every bit of it. It wasn't easy to make up my mind to move on, but some personal constraints forced this decision.  To List two of the most important things that I learnt from this venture: If your basics are clear, you can get into any technology after any amount of time - This was an absolute surprise to myself. I wrote code after almost 3.5 to 4 years when I started with mSauda. But by refreshing the basics, I could get comfortable in a short time span. Once you have learnt something, it is very difficult to forget it - Yes, I logged in to Linux terminal almost after 4 years, but most of the commands started flowing as I typed and I actually wondered - oh *** where did I type this from... But it was very comforting too - I could even do a block copy/delete ...

An excellent movie by Neeraj Pandey, maker of " A Wednesday ".  The plot is picked up from real story taken place in late 80's, to be precise in 1987. The details of the story could be found easily on the web  and hence not covered here.  Anupam Kher is outstanding as usual, in the role of "sharmaji". Jimmy Shergil has given yet another best performance. Comparatively the role is smaller is length, but is very crucial in the movie. Akshay Kumar has done pretty well and something different from his usual Khiladi image. Manoj Baajpeyee looks awesome in the role of Wasim Khan. Director has taken a lot of effort to make the scenes live and mimic the settings in mid-80's and I must say it has paid off well.  On the whole, I would say it is a must watch!! PS: Did someone say what about Kajal Aggarwal ? if you are her fan (possible, but doesn't matter), you should have watched it by now and if you are not, why bother? I have alrea...

Recent buzz that has hit the media is the huge success of instant messaging app " Hike " launched by BharatiSoftBank - a joint venture of Bharati and Japan's mobile operator "SoftBank". As media reports the USP of this app is that it seamlessly integrates with SMS feature so that user can easily chat with those that have not installed the app or have only a feature phone. This USP has helped the app to reach to millions of people on Android market and is evident from millions of downloads in just three months. Launched on 14-November, this app is currently not accepting any sign-ups due to heavy load on servers, which in itself is a nice problem to have. When thinking about the USP, it is clearly a very handy app for smartphone owners. They need not worry about whether the recipient has the same application installed or not as the app will send out SMS in case the recipient doesn't have the app installed. The app is tied up with your phone number and h...

Hanging of Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru is definitely a good news for the people of India. It took several years for the Government to actually take the step, but I would say it is never too late to do the right thing. I am highly inclined to believe this is purely a politically motivated decision. INC has been under fire from almost every corner of the society for various reason and there was no respite for the party in last several months. Azmal Kasab's hanging did bring is some controversy and I wonder if INC could reap anything out of it. At least this time it doesn't seem so. Our new president Pranabda  is looking very much in mood of clearing the backlog , albeit with the permission, one would guess. Should we see some more such decisions in coming days? It is about 18 months for the general elections ( May 2014 ) and every political party is getting ready for the big battle. By taking such decisions, INC surely is removing weapons for BJP's arsenal and soon BJP ...

With recent announcement of Rahul Gandhi taking over as Vice President of Indian National Congress has raised some very interesting questions/thoughts/doubts. Just by announcing Rahul as second-in-command, the opposition alliance seems to have got cornered. BJP, the largest party in opposition, is rushing to identify what should be the counter move. Yashwant Sinha has gone out all the way to praise Narendra Modi as the prime candidate from BJP , whereas there's no official announcement from BJP as such. Rahul got promoted to this position even without demonstrating any real capabilities. What he carries with him the Gandhi Dynasty, dismal failure in UP and so-so in Gujarat . He hasn't shown any interest in coming out with his views on the most current affairs, which matter to most of the people. E.g. Lokpal Bill, 2G scam, Delhi Rape Case and the demands surrounding it. Not a single word has been heard by the people of India, which is getting projected as "probable...

Last weekend while returning home, out of nowhere, Mrunmay started asking question. Actually, not really, he asks questions all the time. Almost every sentence is followed by "Why?" and we need to explain it in such a fashion that there are no more "why"s coming out. Almost every time we fail but at least after 5-7 such attempts in a series, either he gives up or gets distracted and we get saved automatically!! You might have noticed the latest TVC from Bournvita featuring Kajol as a mom trying to answer the questions from his son, which inadvertently forces her to study before she answers. We had our bournvita question ... आई, कुंकू कशापासून बनवतात ? We tried telling him what is turmeric and how it is made and all for obvious reasons... we don't know what is कुंकू made from!! For some strange reason, I don't remember I ever had that question... What is your Bournvita question? PS: I just blogged about that TVC, you can read it here -  Bournvit...

Weekend time. I was playing with Mrunmay, one of his games - 3 letter words. Basically there are some paper strips having one letter printed on it and then there's a letter dispenser, which dispenses 2 letters at a time. The game is to make up a word with those two letters and one of the paper strips. It's too early for Mrunmay to know the spellings and obviously the job of finding out matching spellings was with me. After every round, I was telling him the meaning of the word formed, in the form of question / answers. Like "Do you know this word?", "Do you know it's meaning?" and wherever required giving him examples and/or translations. After few rounds, the dispenser gave us two letters: "B" and "A". The only possible combination left was the word "BAY". I started asking him the meaning... Me: "Do you know what is BAY?" Mrunmay: "Bay??" Me: "Yeah.. do you know what is the meaning of Bay?...