lessons from politicians

so gear up for another session of horse trade in Bihar. the election results look promising for all the traders and tradees as well :) this situation could be worse than giving Lalu a majority. but what totally beats me is the way these politicians 'bury' their differences and join hands. I know money is the big, and probably the only, player here :) but how is it possible to completely ignore all the personal attacks and even the lawsuits. maybe we are too human to understand these things I guess, after all they could be highly idealistic(?) and hence forgive each other :)

in the case of tamilnadu, PMK's ramadoss is clearly the front runner in changing alliances. at this stage he may not even remember whom he is with :) any day he can beat a Lalu or Jayalalithaa hands down :) I'm really impressed with his record..........
from being a wood-cutting activist to a politician who runs a green revolution organization,
from being an unknown doctor to the father of the Nation's health minister,
from being a literally non-existent individual to the one who controls the naming of tamil movies

he has indeed travelled a long distance in a very short period of time :)

actually I'm counting on him........if I were to enter politics ever :)

looks like I can also learn from politicians, let alone movies :)

another good movie....

this is one movie that makes me laugh even when I think about it. and the winner is (sorry Oscar fever is getting on to me :) ) - Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron.
If you haven't watched, go to the nearest store immediately, rent or even buy a copy, and watch it. The movie has a small sequence on Mahabaratha at the end and its undoubtedly the most funniest of all :) the way characters come in during that sequence, taking the designated Pandavas and Kauravas by surprise, is hilarious......especially the turnaround of dushasana :)

humour apart, the cast has also done a terrific job. no wonder it made careers for Nasiruddin Shah, Om Puri, and Satish Shah.

perfectness

so finally became a member of Netflix. I get 3 movies out at a time and I'm really enjoying it.

was watching Good Will Hunting yesterday. what a wonderful movie. I liked the interactions between Robin Williams and Matt Damon. In one scene Robin Williams tells Damon, "Nobody is perfect and can never be. All that matters is if you are perfect to each other (from a relationship standpoint)". that was a good one.

and I have started watching a movie everyday to glory :) a good friend of mine, Manoj, once remarked that he is following the American way, learn anything and everything from movies. Looks like I'm well on track with him :)

p.s: thats why I watch our dear captain movies..... to know how Veerappan was captured, if Osama would be captured, and finally how kargil was won :-)

air wars

over the last few weeks, we saw Airbus and Boeing unveiling their new planes respectively. while the former unveiled the biggest ever, the latter tried to catch up by unveiling the longest non-stop flying machine ever, both for commercial purposes. both are technical marvels. I happened to watch a documentary on the making of A380, the superjumbo by Airbus. it was mind-blowing. the assembling factories are so huge that it took more than 2 yrs to just build them.

now coming to the main point, how comfortable are these aircrafts gonna be for a passenger. Its already taking more than 1 hr to just board the existing jumbojet - 747. I hoping that the airlines and airports would devise a clever way to board the 800 plus people on the A380, without too much delay. same goes with security and baggage claim as well.

ah, now comes Boeing's 777. while it sounds cool to read that it can fly 11,000 miles non-stop in 18 hrs, in reality, its a pain in the neck to travel that kind of distance in one stretch. The longest I have flown non-stop is about 15 hrs, from Los Angeles to Taipei. and everytime I do this, at the end I feel like killing someone :) its not worth it at all.

lets see how these two come up in the next few yrs :)

and the trade wars between Boeing and Airbus is even more interesting :)

pro-choice or pro-life???

I feel this question should not even be asked in the first place. who are we to decide if abortion should be banned?
yes, it is really bad to kill an unborn baby. personally, I wouldn't do it. at the same time, I wouldn't want to preach that to a young girl either. I still feel its the responsibility and personal choice of an individual. and what if a girl gets pregnant because she was raped. with the super slow court system, it would take yrs before everyone gets convinced that she was indeed raped, and in the meantime her child would have attained the age to date someone. its really impossible to distinguish cases and make abortion part-legal and part-illegal. GIVE the choice to the concerned people, they are better judges of their own life.
this has become a very sensitive issue.... to the extent of even deciding the next president of US!

and read this for pope's views on abortion.....

a tale of two movies

After taking a dig at tamil movies last week, I felt a little bad :) though 99% of tamil movies fall under the serious comedy genre (e.g: captain/vijay/ajith movies), there are some adorable ones too. One such movie is Anbe Sivam.

Anbe Sivam - thats what the movie conveys in the end (meaning Love is God). how true. the transformation of a self-centered person to a more caring individual is delightfully presented in this movie. It just takes us on the same path as well. on the way, it depicts the economic disparities in the society, and reminds our responsibilities, in a very realistic manner.
the most touching part was the ending and it really made me cry.

last weekend I watched Swades (atlast). A good movie, and more or less conveys the same message as Anbe Sivam. A non-resident Indian returns to India for good, after seeing the plights of his own countrymen in the remote villages of India. good message..... but to me, it wasn't conveyed in a moving way at all. it was all melodramatic instead. it never really had the conviction.

when I think of Anbe Sivam, I can only remember the characters, not the cast. and when I think of Swades, Gayathri Joshi comes to my mind first :-)

and if you still haven't guessed, Anbe Sivam was a big flop at the box-office while Swades turned out to be a big grosser.

sneeze and learn :)

its a common practice to say "Bless You" when someone sneezes. Since I live in a cubicle zoo, whenever I sneeze, I get a lot of 'Bless You' wishes. strangely, I got none when I sneezed today. I looked around only to find just one guy sitting across. shamelessly I aksed him to bless me :) little did I know that I would soon be blessed with the history behind wishing "bless you".

Whatever I learnt, you can also find it here -

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mgesundheit.html
http://biowww.clemson.edu/biolab/sneeze.html
http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/blessyou.htm
http://www.oldwivestales.net/QandAarticle1112.html

and here is the biggest of all...... my colleague didn't bless me because, yeah try this, he considered it as a pagan belief :)

IT park in Coimbatore

Read this article. atlast the industry and government are looking upto to our dear old coimbatore. I definitely feel that an IT park in coimbatore would be an instant hit, given to the numerous technical institutions the city has. Apart from creating more local jobs, it will also help in de-centralizing the industry to some extent.
PSG STEP was started during my third yr over there, glad to know they are now employing 500 people.

But I also have some reservations. particularly its effect on the existing textile and manufacturing industries. high paying IT jobs could increase the real estate and the avg cost of living in the region. this could drive away these low paying industries, which employs a majority of the population. as long as the IT park is kept out of the current urban limits, these industries can successfully co-exist. lets see what turns out.

In the same article, they failed to mention an important strength of the city. and that is.........
Its the hometown of yours truly :-) hehe

plight of plus two students

was reading this article on Hindu today. pathetic, isn't it. I guess all of us would have gone through something similar in our class XII yrs.
its about 9 yrs since I finished class XII. to describe that whole yr as a nightmare is only an understatement. it was the first time in my life that I went for out of school tutition classes. I took special classes on all the majors..... worked like a dog from 5 am to 10 pm every single day. I still remember those last few months, when I gave full 3 hr practise tests every day. my parents worked equally worked hard too. all the hard work to just reproduce the book in an exam paper. no application of thought :(
it didn't get over after the board exams, as we had to go for yet another round of coaching for the entrance exams. it was far more than a mere coaching class, it was a jail. we weren't allowed to skip classes, skip tests, and on top of it a weekly report (including attendence and performance) would be sent home :)
gladly the entrance test during our yr was entirely different than the previous ones. the math exam was particularly hard. it wasn't a memory test, instead it tested us thoroughly.

I'm just thinking, if I can ever produce that level of hard work again, man, I can even get a Nobel Prize :)

tamil cinema at its best

while we keep getting a lot of comedies from our dear captain and his heir apparent Ajith, there are still some classics that simply cannot be beaten. these are beyond time, and imagination too :)

Here are some --

hero tells heroine - "You and me are alone. I could do anything to you, but I wouldn't. Where else can you find such a decent guy"

From the movie Minnale (I have to quote in tamil for the effect) - "Oru naala, rendu naala... anju naal onna pazhaginoam" meaning "we have been together for 5 days, not just a day or two"

try competing with these :-)

a bad move

after so many yrs of free online publication, vikatan publications is becoming a paid service. I don't know why they want to do this, after the zillions of ads and popups they have. given their existing reader base, I'm sure revenue generation through ads would be lucrative enough. instead of trying to utilize and expand this existing viewer base, they are getting more greedy and inturn shutting their doors on many people. and not all people are that interested in their stuff either, given to their pro-DMK stance.
I read some of their articles, simply because they are free. and many times I have clicked on their ads for online purchases, like calling cards. Now what do they expect, me becoming a paid member.... nice try. and I'm sure they ads are still gonna exist for the paid members too.
business model should be growth oriented, not money oriented.

atleast I'm happy that I can save some time by not visiting vikatan again. instead I find the blog world to be more informative and complete :)

to make it BIG

what kind of profession is engineering? the rewards for our hard work is hardly impressive. I mean, compare us against investment bankers/lawyers/sports analysts/doctors/ ...... we make nothing!
My friend was telling me that the best way to earn a lot of money in the US is to write a book. yeah, if you can get a stellar media coverage. I'm sure Amber Frey is gonna make some millions by writing a book on her "turmoils" with Scott Peterson. and look at Martha Stewart, she is probably writing a book on "prison cuisine" right now. there will be some million fools who would buy that too. she is gonna come out smelling as a rose after spending time in jail for fraud :)

to get an extensive media coverage like these people, I should do something crazy. any suggestions :)

Ponniyin Selvan

I have started reading it again :) I never get bored of reading it again and again. This tamil novel is a true classsic. More gripping than even the popular Angels & Demons and Da Vinci Code. and this novel is for all ages and for all generations too.

sometime back a few us had an interesting discussion on how to make a movie out of this epic, or how the movie should be. in our view, Manirathnam is the only capable person for this task. it would be nice if he just sticks to the original plot and not come up with his own script. that will ensure a bigger audience.
also it will be wonderful if this project can be done in Lord of the Rings style, 3 or 4 releases instead of one big movie.

and yes, we did discuss about the cast. while we couldn't agree on who should play what, we definitely had a consensus that Ajith and Vijay should not even be allowed into the sets :)
but still I will give a role for our dear captain :)

A South Indian Wedding in the US

Last weekend I was in Houston to attend a cousin's wedding. It was a very nice experience, as the atmosphere and rituals were very much Indian, I mean all the stuff were carried out as though it were in India. The marriage was held at the wedding hall adjoining the Meenakshi temple in Houston. I was really suprised to see such a big marriage hall, its definitely bigger than some popular ones we have back in coimbatore :)

The grooms side organized everything (yeah no kidding) as the bride and their family came all the way from India :) The groom's family is settled in texas for the past 15 yrs and what really came as a surprise was their 'Indianness'. I mean this is a proper arranged marriage, carried out in a perfect traditional backdrop. That was something guys.

There was even a Jhanavasam, and the groom was taken on a procession on a decorated horse (this only gets better :)) somebody played item nos like "appadi podu" and "dol baje" and we all danced. I didn't know how to dance, hence put on some "dappangoothu" and everyone moved away from me, fearing that I might hit someone :)

Its really difficult to organize traditional events in the US, as something simple like getting flowers can itself be a major pain in the neck. Like I said, I never felt that I was in the US during the wedding ceremony.

the only downside is that all the expenses are in dollars :)

Happy Married Lives

I was in Houston this weekend for a wedding. A relative of mine had come all the way from Dubai to attend the function. Apart from the wedding (about which I will dedicate a seperate post), here are some interesting facts about Dubai ---

Any United Arab Emirates Male Citizen can marry upto 5 times in his lifetime. At any time, he can have a max of 3 wives. For every marriage, the government will give a gift check for 100,000 dirhams (about 20,000 USD), to set up the family. For every child, the government gives the parents an additional 20,000 dirhams.

now I know why these people marry a lot. apart from a new wife, the money matter is also too attractive to ignore :-)

Now who is talking about financial burden and marriage :-)