When god has different plans

Today's newspaper really shocked me. On the front page was the heart rendering news of a girl being hacked in the busy BTM layout area and a few pages later it was the tragedy on the Mumbai-Pune highway. The second one looked almost like a scene out of "Final Destination". A real lot of things had to go wrong to really cause the tragedy. First a flat tyre, then the wierd arrangement of 2 vehicles parked on a highway side with people in between them, third a tired perhaps sleepy driver who has been driving without rest for past week and finally a lack of reflectors on the back of the vehicles....It was a cataclysm which seems to have been designed by nature. While i deeply mourn the death of 27 people some on the spot and the rest on the way to the hostpital, i also feel a sense of helplessness and frailty of life. 

Man proposes and god disposes they say....

I have my own ideas about god  but this one just enforces my belief that as humans we are just puppets in the hands of the unknown power. Going by logic i would say that the probability of the event with so many eventualities is very rare. Yet it had to occur, because the cosmos conspired. Something to ponder about everytime we think  "I have done this", "I am so good"..Maybe we will get a reality check

Early morning numbers

The advice of the day comes from a caller to radio. As i tuned in to FM 94.3, here is what a caller informed us. 

" The following numbers are to be remembered for a fit life. 0,5,10,25. This means

0% - Tobacco

5 Fruits

10,000 - Steps

25 - BMI or lower"

It is really something interesting that one can learn early in the morning. A little bit of research will reveal that the origin of these numbers lies in the GE (General Electric Employee wellness program. Here [PDF] you can read a flyer about the same. So three cheers to Wellness and Fitness. 

By the way, i hope you notice the new theme for my blog...found it much less taxing on  the eye ...

Lost - In bangalore

I am a typical indian who doesn't mind going to that far off corner in the town to get the stuff at the wholesale rate. This time it was a pair of badminton rackets. The idea of losing some weight by playing a few round of badminton has been running around in my mind for a while now.

I set off to one of the most crowded places in Bangalore. This place doesn't have a particular name but is in general the area around "Avenue Road". There are quite a few places among the labyrinth of roads which have names ranging from "Sulthanpet" to "Bhangarpet". It is almost impossible to distinguish one from other, for one can see only shops and more shops. Most of these shops are "Wholesale" vendors, who don't mind entertaining an odd retail customer. The retail customers are few and difficult to come because the whole place is stuffed and its quite difficult to even walk in this ocean of vehicles and human beings.

Life shows a different face here. The shops are so close that it is hard to breathe fresh air. Forget the luxuries of an AC or in somecases even an ceiling fan. Business happens are a blinding pace. The shops are arranged in a fishbone shape. The main street which keeps getting narrower as it goes inwards away from "State Bank of Mysore" is called Avenue Road. Each of the perpendicular streets specializes in a particular item. The first lateral streets are stationary and books, then it is changes to bangles, Invititation cards, Clothes, Hardware, Electrical items, Glass items, Wood and so on. We could lay our eyes on some "eye-catching" beauty in these streets. We realized that most of the building have shops in the ground and 1st floor and have residential quaters in their upper half. Most of the shops belong to business communities from North India. The girls from these communities have been blessed with ample amount of beauty. Even though the whole thing of walking through the crowded streets is painful, these girls do provide us with some respite. 

After parking our bike in one of these dirt ridden messy dark alleys, we started to look out for our shops of interest. After looking through a multitude of shops and then going around asking for directions to sports shops we ended completely lost with almost no way to figure out which alley had our bike. Karthik and I had to rack our brains and try to remember the streets and shops which we had passed in the last hour. We almost were feeling like kids who had lost their way and had to trace it back using breadcrumbs. The difference being that we didn't have any breadcrumbs. It was a mix of hit-n-trail, excellent guess work and then some mind mapping that got us back to the street where our bike. It was almost a great relief to be on our bike and get out of this maze of shops, life and livelyhood. 

Pic of the week - Education and Creativity

I don't facebook too very often in comparision to what i was doing about 8 months back. I think it is a thing with me that i don't live with the fad. I am in someways similar to that kid who plays with one toy and then gives it up for another one which looks shinier or newer. As i talk about kids, i remembered this picture from Facebook. As you can see the dumping of creativity, intelligence and discipline is highlighted in the picture. Then came the thought, where i realized that i have gone through this process too and perhaps that is the reason why even though i have been writing for about a year and a half now, i have not more than 23 subscribers to the blog. The website here, quotes that 

he scary coda to this story is that by the age of twelve, our creative output has declined to about 2% of our potential, and it generally stays there for the rest of our lives.

The fact thought shocking, is an eye-opener for many of us who are getting ready to force their children to study "Science" because they would like them to be Engineers or those of us who pester their young ones to concentrate and get the highest marks in the class. Parents who fight for every single penny with their bosses, are happy to give it up for their childrens "Special Classes" or Tuitions. 

We could blame our competitive education system, where almost every lost mark could make a difference in where the child gets an admission. What our education system lacks is what our industry is currently demanding. This pehaps explains why the industry complains that our education system lacks the teeth needed for the challenges thrown in the field. 

If we take a quite moment and wonder how was our ancient education system, we might come up with some beautiful answers. In the end our education should prepare us not for an IIT or an IIM. It should prepare us for life. Something like a group sport event, say football gives us a lot of lessons for life. Be it how to assist each other to reach the common goal or how listening and trusting in your coach will help you in aligning yourself to your objective; group sports are great teachers. This is why some of the brightest students don't find the acceptence the wished of, while others who may not have the shiny academic numbers seem to do great in the industry. 

There are many ways to look at this problem, however for now i would let you just laugh at the cartoon and wish you a happy weekend. 

Ubuntu 12.04 intial thoughts

I have been a very big fan of UBUNTU and have come to trust this to be the way Linux can really reach desktops for home users and in some cases even office users.  The recent version of this linux debian unfortunately has been a let down in my perspective. Firstly, i don't really appreciate the new wierd interface where i have to type something to find it, i was better off with the earlier Compiz interface where i knew what i was looking for. The worse part however, is the bug in the linux kernel which makes installation on AMD 64 bit Liano APU almost impossible. The flag "nomodeset" needs to be turned "on" to be really able to successfully go through the installation process. Read the following bug post. 

If you did read you would be crying saying that it is for Oneiric and not for the 12.04 LTS version of Ubuntu. The post says that bug has been addressed. However, i have had the problems with my APU and had a hard time installing the os. Even after i managed to install the little devil, it still troubled me with my wireless keyboard always giving me problems selecting the os during boot. It was not just me but several others who suffer from this bug...Read here

I understand that since i barely contribute to the opensource community, i have almost no right to complain. The only time i have really done something is perhaps by reporting a couple of bugs to a xpath libary in perl. However, i have indirectly contributed to it by extensively using only freeware in my workplace and promoting the use of the same. Finally, i think this post will not weigh down upon my conscience. 

He drinks what we earn in a month

I read this piece of really thought provoking article here 

Enraged Ashwin and his friend started arguing with the waiters and refused to pay the bill, that run up Rs 30,000, until their order was accepted.

This means for some people a night's drinking spree is worth 30,000. This is perhaps many of us earn in a month. Our more unfortunate breathens perhaps see such amount of money in a few months. What i do not understand is that when people of such kind of money to spend, why are we still a developing nation. 

What further drew my interest is that one of the comments on this post suggests that a special tax be levied on pubs. A better and more directed approach would be to levy a special tax on drinks bills which is beyond a particular limit. Of course, we indians would have generally found a way around this. For example, 2 bills of lesser amounts. However, i wonder after having drinks of 30,000 bucks, can anybody still have the sanity to pay the bill or even read it clearly?