Came across this interesting website (http://www.storyofstuff.com/) that talks about all the stuff that we use in our daily lives and the way its produced, consumed and disposed. Watch the 20 minute video that explains the same.
Add comment July 23rd, 2008
The reason why I am posting this here is that the neuro surgeon, Hari Bandi in the video is my uncle’s daughter. So, thought of sharing it here 
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/
The video is about a man who faced lifelong brain damage after a car accident and had walked out of hospital in a remarkable fast recovery within 3.5 months.
Add comment July 18th, 2008
The initial title of this post was Garib Rath experience and just thought of writing about my first experience in garib rath train from bangalore (yeshwantpur station) to hyderabad (secunderabad station). I found many good points in it and there were some things that I didn’t like. But yesterday night when I was coming back from hyderabad to bangalore by kachiguda-bangalore express, I was surprised to see a major change in the 3rd A.C. compartments which made me to change the title of this post and the content as well.
After getting into the train, I had put my luggage and was just waiting for the train to start. I didn’t give much attention to any new changes in the bogie. Just as the train started, instead of the normal 6 people who sit in the six side coupe, an additional person has come…a total of 7 were supposed to sit. I was surprised as to how come 7 would be sitting there because if someone had an RAC ticket, that would be for the side berth. Then when I turned towards the side berths, I could not believe my eyes……instead of the normal side upper and side lower, they had introduced an additional side middle 
. A side middle 
in a normal express train!!!!! That’s something we would definitely not want to have. It makes sense to have that in Garib Rath as its entire concept is different. But trying to increase the seating capacity in a normal express train by introducting additional berths is definitely not acceptable.
Actually, when I saw this kind of seating arrangement in Garib Rath, I really appreciated the innovative thinking of railways. They were trying to provide a full A.C. train and to recover the costs, had to increase the seating capactiy. Makes perfect sense in this scenario. But there should be a limit to the greed. Now trying to follow the same thing in normal trains is definitely not good. Even the T.C. in the train was saying that these people are making the A.C. compartments like general compartments now.
Now this reminds me of an artice that I had read long back about the reasons how Laloo could take indian railways to make profits (or rather just created an illusion of making profits )…..just to summarize two main points…. one was the increase of tatkal quota and issuing tatkal quota tickets from 5 days before the journey (now this is like selling tickets in black publicly)…..second one was related to the freight….the goods wagons were being overloaded much above the capacity that they could actually hold….this directly increases the profits of railways but what about the wear & tear of wagons and the tracks, the safety of the trains……all this just to show some profits in the short-term??? I could not find the original article where I had read about this but a quick google search led me to this article which also talks about the same facts.
And now even the passenger trains are not being left out……berths being increased in the existing compartments!!!! I really can’t understand where are these people heading to…. now this is what I say commercialisation….
7 comments June 30th, 2008
Looks like Vodafone is going to get the iPhone to India soon. Check out this article on Vodafone website. Even Airtel has announced it. You can check it out here.
I had already registered for it . I really can’t wait anymore to get my hands on it
Coming to the tariff plans, the information from the Vodafone customer care is that it would come with a monthly tariff of Rs. 199, Rs. 499 and Rs. 699 depending on the internet usage and downloads, etc. I even heard from people saying that the existing Vodafone customers can use the existing sim card only but of course we can only make calls and send sms . Whatever it is looks like we are going to have iPhone pretty soon.
2 comments June 26th, 2008
Local search engine market is one of the fastest growing markets in India. And it definitely makes sense as we can feel the need for good local information services these days. Call it local search engines, local information services, local directory services or whatever…..at the end of the day what they tend to offer is information about any kind of local establishments starting from food outlets, companies, movie theatres, hospitals or for that matter any damn information.
And coming to the players in this segment, there are the big players like google and yahoo with their localized versions and then the startups like guruji, asklaila, yulop, justdial, ilaaka, onyomo, City Infoline and then the list just goes on ……Now the point is who is going to end up as the winner? Is it that the big giants would eat away these startups or will these startups endup dominating the market? Whatever be the result, one thing is definite…..all of them are working towards a common goal………building a database of directory of information, which is definitely missing in India.
Now coming to all these startups in this segment, each of them has got their own set of unique features catering to a specifc segment. Some differ entirely in the way they operate. For instance, guruji is basically crawler based whereas justdial has got human gathered data and a few others having user generated data. Some cater specifically to a particular segment like food (like burrp), some cover any establishment in general. Some of them like jusdial even have a facility to call them up to find the details of any establishment, some providing the feature of SMS services and a few of them even have mobile versions of their sites (m.asklaila.com for instance) . Some just have a directory listing of the businesses and others provide a search feature. Ofcourse, there are a lot of common stuff as well in all of them.
One question that comes to my mind at this point is whether India really has such a big market size to accomodate all these new statups? And the answer I feel is definitely yes . There is so much information out there that needs to be brought online and on top of it its all unorganized 
. I sincerely hope that one day would come when users will definitely move from the existing giants like google to some of these local search engines to search for local info. Till then lets just wait and watch who’s going to make it to the top
Add comment June 16th, 2008
Last week a friend of mine had come from hyderabad. So, took him to forum…and by default I went to landmark also. This is the place where I will never get bored……I can spend hours together in landmark looking at all the books. Finally bought two books and one of them was this one Games Indians Play by V. Raghunathan.
Coming to this book, I had heard about this book already but didn’t knew what it was all about. So, when I found it in landmark, I just saw the contents and it seemed to be really interesting. This book is basically about “why we are the way we are” i.e., why are we Indians the way we are….an interesting read isn’t it??? I came across many new concepts of game theory through this book and the way the author correlates them to the way Indians think and behave is quite interesting. Especially the prisoner’s dilemma framework was really good. Also the different variations of this and then trying to understand the characteristics of human rationality, irrationality, egotism, competetion, co-operation among we Indians, etc through this framework was really good. Also the author discusses about the various scenarios that he had used when he was teaching at IIM-A and a few experiments that he used to do in parties, etc.
On the whole its an interesting read and would definitely recommend it. If you don’t have the time to read the book atleast try reading about the concept of prisoner’s dilemma, pseudo dilemma, wolf’s dilemma, etc. They are really really interesting concepts worth looking at. Also original articles on prisoner’s dilemma by hofstadter that were published in scientific american in 1980′s are worth reading.
Of all the quotes that I came across in this book, the one I liked the most is this
“India is a functioning anarchy” —by J.K.Galbraith (US ambassador to India, 1962).
Add comment May 30th, 2008
Believe me!!!!!! I just saw a lamborghini in bangalore on airport road and it wasn’t long back when I saw a ferrari on airport road (near the pizza hut junction…near wind tunnel road) and today it was a lamborghini………was shocked to see one in india and that too in bangalore…. . Came home and just googled for “lamborghini in bangalore” and here I found this youtube video.
It was an yellow lamborghini……. I was waiting at the leela palace junction ( near manipal hospital) on airport road….and just then I see this car taking a U turn in front of me….. I was so happy to see it….. and then I saw the power of the car……..just in a split second this guy was racing like hell as the road was not too busy….man the sound was awesome…..and then we got green signal and started following him……poor fellow he had to slow down thanx to bangalore traffic
And then comes another surprise…..I was expecting some young chap in his twenties driving it and what I saw was some old man maybe in his 50′s with white beard and wearing a black coloured cap. Followed him till the domlur flyover and then that guy went straight on airport road and I had to take the flyover to 100 ft. road
Anyways I am really happy to get a glimpse of it….. when I was in US I just saw these lamborghinis’s in a showroom in San Francisco (me standing before the car and here is another one)and was content with that….but today it was a gr8888 feeling to see it on bangalore roads…..this was the first time I felt bad for not having a camera in my cell phone and felt good about the bangalore traffic (or else by the time I could reach him he must have reached some 200 miles per hour ).
2 comments May 18th, 2008
Had been to the venue in bangalore where the pangea day movies were played. It was actually in a company called ThoughtWorks……good to see that companies are allowing outsiders to host such events….and that too on the night of elections day in bangalore. Reached the venue by 8 PM…..the movies were supposed to start from 11.30 PM IST, but here the organizers planned for more….so we had to reach by 8. One bad thing was that we were not allowed to take our laptops or cameras . So, no live blogging.
Coming to the events over there….initially the TED talk by Jehane Noujam was shown followed by some live performances by some of the attendees. Then it was the time for the live telecast. I was there along with my friend karthik till the end of the programme. It was 3.30 am in the morning. All the people who came were there till the end. Overall the concept was good. Getting so many people together to watch films to understand one another, to bring about some change in people, to look at people’s fears…sorrow….etc. The live telecast could have been watched sitting at home also…. but the point is to watch the movies along with everyone and that’s what this pangeaday is all about.
And lastly about the movies……most of them were interesting except a few . The ones I liked the most are Dancing Queen, Elevator Music, I remember Lebanon, Inja (Dog), J’Attendrai Le Suivant (I’ll Wait for the Next One), Pale Blue Dot, Papiroflexia, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, Silli (The Slap), The Americana Project : Cuba, The Ball, WalleyBall. The whole list of the movies can be found here.
I sincerely wish that more of such events should be held. Maybe they might not change the world immediately but the point is that atleast people would start thinking and that’s what is required. After all the whole event was the result of a single person’s wish and it brought so many people together at the same time. Imagine what can be done if everyone of us would start thinking.
5 comments May 11th, 2008
Till now I was using picasa to create the web albums and then was uploading the album on my server. But atlast I decided to go for gallery as I will be getting more features with it. I will be getting a lot of features like allowing users to add comments, add descriptions to the photos, providing slideshows, creating new user accounts (users can upload their photos on my server)and many more. So, installed gallery on my web server yesterday. The first album uploaded through gallery is my shar trip album.
You can check out the gallery here. The link to the gallery can also be found in the sidebar on the right side (My Gallery) and also in the Photo Album page on the top. Will be writing my shar experiences soon.
Add comment May 11th, 2008
Heard about this pangea day a lot but never actually looked into the details. The concept looked interesting to me. Check out the details of pangeaday in bangalore here. The inspiration behind this pangea day is this TED talk by Jehane Noujaim…..the winner of 2006 TED prize. Planning to be there this saturday.
4 comments May 9th, 2008
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Aug | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
