Since the 1999 world cup - when I finished my class XII exams and most eagerly awaited the tournament and India's performance - I have lost interest in the game. Match Fixing scandals, continuously erratic performance of the team ... reasons are too many why I no more follow the game with the same fervour as I used to. Yet - being an Indian - cricket comes in one's blood - and the blood shows when the team looses - more so because of no fault of theirs. The crooked cricket that the Australians play - full of frets, abuses and arrogance - takes away all the dignity that the game ever claims to have had. And to top that, when things refuse to go their way - they run like kids to their Momiee - the ICC and its officials. The way the umpires have not just favoured but been ' subservient ' to the Australian Team - the game has gone to new lows. Check out the last part of the 3rd minute. But the most unfortunate part has been the Australian Media's role of bringing up r...

"Benazir Bhutto Shot Dead" - as I looked at this headline on 27th December, I was shocked - though not as much as I was when I read "Rajiv Gandhi assassinated" way back in 1991 (I was just 10 years old then). The reduction is shock was not just because I had grown up and that Benazir was not a politician from my own country - but also because after Lal mazjid , terrorism has become more and more mainstream in Pakistan. However, there are some aspects of the assassination which are different from Rajiv Gandhi's assassination which make it much more worrisome than the former. 1. Ubiquity of Terror Agents - and failure of Administration The Pakistani Administration (namely the Army) claims that "[Benazir] herself contributed to the incident by standing [and] that none of the other occupants in the bullet/bomb proof car died." Which effectively means that the assassin was just waiting for Benazir to step out of her bullet proof vehicle. It seems quite unli...

I was musing over how popular are India-specific blogging services on Alexa - and here is what I found. The graph below plots RediffBlogs against BlogStreet and BlogPulse. Click on the images to see enlarged versions I have added BlogSteet [in Blue ]and BlogPulse [in Red ] only for comparison because they are pretty unknown services at least in India [BlogStreet is a coranking site cum blog directory (of Indian blogs) while BlogPulse is a blog metrics tracker (not focussed to Indian blogosphere though)] Observe that the traffic of RediffBlogs[in Green ] - is quite comparable to these 'unknown' services. Now I added RediffBlogs competitor O3 [in Cyan ] from Indiatimes.com to the comparison ... Just observe how the scale of the graph changes - BlogStreet, BlogPulse and RediffBlogs , almost vanish when traffic metrics from Indiatimes are plotted. Clearly O3 is way ahead of rediffBlogs - so much so that - if I were to decide the fate of RediffBlogs, I would shut it down! Link to a...

I haven't read a more classic piece since days .... Wah Manish - this is a classic post from you .... a sensational serial killer .... Six young girls had been murdered ... with their throats brutally slit open ... the girl had begun to doze in her seat ..... just how naïve and unsuspecting young girls can be..... ... marriage had been transformed into a dead corpse buried deep beneath a pile of painful memories ....  He should have thought of a better reason than that to get rid of me.... GO Read  it  ...

A Very Happy New year to all those who are reading .... 2008 comes along as the stock market soars, the rupee strengthens and people talk all positive about India. It indeed feels good to be in India at times like these, some 3 years after the slogan was raised - India is indeed shining. So in this mood, I allowed myself to fantasize further. We went to the Gateway of India yesterday and I found the place quite clean as compared to my last visit, no pieces of paper thrown away, little dust on the footpath and no horseshit on the streets (due to the Bagghis ). I was surprised - what had happened? I saw a few dustbins around, but people had hardly taken up the habit of using them - they were still throwing stuff on the street. Then what miracle had happened? This was when my eyes fell on the army of cleaners with broomsticks in their hands fervently sweeping the footpath and the roads, and dumping the garbage in dustbins. I immediately recollected that I had found the railway stations...

Out of 20 New Year Wish emails that I fired to my former colleagues in the UK (some of whom are now in Australia)- I got "Out of Office" messages from 12 .... the British truly love to be on leave during the festive season .... Something to learn ... to take life easier ... and maintain a work life balance!

A comment on Atanu Dey's blog . “Educate the elite alone so that the unwashed masses will be more easily controlled.” British built a educated class (bureaucrats) to do slave work for them. That worked very well for them. All they needed were dumb slaves who know how to read, write and regurgitate. And they did a terrific job of marketing. The slaves feel good about themselves and brag about it too, like so: “I work for the Indian Civil Services”. Why do we keep blaming the British for the state of our education? The concept of keeping education limited to few coveted 'castes' was preached and practised by Indians long before the British set their foot on this soil. And indeed, the reason why we have not been able to uproot the "flawed macaulian educational system" is because we DO NOT WANT TO. So many among our population still believe in casteist ideas!!

I should not have copied a complete blog post from another blog and pasted it here ... but I simply couldn't resist ... Atanu - please forgive my plagiarising Woman 1: "What is that little trash can on the screen?" Woman 2: "My son says that is called the 'recycle bin'. He tells me when I don't want a Word document anymore and I delete it, it really goes in there." Woman 1: "Why in the recycle thingy? Can't you just erase it?" Woman 2: "Oh no, Word wouldn't work for very long if I did that, I would run out of blank pages." Woman 1: "Why?" Woman 2: "Because it cleans the words off the pages, then sends the blank sheets back to Word so they can be used again. That's why it's called the recycle bin." Source: Atanu Dey on India's Development

I am at a client's office and there is one hot-shot who is shouting (on the phone) to anyone and everyone whom he is talking to - even worse he has kept the door of his cabin open to make the 'heat' felt to everyone outside. To one he says - "Its 10.30 and you are still not in office, when do you think you are going to start working" and then to another he says - "I have heard people walk in sleep, where did you get this habit of sending emails in sleep? What's the sense of sending an email at 12.30 in the night?" I despise such people (and companies) who lay too much stress on timing of work than the work itself. What's the point of hankering around the time one works as far as you get the desired results? Why should a company mandate work timings on its employees - especially in these times when most 'corporate' workers are knowledge workers and virtually everything works 24x7? I am thankful that I don't work for a company like this...

There were two articles in the Hindustan Times (Dec 10) which I felt like reacting to. The first one was a very relevant plea for attention towards sensibilities of the disabled . No surprize that that article is written by a Britisher. In India, we have become so used to witnessing misery, poverty and disability that it never strikes our subconscious when disability is used as a comic element in movies. I never felt anything watching the scene in Om Shanti Om which makes fun of a limping character? Some of you may argue that no one is making fun of the disability but rather the character - well I think its a matter of sensibilities. The fact that we find a disabled character funny, clearly signifies we do not feel any pity and definitely no compassion towards the character. I am not surpized, no one in the censor board noticed this as well!! The second article is actually a news item about Maharshtra Knowledge Corp - creating its own version of the Wikipedia. What amazes me is our h...