My Blog

These are my summer vacation days. These days I feel scared to tune in to any of the news channels. I mean it. If you closely look at the recent news : - Fake / Expired medicines - Expired food products - Unprecedented corruption at Medical CI. - Dantewada : 70+ CRPF man killed - Yet another attack in the surrounding place in a Bus killing 30+ - Mangalore plane crash - 150+ killed - Attack / Sabotage on Train in WB - Killing 80+ (as I am keying this) All of these have happened within a short period. And they have all happened in our own country. And we are experts at playing the blame game.  And the above list is only a very small sample of whats happening all across the globe. All the religions unanimously declare that, "God is Love" - "Anbe Sivam" . With my limited understanding I am not able to find any love in the above mentioned events.  Every one of them killed would have a family. He/She might run a business. On that many families might be dependent on.

Hmm... I have Windows XP & 7 in my home PC. (Of course Ubuntu is also there).. Of late my XP had almost experienced the near-death scenario.  As usual initially system was becoming slow.. slower... slowest... Then it reached the next stage i.e. whenever I connected to net the system got rebooted automatically... System became totally un-responsive...  Then decided to go for an efficient(!!) anti virus.. Almost decided a brand to buy which costed ~Rs. 1600 for a three users license. Just before the purchase landed on to "Avast" anti virus site. They say it is free for "home users"... As said in the first line itself  the problem was on my home pc.. so I am a home user... ha ha ... Downloaded & Installed "avast" free edition.. Made the complete scan of my machine... it has 320 GB hard disk. To my surprise it completed scanning within 45 mins or so (more than 2.5 lakhs files) ... I expected much higher than this... It was the first good impression

Well... May 2010.. We all agree the theory of evolution, still. And we do believe that we have six senses and therefore we are the most advanced form of creature. I would like to differ at this point.  A sudden thought, giving birth to this post.. (Would try to translate my mind-map in to English.. Lets see how much I would succeed) Note the title which is the compressed form of Plant + Planet. -> Pla(ne)t. As we all know the mother earth is shared by both plants and animals. (ya.. we, humans being the social animal!!!.. Joke of the millennium)..  Most of us looks at the plants like they are simpler systems than animals/ us. But if you think deeply, look at the power these plants have. They have the ability to "manufacture" their own food (recall your school botany class photosynthesis, chlorophyll etc.). What a magical power it is!!!! Though it has been taken for granted, think of a scenario if humans / animals also  get this power of synthesizing their own food. No

To make it one word "Wonderful"  is the right adjective to describe this book. Pallavi Iyer's (   Smoke and Mirros: An Experience of China )   flow of the book seems to be very nice.. (Though I  read the tamil translation by Raman Raja). "What do we know about China?... Nothing" is one of the few catchy lines in the first page of the book. China has been a black box for majority of us here. The book is not a simple travelogue. You can really get a feel of China by reading this book. Few things that attracted me: How controlled is China. Strict reciprocal to India. Chinese language has no characters to represent foreign names. Even names have to be "translated" to Chinese to represent. Demolishing most of the structures in Beijing for the Olympics (without any opposition) ... Think of the scenario here where even the smallest of smallest roadside temple demolition would raise lots of criticism.  Internal Passport mechanism to control the popu