Sunday, May 27, 2007

Happy Birthday Amol...

So Amol gets mentioned for obvious reasons on the blog...

[For those who might not know, my tryst with blogging started thanks to Amol (indirectly of course)]

Well Amol (since you will be one of about 2 or 3 people who will actually read this, I might as well write in this manner- I think grammatically it is called first person?), it is good to see that you get new friends and fans as you get older.

Of course like I always say - you should still go by your first instinct :p

Anyway enough of all that. Seriously - have a great year ahead.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

R.I.P.

Shraddha
My sister's friend. My friend's sister. My friend.
Totally bindas, always smiling, confident, strong, young....I am sad we couldn't do MCom II together.
You will be missed...

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Sadho Re (Yeh Murdo Ka Gaon) by Agnee

The song is brilliant and the video is even more brilliant.

You have to check out this video (one of the best I have seen this year) -



You can also get the video and some information on Agnee at MTV - http://www.mtvindia.com/mtv/music/features/07/04/agnee/index.php

Can't put my finger on why I so totally love the song.

The lyrics are great - even though a lot of people think they are lame or corny. I think Kabir was a great poet and nothing about Sadho Re (the poem) is bad.

I mean just the line Yeh Murdo Ka Gaon has so much impact. I think it very aptly describes us and our world.

The music sounds different which is great.

The video like I said it totally mind blowing. That little girl is so fantastic. The best part of the video is the moment her ice cream falls and she starts crying. It could be that I am reading it wrongly but the man banging into her and making her drop her ice-cream is the final trigger to everything that has built up already inside her with everything around. She wouldn't have cried if something hadn't affected her personally I believe. Which is the case with all of us. We only really act / react when we go through something personally.

Happy Watching!!!

[So the reason I am posting about the song twice is that I realised that people are searching for the song and coming to my blog but since my blog hasn't had a deep crawl that exact post doesn't show up and lots of people find content they aren't interested in]

Friday, May 18, 2007

Yeh Dooriyan

Yeh Dooriyan
Ab hai kahan

Yeh faasle
Na darmiyan

Badla badla sa hai zamana
Khamoshiyan bhi hai gumshuda


The lyrics as I hear them. The song is also called Shakira Ve I think.

[Don't know if it's legal to put up this YouTube video of the song but the video is super cool too. Have a look]



Fantasticcccc song.

Monday, May 14, 2007


?

Sunday, May 13, 2007

You gotta pay the price...

If you are going to play a game, you need be careful when makes the moves you know you shouldn't make, because if your strategy back-fires, there will be a heavy price to pay.


The thought came first and then I got a very relevant 'narratable' example. I was watching a TV show a few months after the London train bombing, which revolved around how Muslims were being discriminated against in the UK, etc.
There was this lady who they interviewed. I can't remember details now but she either headed some organisation to safe guard Muslim interests or is a lawyer. They should her speak at a gathering and she stated that ALL of the current day Muslim woes are cause by the British. She named a few places / incidents, the history of which I don't know, and she also named the problems in Kashmir as having their roots seeped in British mistakes.
When I thought about it, she had a point. If the British hadn't followed a 'Divide and Rule' policy, I wonder if Partition would have happened. I have my doubts. So technically she was right. Now imagine if all the Muslims or even just all the fanatical Muslims started to believe this, I think the UK would be the first country to be nuked.

The British followed a strategy to get on top which was wrong - ethically I mean, and I think that some day they are going to pay the price. Till date we (the sub-continent) are paying the price but I think the tables will turn, and then a lot of people will not know where to run.

Anyway I think that doing some thing wrong for whatever reason, is a bad idea, always has been and always will be.

Friday, May 11, 2007

I am the worst 1st class (train) passanger

So I don't think anyone who has a first class pass would want to jump to a second class...but I do.

Why?

Cause today was the second time there were freakin mice running around the compartment. I mean the worst I saw in a second class compartment was a cockroach once in 8 - 9 months. Here I see mice twice on different day within a 2 week period.

So I have a friend who travels by first class and she says she has never seen a mouse in the train and I have another friend who has seen a mouse even in 2nd Class. I think it's pathetic. I mean yuckkkk.

And the worse part is, some of the women on the first day (it was much crowded) were so cool about the whole thing. As if the mice were like their own children running around. I'm assuming seeing mice / rats for some of them is common but it's not common for me and it's not acceptable by me to sit in a compartment where there are these little things running in and out from under the seats.

I sure as hell am not renewing my 1st Class Pass next month. The crowded second class is good enough.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

What a waste...

So you want to release your new phone in the market. It's USP you are touting to be 'thump music'. You rope in the guy who is considered the coolest / hottest dancer in the country.

And then....

You give him the most ridiculous dance steps in the ad. Perfect.

I mean everyone else in the ad (Sony Ericcson) has cooler dance steps. The only time I think Hritik was impressive in the ad is when he says at the end of the ad 'The Thump is here'.

He is even dressed horribly.

If all this was purposely done, I can't understand why. It would be a silly strategy.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Yeh Murdoh Ka Gaon...

Sadho Reeeee Yeh Murdo Ka Gaon....yeh murdoh ka gaon.

Fantastic song. It's by a group called Agnee. Never heard of them before. Apparently the song is one of Kabirs. Tried to google it but didn't get relevant results.

If you would like a listen you can go to the bottom of the mtv page talking about the video release and click the 'click here' link.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Shame on us...

We are such a great nation are we not?

Families of 2,823 victims of the 9/11 attacks got 1 million dollars each.
Families of the over 20,000 victims of the Bhopal Gas Leak got 1,250 dollars.
[Figures from Greenpeace]

This post is in no way trying to compare 9/11 and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. My point is about how we see the value of a life. It is not that the BGT victims couldn't have got more compensation. God knows they should have got more. But we Indians are super ineffectual when it comes to big, important things. All we do is make great speeches....

On the terrace...

So I have the company laptop...and it's with a data card...so I am sitting on my terrace and blogging :D

The technology of today is just marvellous and I believe the best is still to come...

I don't believe in the whole theory of machines taking over etc. While the instinct for survival has always existed and will always exist, I don't believe that for the next couple of centuries at least, we will see AI that will display such a strong survival need that it will start destroying even humans to 'live'. These kind of ideas make for great film scripts but I think that's where it ends.

While learning by seeing (I forget the scientific term - but basically learning behaviour and replicating, historical storage of data so as to adapting to environments etc) will most definitely be the way we program our machines to learn, I don't think you can fill 'evil' into a program / code etc.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

www.leelounge.com/forum

This site doesn't exist anymore but I am not killing the post because this post happened on May 1st 2007 when social media wasn't even something people were talking about.

The Lee Lounge Forum

I believe that branded communities and forums are going to be the biggest online sponsorship activities soon.

Communities are big and so is user generated content. People love expression themselves, love believing that what they do is seen by other people and either appreciated or debated.

Yahoo Answers works the same way. Actually Yahoo Answers might be changing the whole search industry. Imagine if you had a super specific query and knew that any resource on the web wouldn't help cause you needed a person solution. What could you do in the past? Nothing much except consult and expert offline and pay him if you really needed the info. Now all you have to do is post a question on Yahoo Answers and you might get just as good a reply from your expert consultant for free.

YouTube is the if you ask me, the most popular user generated content website. I do wonder how long it will remain free and I also wonder what kind of monetization Google will be able to extract from it in terms of advertising revenues. In my opinion, it will always stay free because it being free is what bring it so many visitors and users. More the visitors, more the advertisers will spend.

Sunsilk Gang Of Girls is another example of how a Brand is targeting its Target Audience but in a unique, non boring way. What is interesting though is that they have actually found a new TA thanks to the GoG initiative. Their target is now younger women, who work, spend more on beauty products, etc.

Anyway whats interesting is that you can have a free for all which is on the likes of GOG (with the exception of gender that is) or you can have those on the likes of the Lee Lounge forum that cater to a specific segment of urban youth, interested in fashion, movies, music and everything that's cool.

Idiots

When I meet people who are more stupid than I am, it annoys me rather than making me happy...