Well, for want of a better title I chose this !
Gajabhuja in Sanskrit means the trunk of an elephant !
So, in short, the title means big/huge fundas !! :-)
27 November 2003
well what do i have to write today ? hmm a sucessful completion of all my pending assignments/projects !
and my friend is getting married in andhra.it seems he turned revolutionary (according to his parents/relatives he is a misfit becuase of this but that is a different matter!) when he refused dowry.
hats off to him and ppl like him.only becuase of them can the dowry menace go down.
oh well if you were wondering what i am going to do well first there should be a girl to marry and only then comes the question of dowry right ? so let the girl come up first.the rest can be dealt with later !
but then i cannot attend that marriage ! coz i have a serpent around my neck called exams :-)
so off i go to fight with it!
K.Shyam
http://shyam.freewebpages.org
what a shame !
CAT supposedly one of the world's toughest exams has its question papers leaked.i am not sure why ppl go to such lengths to clear exams.after all they know they will anyway have to take interview.
i am not going to blame the accused people who released the papers.i am blaming the students who approached them as they would not have got the papers released if there were not a demand for it
(demand begets supply you see)
i think its time someone did something about this.
on a more personal front my brother (younger) is also taking the exam.
the last time he took IIT exam the papers were leaked and he had to give the exam again and he didnt get thru.
let me hope he gets it this time.
K.Shyam
http://shyam.freewebpages.org
a very bad start to the week !
after trashing new zealand soundly india got trashed by aussies.
well well since it seems to be occuring with regularity i wont write about it anymore !
and yesterday i finally heard back from my friend.had some problems and hence no news from that side for quite some time!
and i changed my mess from A mess to C mess.well if you were thinking A mess serves A quality food think again ! the food @ that mess is decent not great.but the food in C mess seems to get my vote ! a bit spicy and exactly the way i like it !
and no one breathing down your neck waiting for you to finish fast !
final semester exams are starting in a few more weeks so got to start cramming for it fast if i want to get a decent grade !
so i guess i better get back!
K.Shyam
http://shyam.freewebpages.org
ho hum;
back to blogging after a week with some sensational developments over the past weekend.
1. amma served notice on The Hindu and they tried to drum up some public support by putting it up in the front page in their newspapers ! so sad that such a good newspaper had to resort to such cheap tactis !
2. and india stormed into the finals of the cricket tournament.new zealand were trying to create history by becoming the first team to go back from an indian tour by not being defeated by the hosts even one !
rediff.com had an intresting line regarding that ! the line went like this : "new zealand wanted to make history.38 fours and 6 sixes later they were history !" nice lines.
and monday is my friend's birthday.wrote a small program to play some music on the system speaker wishing happy birthday.hope it is to my firend's liking !
semester is drawing to a close.got to start studying for that.somehow i have to manage a 5.5 out of 8 to maintain my image ! otherwise image damaged!
so shall get back to do some studying !
K.Shyam
http://shyam.freewebpages.org
ho hum;
back to blogging after a week with some sensational developments over the past weekend.
1. amma served notice on The Hindu and they tried to drum up some public support by putting it up in the front page in their newspapers ! so sad that such a good newspaper had to resort to such cheap tactis !
2. and india stormed into the finals of the cricket tournament.new zealand were trying to create history by becoming the first team to go back from an indian tour by not being defeated by the hosts even one !
rediff.com had an intresting line regarding that ! the line went like this : "new zealand wanted to make history.38 fours and 6 sixes later they were history !" nice lines.
and monday is my friend's birthday.wrote a small program to play some music on the system speaker wishing happy birthday.hope it is to liking !
semester is drawing to a close.got to start studying for that.somehow i have to manage a 5.5 out of 8 to maintain my image ! otherwise image damaged!
so shall get back to do some studying !
K.Shyam
http://shyam.freewebpages.org
i guess whatever i had to stay to newzealand captain was ultimately heard !
new-zealand managed to win thereby keeping the series alive ! otherwise the remaining matches would have become of no consequence.
got back to gym today after a week of layoff caused due to a shoulder pain !
and yes 3 weeks have passed since i heard from my friend who is currently now in us of a.hope nothing is amiss there.
and yes i celebrate a week of blogging !
champagne anyone ? :-)
and today was my ex-schoolmate srinath's engagement.though the engagement was happening at a place closeby i couldnt go due to so many other pressing works ! darn ! anyway srinath hope i can make it up by attending ur marriage !
K.Shyam
http://shyam.freewebpages.org
the wise say if you can't beat them join them !
i say if you can't make history start off by being a small part of history.
yesterday history was made when the last of the matrix trilogy was released here in bangalore where i stay.
somehow managed a first day first show ticket !
now for the movie :
i will not spoil it by relvealing what happens in the movie but one thing is for sure.the movie is not in the same league as matrix-1.
both matrix-2 and matrix-3 looked like yet another of those mindless hollywood nonsense.
the impact that matrix-1 had is simply not there in the other 2 movies !
just imagine after a hot chase a person picks up the phone and simply disappears.that kind of impact is not there !
worse matirx-2 had some amazing stunts.matrix-3 does have that too.nor the powerful dialouges.simply put matrix-3 is heading for a flop is my verdict.but then people will definitely see it as they have to find what happens to neo and trinity !
finally the movie ends with the words "asathoma sadgamaya.." reflecting the tru philosophy of the movie !
verdict : aviod it if you know what is going to happen to neo and trnity and the rest !
now to wait for lord of rings final part !
and india takes on new-zealand today in another day-night match.
things are not going well for the back caps at present with them not having won even one single match on this tour ! and to top is their captains outburst towards the indian board that things are loaded in our favour !
this is what i would love to say to the captain :
"hey man if it were do you think we would have allowed you to escape with 2 drawn test matches when even the mighty australians were forced to eat the humble pie ? everything is a part & parcel of this game ! what did your board do when it hosted the world cup ? small stadiums and poor playing conditions and what did your board do when india came there to play ? werent the conditions heavily loaded in your favour ? so stop cribbing and get on with the play and try to win some matches"
and finally news came today that my ex-roommate sukku alias sureshkumar kamalanatha ( phew ! quite a long name ) got engaged.dont yet know whether it was arranged or facilitated marriage ! have fun sukku.
ho hum yet another exam goes down the drain :-(
i guess one thing is very clear.
3.5 yrs of work as a s/w engg has really dulled my abilities in lateral thiniking which i definitely possesed before i came over to this industry.well apart from the industry i am to blame too ! :-( let me see whether i can salvage anything left before it is too late !
and today was a real good article that appeared in "The Hindu" (one of the decent newspapers that i get in my hostel, the other being indian express.to say the least times of india is absolute shit.as we say in tamil vadikattina kevalam ( filtered waste :-) )
tried to get first day show tickets for matrix revolutions.bookings not open yet.so planning to go tomorrow again.
this is another instance of the hype that is present in bangalore(more of that hype in the article below).
people pay 70rs for a theatre that squeezes your legs and forces you to sit in a cramped manner simply becuase it happens to be in the so-called "center" of bangalore.but dont even to bother distrub this good theater which is actually much better with lots of leg room and much better sound quality ! when will the denizens of bangalore learn to separate the wheat from the chaff ?
K.Shyam
http://shyam.freewebpages.org
this is the full text of the article, also available online @ http://www.hindu.com/mp/2003/11/03/stories/2003110301700100.htm
A bit, a byte, and a LOT of HYPE
For the rest of the world, Bangalore is the most happening city with its two lakh computer geeks generating Rs. 15,000 crore in revenues. But, asks ANAND PARTHSARATHY, why is life getting harder for the citizen?
IT power and IT.coms are not going to solve all of Bangalore's problems — Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash
BRITONS, WHO endured severe shortages of food and shelter during World War II, had to put up with the presence of thousands of American soldiers who took over the best accommodation and the best girls in every village by flaunting their wealth. This led a newspaper to famously rue that the Americans were "overpaid, oversexed, and over here".
Don't be surprised if the native Bangalorean, in the not-too-distant future, concludes that the two lakh computer geeks in the city — flaunting their doggie tags with the logos of the world's biggest IT companies are helping raise the price of a cup of decent kapi to unaffordable levels — are two lakh too many... that they are `overpaid, over-stressed and over here'.
Between April and September this year, the IT industry in the city generated Rs. 7200 crore. This is 65 per cent higher than a similar period last year — and, by the end of the fiscal year, the industry is expected to notch up between Rs. 16,000 crore and Rs. 17,000 crore. A good chunk, nearly 10 per cent, is ploughed up as investment in Bangalore. Of the nearly 2,500 hi-tech players here, almost a tenth are international companies and the number keeps growing: 78 new foreign companies came here last year alone.
These statistics only underline how dominant the role of IT is in the life of the city — and the sort of clout its top practitioners enjoy. We saw a demo of that a few months ago when Wipro chief Aziz Premji used a shareholders' meeting to express his angst at the lousy infrastructure around the company's new site on the Sarjapur Road. "We came here when we were promised a lot of facilities... now we are stuck in this wilderness and have half a mind to go back." Well, that's not quite how the suave Premji put it, but that was what he meant.
Last Thursday, the flyover at the Silk Board junction of the highway leading to Electronic City was opened to traffic. Seven flyovers built in two years may indeed be a splendid achievement, but while the latest might indeed be "on par with world class standards" as the Chief Minister said, this may come as cold comfort to the city's vast majority who don't zip through in their own vehicles.
Indeed, the last `splendid achievement' of this kind, the cable-stayed Garden City bridge on Old Madras Road, has made life more difficult for the local residents of Krishnarajapuram who have no easy way to get across. It has also reduced the railway station approach to a permanent quagmire.
Chennai and Mumbai are two other cities that went on a flyover spree a few years ago, but the population there (except for vehicle owners and taxi drivers) is not exactly beside itself with joy.
The Karnataka High Court was none too happy at the very concept of flyovers, particularly when each involved felling dozens of trees. "Flyovers have been discarded by every civilised country for the last 30 years in favour of underground passages, but our authorities still use half-century-old ideas and have so far destroyed 4,000 trees in Bangalore city alone," was the caustic comment of Justices M.F. Saldanha and M.S. Rajendra Prasad.
In other ways too, the high-profile presence of the IT industry impacts the life of the average citizen in ways that reveal insensitivity at the very least. Parking is admittedly a severe pain. So what does the Mahanagara Palike do? It installs hi-tech parking meters on Brigade Road, doubling hourly fee to Rs. 10. In effect, the taxpayer has to pay for the administration going hi-tech. Elsewhere around the central business area, virtually every alley has been handed over to private contractors to charge parking fees. Why is there perennial shortage of parking in this area? Because all those fancy high-rise office blocks prevent the customers of their tenant companies from parking within.
When these builders obtained their permits to put up these high-rises, one inflexible condition was that they should make provision for adequate parking. But who enforces this? In next to no time, the parking area morphs into ATM cubicles, STD booths, copying kiosks or whatever. And every customer for every tenant in the building becomes another burden on public parking space. In one such upmarket address on M.G. Road, they have gone a step further: all the companies in the building have colluded to charge Rs. 20 for their own clients to park inside the compound. This is a Bangalore-style rip-off that has been exported to that other worshipper of Mammon, Mumbai.
Granted that such horrors are part and parcel of any boomtown on the rapid track, Bangalore still falls short of the minimum that must be expected from a city that has pretensions to an international ambience.
As the city lurches forward into the competitive global arena, it not only needs to reinvent itself as a welcoming place for the world's hi-tech talent but also as a place where all her citizens, not just the IT elite, feel wanted, cared for and appreciated.
as i write this india is crashing towards yet another defeat to australia.and to think of australia has only second string bowlers.one this is clear : both sides are short of some good bowlers.
now for some important learnings from this match.
1. think with your head not heart.this is for indian captain dravid.it beats me to see sehwag coming in the very second over ! i would have reasoned out either harbhajan or kumble in the early overs but sehwag is nothing but easy picking.
now why did dravid bring on sehwag early ? simply becuase he turned the earlier match around for us ! in the earlier match he came into bowl when the ball was old and not new.
2. why does zaher khan get excited every time he comes on to bowl a big match ? too many excitement = too many extras !
3. why didnt harbhajan bowl around the wicket ? i always see our indian bowlers not change plans when nothing is working.this has always been happening again and again with no signs of change.
4. the professionalism of the aussies: ian harvey was an in form bowler.but what did the aussies do ? they dropped him placed faith in an unknown bowler called clarke who has played just 6 matches before this and the bowler responds ! how well he responds ? he picks up 3 very important wickets within a span of 3 overs.sachin,dravid and yuvraj ! this is what is called confidence is a player.
ganguly is the only person whom i know does this in the present indian team ! but unfortunately he does not get support from the selectors becuase of a screwed up zonal policy which says every zone in the indian country must be represented ! ( of course tamilnadu does not count in this but more about this in a later post)
moral of the story :
1. winning the toss in an india-australia means that team will win the match !
2. come back quickly dada.we are missing your agression !
let us hope things change better for the boys in blue the next match around !
one self learning from this match : dont trust the indian team to win or loose.they are highly unpredictable ! i postponed studying for my monday's exam becuase of this match hoping to see an indian win :-( but i see my exam going down like the indian team ! let me try to salvage it by thinking with my head and not my heart !
K.Shyam
http://shyam.freewebpages.org
yet another weekend starts bringing along with it the month of november !
a few months ago i was a carefree s/w engineer eagerley welcoming weekends.
huh ! 1st august 2003 changed all that.
here i am in Indian Institute of Science sloggin my backside out hoping that something good would happen to me once i finish this research degree !
the past week was quite cool.answered quite a lot of happy diwali mails !
and found out a good collection of tintin and asterix comics in my library :-) hope someone adds calvin & hobbes and dilbert to this collection !
i better get back to my hostel room and catch some sleep to be fresh for tomorrow's exam ! :-(
