Back Again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Always figuring out ways to amuse my two months old boy, he laughs at me when I try to scare him out.... lot of things to be written... hoping a better script :)

Few pictures of my new cam

These pictures came out as a surprise given my level of expertise with photography.
Camera :- Canon SX10 IS

Canon SX10 IS

Guess what, This is chennai

Daddy's Recession

Watch this, A Daddy explains an economic meltdown to his son in his own funny way

Curious Face of Benjamin Button

From cradle to the grave , born as on old man, growing towards Youth, enacted by a single man.... Really curious, the face of older Brad Pitt is completely Digital....

for all those noobs who know much of Slum Dog Millionare due to oversold Indian slums, this is a movie which got its share of oscars, really intriguing...

Predictable Irrationality over Chapatis!!!

Being adept at myself being a guinea pig for my wifes dangerous culinary experimentations which might lead me almost to an irresistible instinct to disapparate, let me explain the concept of predictable irrationality. Predictable irrationality is

When you face a situation of eating neolithic chapatis, you are bound by your reactional mind to shy away from them, then you look at your wife, who looks at you, which says it all-How much pain she had endured in making those chapatis really neolithic, and you are bound to eat them, even your rational mind prefers other alternatives by doing a Cost benefit analysis on getting a mouth ache or breaking some of your teeth, considering the even more cost of soothing her.

Here is one more serious example:

When your company gives you gifts such as a company branded bag, even though you dont need it, you line up for the gift, which many of you think as completely rational, because you may think that the bag may come in handy some times later and refusing the bag may result in unfavourable opinion from your bosses or even your Peers.

Reverberations

vizhi moodi yosithaal angeyum vandhaai munne munne
Thaniyaga pesidum santhosam thandhaai penne penne

W. Review

While S.D Millionaire was iced with bollywood masala, well , this movie must be first of its kind the Academy awards selection committee have seen, W. is all set to be for the awards. My expectations rose with the release of the movie W. while Bush was still at the seat. Ambitious enough for Oliver Stone.
The movie is all about the rise and fall of George W. Bush, the Junior. My expectation was high as Oliver stone had taken the biopic of a man who had lived the most eventful life, one has to admit. I was little sceptc that this movie could end up as another biopic mulling around the characterisation of Bush. It wasn't.
The story starts with Bush's fraternity days in Yale, and traces his carefree alcoholism to Harvard and his patch job at Oil refinery. to a born again christian whose belief in religious destiny leads him to the top job. This story every one knows, what interested me is the characterisation of his circus at the white house with Dick cheney as the monster manipulating him into the Iraq war, constantly sitting on his shoulders. i couldn't stop laughing when I saw the conoleeza rice character. She was meek and had a subdued in the inner circle, was it made purposely or the characterisation was wrong. I wonder the real condoleezza is what as shown!!!!
The movie was made for one purpose, that is to denounce Bush. Even little nuances like the camera closing on the Bush highliting his (bad) mannerisms like picking food specks by hand from his mouth, taking out the salad from the sandwich, eating lot of crackers, was not missed.
When Bush senior wins the Iraq war, and stops stops with that, W reveals his true nature, he insists on getting saddam, which he does when he comes to power.. the world's leadership at the hands of a man who takes everything personal.... really frightening. When post Iraq war casualties mount, he starts quesioning about the real existence of the WMD, the real reason behind the invasion ( he he). and nobody knows who is responsible for tracking WMDs, and every one starts the finger pointing. Really scary to think if this is the way the US government works.

IM in your Linux Distro

Google any IM client for Linux. E.g., http://pidgin.im/ which I am using on my Fedora codre 8.

Download pidgin and save it in /etc/yum.repos.d/
Then Run the installation

$ yum install pidgin

This should help.

To confgure the pidgin for google talk,
the following link may be useful
http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24073

Install VLC on your Fedora

I have always wanted to do this for quite a long time. My creaky CPU fan and the dwindling HD memory made me think of upgrading my system. Thats when I thought why not re install the Xp and the fedora.
This may not be helpful to my readers, yet this is for me :) i tend to forget things where i keep, esp the help files.

install VLC on Fedora 8
***********************

[deepu@localhost ~]$su -
[deepu@localhost ~]$yum update

You must be connected to internet to for the below two commands.

[deepu@localhost ~]$rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

[deepu@localhost ~]$yum install vlc


else get the source from http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.9.8a/vlc-0.9.8a.tar.bz2

$ bunzip2 vlc-0.9.8a.tar.bz2
$ tar -xvf vlc-0.9.8a.tar
$ cd vlc-0.9.8a
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

In case of any dependancy errors, install the dependancy first and try installing the vlc again. Anyhow, yum is the best way if you are connected to internet.

Most Comical

Do you believe this in your most insane mind? have a look at this picture.. not the SRK, the legal notice below. Since India doesnt have any anti spamming law, an Indian company follows US law!!!!? Does that mean an Indian company can follow any country's law that suits its needs?

Kudos to them

But little uncomfortable with the interview on the background of gunshots. Is the interview really needed when it is still not over?

I want you to take a look at : Terrorists aware of Taj lay out: Marine commandos

Nordic resilience?

I am in Oslo for the past two weeks and…. Oslo is similar to any contemporary European port city and…. its quite costly, given the limited(miserly :( ) daily allowance from my employer, I had to be very careful not to burn my wallet. The high cost of living in Oslo may be due to the landscape of the country. Being a northern Scandinavian country, I should have thought about this early, atleast my employer should have. Surprisingly the Europeans have thought of this, and my European counterparts have a higher daily allowance for cities like Oslo and Paris. Well, that could raise another question, and I do not want to raise an issue here. Otherwise, Oslo is a really an international city, and I found a little natives living here. I got a chance to visit one of numerous museums, in fact Oslo can be called a city of museums, FRAM museum, that holds the ship that had had made a longitudinal cross country of earth, reaching both north pole and the south pole. Earlier I wasn’t that interested, since I have a bad taste for museums. I had really contemplated the thought of writing a travelogue, hence I had thought of giving a photographic tour of the museum.

IF you know something or anything about Ronald Amundsen, you might have studied in your fourth grade, you may have something interesting here. The FRAM is a hardy ship built in 1800s, handled by two great explorers, Nansen and Ronald Amundsen. The two explorers are Norwegians, particularly Oslovites. What impressed me is the majesty of the ship.

The Transsiberian

Just happened to watch the sundance 2008 release "Transsiberian". The movie moves along the longest train route in the world, the transsiberian railway, from vladivostok in the east to the Moscow in the west. Much hyped to have some hitchcock touch, the film was worth a watch, esp. on a sleepless night. After all, I was used to the idea that snow(I am talking about real white snow, with all due love to my snow) is joy being in chennai, but this film gave me an idea, how cold and brutal a winter could be. Imagine being always in snow, clad with triple wound doubly knit sweaters, seeing faces as white as the snow itself, fighting off frostbite.... Chennai would be heaven even though the sun gets me tanned every summer :). Well, the story is about a young(hope so) couple whose marital life is on a bad patch, deciding to give a last push to make things better. So, they decide to go on a transiberian journey to Moscow,after their humanitarian misison in Beijing.

As you might have guessed, the story goes around the journey. The couple were joined by another couple, and a little KANK(Kabhi Alvida Na Kehana) going on for a while, except that the heroine kills the Italian seducer, when he tries to rape her luring her into an abandoned church. Then she learns about the Italian as Drug trafficker, who and his girlfriend were on pursuit by the corrupt police(Ben Kingsley). After that it's american guy, american girl escapade bravado from villains....
It is crap to compare this to Hitchcockish, though it has its own sharp turns. The movie keeps you always on the edge of the seat, even though you know what'd happen. This may be due to the location, ( a laid back lithuanian snow forest), which gives additional creepy touch to the cinematography(kudos to whoever did that). Some interesting dialogues by Ben Kingsley, who was not used completely, such a versatile actor...

"There are two kinds of people in Russia, one who fly up in private jets, another who go down in coffins"

"We have a saying in Russia: You can always go forward with a lie, but you can never go back."


p.s: This movie was released against the "The Dark Knight", may be that could be the reason why it didn't get through well.

rating: 7/10

Earworms

My wife looked at me like I am a some kinda plesocratanian, when I hummed this song



18th time, this day. Puzzled at my own behavior, got this word from google. earworms???
Some songs you hear, and you'll be unable to forget them for a quite a long time, start humming them umpteen times that your girl friend kicks you out of bed. Nicely said.. Earworms... the last time I heard this song was two weeks back... my list of earworms inlcude even the commercial of saravana stores. I pity Sophia......

Desire, fried, flat rice crepes, Papad, fried rice and lentil fritters

That is the literal translation of "Aasai, Dosai, Appala vadai"from Tamil to English, courtesy Krishashok.... Man, this one literally ripped out my stomach off laughters... Hats off man... But one thing... You missed those "Aiing", infront of those words.. May be you didn't get some in English for those.... :)

7 reasons why you won't get a raise this year!! I've got my 3

An interesting article was forwarded by a colleague of mine about some 7 reasons why you won't get a raise this year. Pretty interesting reasons, the blames were mainly on the concerned person, and his inability to act at the right time, like threatening his boss with other job offers with higer perks. One more intersting thing is that there was only one reason out of seven that blames the employee directly - " make yourself valueable to the company". I've got my 3... :)

To be sensible or sensitive: Driving in Chennai

After a long time I was scrolling through the communities I have joined in orkut. There was a community started by a colleague of mine( ofcourse with intuitive ideas of mine), named "Good Citizen". Pretty interesting topic related to Driving and I wrote them... I couldn't believe it...May be all drivers in chennai need to read this, esp. indicab night ghosts with yellow number plates

Never Let any Westerner

I knew it would happen... that Minneapolis Guy who attended my wedding reception had wriiten a blog about indian wedding, quoting me...$!@*$^, thanks a lot uncle Bosco :). One thing I noticed, his language was simple,despite his long long suffixes... it could be one of those priesthood virtues....


Indian Wedding Ceremony-noted by Prof.Edward Ulrich,Ph.D,USA

--online-attached-message:

Perambalur-Feb 2008

I spent the first two weeks following the departure of my students finishing up everything involving the course and resting from the experience. Following this, my first main destination was Kulittalai, a village near Trichinopoly where Abhishiktananda had founded a monastery. On the way to Kulittalai we stopped at Perambalur, the hometown of Bosco’s wife, Amali. There we attended a wedding of one of her relatives. This was the first time I had attended an Indian wedding ceremony and I was very happy to have been included in this three day event.

The first day was a gathering of extended family at the groom’s family home. There I spent many long hours sitting with the family. I knew very few of the people, but Tamils love foreigners and the environment was so different from America that it was fun to be present. One difference in the environment was that extremely loud music was played on speakers outside the home both day and night. Indians are very proud of marriage, and the music announced to the village the good fortune settling on the family.

The wedding ceremony was Roman Catholic, so I was startled to find out that the second day consisted of Hindu-based rituals in the home. However, I was learning, as I had been learning for years, never to be surprised in India. These rituals involved of arrangements of food and flowers, and anointing the bridegroom with sandalwood paste and the red kumkum powder. Although learning not to be surprised, I was startled again on the same day, for I learned that the wedding service would be held at 6:30 am on Monday morning! A wedding early in the morning on a Monday? That seemed perverse to me; Monday mornings are a miserable time for Americans, celebration is the last thing on our minds then.

Many of the celebrations were held in the local Kalyana Mandapam or “Wedding Hall.” These mandapams, used by Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, are huge, square buildings decorated with brightly colored lights. The lights attract one’s attention from a long distance, announcing the joy of the families. In traditional Indian weddings the bride and bridegroom are regarded as a prince and princess. Indeed, at the mandapam Deepak and Sophia looked very regal, Deepak in a dark suit and Sophia in a brilliant red sari and bedecked from head to foot with jewelry. The faces of the couple were very solemn, and bold drumming served as a continual backdrop.

At the mandapam the couple had to spend long hours greeting the throngs of family and friends who come to visit. The women wore saris with deep, beautiful colors, while the men wore white dhotis and light colored Western dress shirts. Whenever a family elder greeted the couple they would, in a rapid and fluid manner, immediately drop to their feet in prostration. The sight of this young, fancily dressed couple dropping so quickly in prostration before the frail body of an elder, dressed simply in white, was stirring. Further, the very loud drumming magnified the both the joy and solemnity, making it seem as though a royal couple from ancient times was holding court. Also, the reader may be aware that a common Indian greeting is to join the palms in prayer before someone. Though religious in nature, when I saw this greeting given by the groom in his suit and with the drumming as a backdrop, the gesture seemed very worldly and masculine, a manly gesture of fellowship.

I was struck by how well the western suit and tie on the groom looked with the sari on the bride. Traditional Indian clothing accentuates differences in manners and appearance between men and women, and the difference in clothing between Deepak and Sophia, which was a difference of Western vs. Indian clothing, accentuated the difference between genders. The long, straight, and box-like nature of the suit contrasted with the broad, loose, and flowing bride’s garment. Also, the dark color of the suit highlighted the woman’s bright red sari. The hair of the bride was tightly bound back. Normally I associate long, flowing hair with beauty, for one can appreciate the shape and texture of the hair as a part of the overall appearance. However, having the hair tied back accentuated the beauty of the face, which included high cheekbones and dark, sparkling eyes.

Who said a Doctor shouldn't wear a kurta on his duty time!! The doctor who treated me for my 100 degrees wore a kurta, amicable, but not his shot at my butt... one interesting aspect.... The relatively smaller clinic at the NGO colony road was opened by the governor of Tamilnadu????!!!!!