THE OTHER INDIA

Yeah, Gandhi bought(pleaded, infact... and Phirangi found no use of us, so he left) us freedom, well I can't say freedom, it is independance....It was BG tilak who did start it. The following excerpt from firstpost triggers a similar chord, the notes are different here, "freedom from netas". I cant metaphorise Baba Ramdev to BG Tilak, but Anna Hazare can be. Tired middle class wants no more Bofor, 2G, Ayodhya, Gujarat massacre, kashmir bullshit, ....but India as a better living place



It’s easy to be cynical about Baba Ramdev. This is the godman who giggles. He suggests doing pranayam and shut his nose after the Pakistani terrorists attacked Mumbai. It’s a little harder to be cynical about the thousands who have gathered in his name, the families that are parked on the ground, heads resting on a battered carry-all, damp towels and undershirts draped on the bamboo fencing.



It is, instead, chastening. An old man, in his seventies, with thick discoloured glasses, walks carefully down the aisle, holding onto to the bamboo fence next to him. He’s from Indore, he tells me. He has eleven children, two of whom have died. He’s come because he wants to make India a heaven. “Don’t you?” he asks me and hands me a photocopied pamphlet about the economic fallout of corruption. Instantly five people gather around us, anxious to get his pamphlets. The man beams. “One at a time,” he says.



One at a time. That’s strangely the most un-Indian thing about the whole affair. One at a time to fill your water bottle. One at a time to get your pamphlet. Standing in the hot sun, in a long line slow line, Indians do what Indians do. They try to wangle their way into the front of the line. A retired man, who now runs a school for girls, admonishes them.



“One at a time,” he says. “Go stand in the line. We are all standing in the sun. Brother, what kind of anusilan ke sipahi (soldier of discipline) will you be if you break in like this? We are not here to watch some movie.”





For most of us in facebook, it is "THE OTHER INDIA". Yes, the other india wants someone who can lead them, which netas and saffrons make use of..... and I write about this in a suddenly spiked nationalism, on FACEBOOK, and I go off to browse the internet about "how to become a PMP certified leader" :)

My Bike Ride

Planning to Write a miniature MotorCycle Diary :), well dont ever compare this with the real Motorcycle Diaries...

Plan is to ride on my bike to Ooty via Bangalore, Mysore, ...

Well, let us see..how for I stick to my plan...

Yayy!!!!!

I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog

Yayy!!!!!

I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog

Flash Player plugin on Fedora 12

Kernel:
[root@Samuel ~]# uname -a
Linux Samuel 2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686 #1 SMP Sat Nov 7 21:41:45 EST 2009 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

To Download the RPM:

[root@Samuel ~]# rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

To Download the Key Code:

[root@Samuel ~]# su -c 'rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux'

To Install the Package

[root@Samuel ~]# su -c 'yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 \
> nspluginwrapper.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 \libcurl.i686'

To enable the plugin, exit browser and start again.

VLC on Fedora 12

For normal steps, I followed the link
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-fedora.html

Encountered problem wth repo list in fedora 12...
Updated the following repo files
/etc/fedora.repo
/etc/fedora-updates.repo
with removing the comments of lines starting with baseurl & commenting lines strating with mirrorlist.

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