Taking a step...

Taking a step is the most important thing towards achieving something you want or overcoming a fear. However big, however small.

BSNL tutorial

Rainbow range of colors in the background
Yellow sun, using a rainbow umbrella to shield against blue drops of rain, holding a red phone and working on a purple laptop
In another corner, a gleeful & glamorous Deepika is trying to attract attention, but is hardly a competition with her monochromatic dress and décor
The headlines in 5 different font & color combinations, in vernacular language have just about 1 word per line which is actually a vernacular word, rest are all english words
In all there are about 9 font combinations, each highlighted in their own unique way through size, color, callout, highlight, exclamations and what not

Now if that doesn’t catch the customer’s attention, any clues what can?!

;)

October 2nd

This Gandhi Jayanti, for the first time means something to me apart from a holiday. While my reading of 'Freedom at Midnight' is coming to an end, it has given me an insight into the life of the man whom i henceforth was neutral about. To be truthful, i always related much more to the ideologies and methodologies of revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and the brave Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. To Gandhi, i did associate some negative thoughts like shrewdness, manipulation, pretention and double face. For most people, this shouldn't be an unusual revelation since such comments are often heard. But i realize there is more depth and resolve in the ideology and actions of Gandhi than we were ever willing to explore. It seems the actual Gandhi is too idealistic for us to believe in the context of our world and so we internalize the more believable allegations, while associating the 2 words - truth and non-violence in a very shallow and hollow manner.

Evoked by this book and also the repeated references given to the film Gandhi in our communications or strategy lectures, i did watch the film too. As a child, the film was a boring obstruction to us being able to enjoy anything on Doordarshan, the only known TV channels to us, on our 2nd October holiday. But finally, it made sense to me.. to use a cliche.. better late than never. Though i now realize it is impossible to capture the life of this man in a 3-hour movie, nevertheless, for a film it is very well made and intruiging indeed. I wonder why nobody has thought of making a tele-series on Gandhi. I am sure it can be made interesting enough.

However, i have to end this by referring to a quote i found while browsing for  sayings by and about Gandhi on wikiquote:

A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back -- but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

Can't re-invent the wheel :(

It was our 'Corporate Environment Management and Carbon Markets' class, i would say early morning... Just to 'set the context', this class is like an extension of the documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth'. Btw, if you haven't seen this documentary, i strongly recommend it.
So while some mention of renewable energy, small dams being built on waterfalls and oppsoition toward dams etc... i had a thought.

Why don't we use wave energy for generation of electricity? I wrote it down and asked my friend. She didn't react much. I wrote again... i think i have got a brilliant idea, i will be a millionare now :)
She said, lets google and see after the class. Now as i have already stressed, google is really insensitive. And so it happened... the idea is already out there!!

See for yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/14/magazines/fsb/nextlittlething_wave_power.fsb/index.htm http://www.wavegen.co.uk/
However, i do think this should be pursued seriously.

With the UPA Govt now gaining majority minus the Left, we could hope for action on clean energy mechanism in the form of nuclear energy sometime in future(At last, they'll do something!!). However, its merits remain debatable to many, so alternate options have to be explored for sustainable development(Yes!! This is an after effect of writing my mid-terms... forgive the use of any cliche jargon).

Life is quite simple for you.. I'll ask you how it looks, you have to say its good

So, here's the look of my blog before and after undergoing a cosmetic transformation:

In case you want to explore options for your blog.. visit freeskins.blogspot.com

Thanks to Iyer for inspiration for this change... though its a lazy inspiration, nothing close to his meticulously customized blog. Will sometime soon get atleast the side bars back there. But somehow i don't yet feel like adding any content here... thats why posting this in spite of it being an obvious change. No i don't feel like writing anything about the over-crowded place i am living in right now. Maybe sometime later.. gotta spend 7 more weeks here.

We are a moody bunch of people

I suspect my closest friends here to be an extremely moody set of people. I also suspect, that they suspect me to top the list of mood swingers.

Sometimes we are sad without reason, sometimes we are happy without reason. In the worst of our times together(read term 1 and term 2) we were laughing in the midst of seniors and committees making us feel like idiots, profs screwing us with projects, assignments and quizzes, and companies walking over our dreams of getting through them. We sailed through not missing on our long chats specially in exams, singing songs and mocking at one another's incompetencies to sing and remember lyrics. Sporadic walks, star gazing and head banging at insti parties. Whatever... we stole time to do anything we could manage to do in this schedule.

What is amusing is that what happens when we give in to all the pressure and actually start spending more time on our acads, work or any serious activity. For sure, within a week of this 'undesirable' behaviour, we will have wierd look on our faces and status messages to complement the same. On second thoughts, it wudn't actually be a fallout of working hard, it could happen at any random moment. Often this is a virus that infects the others too and all of us would soon be roaming around with long faces the reason for which would be unknown to most. A sample list of Maggu and Maggi's messages at random times is like:

'It ended exactly where it started from...'
'Third in a row'
'Sometimes... its best saying nothing...'
'Les petits mots ont tellement la signification...(small words hold significant meaning)'

If you read them alone, they are almost.. i shudn't say it, but comic- given the seriousness they try to put in a simple digital status. Or at least i hope so, else they are killing me for posting this. The problem is that they want to shout out these statements on the little space they get on our screens, but at the same time conceal what they are for. Is the intent merely to grab attention and keep people guessing to the extent of frustrating them? Yes, i was kinda bugged and still don't understand what is the matter with stating without being ready to explain.

Now starts the fun part. People start to guess the reason for the wierd gtalk status messages.. and considering the possibilities of their contribution to it. For example, my dear friend Maggi always has the most enigmatic messages and when asked the reason for them, she would always quip.. 'generally... for nothing/no one specific'. We sure buy that, don't we? Recently she let 'arrogant personified' be the resting message on our screens. Hmmm... well, i had not been spending much time with my musketeer friends and had few arguments in the little time that i did spend. So i was about 80% sure that i could the the object of that arrogance impression. Theek hai bhai, kya kar sakte hain. Shrug.

I left only 20% doubt that it could be some other story. But after some chance discussion with others around, it turned out that there were too many people waiting to grab their claim to fame for arrogance. Aditi thought that because she had just won another amazing competition, non-intuitively she might have done something to deserve that status. She said 'abhi to maine orkut mein pic bhi nahin lagayi thi trophy ke saath, maine socha rehne deti hun ab'. Gaurav too chipped in saying, since he had got through INDEX, he thought maybe in his ecstasy, he had done something that annoyed Maggi. Wah!! so we were all in our individual wonder worlds speculating whether we had been too arrogant lately.

Obviously, as always, we still don't know who the message was for, but i stopped paying attention to them and uselessly blaming me or anyone else for that matter for them. Now they are a source of.. YouKnowWhat ;)

Scratching to code and update about my now complacent nalaayaki

Here goes the pseudo code for an average performer's happy life at a b-school...

Keep(Expectations, VERY_LOW);
if(results==LOW)

I = Happy;
Life = Chill;

Declare(%s, 'A relaxed five point someone at last :)');


P.S: I would appreciate if my competent coder friends could refrain from comments on misuse/wrong use/no use of syntax.