They see him rollin, they kidnappin....

This is hilarious !!

http://gawker.com/5848548/porn+making-gang-keeps-trying-to-kidnap-saddam-hussein-lookalike

Kalpana - A Short Story

Kalpana was disappointed. She felt her life slipping in front of her eyes. She was shocked to see her lose control of her life and the worst part was that she could not see a way to work out of it. She had never been in a situation like this, and it bothered her greatly. As she walked out of the room of the “Regional HR Head”, after a long and bitter fight denouncing the company’s HR policies, she was a bit shaken.
Like many of her friends, as soon as she completed a degree in Electrical Engineering, Kalpana joined a software company. Though she wanted to join a company in her ‘core’ field, she was satisfied with the opportunity at hand. Salary was good, the quality of work was good (or so said many) and growth seemed to be good. In particular, there were no ‘Glass ceilings’ for women in the software industry.
Initially, she was ecstatic to be the part of this ‘MNC’. The plush offices, competent yet friendly colleagues & an informal atmosphere were almost too good to believe.  The first 3 months in the company, she was busy with her training. As in with any training, be it with college or company, the boredom usually starts within the first half of the first half of the first day. Kalpana was no stranger to this, given that she was just out of 4 years of engineering education. After the training she was absorbed into one of the myriad of projects in the company. Her friends told her she was lucky because she was into an overseas client project. That meant an on-site opportunity, something of a craving, bordering on insanity, in the software industry. This should have been her first clue. Personally she felt it was a crude euphemism for bonded labor, albeit in a plush office.
Within a week into the new project, she became totally absorbed in it. She had to admit it to herself, though, that the work she was doing did not exactly require earth shattering intelligence that she expected. After the initial learning curve, it was gradually turning into mostly mundane, repetitive work. This should have been her second clue.  Yet she drove herself on, justifying herself by thinking that initially, maybe, this is how it works. She didn’t mind the long, arduous journey back home, nor the adverse affects on her health. She believed in the bigger picture, the one that paints talented, hard working, dedicated employees quickly climbing the proverbial ladder. As the days went by, she was becoming an indispensible contributor in her project, something, she felt, her managers recognized.
Within no time, a year had passed after she joined the project. And it was that dreaded time of the year, the time of performance evaluation. Kalpana, however, felt that she did not have to worry about anything. Though all her colleagues worked very hard, she always felt she was one step ahead. On her own initiative, she envisioned and implemented 6 major process changes and numerous minor improvements. All of them were highly praised by her managers and all of them were certainly noticed by her peers.
However, after her first performance review interview, she felt uncomfortable. Something was amiss. Her manager spoke to her about her performance over the year. She was repeatedly asked to stretch herself and the conversation did not even remotely touch upon her achievements. Kalpana mentioned all the extra work she had done, but every time she brought this up, her manager diverted the topic. Something was seriously wrong, and she was worried. Her second and final interview too went more or less along the same lines. The final nail in the coffin was her performance rating. She was rated as ‘Efficient, but can certainly improve more’. The most highly rated people in her team were, apparently, very close to her managers. Politics it seemed, had taken precedence to hard work. And because she trusted her managers, she hardly ever documented her extra contributions to the project. Most of her managers had only verbally appreciated her. She did not have any ‘proof’ of her hard work. Overnight, everything was falling apart in front of her eyes.
Not wanting to see her efforts  go up in smoke, she put up a vicious fight. She rejected her ratings and demanded to see higher ups. The fight went on up to the level of the regional HR head of her company. At every level, what she was essentially told was that her managers gave her a fair rating. By this time, she was fed up with the whole industry itself. It was quintessentially hypocritic in its nature. The so called ‘high tech’ jobs were usually mundane, repetitive pieces of work, just a degree away from clerical work. She certainly felt no one needed an engineering degree to do what she was doing. Throw a bit of computer training and some enthusiasm and anyone could pull off what she was doing.
As soon as she got involved in discussions to modify her rating, her project managers brought in her replacement. It didn’t seem that they tried too hard or waited too long to get one. Her replacement was already in training on the project.
So, here she was, just out of the office of the regional HR head. After the meeting, she felt that, in choosing a career in the software industry, she had made one of the biggest mistakes of her life. She was essentially in ‘foreign territory’, and as long as there were innumerable replacements for her readily available, she would always be at the mercy of the company.  She resigned from her job and made a resolve that no matter how long it would take her to find a job, she would never put her foot ever again in the software industry. With renewed conviction and determination, she tried hard for some of the best ‘core’ companies. After a year of hard work, she wound up getting selected in 3 top ‘core’ companies in India. She chose the best of the three.
In retrospect, she was thankful for her low rating. It was a wakeup call to shake her out of the well she fell into and help her carve out her career the way she wanted to.

After a long Hiatus

It's been a long long time since i posted in this blog. I've been busy with my other blog (http://code-nirvana.blogspot.com). I have decided to get on track once again and start updating this blog. Here is a run-down of things I might have done between the last post and this post.
1. Watched lots of episodes of Whose line is it anyway.
2. Watched lots of episodes of The Big Bang Theory.
3. Wasted countless hours of my life doing 1 & 2
4. Finally figured out how to turn ON/OFF household appliances with commands from a microprocessor.
5. Got red-hot angry at the UPA for simply arresting those who loot the country, but making no effort to bring back the black money that is stashed.
6. Have volunteered as an invigilator for my company's Engineer Trainee exam.( More on that later)
7. Wrote a short story. (More on that too later.)
8. Kept closely following Anna's hunger strikes, Baba Ramdev's mindless monkey business and all that is related to it.
9. Saw the rise and fall of JMR (J. Mohan Rddy)
10. Cheered for the hacktivist group Anonymous.
11. Closely followed the lawsuits big media companies are bringing against illegal downloaders.

Last but not the least have been mightily successful in boring you to death, 11 time over !
-Cheers.

Let's go to the Mall !!

The 80's didn't come to the Canada till 1993 !

Somehow, I love this song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF1b1pf9DRY

Things my father made me believe me.. #1

Way back in 1996 or so, me, my brother and parents used to travel to a lot of places on our trusty bike, an old Japanese made IND-SUZUKI. Now that's not the point of this post though, just a nostalgic slip of thoughts.

Once while on such a trip to an ashram in Jeedimetla, about 30 km off the Balanagar - Patancheru road in Hyderabad, we had to witness a small dust whirlpool. At that time, though, it seemed as Apocalypse Now to me. It genuinely looked huge and menacing. And it looked as if it was moving about with a purpose. My dad stopped the bike to the side and we all just watched. As always, my dad was cool as ice. The whirlpool looked as if it was coming towards us, then suddenly shifted it's course and drifted off into the waste land....

Back home, when I asked my dad what the 'thing' that we saw was, he went off into a long, overdrawn account of the supposed accounts of devils and evil forces in nature, citing historical and folklore references. At that time, I listened with rapt attention, as I was really into those stuff, back then.

After the whole talk, I had one question. Why did the devil in form of a dust whirlpool on a hot day in Hyderabad, motivated by pure evil, bent on destroying humanity and all those children who do not pray early morning and in temples, chose not to devour us into our deathly dust filled graves, but left us alone?

The answer impressed me much. My dad was reciting prayers silently, the power of which, brought upon the forces of good, from the heavens, with the force of a thousand counter dust whirl pools, on a hot day in Hyderabad, onto the representation of evil, bent upon destroying us.

I was so grateful to my dad, that for almost 6 months after that, I always brought him a glass of water whenever he asked my mom for one.

Good times.

I love my dad.

Good Bye Lenin !

This is my first German movie till date. I've broken my German-Movie-Virginity, and I'm glad I could do it with this masterpiece. Even though I am not related nor affected by the events in Germany that happened during the collapse of the Berlin wall, I could instantly connect with the characters shown in the movie. The single mother who is committed to the socialist nation, loving and caring children who, while battling their own issues with life, take all that pain to create an East Germany in the post Berlin wall Germany for their mother.

The strength of the movie lies in the way the characters shape up as the movie progresses. It's easy to understand the context of the situations the characters in the movie face, given the excellent narrative. Though the movie feels a bit dragged sometimes, it can be forgiven for that. After all, where do you get to see such touching films made on such subjects.

I'd recommend it as a must watch for any movie buff. Watch it in the original German though.

Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß are added to my list of favourite actors and Wolfgang Becker to my list of favourite directors.

Licence Raj(a)

That such a scam is happening in India, is of little surprise to many. Politicians in India, enter politics to earn money.

I'm not going to speak of the scam itself, it has been and is being covered in many leading dailies. I want to write about my calculations on the amount of loss that has to be borne by us.

The figure 1.76 Lakh Crore Rupees is being thrown around a lot. So i'll assume that is the loss to the public, and my calculations are based on that figure. If a more accurate estimate is given, i'll republish my blog with that.

So what does 1.76 Lakh Crore Rupees actually mean?

What difference does 1.76 L Cr. Rs. make to the poor in India?

1. NREGA - With the above mentioned amount, the NREGA program can be run in India for about 28 years.

That's right, with that much amount of money, you can keep the NREGA program running for 28 whole fucking years. Accounting for Inflation, etc, my guess is NREGA can be run smoothly for atleast 15 years. How many people does NREGA cover?

59619903 people. (This estimate is based on the actual employment given, for the year 2010-2011. If this is not the correct figure to use, please inform me. Source of the data is given at the end of this section.)

Almost 60 Lakh people can be given employment, for 100 days a year, for almost 28 years. Mind you, it's not donation or charity. These people do actual work, laying roads, cutting trees, tilling land, etc.

Source of data is here..

2. Poverty : At present, about 486 million people live below poverty line in India. 1.76 Lakh Crore rupees can give those mentioned above, Rs. 3000

Though it may sound nothing to me and you, 3000 Rs. can, be a blessing for those living below poverty line.

Source of data is here..

3. Infrastructure : In the 2010 Union budget, India set aside 1.73552 Lakh Crore rupees for Infrastructure development.

For every unit of Roadways, Railways, Bridges, Highways, Canals, Buildings, etc, one more could have been built, had it not been for the loss we have to bear.

And this, is including the usual leakage of money to politicians, contractors, middlemen, etc.

Source of data is here..

4. Military : We set aside 1.47344 Lakh Crores for Defence spending this year. That additional 1.76 Lakh Crores could have doubled our capacity of military equipment, ammunitions, tanks, guns, missiles, etc. Not to mention funding for research and development.

Source of data is here..

5. Education : 26,800 crores was set aside for Education in 2010. With 1.76 L Cr, we could have had almost 7 times as much to spend for school infrastructure, teacher recruitments, books, etc.

Source of data is here..

To TOP it all, the man in question, A Raja, under whose watch this scam took place, was not even questioned. Not once. Even by the CBI. The Supreme Court of India had to tell CBI to start questioning the man.

More stuff follows.