Thursday, June 11, 2009

RECESSION BLUES


Now at this moment of time you have the whole world talking about recessions,take-over,bankruptcy etc. But the problem is how do we know that recession is around. We don’t watch CNN neither we work at GM. We have no company to take-over nor a company to be taken over by our poor Indian government. We have just voted for a long standing government and we believe that it will take care of the recession in India as we have its leader a lecturer from Cambridge in economics. For us whether India is doing well or not depends on how our stock markets are performing and an occasional glance at the GDP. That too we only know its good if it is around 8% as China maintains that. So how do we the insolent, ignorant people, rustic from the backwaters of a Third world country know it is recession. Well do not fear cause the expert is here. Here are signs if you notice this around you know it is recession.

1.Your daily rag-picker carries a Satyam, Wipro, Cognizant, TCS identity card. No he is not flashing a style statement nor is he emotionally attached to the company. But he is actually a recruited guy waiting for his appointment letter.
2.You find a General Motors or a Satyam hoarding in your garbage. Or you might find your son using those hoardings as stumps during gully-cricket.
3.You find I luv GM,I luv Satyam coffee mugs, flash-drives, T-shirts at Sunday Bazaar, Revdi Bazaar, Mohammad Ali Road, Chor Bazaar and don’t know how many other Bazaars. Caution : The above listed products will not be found at Big Bazaar because Big Bazaar is one of the items kept for sale at Chor Bazaar.
4.You will find people writing more posts on blogspot. They have no useful thing to do.
5.You will find scraps from those guys that have never scrapped you or poked you or tweeted you , I don’t know what those mean but suddenly such occurrences increase and you say Whoa! Duggu, he still remembers me.
6.You find that your resume cannot be accepted at any of the company websites because their server is overloaded with them.
7.You find some guy coming in the night and knocking at your door and asking “Walk-ins chalu hai kya?”. This is insane.
8.Suddenly you find that there are youngsters working in all the kirana stores, mom and pop stores, grocery stores (sabzi mandi ,I had to be subtle), hair saloon (hajaam ki dukan, again I had to subtle) etc. You think the trends of the western countries are picking up in India where children for their education but one more look at the person at the grocery stores and you say “Yeh to wahi ladka hai jisne IIT clear kiya tha” And you are left to wonder.
9.You will find parents of engineering students exclaiming that “Mene kaha tha ki Mechanical engineer mechanic banta hai, electrical engineer electrician banta hai aur computer engineer dono bante hai i.e.(mechanic and electrician).
10.Sadly the author cannot find the 10th sign because he is a computer engineer and on the keyboard he cannot the find the number 10.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

ESPN STAR COVERAGE

Its cricket season again and we have some of the best tournaments coming this year. We all see our stars on the television performing their hearts out against different teams and they do entertain us.
However one unsung hero who goes unpraised often is the media coverage which brings such live action right into our homes, with some flavours added on their own to entertain us even more. One thing however that I noticed was that not each and every channel is able to maintain high quality viewing to us viewers. For e.g. the ESPN coverage is the most optimum and they have set a benchmark which other channels should dream of achieving. We have Set Max's coverage of the IPL and the world cup upto 2010. And I have to say their coverage of the game is the worst. With prematch and post match analysis populated by the "so called" celebrities rather than proper cricket pundits. You have experts like Ian Chappel ,Gavaskar bewildered by the discussion going on during the prematch analysis. Like what does the astrologer say about the match analysis. is there some rift between the senior and the junior cricket members. One other day I heard cricketers were not able to concentrate on their matches because of their faces being used on the advertising boards. All this tamasha just to degrade the purity of the game. You have Laxman Siva RAma krishnan sliding down some slides while a four or six is being hit. You cannot see what happened to the last and the first ball, because of silly ads being thrown in. You don't what happened to the last ball of the match and hence have to wait for the limca girl to stop hopping and dancing around to know the result of the game. Steve Waugh a legend once commented that Indian coverage of the game was unwatchable.
However one can be assured of the quality offered by the ESPN coverage with ball by ball replay with greats like Wessels, Shastri, Gavaskar,Hadlee in com-box talking serious cricket instead of fake celebrities.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Pakistan old script new cover

Last week with the release of the Lakshar-e-Toiba chief Sayeed, Pakistan has once again shown how indifferent it can be on its set of policies. Even after so many attacks by the militants in Lahore and other major Pakistani cities, still it has not learnt the lesson. And the lesson is to stop sheltering terrorism on its homeland. And as it stands the attacks that have been made have been on religious shrines and other such holy places. Just yesterday a bomb blasts in Lahore killed around 40. Capturing of training cadets was another incident of blantant disrespect to law and order. All these attacks are again reinstating that Pakistan as a state is failing. Yes such chaos in a country states its on the verge ending its life.
But does such a state of affairs affect any of the world administration. Already we have U.S. drones attacking the Pakistani SWAT just to flush out the terrorists. The FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) are not in favour of such a move, because in the name of flushing out of the terrorists innocent victims are the one being hit.
Even in such state of affairs Pakistan is releasing international terrorist for lack of sufficient proof. Such blatant disregard to the constant efforts by the Indian government to nail such terrorist are another chapter in Indo-PAk deaing with terrorism.
Instead of looking at this grave situation and the turmoil being built by them, they are more concerned with India's hand in shifting the Champions Trophy from Pakistan and into India. I think they are forgetting the attacks on the Sril-Lankan Cricket team just recently. All and all if such state of affairs continue then it would be not long before we see Afghan like Pakistan.

Friday, June 5, 2009

BING VS GOOGLE :WOLFRAM ALPHA

The name suggests it and it is quite right that BING is not Google.Bing the newest search engine developed by the evil Microsoft Corporation who intend only to do evil Yeah that is right MS has again tied quite shamefully google’s method of earning money that is placing no advertisements on their homepage of bing. It has done nothing new to enhance searching capabilities of Google. It is the same thing it is like you are seeing two same results on both Google and Bing. Yeah there is no difference between the search results of Bing and Google. I think that Bing has a provided a Bing like interface with some really poor design and behind that dirty interface they have secretly kept a Google link. By seeing its results by the search engine it seems the same. Again Bing has added some really stupid features to prove its genuinity first of all it has added in the images section the history or extra details for the search term. Then the maps is almost the same. One another thing that I noticed about Bing is that it takes an awful lots of time to get loaded. I don’t what is the reason behind it but the coders forgot the slow modem testing thinking that it is an extinct variety.

After Bing another new and recent opening is the Wolfram Alpha the computing engine. Basically people have mistaken this for another search engine. But actually it is a search engine with some serious computing power and huge amount of statistical results. For e.g. if you want to know the population of a country then in Google we get the link to the particular information, but not so in WolframAlpha,it directly gives you the required information. By the way its name suggests it to be some Nazi secret project but actually it is of its creator. It has awesome computing power where you can get anything related to numbers done. You can enter equations get conversions, graphs and other sort of mysterious information required by high end experts I suppose.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

T20 Analysis-Team Australia



The Australians could be the surprise underdog in this years T20. Not that the Australians are ever labeled as the underdogs in any tournament but a quick look at their team formation and we can see that they are not the favourites that they are always so used to. First of all they have not found a potent opening combination since the departure of Hayden and Gilchrist. Although they have found some respite in Haddin and Clarke. But both are essentially middle-order specialists whom I doubt would be as successful as their previous kings. Haddin is essentially a straight down the ground hitter who is good in clearing the in-field during the power-plays.Clarke will essentially play the anchor role with others. Then comes their real strength their explosive middle order, here is where the tournament will be won and lost for them. They have classy Ponting to begin with,followed by the explosive Andrew Symonds who is already looking in ominous form during the recent IPL. They have the Hussey brothers who can manuoevere and use the handle to good effect.Then comes their selection dilemma between Watson and Hopes.Both are equally destructive and chances are that both of them will be played at the cost of mostly David Hussey,the Victorian bomber. Then comes their bowling line-up which is mostly uni-dimensional and pace oriented. Except for Bracken all the others are fast and furious who can hit the deck hard without too much lateral movement ,which could be a case of not exploiting the English conditions to the full. Lee has struggled on the English pitches because of his failure to use the Kookaburra balls. Moreover Johnson would be their only potent attack,who too is relatively inexperienced. The major problem that Australia faces in the bowling department is absence of a quality spinner. This could be a chink in their armour as far as I am concerned. As we have seen that spinners even part-timers have an important role to play in this format. Last year when Yuvraj went on a rampage against them in the semi-finals the absence of a quality spinner hurt them, as Yuvraj was pulling their hit-the-deck hard kind of bowlers over midwicket with relative ease.

Although the Australians do seem to be an underdog, but in T20 format it is not bad to have that tag, because as we have seen from our past experiences that it’s the cup of the underdogs.Hence this could be a blessing in disguise for Ponting and his men who would be in real pressure situation this time around, because the Australians don’t like their trophy section to seem empty.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

BARACK OBAMA MR. PERFECT

Its been more than 100 days for the President of USA and we have found out that the guy is impenetrable. Not that he boasts of some of the best security in town.But he has a certain demenaour with him that makes him a strange man to talk about. The reason I am saying this is that after so many days in the office not many have been able to make fun of him. Yes that's right try hard think hard and tell me the last time that Obama was made fun of. Not that America consists of some guys with the dryest sense of humour,but yeah its true that its hard to make fun of the President.

If you see during the Bush era everyone was taking potshots at the President. He I think was the most made fun of guy in the entire U.S. presidential legacy. I think some of the comedians earned their living by making fun of Bush. I think along with recession these guys are also facing hard time. That was because Bush was the most unpredicatable caricatture that a cartoonist named God could ever draw. No one can know what he was upto at the very next moment. At the very extreme is Obama, he is the boring, perfect kind of a guy, whom political satirist hate.He is very much like the common man who leads a boring well planned life with his pension secure.

They say its hard to rob an honest guy,similarly its the most difficult thing to amke fun of a simple dwon to earth guy who knows what he is doing.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Australia's racist turn

With the recent attacks on Indians on Australian soil one has to wonder why the hell are the Indians being the constant targets of racist groups. Whether it’s the English, Americans, and now the Australians. We are the butt of so many jokes which are not taken seriously but still if there is a joke, there is some feeling of resentment that is hiding its ugly face inside. I think now it’s the time that the Indians instead of holding silly peace rallies in foreign countries and ranting same old reasons for attacks like we better than the foreigners and they being jealous of us, look ourselves in the mirror and give ourselves a dress rehearsal to ourselves.

If we are so better than those foreigners then why do we leave India in the first place and work for those racist pigs. If you are so brilliant then use it in India you will earn far more respect in India than all those dollars can ever buy. Today if a guy prefers to work in India he is called a rustic, a man who does not have the guts to leave his home a man who is afraid to leave his house and who thinks small. If that is the case my dear friend if you are so enterprising, daring and extrovert why don’t you choose to set up a company of your own and make an acquisition of a foreign firm instead of licking somebody who thinks that all Indians know is to set up a damn shop in corner and all he can do in his life is cook curry and get married at the age of 25.

If red tape is the reason which is stopping you from setting up your firm then stay in India and vote damn it instead of flaunting your green card of H! visa own a Indian voter ID first. Even if it’s a small step at least it’s a positive one. Why do you point your crooked finger at the Indian system instead of accepting that you are too afraid to compete in India because of the large amount of guys who think that Indian education is no less than a foreign degree? If you think that India is run by Babuism then you are the only one who is leaving it to die at their mercy, instead of changing the system we try to run away from it. If its reservation that is stopping you in getting into a college open a college of your own who is stopping and stop reservations and others will follow suit. It is far better than cleaning foreign college toilets just to pay the fees of your college. It is far more easier to open a burger chain in India than to serve burgers at Burger King and much more rewarding, don’t worry about failure ,it is better than getting fired from Burger King. It is better to walk on the unpaved potholed roads of India than paving one for the foreign guys.

However we guys are used to taking shit from the colonial days so it does not matter to anyone what the hell Baljinder is the one who got hit ,I am not that unlucky. Okay man then try your luck.

India defends T20 crown-Analysis

With India reaching England where the men in blue look to defend the title of T20 champions on English conditions. Starting from the first match against the New Zealand, then against the Pakistanis ,we could well say that the Indians are well on the way to defend the title this time around. But think as it happened to Manchester United last week the law of averages will catch up with Team India.

Lets look at the Indian lineup, On paper India looks like a world beater.But as we know cricket is not played on paper but between the 22 yards. It has explosive opening pair in Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag. Both have done well in all forms of the game. And especially both can be devastating on their day. Although gambhir has become a touch conservative but more effective than he ever was. For Sehwag he is the belligerent himself. I think this is the first time since the Ganguly Sachin duo that India is going into the tournament with a steady opening pair. Then comes the middle order with Suresh Raina the natural choice and him being in the most dangerous of the lot.Moreover his bowling exploits in this year’s IPL has made him all the more potent. India surely missed him in the last year’s T20 cup. Then comes the batting God that is Yuvraj Singh.God because on his day he can make hitting seem simple one of the cleanest striker that the game has seen since Gilly. Then comes our Captain Cool MS Dhoni with his uncanny knack of playing crucial knocks at the end and finishing the game with surgical precision. His captaincy has been the most talked about aspect about his game. A canny operator with him at the helm one can feel that India is never out of the game. He has a certain degree of Australianness to his game , is innovative and thinks on his feet which is the most important thing in T20 rather than letting things shape up he shapes things up for the opposition. Then comes the most dangerous finisher in this year’s IPL Rohit Sharma and he like Raina has found his bowling boots on this time and with his much talked back lift could give a real whack to the leather. The middle order ends with Yusuf Pathan as the big hitter taking hitting to another level but should be promoted to No.3 if not too many wickets have fell and less overs are remaining.

In the bowling department we have Zaheer Khan leading the attack not sure about his fitness, but if he plays he can be very steady in his attack.And moreover he absouletly loves England ,here is where he reinvented himself as the bowler that he is today.Then we have Ishant Sharma who is young but I think he enjoys the bouncy wickets more than the swinging English conditions where he would have to pitch it up. I think Irfan Pathan would have been a better choice due to his clean hitting but that’s upto Dhoni to decide whom he takes the gamble with. Then we have two spinners Harbhajan and Ojha vying for the single spot but I think the spot would go to Harbhajan with his new found technique in T20 and of course his habit of hitting the balls in the strangest areas in the field.

So unless India presses the self destruct mode I don’t think it will that much of a problem in retaining the trophy. However the law of averages might show its ugly head again. And one more thing please don’t give the silly excuse of burn-out in International stage ,these guys are professionals and not some 19 year olds to talk about their fitness.Moreover its their only job and I don’t think anybody can say tirdness is a factor in your job.
Site Meter