Didi's comedy show

Here is a nice one which invoked a strong feeling of nostalgia. Didi's comedy show!

Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave

I really liked this one from Thomas Friedman. His analysis stops short of saying but gives enough hints that Bush's friends in the oil business are the ones behind the current carnage in the international oil market. Bush's weak policies are hammering the dollar too, which to my mind is the biggest worry facing Americans!

A good read!

Spam King hit by 6 million dollars!

Spam comes home to roost, or not! Read here.

Is It Right?

Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’
And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’
But Conscience asks the question ‘Is it right?’

And there comes a time when one must take a position that
is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do
it because Conscience tells him it is right.

~Martin Luther King~

Women without Cosmetics.....Naaah

My wife and I had our usual argument about the use of cosmetics. She loves buying them and I, of course, consider this a huge waste of money.

I wanted to show how she is getting influenced by the mass-media fueled hype of cosmetics. So I typed "women without cosmetics" in google image search. I got the shock of my life (or not!) when it dutifully reported "Your search - "women without cosmetics" - did not match any documents." !!!

Try it here!

There are three results as on date and all, sadly, not relevant!

Vanity, thy name is woman!

Update on 19th October: After this post, my blog is the only link that currently appears!

Ahhhh - :)

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
- Lawrence J. Peter

If you steal from one, it is plagiarism; if you steal from many, it is research.
- Anonymous

An anonymous quotation indicates you were too lazy to find the original author.
- Anonymous

Interglobe 2008, An MDI Initiative

Management Development Institute, Gurgaon and ESCP-EAP European School of Management, London are jointly hosting InterGlobe 2008 the first in a series of annual conferences.The event is being organized by students of MDI and aims at bringing together personalities from the corporate and academic world to better understand the current business trends and issues that affect us all. The theme chosen for this year's InterGlobe Conference is 'India: Emerging Trends'.

The distinguished Speakers at this year's conference are:

1. Amit Chatterjee, Vice President, Tech Mahindra, U.K.
2. Ashish Gupta, Head of Design, British Telecom, U.K.
3. Ashvini Chopra, Head of Private Banking, ICICI, U.K.
4. Mark Bretton, Head of Outsourcing for UK & Ireland, TCS, U.K.

Discussion Panel Moderator: Dr. Davide Sola, Director, ESCP-EAP, London

Further details are available at the website.

Date of the event : 19th June

Official Website : www.interglobemdi.com

....then why does it feel so complete?

The last line really touched me!

"There are more than than one hundred different types of atoms, from lightweights like hydrogen and helium through welterweights like tin and iodine and out to such mumbling mooseheads as ununpentium and ununquadium, but they're all much the same nearly nil size. You can fit more than three atoms in a nanometer, meaning it would take 10 to the 13th power, or ten trillion of them, to coat the disk of our pinhead. And the funny thing about an atom is that its outlandish smallness is still too big for it: almost all of its subnanometer span is taken up by empty space. The real meat of an atom is its core, its nucleus, which accounts for about 99.9 percent of an atom's matter. When you step on your bathroom scale, you are essentially weighing the sum of your atomic nuclei. If you could strip them all from your body, go on a total denuclear diet, you'd be down to about twenty grams, the weight of four nickels, or roughly the weight of the doornail that you would be as dead as.

"Those remaining twenty grams belong to your electrons, the fundamental particles that orbit an atom's nucleus. An electron has less than 1/1,800 the mass of a simple atomic nucleus. ... Viewed from the more impressive angle of volumetrics, we see that, while the nucleus may make up nearly all of an atom's mass, ... it takes up only a trillionth of its volume.

"Here it is worth a final reversion to metaphor. If the nucleus of an atom were a basketball located at the center of Earth, the electrons would be cherry pits whizzing about in the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere. Between our nuclear [basketball] and the whizzing pits, there would be no Earth: no iron, nickel, magma, soil, sea, or sky, ... nothing, literally, to speak of. ... We live in a universe that is largely devoid of matter. Yet still the Milky Way glows, and still our hemoglobin flows, and when we hug our friends, our fingers don't sink into the vacuum with which all atoms are filled. If in touching their skin we are touching the void, why does it feel so complete?"

Natalie Angier, The Canon, Houghton Mifflin, 2007, pp. 85-86.

From Delanceyplace.com

Watch Sholay

Watching movies is fun, isn't it? And if they are free then even better :-) - Sholay on the net, free!

Closets

There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton restless.
-Anonymous
(Courtsey Mountainwings)

Hmm....thought provoking !

Candor affected is a dagger concealed.
-- Marcus Aurelius

The 10 most bizzare experiments of all time!

Oh! This list is sickening and fascinating at the same time. Do Read!

Can Engineers be Touch-Feely

An article by Chetan Bhagat.

==
I remember the incident - I was in a restaurant, and one girl in our group was especially charming. So I, like any other male, tried to put on a wooing act and it seemed to be working.

She leaned forward when she spoke to me, and every now and again, we'd have a small conversation of our own, separate from our group. She laughed at my approach with the fork and knife, and I teased her about her hair band, which had little teddy bears. Yes, we were flirting. A while later, she asked me the question - what did I study? I said engineering, without any particular meaning attached to it. And then like a cold metal rail, she went stiff.

My jokes weren't funny any more. Her eyes wandered to everyone else. What was it?

Why? Why? Why?

Two days later, I still couldn't get over my great start that had dissipated listlessly upon mentioning my education. Engineer? What was wrong with that? My mom had wanted me to become one since I was five!

I had to call her. 'So what happened to you that day, hot and cold, missie?' And then she said, trying to be nice, 'Well, it's just that I am skeptical about engineers as friends. I don't know, they can be, you know, very logical and everything...not very touchy feely'.

Not touchy-feely. Now what the heck did that mean? Well, she obviously did not mean it literally, since girls don't really suggest that sort of stuff, certainly not in the first meeting across the table. I guessed it was something to do with feelings, sort of having an emotional side. The stereotype being, the nerdy guy who sees relationships like laws of physics, to whom love is just a bunch of chemicals going crazy in your brain, and getting to know a person means obtaining their bio-data.

It's time to set the record straight.

It's true that a lot of what engineers study (and they end up studying quite a lot), has to do with formulaes, laws and numbers. No matter how hard we try, some of the vocabulary we read all day gets into our language. So when my mother said, 'Are you getting married next year or not?' I was liable to say, 'Well, at this moment in time, the probability is relatively low,' and felt it was completely normal to say it. And when my sister went sari shopping and couldn't explain the shade she wanted, I told the shopkeeper the percentages of pink, orange and red in the sari.

Yet, ladies, I don't think we're bad at relationships, love and getting to know people. We too, can be touchy-feely, as that is part of our education as well. The reason for this is that most engineering students live in the ultimate educator - boy's hostels. Now, let me explain how this plays into this 'touchy-feely' thing.

Relationships. Imagine eating, sleeping, brushing your teeth, bathing (ok rarely this one) and partying with the same people all the time. So, when you are kicking that bathroom door down for the tenth time, or when you stand in line for 'gulab-jamuns' in the mess, and when you are done with the vodka bottle and sharing all your secrets, you know it is good practice. Yes, hostels maketh the man.

So, next time you are in a flirtatious situation with the techno types, go on, flirt a bit more. Of course, I am biased towards my kind, but if you find the conversation turning too geeky, just ask them, 'So, what were your hostel days like?' and chances are, you'll see a heart behind the calculator. Coming back to my missie, I thought of what would make me win her over. Flowers... too cheesy. Music... don't know her taste (nor trust mine). Teddy bears... don't even go there. Desperate for some good lines, I just turned it right back at her. 'Yes, I know what you are saying about engineers. The thing is, unless people with depth like you start hanging out with us, we won't get any better. Can you meet me some time for some touchy/feely...oops, I mean coffee/tea?'

She giggled. When they giggle,you have won.

Hence proved.

Man and Woman

A man is a person who, if a woman says, "Never mind, I'll do it myself"; lets her.

A woman is a person who, if she says to a man, "Never mind, I'll do it myself," and he lets her; gets mad.

A man is a person who, if a woman says to him, "Never mind, I'll do it myself," and he lets her and she get mad; says, "Now what are you mad about?"

A woman is a person who, if she says to a man, "Never mind, I'll do it myself," and he lets her and she get mad, and he says, "Now what are mad about?" says, "If you don't know I'm not going to tell you."

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS JEWISH
He went into his father's business
He lived at home until he was 33
He was sure his Mother was a virgin,
and his Mother was sure he was God

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS IRISH
He never got married
He was always telling stories
He loved green pastures

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS PUERTO RICAN
His first name was Jesus
He was bilingual
He was always being harassed by the authorities

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS ITALIAN
He talked with his hands
He had wine with every meal
He worked in the building trades

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS BLACK
He called everybody "brother"
He liked Gospel
He couldn't get a fair trial

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS A CALIFORNIAN
He never cut his hair
He walked around barefoot
He started a new religion

THREE PROOFS THAT JESUS WAS A WOMAN
He had to feed a crowd, at a moments notice, when there was no food.
He kept trying to get the message across to a bunch of men who just didn't get it.
Even dead, he had to get up because there was more work for him to do.

Parrot parrots parroted address

The title of this post is cryptic, eh? Well this article does it better!

Interesting

Interesting to read about the travails of an aspirant for MBA! Read here.

A photo a day

A nice blog article about an amazing website!

The Biggest Drawing in the World

Check this out - this is indeed the biggest drawing in the world! Some people have waaay too much time, money and waaaaay too many ideas. But good, nonetheless!

Another one on Bongs!

To choton, gulgul, khoka, laltu, gogol, tutu, bubu .... et al.

In these pages, I will attempt to alert people to a great injustice that is being perpetrated upon the sons of Bengal. So you thought they were wimpy to begin with.
Far from it, my friend. Their current state is a result of years of conditioning by the oppressors - namely the women. By using a variety of psychological weapons, they have reduced these fine men to what you see today.

Today we focus on the first weapon in their hands - the nickname.

When a son is born into a Bengali household, he is gifted with a resonant, sonorous name. Bengali names are wonderful things. They convey majesty and power. A man with a name like Prasenjit, Arunabha or Sukanta is a man who will walk with his head held high, knowing that the world expects great deeds from him, which was why they bestowed the title that is his name.

But it simply will not do for these men to get ahead of themselves. Their swelling confidence needs to be shattered. How can one go about it? This task is left to the mothers of these lads and is accomplished by the simple act of referring to the boy, not by his fine-sounding real name, but by a nickname which Shakti Kapoor would be ashamed to answer to.

There are some rules for creating nicknames, which need to be followed. They are -

1. Nicknames must have no connection to the real name. Arunabha cannot be called Arun. No, or that would be logical, and such things are anathema in the world of women. Instead he shall be called Bhombol. If possible, the nickname and real name must have no letters in common, but an ancient alphabet proves to be the constraining factor there.

2. Nicknames must be humiliating. If you are a tall strapping boy with a flair for soccer, an easy charm and an endearing personality, then you shall be nicknamed - Bhondu. And every time, you have set your sights on a girl, and are on the verge of having the aforementioned lass eat out of your hand - your mother will arrive and pronounce loudly - "Bhondu, chalo".
The ensuing sea of giggles will drown out whatever confidence you had earned from that last winning free-kick.

3. A nickname must refer in some way to a suitably embarrassing incident in your childhood that you would give your arm and leg to forget. If it took you a little too long to shed your baby fat, then years of gymming will not rid you of the nomenclature - Motka. If your face turned crimson when you cried as a toddler, you will be called Laltu. When you turn 40, your friends' children will call you Laltu Uncle. Even age will not earn you the right to be taken seriously thereafter.

4. Different members of the family will make up different nicknames - each more embarrassing than the preceding one. If one member of the family calls you Piklu, then another will call you Mitul, and yet another will call you Jumbo... The humiliation multiplies.

5. You will always be introduced by your nickname until people forget you had a real name. Ranajoy might have taken on a gang of armed men single-handedly, but Toton really didn't have a chance. After a point Toton will completely take over the beaten body of Ranajoy, weighed down by the pressure of a thousand taunts.

6. This strategy is surprisingly effective. Ask yourself - would you take Professor Rintu seriously? Or put much weight by the opinion of Dr. Bubai? Or march into battle under the command of General Thobla?

7. The power of the nickname has scarred the psyche of Bengali men everywhere. It follows them like a monkey on their backs. That too, a monkey with a flair for slapstick, that was gifted to them by their own mothers.