This blog on Googleblog, apologies to my blogs and ponderings from Pondicherry

0.This blog on Googleblog!
1. Apologies to my blog[s]
2. Ponderings from Pondicherry
3. Related/unrelated blabber











Dear [main] blog,

Before the apologies, let me share a great piece of news with you. I think this piece of news should more than cheer you up. In fact, I have to issue a Coffee and cats warning[It is for the knowledge for such trivia that I find quizzing interesting to the extent to which I’m crazy about it now]

This blog had the privilege of appearing on Google’s official blog. The previous post appeared
HEREon the Google official blog. Make sure you clear all you cache and the refresh so that it appears in the page. If you don’t want to take the trouble but still want to verify the authenticity of my claim, here’s the screenshot. That was probably the best day of my blogging life. So much so that a correspondent from am leading national English magazine read it and contacted us. We should see an article soon.





1. Apologies to my blog[s]

Let me apologise for not paying enough attention to you. But I guess you do understand that you are one of the only two things that I take seriously, quizzing being your competitor for my attention. I agree I have not been visiting you often enough and not providing you enough with enough food for your growth, believe me I’ve been thinking of you all the while. One of the thoughts that crossed my mind was that I should give you a face-lift and make you more beautiful and visually appealing by changing the current template. Better still, I thought I’d show my love to you by moving you to a totally fresh place named Wordpress where we’ll be able to able to move much more freely and customize our home. Another gem of an idea happened to me when I was riding on the M-80 by the Pondicherry beach and it suddenly stopped because it had forgotten to turn on the petrol knob
[I was totally Left stranded on that boulevard. Thanks M/s Karat and co for protesting, but please let the media cover some other news as well. And please for a while experience the pleasure not seeing your own faces on TV and in the newspapers].


I must admit that I have a little difficulty in managing your family. For example, there’s your travel blog sister who I believe will get lot of attention now because I’ll be hitting the road soon traveling to four different Indian states in South and Western India. And I have enough goodies for your photo-blog brother, with Scott and Kate’s cameras. Also there is the big brother, the Movie Company blog – 10+3i. I have some real great news in store for him. Suffices to say that the documentary –de Young Basanti has reached some good hands and I’m waiting for a final word before I reveal anything. So to make this job of managing your family easier, I am planning on investing in a brand new residence for you all where all your other relatives, like my projects and presentations, my quizzes, videos, useful links on the internet can reside in peaceful co-existence. I will take some time for me to buy web space and a domain name and set it up into a complete web-residence for you. But I’m sure it will be worth the wait and the investment. [Could you please suggest a name for my web-site? I have thought of quirky.in, which sounds too informal and nikhilkulk.in, which sounds a little funny]



Ponderings from Pondicherry.

There are so many other things happening that I’m afraid of missing recording them here. That is why I call up Bharath and ask him to remember them for me. At a later date, I’ll sit with him and then fill in the details. Because I’m not studying anymore, which euphemistically means I don’t have much free time, which straight-forwardly put means I don’t have much time to waste[as it was termed by a certain section of ‘intelligent’ people in college] books, movies and music. That is why another idea struck me when I was looking at the Siemens hearing aid of my newestest friend, Balakumaran at the deaf school. The idea was to appoint Akshay Rao [aka Kaak, to whom I owe my ‘half-way between sanity and insanity attribute] as my literature consultant. His assignment involves, watching Just Books on NDTV Profit, reading Bibliophile in the Outlook and going through press reviews of books periodically and give me regular updates. He will gain by getting a share of my gyaan during our discussions and additional perks which involve gifting him a T-shirt or a book every six months subject to his satisfactory performance. I keep regular track of the latest happenings on the technology and business front, my obsession with Web 2.0 still continuing and my understanding of the Indian Politics is only getting better. I am in search of a sports consultant now. I believe it’s a good thing that I haven’t caught on the soccer World Cup fever. My belief is that I am now investing time in something much more concrete and having long term benefits. But my greed for information and knowledge prompts me to look for a sports consultant as I don’t want to lose out on the World Cup as well. I also need a ‘masala Bollywood’ consultant. Here in Pondicherry, we have people who think that there’s movie by the name Cheena Gaate, which on further enquiry turned out to be China Gate. So with no ETC and Zee Music and no Jita to discuss about Raj Kanwar, Sunil Darshan and co, I’m finding it a little difficult to keep track of the same. Positions open for this post as well. Any takers?

Balaji is afraid that I might have turned ‘good’ and Sajani Mrinalini Dutta wonders if I’ve turned decent. It’s a little funny because people tend to turn apprehensive when they see others become ‘bad’ or ‘corrupt’, but in my case it’s the other way round. It’s mostly the other way round in most of my cases. Maybe because, I’m sitting on a revolving chair and hence it’s the other way round. [Isn’t this testimonial enough to the fact that I’m still the same idiot who cracks horrible PJs and talks non-sense most of the time?!] Maybe the experiences that I’ve been through in this short period here and the people I’ve met have only made me more humble. They’ve also made me more conscious of the fact that heroes are not only the ones who make headlines, but there are innumerable unsung heroes who in their own ways have made people’s live better. This is definitely true of the teachers at the school for the hearing impaired. Trying to communicate with the hearing impaired is indeed a taxing job, and meeting people who have been teaching the gearing impaired for more than ten years and their passion, concern and dedication towards what they do is what reaffirms my faith in the human spirit. As someone who is decently informed of the latest technologies and has access to resources, I feel responsible in seeing to it that such gifted children and these angels striving to help them are provided with simple, yet efficient solutions.

Same was the case when we visited the Koonimedu, 10 kms into the ECR road between Chennai and Pondicherry. Read more about it on my travel blog, sometime soon hopefully.

The experiences there again left me with a feeling that there are enough resources available to help people lead better lives and definitely there is a huge need for better solutions for their problems. What is amiss is a proper ‘delivery system’, in biz-speak. I’m sure there are a large number of credible individuals and organizations working towards solving these problems. India’s problems are complex and are subject to various factors, but such experiences also spur me to do something from my side towards this cause. It might not necessarily involve reducing poverty or providing better health facilities or clean drinking water as a means to work towards this cause, I think my focus will be on knowledge and would certainly involve the small towns and villages. Balaji again wonders if there have been any ‘it’ moments during these trips that have led me into thinking like this. I don’t think that is the case. I have spent a better part of life in towns and villages of North Karnataka, and that experience has kept me in good stead all this while, helping to keep my feet on the ground. As I was growing along there was this urge to help people as I could identify with them and their problems. It is a culmination of such everyday experiences, rather than any ‘it’ moments that lead me into such thoughts and making such plans. And my biggest strength when I indeed embark on such a thing will be such experiences. There are some in the thought pipeline and some have come on paper, albeit in a very sketchy and a rough manner. Over a period of time, we will come out with something concrete and viable. What say, Bharath?!


Random related/unrelated blabber.

1. Good or bad, lucky or unlucky- I do not know. But I miss reading The Times of India here. When it Surat, it used to be daily source of humour, on account of some hilarious articles[read laughable reporting] and some sensible information on the Op-ed page on Sunday. Not to forget the free sleaze and non-sense glitterati news that accompanied it. I only get to read The Hindu. On careful perusal, it is proving to be too bland and blatantly Left for me. Getting up in the morning is one thing, but having M/s Karat and co staring at your face is not just another thing. Isn’t this what our grandparents used to say when something used to go wrong?! – “Whose face did you see first when you woke up today?” Now we know whom to blame when my day goes bad. But the funny thing is in spite of M/s Karat and co happening to me, my days have been great so far. So am I immune to the Left?! May be because I took the injection on my left arm!

I’m no big time BJP supporter though, but I’m annoyed with the usage with the word saffron with BJP. Saffron as a colour is sacred for Hindus and it not the BJP’s property as well. Somehow my impression of The Hindu as a ‘comprehensive’ paper isn’t quite the same now.

2. Scott and I went shopping the other day. Here’s our shopping list :

Businessworld – Rs. 10
Business Today - Rs. 10
Outlook Business - Rs. 15
Business Standard Rs. 4
The Economic Times - Rs. 1.50
The Indian Express - Rs. 1.50

and

The Economist - Rs. 150 (One Hundred and Fifty)
__________________________________________________
Total - Rs. 192


3. Thanks Sharma and Hitesh for the conversations, I hope I have returned the favour to Sharma and Hitesh, you better work on it well and learn your stuff at MDI well. I want you to be oozing biz-speak bull-$hit by the time you pass out from there.

4. Pandora rocks! If you still do not know what I’m talking about, check out www.pandora.com, I think I’ve almost perfected the Greenday station and with a little more effort, will perfect the Coldplay station. If anyone has some similar things, maybe we could share stations!

5. I think we will start on our full-blown trip from next week. Will keep people informed of our itinerary. If the two trips that we’ve had are any indication, I’m sure we will have lots of fun and adventure, more importantly learning and experiencing on the forth-coming trips. But there huge amount of work to be done before that to ensure that the trip goes on smoothly and we are able to spend more time on our documentation and research.