5 Things I Learned During Crisis

I hope I was missed. It is more than three months since I have posted anything here. There was a crisis in my life. I may share the details here some other time, may be at a time when I will be able to look back into all that happened in last three months and smile at them. But as they say, anything that does not kill you makes you tough. It was a learning period, when you are in the middle and lot of stuff happens around, things you wish had never happened, people you wish you had never met. Needless to say, I lost few things, but gained a lot. The crisis is unsolved yet and I am in no way sure of the outcome, but as of now, I am at peace with myself and the world. I am in a position now, to look back at things and analyze them, though it makes me feel sad. I thought I will make my come back post by writing about few things that I learned during this time. May be you can use them sometime.

1.     Face the heat: You got two options when shit hits the fan- run for cover or stay and face the heat. You run from any problem, it always finds a way to reach back to you. But if you stand and face it, in your terms and your way, there eventually emerges a solution. It may not be what you wanted, but some solution is better than no solution. At least you will not face the same problem again. And even if you do, you have some idea of how to tackle it again, because you stood up and faced it first time.

2.    Forget the convenient way, go for the right one instead: While facing any problem, there are many ways you can go about it. Normally people end up taking the first visible path that is seen in front. Because it is convenient. It is a well made path and you have a comfortable journey. The best thing is that you reach somewhere too. But most of the times it may not be the right path. The destination that you reach may not be the one where you should be because all you were looking at was the smooth, wide highway just in front of you. If you want to reach the right destination, you may have to look more intensely. It may be a path that is less travelled, laid with gravel, thorns and many obstacles, but which will take you were you really want to reach. Sometimes you may not even have a way to reach there and you have to make a new path. It is tough, but better than reaching a false destination and pretending that you have done a right thing.

3.       Let the life be principle-centered: All of us built our lives around some objects or virtues. We have lot of money-centered people amongst us, who is hell bent on making money their sole destination. There are luxury-centered people, God-centered people, spouse centered people, job- centered and alcohol centered people. What is your center? I feel we have to be principle centered. I feel I should have a set of well formed principles on which I build my life. My actions should be based on them. I told to someone last day, “I don’t feel the need of convincing you or anyone the rightness of my deeds. The only guy whom I should convince is that man in the mirror whom I see daily. If I am unable to meet my eyes with him, I know I am in some real trouble.” I believe principle centeredness gave me the confidence to assert it. But do not be too tight with your principles too. You will soon be an arrogant ego centered person. Every while let your inner man- the man in the mirror, audit your principles and let him to modify or scrap it for you. 

4. Keep your options open: No one can say what lies in future. Never shut a door fully unless you are clearly convinced it is out of bounds. Keep the good relations; give whatever support you can to anyone around you without giving a thought if they deserve it. Be open to everyone and every thing, because anything that comes to your life makes a mark on it. It is up to you how you interpret if the influence is good or bad. Let your life be flexible enough to accommodate diversity and it will surely pay one time or other.

5.      Money is a means, not the end: Money is never an evil. It is a necessity. Just like air and water is required to sustain life, in modern life money is essential to sustain and develop you. But undue importance should not be given for money. There is no point in killing a relationship for sake of money.

That's all for now, guys. Keep smiling.

Male or Female

Ah... copy paste... copy paste.... blatant copy of some other webpage...

From the Washington Post Style Invitation, in which it was postulated that English should have male and female nouns, and readers were asked to assign a gender to nouns of their choice and explain their reason.

The best submissions:

SWISS ARMY KNIFE: Male, because even though it appears useful for a wide variety of work, it spends most of its time just opening bottles.

KIDNEYS: Female, because they always go to the bathroom in pairs.

TIRE: Male, because it goes bald and often is over-inflated.

HOT AIR BALLOON: Male, because to get it to go anywhere you have to light a fire under it... and, of course, there's the hot air part.

SPONGES: Female, because they are soft and squeezable and retain water.

MAGIC 8 BALL: Male, because it gives monosyllabic answers that usually

indicate it did not pay attention to your question.

WEB PAGE: Female, because it is always getting hit on.

SHOE: Male, because it is usually unpolished, with its tongue hanging out.

ZIPLOC BAGS: Male, because they hold everything in, but you can always see right through them.

SUBWAY: Male, because it uses the same old lines to pick people up.

HOURGLASS: Female, because over time, the weight shifts to the bottom.

HAMMER: Male, because it hasn't evolved much over the last 5,000 years, but it's handy to have around.

SUBWAY: Male, because it uses the same old lines to pick up people.

REMOTE CONTROL: Female...Ha!...you thought I'd say male. But consider, it gives a man pleasure, he'd be lost without it, and while he doesn't always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying.

CRITIC: Female, What, this needs to be explained?

Caught in the web: Attack of Micro blogs

The final installment in Caught in the web trilogy.

Continued from Caught in the web: Rise of Social networking

So by the end of 2008 I had just joined Facebook,where I was alone, started a blog in Blogger, the one that you are reading now, and was using orkut as the main link to connect with the virtual world... In orkut usage, I had by the time totally stopped using communities, where previously I used to socialize a lot and where I got a few good contacts too. Another couple of sites that I didn't mention before which I had joined, but never used much were job sites. I had account in Naukri, Monster and Times jobs. Never came to any use. And also a profile in Bharatmatrimony.com thanks to my sister, in which I did not had any hand!

Blogging was the most challenging endeavor... You need to find a subject which is the most toughest process, develop it into atleast some 100 words, tell it in such a way that people will connect with it and ultimately typing it without much spelling and grammatical errors... phew... But the satisfaction when you get a comment on blog is just awesome. Even if it is just a review on a book, when a comment comes that someone I never knew will read this book after reading my review is a sign of some personal achievement. Initially for around a year, very few people used to visit. These days it is picking up. I have joined some sites were you can promote the blog and interact with fellow bloggers, like Blogger, Indiblogger.in, blogadda, networked blogs, entrecard, were you can get to meet and read some fabulous people around the world who want to announce their voices to the world...

The only temporary stoppage in blogging was caused by a new inventive site that allowed to blog spontaneously, in small sentences of 140 characters... Yes, Twitter... I joined twitter around middle of 2009, and got hooked soon, although initially I was alone there too. I liked twitter because unleashing yourself was too much easy there.. no need of thinking and planning your words, just put out what is in your mind and forget it... yes that was the problem, tweets are like those droplets of mist in the daybreak, no life..... How many of you cares for those tweets you made a year back or even a week back? All those tiny part of your mind, let alone, orphaned in the twitterverse... it was a painful thought for me.. these days I have reduced microblogging... may be just to promote my macro blog... or to reply some friend's tweet, or to catch up with some friends... 

So after the realization I came back to macro blogging with a bang..... And as I knew when I made my Facebook account way back in 2008 Jan, by 2009 end it was surpassing Orkut.. Lot of my friends came to Facebook and lot of time and energy and money were spent in virtual farming and killing people, thanks to addicting Zynga games Farmville and Mafia Wars, for some time... Then life became normal again...These days Facebook even serves the purpose of twitter, but with lesser restrictions and more flexibility, like "like" and a facility to comment... my only regret is that there is no Unlike option there. It would have been great. 

The last social networking site that I joined is shelfari.com, a quiet cool place were you can discuss on my favorite subject, with lots and lots of equally fanatics... BOOKS. Now this is the place to be if you are a book lover... a great, understanding, supportive community.

There are few more sites that has to be atleast honorarily mentioned here... how can they be avoided when these sites occupy 80% of internet? hm... porn sites. I would just mention hereby that like any young guy I too had my share of adventures with them, but as the time passes, was able to come out of it unscathed. 

Last decade internet had been a major changing factor, in the life of many people around the world, changing it for good or bad... Like any inventions this too has its downside. I believe three terms will explain atleast most of it: Spam, Scam and Stalking. Spam can be avoided or neglected although it irritates like any thing. As for scam, I genuinely feel that if some one was cheated in scams, they probably deserve it. Finally about stalking, in my case there was only one incident where one person, with a female fake profile tried to abuse me in Orkut. Months later he tried to contact me with his real profile. I could find out this was same guy by the same wordings he used in the scraps that he send me. Now if some one I know hates me and wants to stalk me it is the problem of his mind, not mine, he has to deal with it. Hope he gets the will to do that...

This story never ends... more sites and new adventures are being loaded day in day out... waiting with anticipation and praying those novel things not turn up like Chatroulette.com were perverts all over the world are on the vigil 24X7 for the unsuspecting visitor, to scare the hell out off with naked genitals.

There ends my trilogy of Caught in the web. Hope I did not crash land it the way they did it with The Matrix trilogy, some how trying to end the sucker...

Caught in the web: Rise of Social networking

Continued from Caught in the web: Part 1

So till 2005 my time with internet was spent only by checking emails, forwarding funny pictures and other stuff to friends and then in late 2004 some downloads... mostly songs, old hindi tracks, ghazals, and ebooks from esnips and of course a few comic strips. I was crazy about comic strips like Hagar the Horrible and Garefield, who shared an uncanny resemblance with a good buddy... 

Then I was introduced to social networking sites by a friend, the first one being a very non popular site whose name I forgot... me.com or something like that. It was a very short lived amusement and I was feeling kind of bored with it... Life went on with more downloading and more forwarded mails, which I never used to open and just forwarded like that to all friends. 

Google was the emerging giant then, which revolutionized searching the web and giving a new word to the netizen's vocabulary "Googling"... so when they started a new email service Gmail, which was kind of unlimited service, a new trend then, all of the friends switched to it...again I kept my loyalty to Rediff. Then another new concept Orkut came into existence. Initially I was apprehensive of it, may be due to the disinterest caused by my association with that I-Forgot-the-name social networking site. My friends recommended it a lot but I kept my resistance, later I bend only when they made an orkut account for me... they set the profile for me and even helping in searching some old high school and higher secondary school friends whose existence I had forgotten by then. Thus started orkutting that was valuable in getting in touch with scores of old contacts, otherwise whose memories would have slowly moved into oblivion. Those days emails took a backseat and only those mails were checked which were personal and important. Orkutting and downloading songs and books were the internetting pastime. Later if we were able to organize a get together of high school friends and made it a reasonable success, it was all courtesy Orkut.

Another two sites that came into forefront at that period were  wikipedia and youtube... former was an information revolution and latter, a visual revolution. The success of these sites was phenomenal... Facebook was also making it big, but outside India. In India, it was all orkut for another couple of years, probably till 2008. I decided to make my entry into blogger world in 2006. It was a fascinating thing then. A platform for  showing off all your creativity, a vent for all the crazy things that goes through your mind.... I realised the potential but inspite of making a profile in blogger and starting a blog I never continued it. Later in 2007 I started a few blogs, in which I reviewed movies, books and things like that but that also stopped by 2008. 

I also joined Facebook by 2008 starting, but I was alone then. And bored, none of my friends were around. So I went to Orkut again for two more years. These years, 2008, 09 and 10 saw a large number of social networking sites and communities developing and prospering... but I believe all were short lived...and in 2009 I took to blogging seriously... micro and macro ways...In 2008 another thing I did was chatting. Yes, I was too late getting in it. I opened a Gmail account, which is a spammer's paradise right now filled with disgusting ads of machines to increase size of private body parts, power enhancing drugs, multinational companies announcing me winner of lotteries (Now do any one sensible will believe microsoft or Yahoo will have any interest to invest their hard earned money into lottery business?) and millionaires in Nigeria ready to give me a part of their black money. And I still find it difficult to chat with strangers... I feel kind of cheating them and at the same time feel cheated too.

Coming up next: Micro and macro blogging

Caught in the web- Part 1

This post and the upcoming ones are dedicated to all those poor social networking websites where I never joined in spite of many friends sending invites and also to those ones where I joined and never cared to go back... like ibibo, friendster, shtyle, indyarocks (who cares?)....

It is around 16 years since I have first heard about Internet, and 12 years since I am using it... So in this occasion I will just try to recap my tryst with internet... 

It all started when I first saw an article in Reader's digest way back in 1994, I was a small kid then, about internet and its scope in revolutionizing the world. I thought "Whoa! What an idea sirjee!". Then I was doing a one month beginner's course in Computers and floppy disks and DOS were the in thing... It was the era of COBOL, BASIC, Fortran... After many years in Higher secondary, we got another class on Windows, a very primitive version, I forgot which, may be Windows 1990 BC...

The very first time I logged on was probably 1998/99, in Dharwad when I, with some friends went to a newly opened internet cafe and opened a Hotmail account. It was an accomplishment.. But I didnt knew what next! I remember one friend who opened his email account and was proudly telling us to note it down. He also gave us his password. He didn't knew it is supposed to be a secret. My friends used to open account in every free email sites, like yahoo, usa.net and many more. I stayed loyal with hotmail for another 2 years. Then Rediff became the new rage... It looked cool compared to any other email providers then. I opened an account in rediff that I uses still. Never ever I touched Yahoo or any others that had better options then and I even hated chatting at that time. 

I was never a regular internet user then, may be once in two weeks or one month. There were times when I never browsed for 3 months or so. After studies, internet was really a useful thing because, it was comfortable to send resumes, keeping in touch with friends...And the way I used internet was again revolutionized in 2005.

Coming up next: Social networking and chatting

Musical paradox

Only today I noticed this option of checking the most played songs in my mobile. I had seen it before but today morning only could appreciate the advantages of the feature. I was quite astonished to see the list because many songs that I considered favorites are not featured in it. And many that were quite mediocre was there in it. Surely my favorite songs list is not the one that I hear most! What a strange Paradox! I thought I would just list them in this post with a small review of my own. What I like about the song and what I think is not agreeable to my auditory nerves. And I will try to upload some videos of lesser heard ones...

1. Madno from Movie Lamhaa:    I had down loaded this song last week and this is the topper of the list and with every right to be so. This is a great track. The best one of that album, penned by Saeed Quadri and composed by Mithoon. The song has something that reminds us of Maula Mere from Anwar, which is also composed by Mithoon, but it never gets in the way of appreciating this soulful melody. The insertion of Kashmiri Lyrics makes the song all the more exotic. It is a long song (more than 8 minutes) but no complaints. 

5 Worst ripped off Hindi movies

Plagiarism was always existing in hindi movie industry. Even the biggest hit of hindi - Sholey, was inspired by many westerns like Magnificient Seven and For a few Dollars more. Or Zanjeer was inspired by Dirty Harry. But these days it is rampant to such an extent that when any good movie is released people are on the lookout of its original. Like Bheja Fry or Acid Factory which where lifted from some sources so difficult to trace that it may be a surprise to the makers that it was eventually unveiled. Here I am trying to put forward 5 Hindi movies that are inspired by Hollywood movies and made a mess out of them, the worst rip offs that I have watched. Opinions are mine alone and any difference of opinion is welcome to be expressed.

1. 
   
   Kaante from Reservoir Dogs: Sanjay Gupta's Kaantey was a decent effort, I agree. You may even like it if you have not watched the original. The direction was good and performance was top notch by Bachchan and gang. But when compared to the shrewd brilliance of Reservoir Dogs, it is a wasted efforts. It stands dimetrically opposite to the film making style of reservoir Dogs.


2. 
   
   Daddy Cool from Death at a Funeral: Death at a funeral is a British Black comedy that is sharp and tickles the right bones heavily. It is crude and non apologetic, still very enjoyable. Its Indian version Daddy Cool by InderKumar is crude and thats all...


3. 
   
   Padmasri Laloo Prasad Yadav from A fish Called Wanda: Such a great comedy converted to a silly buffoonery exercise of 3 hours. A test on patience.


4. 
   
   Choclate from The Usual Suspects: Mother of all Rip offs. So bad.


5. 
   
   Road from Hitchhiker 2: Copying is bad, copying from a b- movie is superbad, what to call copying from the second part of a b-movie?

I considered adding Ghajini from Momento to the list but then felt that it is not a total rip off, only some concept was stolen and the makers have put in good effort on script and plot. So decided against it.

Other side:

Case of a bad hollywood movie copied and made watchable :

• Musafir from U-turn: U turn was a sick and depressing movie with Sean Penn and Jen Lopez, but Sanjay Gupta ripped it to make Musafir, which was not a great movie, but a watchable one when compared to original.