Privy

The following was quoted on Dawn:

Since we had nothing to hide, we thought there was no harm in calling the Indian bluff by agreeing to the request to send the ISI chief to Delhi…

The latest however is that ISI chief is no longer travelling to India. Does that mean that Pakistan suddenly found something to hide.

Now, the Pakistan media wants the world to believe that like in the past India is just blaming them when instead the operations are carried out by India (hindu) terrorists. Well, it is fooling itself more than anyone else.

During the last round of attacks: Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Surat, I was in a way happy as I thought the terrorists have crossed the limit and India will awaken to their threats. However, sadly, that wasn’t the case and we had to witness these horrible three days.

Only hope that we are not waiting for more limits to be crossed and come up with a definitive action against the guilty whether Indian origin or Pakistani. One terrorist has been caught alive and he will help us in the probe, Inshaallah.

NDTV was always better than the rest of the news media, until recently, but now as a part of commercialization perhaps, has joined the crowd. I can recall atleast two instances today while watching the Mumbai attacks coverage, where I really cursed NDTV and switched to Times Now.

They were showing the scenes of rescuees coming out of Oberoi and the media people trying desperately to get a word out of them. Immediately, the correspondent communicates by the phone and says “we tried to chase down the rescued people (a tone of confidence), however they were not willing to talk us (a tone of complaining) …”

Then they carried out a statement by an army chief in which he refused to give the count of casualties in the army, for obvious reasons of maintaining the morale. However, this channel reports “NSG casualty count unestimable…”

Similar thing had happened on Times Now, but the news anchor Arnab  politely advised restrain to the correspondent and the camera man. Times Now, today is the most responsible news channel (still they could improve) among the lot. I never ever switched to Aaj Tak or India TV who are glorifying the terrorist by carrying out his interview.

It looks like our cities are becoming an easy target of the terrorists. In these times where news spreads faster than light, I somehow missed this one, while watching India tame England again in the 5th ODI. I only came to know about it this morning, after I had just finished watching the movie “Shoot on sight“.

It felt like an extension to the movie and it took me some time to sink in the news. I am planning to move to Mumbai in a couple of months from Bangalore and now this has happened. But, the city is very strong and I am sure most people would be still worrying more about the stock market being closed.

The terrorists have declared a war on MY country and it is high time WE respond as a nation. After the last round of serial blasts, it felt as if the country has pulled up its sleeves to control the terrorist activities, only to see this happening.

But, most likely we will get up again and forget this ever happened, as we have a very short term memory. While this is good for the general public, behind the scenes the vigil needs to be maintained and our network be made so secure that we are always a step ahead of these cowards, mislead souls who do not understand Islam, but are out there to preach others.

Google seems to recently have added a new feature called SearchWiki, that allows users to re-order the search results for their own future reference. This reordering however will remain only for the same logged in user and not influence the search results of other users.

Now, what prompted Google to bring out such a feature? The answer lies at this url.

Yes, Wikia is the same organization behind the much popular Wikipedia (which is increasingly becoming more reliable, rather handy, than Google search itself). Wikia had promised an open source search engine sometime back and this service was launched quietly.

Wikia search as such is quite a pain as of now with respect to results and it looks like it wants more feed today than what it can milk. But, Google as always is in an advantageous position, because even competition contributes to its revenues. Did you wonder why wikia shows Ads by Google?

Dial C for cricket on Neo Sports beats Extra Innings on Sony as the worst cricketing show on TV, by far. More so because of the format, its anchor and the callers. The aim of the show is to create controversies where there are none. Though Arun Lal talks sense, the whole show is worth a miss.

The problem starts with the anchor having no cricketing knowledge, or rather a cricketing brain. Next are the callers, who are from a very naive public and then the iteraction between the bozo anchor and the bozo or the hapless caller.

Yesterday, they made a huge hue and cry on Irfan’s selection. Well, media did play its role in fueling the controversy. Our media, like any other, will never become a responsible one. I have lost all hopes even from the likes of Times Now and NDTV.

Ideally, India would prefer an in form Irfan Pathan, because I think we are forgetting the fact that he was the man of the match in the T20 world cup final, that India won on a good bowling performance. So, he will definitely get more opportunities than any other player. Mind you, he has still batted well even while being dropped. The problem in recent times has only been his bowling, for the term bowling allrounder) If he were an offspiner, people would have promoted him to be a batting allrounder instead, even with the same batting capabilities.

By the way Sachin is back and Gambhir might have to give up his opening spot (which I feel is a bad idea).

Humans have made a lot of progress in many fields, thanks to technology. However, if we look at certain areas, it seems that we have made a very little headway. One example is the commercialization of electric vehicles. We could argue that if we could make electric bullet trains, why is it so difficult to make electric cars?

Perhaps, somebody does not want electric cars, because either it is not financially attractive or is financially threatening. There was a talk of the cheapest car (cheaper than Tata Nano), being an electric car Tara Tiny. But nobody knows where it came from and where did it go.

Imagine the cost of cancer treatment, which gives no gaurentee whatsoever. Why would any hospital invest in finding an affordable cure to cancer when they are already well off with what they have now? True, there will be people, who want to prove a point or are not earning from the current scenario, who will try hard to develop an alternative. But, such efforts will be very limited.

The main point of this article is that we are controlling the technology for our financial selfish motives. How will this change? Lets discuss!

It is really amazing to hear the commentary of Englishmen in the ongoing one day series between England and India. One can easily decipher the arrogance in their comments and the contradictions they make in what they say. The best example is from the second ODI. When Stuart Broad opened the bowling for England, the commentator didn’t mince words in expressing his displeasure at the move. He was of the opinion that either one of Flintoff or Harmison should open. However, when Broad picked up three wickets, he did a complete U-turn and said, “I told you this guy’s going to pick wickets for us”.

Yet another commentator described Yuvraj’s innings in the first match as Blitzkreig (all right), but termed Ravi Bopara’s innings (which basically involved slogs) as classy. Now, no doubt the innings was great under the circumstances, but classy?

It is fairly evident from the way they talk about the umpires’ decisions and about Indian dismissals (a gonner) versus English dismissal (unlucky). I prefer switching to the Hindi commentary, which is atleast amusing. Agreed, sometimes even Indian commentators can be erratic (Gavaskar, LS), but still they are much better even in their criticisms.

The series anyways is dead, with India now leading 3-0. You know actually Indians were praying for an England victory to bring it alive. 

I have now spent a good four years in Bangalore and despite its progress in many areas (it was already doing well when I came), there are many issues which even the lesser known cities in other states don’t face.

A lot has been written and said about the infrastructure woes and the poor traffic conditions. However, recently it is really surprising to see that the traffic congestion has reduced vastly. I can reach office within half an hour for more part of the day, from earlier one hour. However, roads are still bad, or worse. If you want to see the poorest condition, come to Ramamurthy Nagar.

However, the biggest problem faced by Bengaluru today is not roads, but power cuts. At my place there are five power cuts daily of one hour each. It is increasingly becoming frustrating. The chief minister has made lot of promises, only to break it the next day.

The condition is not likely to improve in the near future. Imagine how did Karnataka approach Tata’s for their Nano project and offer subsidized electricity.

Picture this! There is a play school for kids, where the head master Peter considers safety as the utmost priority. He hires three security guards. No bad incident happens during his tenure. The board owning the school is happy.

Peter retires one day and there comes a replacement Jack. He prepares a list of areas where he can cut costs. He thinks three security guards are overhead and fires two of them (total salary saving 24000 per annum). He goes to the board and gives them the annual savings figures. The board is quite impressed and is inadvertently cursing his predecessor.

Now, a mishap happens when the one security guard is gone for a leak and a kid runs out of the main gate and meets with an accident. The parents of the kid threaten to sue the school. Jack intervenes and promises a compensation of 50000 to drop any charge on the school. He goes back to the board and explains how well he handled the situation. The board as usual is all praises for the head master for his crisis management skills.

Jeff next calls all the parents and explains how he is taking steps to increase the safety of the school and announces the addition of two new security guards. The parents are happy and praise the head master’s foresight and concern for their children’s safety.

Jeff is a now hero! Nobody remembers Peter.

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I use multigle search on my laptop

If you are in India, you must have seen advertisements on television claiming that it is easier to get a life insurance than to appease your wife. Well why not! You are paying them (premium) to get the insurance, so why would it not be easy for anybody to accept money.

When they say “no medical tests” and “no records”, a lot of it is already taken care of in the visibily hidden terms and conditions. Also, when you make claims, (get the money back) that’s when you will come to know the easy or difficult a life insurance actually is. It’s not that you wont get your money back if you have all records in place. It is just that unless there is a cashless hospitalization kind of facility, you will not enjoy the whole process of making the claims, to the extent that you will not bother for small expenses.

There is another problem with cashless hospitalization, that of the hospitals trying to take advantage and making the patients go through unnecessary tests and prolonging the stay at the hospital. It can cause a lot of inconvenience and more importantly a fear in the mind of the patient by seeing the number of tests.

These are the days when hospitals are opened not for public service, but primarily to earn profits. Same is with schools with fees getting skyhigh. That’s democracy, that’s capitalism for you if you like.