Feel Like Working ???

If you feel like doing some work, sit down and….

Wait until that feeling goes away.

How to build your inhouse magazine.

An excellant slide presenation

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Indian Video Vaults like youtube for Desi Janta

as manishxing reports
After the huge success of youtube and being aquired by google for 2.4Billion dollar, lots of indian startups are coming on same domain to make it big like youtube. Not sure if any one can become as big as youtube but definately some of the companies would give birth to focused content for desi junta .

I have compiled a list youtube clones for desi content with there alexa ranking..

rajshri.com : 8,407
videodubba.com : 62,078
apnatube.com : 67,576
meravideo.com : 77,517
aapkavideo.com : 93,864
konkan.tv : 108,342
tumtube.com : 167,170
punjabitube.com : 210,495
toad.in : 332,292
infeedia.com : 411,612
canaravideo.com : 434,736
4indian.tv : 471,324
sixer.tv : 476,685
crictv.com : 537,556
connectfilms.com : 568,903
merovideo.com : 918,255
tubedesi.com : 952,068
motionflicks.com : 1,110,983
layfile.com : 1,696,130
nautanki.tv : 2,297,228
desiscreen.com : 3470,560

IIT IIM Grads introduce in mouse to bell the CAT

I stumbled upon this cool free portal for CAT guys http://www.catindiaonline.com/. The site offers online mock CAT tests. This site s very different and has many more features than what one may think of. I must say catindiaonline.com impressed me from the word go! Their test framework is quite cool and analysis part is something that I bet that you can’t find anywhere else. Their best part is their in-depth analysis that gives gory details of one’s performance - topic wise, difficulty wise, time requirements wise, comparative analysis of performance etc… etc… The analysis really blew me off and very precisely pointed out the issues with my preparation. In the end, I found there is something call recommendations which was recommending me how you should have taken the test to maximize your score…they didn’t ask much to register and everything seems really cool…Go and check out its fun to try it irrespective of CAT aspirants.

How to build Google like team

1. Teams size should be less than 5.

2. All leaders no followers.

3. Don’t hire spotless people, Look for spots in the people which matters the most.

4. Punish mediocre success and reward excellent failures.

5. Don’t award TOP 1% and create 99% people unhappy. Award TOP 99% and Fire rest 1%, create 100% happy employees.

6. Freedom to loose = Celebrate failures = Team which looses most wins on creativity.

7. Kill “Lick my ass” kinda managers.

8. Kill project meetings instead go for drink parties and fight over your creative opinion.

9. Don’t work on a project instead own project.

10. Bring design and creativity in all aspect of work.

11. Don’t work when your energies are low as your work requires the best times of the day.

12. Fire managers and buy Leaders.

13. Creativity is driven by stomach so don’t work with empty stomach instead eat best food you love.

14. Don’t earn money earn reputation.

15. First build the product than collect the requirement than do project planning than test it and if it sucks.

Repeat the above cycle.

Aravind Adiga - Profoundly Indian - UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA

An excellent article in Frontline about the Indias new celebrity - Aravind Adiga... Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, “The White Tiger”, is the story of India’s underclass and its life.

IN June 2006, in an essay titled “My Lost World” published in Time magazine, Aravind Adiga wrote about a personal search he made in the Indian city where he grew up. That city was Mangalore, nestled alongside the Western Ghats on the Karnataka coast. Born in Madras (now Chennai) in pre-liberalisation India, Adiga spent his early childhood years in that city before moving with his family to Mangalore, where his father worked as a doctor.

In Mangalore, Adiga first attended Canara High School and then St. Aloysius High School. Despite the loss of his mother to cancer shortly before his secondary school leaving certificate examinations, he reportedly stood first in the State. He knew the importance of education. “When I was growing up,” he wrote in the Time essay, “young men of all religions were united by shared values of hard work, enterprise and a desire to get out of Mangalore as quickly as possible. My brother left when he was 18. I left when I was 16. Many of those who got out never returned. There was no need to go back because the place never seemed to change.”

Adiga left Mangalore in 1991 when his father moved to Australia. Returning to the city 15 years later as a journalist with Time, he found it vastly changed. The population had doubled. Shopping malls and high-rise apartment buildings had reshaped the skyline. There were now five medical colleges, four dental colleges, 14 physiotherapy colleges and 350 schools, colleges and polytechnics.

The new affluence seemed to have come at a price, however, as Adiga wrote: “I met neighbours, relatives and classmates, and each had done well in some way – one had his own house, another a car. But each also had some sorrow we could hardly have imagined. A Catholic friend’s daughter had married a Hindu, and her family no longer spoke to her. A Hindu friend’s daughter had been divorced by her husband. Divorce, extramarital affairs, interreligious marriages, homosexual flings – the doors of experience had swung open in Mangalore. The small city had grown up.”

Looking around the transformed city, he also noticed “a group of drifters and homeless men, some carrying rolled-up mattresses” – part of the underclass who seemed to have been left out of the story of India’s growth. Adiga was curious and troubled by the sight, and during his travels in India as a journalist, he wanted to find out more. The White Tiger, Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, is the story of this underclass and its life – begging for food, sleeping under concrete flyovers, defecating on the roadsides, shivering in the cold, struggling, in the 21st century, for its freedom. The White Tiger gives this underclass a voice: one that is intelligent, savagely funny and quite unforgettable. It is a voice that seeks out and understands the power of beauty: “If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.” But it is also a voice of anger and protest, and it is almost completely unsentimental. “I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience.”

The novel is structured as a series of letters written to the Chinese Premier by a former car driver from Bihar. Why the Chinese Premier? “Because,” the narrator Balram Halwai, now based in the city of Bangalore, writes, “the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage and drug abuse.”

Balram explains, further, why he is writing in the language of the “erstwhile master”: “Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.” Things like Balram’s story of “entrepreneurship”. The Premier of “the Freedom-Loving Nation of China” is apparently interested in the story of Indian entrepreneurship; Balram, the narrator of the novel, is an entrepreneur based in the city of start-ups. His story, he assures his addressee, will not be found in the white-washed version or the cellophane-wrapped pirated copies of business bestsellers that are sold at traffic signals: “Don’t waste your money on those American books. They’re so yesterday,” he writes. “I am tomorrow.”

He is, furthermore, “The White Tiger” of the title: “A Thinking Man/And an entrepreneur/Living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing Electronics City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road), Bangalore, India.” The India of that address is actually two countries in the novel: one of “Light” with access to education, health care, good roads, electricity, running water, as well as hope and justice; and the other of “Darkness”, where there is only deprivation and injustice. Balram’s story is about how he clawed his way out of the Darkness into the Light.

Balram, or Munna as he was named by his parents in the Darkness where he was born, is the younger son of a rickshaw-puller, “a human beast of burden”, in Laxmangarh, a tiny village in Gaya on the banks of the river Ganga. One of Munna’s first lessons in growing up comes when he follows his family members on his mother’s funeral procession. “My mother’s body had been wrapped from head to toe in a saffron silk cloth, which was covered in rose petals and jasmine garlands. I don’t think she had ever had such a fine thing to wear in her life. (Her death was so grand that I knew, all at once, that her life must have been miserable. My family was guilty about something.)”

Refusing to call him “Munna” because that is not a name at all, the teacher at the local primary school gives him a new name. But Balram is not destined to remain in school for very long: there is a wedding in the family, they have the girl, and therefore, as Balram writes, they are “screwed”. The family has taken a loan to pay for the wedding and the dowry, and they must now work for the moneylender to pay off the loan. So Kishan, Munna’s brother, takes him out of school and to the tea shop where they will spend their future working as “human spiders”, mopping the dirty floors or smashing chunks of coal against a brick.

Years later, while telling his story, the narrator reflects on this part of his life: “Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep – all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.”

If we see the physicality of poverty (“My father’s spine was a knotted rope… cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist…. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”), we also see the carefully protected lifestyle of the ultra-rich: security guards, Alsatian dogs and, literally, bags of money.

The two worlds intersect within the strict bounds of the master-servant relationship. In Laxmangarh, the rich landlords are a pack of animals – stork, buffalo, wild boar and raven – who feed on the village until there is nothing left for anyone else, and the rest are forced to climb onto the packed buses that lead to the world outside – Dhanbad, Calcutta (Kolkata), Delhi – to find work.

In Delhi, the rich are driven around in air-conditioned cars, protected from the pollution that takes years off a man’s life. But Balram, as he drives the rich around in their cars, will always be a member of the world outside – a member of the servant class. The servant who washes his master’s legs in a bucket of dirty water and massages them; the servant who pours out the drinks while keeping one hand on the steering wheel and an eye on the road; the servant who can be smilingly cajoled into taking the rap when his employer, in a drunken haze in the middle of the night, drives the car over a small, dark ragged shape that might have been some sort of small animal but actually turns out to be someone’s child.

SHAUN CURRY/AFP

Aravind Adiga with the 2008 Booker Prize, in London on October 14.

Even Balram’s God is a master who demands gratitude for the scraps he gives him, as we read in one unforgettable scene. Once, returning to his village, Balram climbs to the top of a hill, to the black fort, and looks down at the view below him. “Up in the blue skies, God spreads His palm over the plains below, showing this little man Laxmangarh, its little tributary of the Ganga, and all that lies beyond: a million such villages, a billion such people. And God asks this little man: Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it all grand? Aren’t you grateful to be my servant?”

Born in Chennai, brought up in Mangalore, writing about Delhi, and living in Mumbai, Adiga loves Tamil, speaks Kannada and writes in English. And in this language of the “erstwhile master”, without exoticism and without sentimentality, he has written a profoundly Indian story. It is not as if other writers have not written about the other, forgotten side of India.

For example, Amitav Ghosh, whose novel Sea of Poppies also appeared on the Man Booker shortlist for this year, has written memorably, with rich detail, compassion and wisdom, about those on the margins of history and geography as has Kiran Desai, in her Man Booker Prize-winning second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Adiga’s prose is not quite so elegant, but the force of his writing comes from its savage humour and its strength of feeling.

The pages of the 34-year-old Adiga’s novel, however, are different, in their dark humour.

They are also incandescent with anger at the injustice, the futility, the sheer wrongness of a life such as the one from where a bright little boy called Munna, who was later called Balram Halwai in his school records, and then called the White Tiger of the jungle because of his good performance during a school inspection, was pulled out of school and told to smash coal for a tea shop. Where private armies roam about the fields, men and women live sad and stunted lives, and dreams are cut short even before they are fully formed.

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta is in the Indian Administrative Service. The views expressed in
this article are personal.

Indians fear Adiga's Revelation - Telegraph Reports

Indians fear Aravind Adiga's 'The White Tiger' says too much about them - Telegraph reports

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was praised for highlighting the injustices and poverty present in the rapidly changing India when it won the Man Booker Prize, but now many Indian critics have expressed outrage at the judges' decision.

Many Indians feel that Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize winning novel - The White Tiger - presents their country in a poor light Photo: EPA

For some, Adiga's savage indictment of the way the rich treat the servant class panders to western prejudices.

"I felt the book took us back three decades," said folk art expert Ritu Sethi. "It had every stereotype going in it. The BBC used to show nothing but cows on the roads for years. We're back to that with this book."

Others criticised the novel for being dull and demeaning. Author and playwright Manjula Padmanabhan dismissed it as "a tedious, unfunny slog".

She agreed that much of the recent hype about India as an emerging superpower was dishonest and complacent but asked: "Is this schoolboyish sneering the best that we can do?"

Having bought the book, affluent Indians may shift uncomfortably in their seats. The daily inhumanity shown by the rich towards their domestic staff in The White Tiger is something of which many will realise they too are guilty.

The fearful crime which the protagonist Balram Halwai commits will send a frisson of fear up their spines.

Adiga says the Indian middle class is paranoid about servants and their "laziness", "greed" and "thieving" tendencies but expresses amazement that, given the huge disparities of wealth, so few actually commit any crime.

"Look at the intimate access that servants have to their masters in their homes, and yet there are very few murders or attacks. But that doesn't reassure the middle class. It is becoming more insecure than before because it is richer now and has more to lose," says Adiga.

The White Tiger marks a new departure in India by portraying the emotions, sorrows, and aspirations of the hitherto invisible poor. For Adiga, his achievement is capturing "something new" in India, a stirring, a glimmer of a refusal by the poor to accept the fate ordained for them by their masters.

But this flicker of an "awakening" does not mean the end of the current social order where the poor slave 24/7 as cooks, cleaners, drivers, nannies and maids so that the well off can feel comfortable.

"The system is beginning to deteriorate but it remains. It will remain, but with higher levels of crime and lower levels of security," says Adiga.

The author looks at India with the perspective both of an insider, having grown up in India, and as outsider, having emigrated for years and then returned.

"As an immigrant in the US and England, I was an outsider. I spent a lot of time being confused, trying to figure things out. That was how I understood how Indian villagers feel when they move to the big cities for work," Adiga says.

William Green, former Time Asia Edior understands why the book has raised Indian hackles. "It is an unsettling novel, it touches very raw nerves, but I think he captures the complexity and subtlety of India in fiction in a way that you don't see in journalism," he says.

For some Indians, The White Tiger is an appalling regression. Just when they thought they had finally shed the old image of India as a land of poverty, cows and snakecharmers and started being respected as a hi-tech, prosperous nation, along comes Adiga to, as it were, rub their noses in the dirt again.

"I used to hate Naipaul for talking contemptuously about India, about how cleaners mop the floor in restaurants by crouching and moving like crabs and all that talk about Indians defecating in the open," said a freelance editor, Anjali Kapoor. "Adiga is the same, focussing on everything that is bad and disgusting."

Cross Roads, Poem by Robert Frost and Self-contemplation... Musings

How many times in our life we remember the poem by Robert Frost we first read in school.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

Today is one such day again in my life. I was offered a permanent position with one of a company that has its HQ's in England. The place in question being Scotland - Dunde. I've never been there earlier (never been anywhere for that matter) So strange that this reminds me only of the cross-roads the Robert Frost's words....

Ofcourse i've negated myself against the temptation i had to grab the offer (u blame it on my lethargy or my inability). Everytime i put myself through the through question while self-contemplating, the answer is evident. I cannot move my ass from here...

May be im getting institutionalized... heading-off for the same job guess not much has changed, the same life and same routines. Maybe I'll be alone here as well. Everyday I will hear someone say "Yaar yahan life bekar hai" (Buddy ,life in India is no good)

Everyday I'll see social networking profiles of Indians with Pics with the background of Opera house,Eiffel Tower,Statue of Liberty and Niagra Falls with the caption " Me Chilling @ .....".

But for some reason that I can't put to words I say No not even to the thought of it. Maybe I love things as they are, maybe I love being here, may me im not adept enough, Maybe the Economy is booming.. Maybe the India is the best place to be at this moment..

Sourav Ganguly: Victim of a revenge cult - cricketnext.com

Unjustified criticism is a popular media pastime in most parts of the world. Knock over the hero image and belittle his or her achievements by humiliating their performances.

The more public it is the better for those would-be assassins who, for the sake of stirring controversy have the comfort of their offices or studios in which to sit and fire sniper-like vitriol at the intended victim.

It was in early December 2004 during the Kanpur Test that involved South Africa when NDTV asked me to become involved in a discussion on Sourav Ganguly, his perceived lack of form as well as leadership skills.

The way questions were posed brought the realisation that on the other side was a hit squad with an obvious grudge against Ganguly. It also made me wonder why I had been asked to take part in this show and in the firing line of Raj Singh Dungarpur, who came across as someone who didn't enjoy the Ganguly style at all.

Maybe because articles I had written much earlier, as well as those during the 2003-04 Australia tour for the Indian Express, had praised Dada and the way he had not backed off from a challenge against the Australians on that tour.

It has rarely ceased to surprise me that in the past fifty years or more, how players who have performed well for their country have been ridiculed by those who have not played a club game let alone a Ranji Trophy match or in a Test. Yet they sit and pontificate as though they have scored over 6,000 Test runs and taken more than 100 wickets.

There was also an awful feeling earlier this year in Sri Lanka that there were those media types who wanted Ganguly to fail. Want to point fingers and loudly say, "We told you... We told you... He is finished. Good... Good. Get rid of him now; forever."

Yet this was in a three-match Test series where most batsmen, not only Ganguly, fudged their lines against mystery spinner Ajantha Mendis and Muttiah Muralitharan.

In Port Elizabeth, before the start of the fractious second Test of India's 2001 tour of South Africa, and following the defeat in Bloemfontein after centuries by Sachin Tendulkar and that on debut by Virender Sehwag, I asked Ganguly about the enraged reaction in India to that particular defeat.

He was precise in his comments by saying he did not worry what his critics felt, or would say, or likely to say as they would not change their criticism even if India had won that first Test.

As with the NDTV episode with Dungapur, you felt they want him to fail, so that they could get out their rusty sabres and use his back as their personal dart board.

Forgotten is how months earlier he had defied a rampant Australian attack by scoring 144 in the first Test in Brisbane: walking out to bat with the top-order a mess at 62-3, Tendulkar lbw to Jason Gillespie for a duck, and later 127-4. But India still managed a first innings lead because of his century.

Also forgotten is how he led India to a World Cup final in South Africa when there are those on the subcontinent who wanted India to win but Ganguly to fail. The poison from that defeat in the final, it seems, still flows as swiftly as the Hooghly River.

What has been amusing in this latest Ganguly episode is how newspapers run interviews on half-baked supposed comments and offer them as being genuine. Anyone who stooped to this level to sell papers should be asked to account for his honesty. In another country, his job might be on the line.

All Dada can do here is refute the allegations that he made such comments while the reporter now has a credibility problem. What is known is that he has long been the fall guy when it comes to India's middle-order failures and you don't need the former captain to tell you that. It has been a known fact for a long time.

Now joining those snipers is some typically bad-mouthing Aussie who is doing his own ludicrous pantomime act.

To suggest that Ganguly had indulged in time wasting is an excuse for ignorance of the laws. The Channel Nine loud mouth overlooked that there were no overs lost, despite the interruptions. So why the fuss?

That the target was an impossible one is overlooked by such media bullies who snarl and snap when they can't get their way and attempt caricature humour to make a non-valid point.
How many Aussies in the past have also been involved in such a tactic to prevent defeat? Memories of a Perth Test against New Zealand in December 2001 resurface. Apart from several appalling umpiring decisions, they were calling for gloves and pads and other time-wasting tactic they could conjure.

The Kiwis didn't grumble, but you knew they weren't too happy either. There was Aussie criticism of Steven Fleming's plus 300-minute long century; no praise either for Daniel Vettori and his six wickets in the first innings that helped the Kiwis a good first innings lead. No honesty among thieves.

What needs to be appreciated here is that there is far, far more to Ganguly's style of play than statistical jargon and metaphorical branding.

He needs neither a register of meaningless allegories nor statistical lists that categorise who he is and from where he comes.

Yet for some peculiar reason, universally the Indian media, always seeking new cult heroes outside the outlandish tinsel confines of Bollywood, have this arcane obsession to indulge in such inane metaphors and clichés when discussing a man whose individual stylish left-hand batsmanship as well as leadership showed that Indians can take on the bullies from Down Under and elsewhere.

Those so fond of rehashing the meaningless 'Lord Snooty' as a way to unjustly caricature and pillory the man, or Prince of Calcutta to explain his elegant strokeplay, fail to understand his innate competitive drive.

There have been times when watching him place a cover drive suggests the soft growl of a Bengal tiger on the prowl. Here there is the impression of his sensing the mood of the bowler and by scoring a boundary in such a way it evokes an instinctive habit of his stalking of the bowler, seeking to hunt down the next ball as well.

There is a finesse about the Ganguly cover drive that hints how its execution is unique; it has nothing to do with textbook technique but his style of adventurism. He has had that trendy manner since before he was selected 16 years ago and sent to Australia.

Yet as he is about to say adieu to a Test career, Ganguly deserves fresh descriptions and a new landscape as a tribute to his skills and leadership: not old clichés or tired metaphors that have long failed to describe his style of game or intense personality.

There was agony in Australia in 1991-92 where he was largely misunderstood by a self-indulgent team management system; then a heroic debut century at Lord's a little more than four years later. These are all part of the often haphazard journey.

It is one though that deserves a far better epithet than it is receiving from a malevolent sniping media.

She addressed a UN Meeting on issue of environment

How much is your time worth? Go ahead, calculate

Should you spend extra money on petrol for your car and get home faster or should you stick to public transport which is cheaper, but which means you get home an hour later? Given a choice, which job would you opt for- a high stress job that offers a bigger pay check, or a lower paying job that allows you to balance work and life? Would you put in overtime at work to impress your boss and bag a promotion, or would you rather sacrifice the opportunity to help your child pre pare for an important exam? Which is more important to you, time or money? On a second thought, have you ever thought about how much your time is worth?

Each day we find ourselves being pulled in different directions, with conflicting needs and wants crying for our attention. Work priorities, life commitments, personal needs and desires, friends and family- all need our time and consideration, but with only a limited amount of time to spare, how do you ensure that you are able to prioritise, do justice to all those requirements, and to yourself too?

A simple computing of how much your time is worth can help you understand the value of it, showing how you can be more productive, more efficient, manage your time better and get more value for it. Here is how to go about it.

Start with the total gross income you have earned from your job for the past year. From this, subtract taxes straight away. Then deduct additional expenditure incurred by you on account of the job. This can include rent, living expenses (if you have relocated to be closer to the job), childcare, work related expenses and bills, petrol and vehicle maintenance, office supplies, even the amount spent on your work wardrobe and doctor’s expenses if the job is stressful. This gives you the actual income you get from your job.

Calculate the number of hours you work each year. This not only includes the number of hours you devote to actual work, but also the time you spend commuting to work, meeting clients, speaking on the telephone and other job related activities.

If you don’t have an exact estimate of the time, log the time you spend on each activity for a week and multiply that figure by 52 to arrive at the yearly total.

Divide your net annual income by the actual amount of time you have devoted to the job. This is what each hour of your time is worth. The figure can come as a shock for most people, but it has a way of putting things in perspective.

This simple computing helps you to work out whether or not it is worth to do a task yourself, delegate it, or simply not do it at all. If you spend a lot of time doing low-yield jobs, then you can streamline and manage your time better by employing an assistant or giving it up altogether.

When spelt out in black and white monetary terms, it is easier to rationalise a lot of otherwise confusing decisions. If, for example, your job is making you good money, wouldn’t you rather you spent an hour working, than frittering it way chatting or checking your email? If on the other hand, your job makes you miserable, then perhaps you may wonder if you would be better off trading it for something that pays less, but leaves you feeling healthier, happier and more satisfied. You can even use this figure as a benchmark to compare against when accepting an offer. When the value of our time is converted into measurable monetary terms, we tend to respect it more, and are more careful about how we use it.

There are only 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. And you still need to spend a fair amount of time eating, sleeping and taking care of your basic living needs. After all this, you will be left with very little productive time, and it is important that you put it to maximum use. Time and tide, as they say, wait for none.

Tribute to Saurav Ganguly - The prince of the cricketing world

Its always very easy to give up. all u've to say is 'I quit' and that's
all there is to it. the hard part is to carry on..


They say, there are few men every now and then after whom
the world will be changed forever
proud I am to see such a man in my lifetime
so virtuous and passion personified

To him winning is everything
The ever spirited fighter who lives his dreams
Rising often from the ruins with a never-say-die attitude
pushing his own limits, erasing his boundaries

the elegant strokes he played
And the powerful hooks he swayed
Throwing the bowlers tottering in tantrums
As a cold-blooded predator prying its Prey

so relentless are his display of courage, exuberance and style
A prodigy of valour whose contribution to the game will be ever lived
His aggression is synonyms with his name
whose eternal grandeur can never be quashed as his fame

The Bengal tiger snarls a little
while all those who faces him runs belittle
so powerfully he hits the balls
that dreadfully thumps into the foemen's walls.

An innate leader with a unique calibre
That made him the best ever a country can have
Who faces the victories in par with the loss
Even when all his works gone for a toss.

One cannot forget the blistering innings he played
Both with his contemporaries and critics
The all-round performances he displayed
That only goes to show his commitment to the game

But nothing was smooth for this storm rider
who has been the man of action both on and off the field
For a man who suffered the most due to politics and policies
He endured the most and still inspired a lot to who me meant something

Such a quality he possessed as a sportsman
whose willow speaks more than his words
Though his critics found it hard to swallow
He is the man the cricketing fraternity can never forget

For every fall he had, he bounced back and made his mark
The harder he hit, he hit back
If only the jokers had known they can't stop the shining sun with their bare hands
For it only grows with time..

He is simply a man out of time
whose integrity has been tested more than a time
have we honored him enough and gave him the respect he deserved ??
We cannot help but vacuously wondering why ??

will time heal the wounds he suffered
will the pain of the scars he bears ever abate
Only time will tell what remains to be seen
for we all know he is a fighter with a never ceasing attitude

An emotive final that he ever played
Awaits him amidst his protagonists and admirers
the greatest gladiator of our times
who resurrects himself every time out of nowhere

Its very unfortunate for him to call it quits and ever retire
a whole new conspiracy in its own attire
as the curtains draws for a final time in nagpur
Herez me wishing him. may a new life dawns on him altogether

the man of unquestionable integrity, commitment and passion
that had made him to the lords hall of fame
the ruthless display of him swaying his shirt
again only goes to show his aggression and passion for the game

He greatly inspires everyone with his flamboyance
and the remarkable display he exhibited as a scrapper
That makes everyone learn the lesson: No matter how harder you are hit,
The harder u push, the harder u can hit back

A true believer of hard work, determination and courage
he is the infinite pond amidst the mirages
The undisputed DADA of the cricketing world,
The epochal prince of the modern day cricket

one would only run out of adjectives
for he is a finesse display of class and courage
Whose prodigious life is an inspiration to everyone
Sourav Ganguly - I bow to thee...

- Chuppandi

DIY methanol powered scooter functional

With the importance of an alternate source of fuel rising steadily, many of us might wonder if methanol could be used as a fuel, though it is highly volatile and inflammable. Recently, a member on WebX took up a project to build a methanol powered homemade scooter. The first version had a prop and a 10cm thundertigre methanol glow engine, which didn’t work too well. In the second version, he changed the engine to the more powerful OS60 MAX without any props. However, this was too big for a scooter of this size. In the third and final version, he changed the engine shaft to 23mm diameter. A simple homemade filter was used, and the engine board is made of a 10mm thick alu arm, which allows flexibility. This version reduces the size of the engine, and there are no over-heating problems. Now, such things may not be legal to drive on our streets but then, it is always nice to know how things work, and they could set the stage for something legal to be manufactured.

10 future shocks - for the next 10 years

infoworld.com reports
Though may not be an alvin tofflers article or Nostradamus predictions, worth a read...

Shock No. 1: Triumph of the cloud

My main prediction is that the high cost of power and space is going to force the IT world to look at cloud services, with a shift to computing as a cloud resource occurring in the next five years. So like the old mainframe model where we didn't care how the machine is configured, we just dump requests to the machine and get results. In fact, cloud computing services
will resemble mainframe service bureaus. We're already starting to see cloud service bureaus, such as Amazon's EC2. Ultimately, the emergence of cloud computing will reduce the need for computing at the enterprise level. -- Brian Chee

Shock No. 2: Cyborg chic

By 2018, geek chic will look a lot like what today we'd call a cyborg. The human/machine interface will be ubiquitous, with people walking around giving voice/whisper commands and using earbud audio and an eyeglass display that superimposes a machine-enhanced view of the world on ordinary vision. Nobody will notice that half the population is cyborg, because we'll get there one small step at a time, as iPhone belt-clip holders give way to the iBeltBuckle, iGlasses (hey, that's catchy!), and iEarRings. A new generation of computer viruses will take over the new display technology. Sometimes they're fatal, as when the computer display shows an empty street, when in Actual Reality (AR) the street is filled with high-speed traffic. Other times they're just funny, as when the display insists on showing mustaches on every face in view. -- Bob Lewis

Shock No. 3: Everything works

You come home to do a little work on the computer, and when you turn it on, it boots up in just a few seconds with no issues. You open e-mail and it comes up without your having to wait. In fact, this new OS doesn't even have an hourglass icon! For the rest of the night, your computer does everything you ask it to do, without any waiting, hiccups, or errors. The interface is intuitive and sleek. It even changes based off what you're currently doing so that you can access features of the OS that you need while you're, say, working with e-mail or editing pics. We'll call this OS "Windows Sci-Fi" because we're all dreaming if we think that'll ever happen. -- Sean McCown

Shock No. 4: Nothing escapes you

In 1945, Vannevar Bush conceived of a device called a Memex that would store and retrieve all information accumulated throughout one's life. In the next 30 years, advances in speech and video recognition, the power of cloud-based computing, and real-time, continuous, wearable content capture will bring the Memex vision to life. Just think: You'll be able to leave a meeting without worrying about manually capturing your to-dos. You won't have to remember that interesting thing your friend mentioned over coffee. You won't have to write down the thought that sprung to mind when you saw an advertisement on TV or a billboard on the way home.

Vannevar's Memex vision will come to fruition through your next-next-next-generation PDA. The device will continuously capture all audio and video from your daily experiences and upload that content to the cloud, where it will be parsed to succinctly recognize your tasks, interesting information, and reminders -- all searchable, of course. A summary of important content from your day will be available through your PDA automatically. And yes, like Google Chrome, a "p0rn mode" option will ensure that the things you don't want remembered won't be. -- Savio Rodrigues


Shock No. 5: Smartphones take center stage

I see the smartphone evolving into the preferred instrument for constant connectivity, with voice interaction, facial recognition, location awareness, constant video and sound input, and multitouch screens. The keyboard won't go away completely, but it might be virtual: Think about typing in the air on an image projected from your "smart glasses." Business desktops would evolve into docking stations for your smartphone, with large screens and input devices, Gigabit or better connectivity, and local resources comparable to one of today's big servers (technical desktops would be similar, but with way more onboard CPU and GPU power, as well as massive memory and storage, all connected to massive servers and cloud resources). In this vision, the laptop nearly goes away. -- Martin Heller

Shock No. 6: Human-free manufacturing

We're already close to the perfect factory. (It employs one human and one dog; the human is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the human from touching anything.) Right now, manufacturing in the U.S. is up, while manufacturing employment is down. By 2018, automation will have hit enough labor sectors that while the GDP will continue to grow, fewer and fewer people will receive that growth in the form of wages. This will drive either social collapse or the establishment of a no-apologies welfare state. -- Bob Lewis

Vannevar's Memex vision will come to fruition through your next-next-next-generation PDA. The device will continuously capture all audio and video from your daily experiences and upload that content to the cloud, where it will be parsed to succinctly recognize your tasks, interesting information, and reminders -- all searchable, of course. A summary of important content from your day will be available through your PDA automatically. And yes, like Google Chrome, a "p0rn mode" option will ensure that the things you don't want remembered won't be. -- Savio Rodrigues
Shock No. 5: Smartphones take center stageI see the smartphone evolving into the preferred instrument for constant connectivity, with voice interaction, facial recognition, location awareness, constant video and sound input, and multitouch screens. The keyboard won't go away completely, but it might be virtual: Think about typing in the air on an image projected from your "smart glasses." Business desktops would evolve into docking stations for your smartphone, with large screens and input devices, Gigabit or better connectivity, and local resources comparable to one of today's big servers (technical desktops would be similar, but with way more onboard CPU and GPU power, as well as massive memory and storage, all connected to massive servers and cloud resources). In this vision, the laptop nearly goes away. -- Martin Heller

Shock No. 6: Human-free manufacturing

We're already close to the perfect factory. (It employs one human and one dog; the human is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the human from touching anything.) Right now, manufacturing in the U.S. is up, while manufacturing employment is down. By 2018, automation will have hit enough labor sectors that while the GDP will continue to grow, fewer and fewer people will receive that growth in the form of wages. This will drive either social collapse or the establishment of a no-apologies welfare state. -- Bob Lewis

Shock No. 8: Big Brother never sleeps

In the next 10 years, perfect governmental tracking and monitoring of each human being will become reality. Some people will accept LoJack implants for personal safety. Face-recognition technology tied to video monitors at street corners will also contribute. Also very possible: LoJack-style technology along with a digital voice recorder embedded in drivers' licenses (it's optional -- hey, driving is a privilege, not a right). The actual trigger will be pulled when Mercedes-Benz buys General Motors and acquires OnStar, which by then will be private industry's principle purveyor of "Personal LoJack" systems. Shortly thereafter, Russia will have acquired Mercedes, either through conquest or by buying it with oil money, so Russia will know the exact location and movement of most affluent Americans. So will China, which will have manufactured the LoJack transmitters, surreptitiously adding a backdoor feature that lets the Chinese government track everyone as well. -- Bob Lewis

Shock No. 9: Unbroken connectivity

Checking to see if you're connected to a network will seem as old-fashioned as turning on a device to get information in 10 years. Devices that are always receiving information (and displaying it on low-draw screens in the cover of phones and portable computers) will meet networks that are always available to make your interaction with the information world more like a flowing stream than a chain of data lakes. From sports scores to friends' activities, the idea of interrupting your activities to get the news will be a thing of the past. -- Curtis Franklin

Shock No. 10: Relationship enhancement

My 2018 prediction is that we use technology to remember and fortify social connections. You'll get together socially with a friend, geo-locate, take pictures, Twitter, make notes and videos, and so on, and it all gets automatically filed away. You may forget what happened, but you can access it all again when you search your own personal store, either by matching keywords or simply preparing for the next social event with same friend. There will be no difference between "online friends" and "real friends". This will be life-altering. We already have the freedom of not having to remember street directions. When we have the freedom not to remember what happened in social interactions, it raises a fascinating question: Will this solidify personal relationships or change them in some other way? -- Jon Williams

Can Nanotechnology make man immortal?

In his novel ‘Prey’, Michael Crichton created the fictional world of nanotechnology running amok in human life. Some believe that the tiny particles have the capability of reversing the aging process in humans. Is it possible for nanotechnology or the ‘power of the small’ to make man immortal? The current trend in technology does not point to that direction but some over enthusiasts feel that some time in the distant future nanotechnologists could decode the mystery of life and death. Currently the smallest human-made particle is 20 nanometers in diameter. A human red blood cell is 10,000 nanometers in diameter. By building an autonomous robot 1/10,000th time that of a red blood cell, it would be possible to program it in such a way that the tiny robot could reverse the aging process in humans when once inserted in the body cells. The interior of the human body would then replicate an ocean of floating nanobots commanding human metabolism.

While the concept of nanobots is in the theoretical stage but nanotechnology has been expanded to anti-aging treatments by direct infusion of electrons in the skin via nano current that is equivalent to over one-billionth of an ampere. Nanotechnology is currently used widely in dermatology and in regenerative medicine research. However, nanobots have not been tested yet but some nano devices have been found to work on a number of animal specimens. It has been possible to cure type-1 diabetes in rats with a blood cell-sized device. Scientists at MIT have been able to develop microscopic devices that can remove cancer cells from the blood stream and destroy them. Given the current rate of acceleration in technology, in the next two or three decades these devices are expected to become powerful enough to work inside human cells.

Source: NanoWerk
image

Falling Prey To Machines?

ScienceDaily Falling Prey To Machines?: "It's coming, but when? From Garry Kasparov to Michael Crichton, both fact and fiction are converging on a showdown between man and machine. But what does a leading artificial intelligence expert--the world's first computer science PhD--think about the future of machine intelligence? Will computers ever gain consciousness and take over the world?"

"Comparisons between the brain and electronic hardware are also difficult to draw. For example, the issue of 'fanout' demonstrates the complexity of the brain over even today's most sophisticated computers. Fanout refers to the number of connections an element in a network can have to another element of a network. Today's most complicated computers have a fanout factor of about 10. The human brain, however, has a fanout of 10,000.

'We don't have the faintest idea of what machines with that kind of fanout would be like, so inference from the capabilities of present machines to such machines is feeble at best,' notes Holland. 'As Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann says, three orders of magnitude is a new science.'"

Manual for Conserving Paths - Paulo Coelho

Magnetohydrodynamic Propulsion

Motors without moving parts

In the 1990 film The Hunt for Red October (based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name), Sean Connery plays the captain of a Russian submarine. This much I remembered from having seen the film many years ago. I did not recall that the submarine in question—the eponymous “Red October”—used a special high-tech propulsion system that, having no moving parts, was silent. I’m sure my science fiction filter was on, and I just assumed at the time that the top-secret engine was the sort of almost-plausible futuristic contrivance any modern spy movie will have—and not worth taking very seriously. Just a few years later, though, Mitsubishi demonstrated a boat using a propulsion system of roughly the design Clancy described in his novel. And now variations on this technique are being used in electrical generators, nuclear reactors, and even spacecraft design.

Gimme an “M”

The scientific principle in question is known as magnetohydrodynamics, which is a fairly straightforward combination of magneto (as in magnet), hydro (as in water), and dynamics (as in motion). Those in the biz call it MHD for short. And yes: it uses magnetism to cause motion in water (or another fluid). MHD is not by any means a new discovery—academic researchers have been working on this since at least the 1960s, and the Journal Magnetohydrodynamics has been published since 1965 by the University of Latvia. But in recent years, MHD designs have begun to appear more frequently in everything from large-scale commercial operations to high school science fair projects.

The basic concept is simple, even though it relies on some complex math and physics. When a conductive fluid (such as saltwater, liquid metal, or even plasma) is exposed to a magnetic field and an electric current at right angles to each other, their interaction propels the fluid in a direction perpendicular to the other two axes. In other words, the fluid itself functions more or less as the moving part of an electric motor.

You can demonstrate this effect on a small scale if you have a free afternoon, a few tools, and a bathtub. Take a small plastic tube and glue a pair of nice, strong magnets onto the top and bottom (opposite poles facing inward). Then glue strips of metal to the insides of the tube on the left and right; these will be the electrodes. Affix this assembly to the bottom of a small toy boat. Wire the electrodes to a fairly high-power battery (being careful, of course, to keep the battery dry), and float the entire contraption in a saturated solution of salt and water. If the battery is strong enough and the boat is small enough, it will start moving through the water.

The Solid-State Paddlewheel

Of course, if you want to power a boat large enough to hold passengers, the engines will have to be pretty large. You’re going to need some very strong magnets—think helium-cooled superconducting electromagnets—plus an awful lot of electricity to provide current to the electrodes. Even then, you may find (as Mitsubishi did) that the thrust produced is a bit underwhelming. The prototype boats were expected to reach speeds of 200 kilometers per hour, but only got up to 15 km/h. Even though MHD drives have virtually no drag (unlike propellers), the energy conversion efficiency is currently pretty low. (Had they used the same amount of electricity to power conventional motors, the boats would have gone much faster.) Further technological advances are needed to make this a practical propulsion system for marine vessels.

As far as I know, there are no submarines using such drives now, but a Red October is at least more plausible than I’d previously have suspected. However, I should point out that MHD drives are only sort of quiet. By this I mean there’s no noise from an engine or propeller, but the electrodes do produce huge numbers of bubbles—after all, this design amounts to magnetically enhanced electrolysis, and electrolysis separates water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. So a submarine with an MHD drive would not be quite as stealthy as you might imagine.

Much more promising are designs that use other kinds of fluids that conduct electricity better. For example, plasma-based propulsion systems being studied for long-distance space travel use a variation on MHD. It remains to be seen whether technological innovations will make MHD an efficient and practical means of propulsion (terrestrial or otherwise), but the mere fact that you can induce motion in a fluid without either moving parts or combustion seems incredibly cool to me. As with so many scientific discoveries, truth is much more exciting than fiction. —Joe Kissell

Wireless Powering of LEDs via Resonant Inductive Coupling

Tesla's dream coming true..... I never knew we could do that so easily.. It was always trouble for me when i tried that...

The Big Bang and the CERN

Did you know that the matter in your body is billions of years old?

According to most astrophysicists, all the matter found in the universe today -- including the matter in people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies -- was created at the very first moment of time, thought to be about 13 billion years ago.

The universe began, scientists believe, with every speck of its energy jammed into a very tiny point. This extremely dense point exploded with unimaginable force, creating matter and propelling it outward to make the billions of galaxies of our vast universe. Astrophysicists dubbed this titanic explosion the Big Bang.

The Big Bang was like no explosion you might witness on earth today. For instance, a hydrogen bomb explosion, whose center registers approximately 100 million degrees Celsius, moves through the air at about 300 meters per second. In contrast, cosmologists believe the Big Bang flung energy in all directions at the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second, a hundred thousand times faster than the H-bomb) and estimate that the temperature of the entire universe
was 1000 trillion degrees Celsius at just a tiny fraction of a second after the explosion. Even the cores of the hottest stars in today's universe are much cooler than that.

There's another important quality of the Big Bang that makes it unique. While an explosion of a man-made bomb expands through air, the Big Bang did not expand through anything. That's because there was no space to expand through at the beginning of time. Rather, physicists believe the Big Bang created and stretched space itself, expanding the universe.

A Cooling, Expanding Universe

For a brief moment after the Big Bang, the immense heat created conditions unlike any conditions astrophysicists see in the universe today. While planets and stars today are composed of atoms of elements like hydrogen and silicon, scientists believe the universe back then was too hot for anything other than the most fundamental particles -- such as quarks and photons.

But as the universe quickly expanded, the energy of the Big Bang became more and more "diluted" in space, causing the universe to cool. Popping open a beer bottle results in a roughly similar cooling, expanding effect: gas, once confined in the bottle, spreads into the air, and the temperature of the beer drops.

Rapid cooling allowed for matter as we know it to form in the universe, although physicists are still trying to figure out exactly how this happened. About one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, protons and neutrons formed, and within a few minutes these particles stuck together to form atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium. Hundreds of thousands of years later, electrons stuck to the nuclei to make complete atoms.

About a billion years after the Big Bang, gravity caused these atoms to gather in huge clouds of gas, forming collections of stars known as galaxies. Gravity is the force that pulls any objects with mass towards one another -- the same force, for example, that causes a ball thrown in the air to fall to the earth.

Where do planets like earth come from? Over billions of years, stars "cook" hydrogen and helium atoms in their hot cores to make heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. Large stars explode over time, blasting these elements into space. This matter then condenses into the stars, planets, and satellites that make up solar systems like our own.

How do we know the Big Bang happened?

Astrophysicists have uncovered a great deal of compelling evidence over the past hundred years to support the Big Bang theory. Among this evidence is the observation that the universe is expanding. By looking at light emitted by distant galaxies, scientists have found that these galaxies are rapidly moving away from our galaxy, the Milky Way. An explosion like the Big Bang, which sent matter flying outward from a point, explains this observation.

Another critical discovery was the observation of low levels of microwaves throughout space. Astronomers believe these microwaves, whose temperature is about -270 degrees Celsius, are the remnants of the extremely high-temperature radiation produced by the Big Bang.

Interestingly, astronomers can get an idea of how hot the universe used to be by looking at very distant clouds of gas through high-power telescopes. Because light from these clouds can take billions of years to reach our telescopes, we see such bodies as they appeared eons ago. Lo and behold, these ancient clouds of gas seem to be hotter than younger clouds.

Scientists have also been able to uphold the Big Bang theory by measuring the relative amounts of different elements in the universe. They've found that the universe contains about 74 percent hydrogen and 26 percent helium by mass, the two lightest elements. All the other heavier elements -- including elements common on earth, such as carbon and oxygen -- make up just a tiny trace of all matter.

So how does this prove anything about the Big Bang? Scientists have shown, using theoretical calculations, that these abundances could only have been made in a universe that began in a very hot, dense state, and then quickly cooled and expanded. This is exactly the kind of universe that the Big Bang theory predicts.

CERN and the Big Bang

How do experiments at CERN improve our understanding of the early universe? Click the photo above to hear Dr. Alvaro De Rujula explain. You will need the RealPlayer in order to view this video.

In the first few minutes after the Big Bang, the universe was far hotter -- billions of billions of billions of degrees hotter -- than anywhere in the universe today. This heat gave particles of matter in the early universe an extraordinary amount of energy, causing them to behave in a much different way from particles in the universe today. For example, particles moved much faster back then and collided into one another with much greater energy.

If these conditions do not exist anymore, how do scientists study the behavior of matter in the early universe? One of the most powerful tools for such analysis is the particle accelerator. This device allows physicists to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang by making a beam of fast-moving particles and bringing them together in very high-energy collisions.

Researchers at CERN are using an accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to accelerate subatomic particles called protons to close to the speed of light. This is how fast scientists believed these particles moved in the instants after the Big Bang. By looking at the behavior of these protons, CERN physicists hope to better understand how the Big Bang created the universe.

photo: CERN

When completed in 2005, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will provide new insight into the past, present and future of our universe.

What is the fate of the universe?

The Big Bang theory raises some important questions about the fundamental nature of the universe: Will the expansion of the universe, set in action by the Big Bang, continue forever? Or will gravity stop the expansion and eventually cause all the matter in the universe to contract in a Big Crunch?

Scientists don't yet know the answers to these questions for certain. But particle physics experiments like the accelerator studies at CERN may offer some clues down the road. By probing into what matter is made of and how it behaves, such experiments can help us explore what the matter in our universe--the planets, stars, and galaxies--might be doing billions of years from now.

Courtesy: Exploratorium