« Goto Swiss Tours Part I We reached Interlaken quite late – especially by Switzerland standards – I should confess that it was quite scary to reach the youth hostel there, as it was in one secluded part of the town, and we had to walk through a road almost in the woods to reach it from the nearest bus stop. We both are vegetarians and were well aware about the paucity of (vegetarian) edible food, so we had packed enough vegetables, wafers, bread and butter from Geneva for our survival. The hostel was well equipped, and we had a comfortable dinner and slept to rise early the next day! The train to take us to Jungfraujoch was to leave Interlaken by 8 AM, so we woke up early – in fact we were up early enough to have time to look around the location of the youth hostel. However, we got a little carried away, and got a bit late to catch our train. Fortunately, the platforms were quite low and we were able to jump our way to platform 2 to catch our train! The train had a guide, who told us...

The CPIM government in West Bengal might have taken a leaf out from China ’s book Of development when it tried to force development in Nandigram. Like in China , Buddhababu wants India too to build SEZs on dead bodies of its own citizen – nothing wrong in it he thinks ; after all didn’t Stalin develop the Soviet through his oppressive methods? I think it is high time the communists in India realized that they are in a functioning democracy especially so in WB where they have been running a government for the past 30 years. In communism a group of intelligentsia sitting in the Politburo office far removed from the people can take a decision and implement it through any means it deems fit. But in Democracies, while the cabinet can take a decision far away from the people – it must sell it to the people before it can implement it. The ways of democracy are inclusive, made up of techniques like consensus building. Bengal is not the first state in India to be industrialized and t...

No, I am not referring to India ’s batting performance against Bangladesh , I am referring to the ‘extra innings’ session hosted by Charu Sharma and Mandira ‘Cricket’ Bedi. It’s a lousy program and its current quality is worse than the ‘third umpire’ that used to appear on DD (with Krish Shrikant). When the studio came back after the first innings – the program director probably instructed the presenters to make the opening melodramatic by remaining silent for a few minutes. But instead of looking like shocked fans at a loss of words – both Charu and Mandira – looked more like lost presenters caught unawares by the camera! While the guests on the program are good – the presenters have been pretty ineffective in involving them properly. Add to it the nervous laughs of Ms Bedi that come right when the guest is trying to make an honest comment – the direction of the show sure does look very poor! Another lousy and artificial snippet on the World Cup telecast is the VISA advert – the...

I have never actually written in detail about my trip to Switzerland. Today, as I was idly browsing through my Photos collected during the UK trip, I discovered that more than half of the collection came from my 5 day trip to Switzerland. Indeed, those 5 days were the most enjoyable part of my 6 month sojourn! Adventurous as it was, I guess it is important that this blog has some record of the trip! Hemant was already stationed in Geneva when I reached London, and so the idea of planning a Swiss trip together sprouted right away – just the dates were an issue. Soon, we had finalized dates around end of July and the planning for the trip started around mid July. Both of us did online researches about places to visit, Hemant also interacted with some colleagues in Geneva for the details. Our “tech savvy-ness” reached new heights when we used MS Powerpoint to document and discuss route maps, train timetables and tourist attractions. The result – by the time I was boarding the plane to Ge...

आज से Blogger हिंदी (Hindi) में उपलब्ध हो गया है [ न्यूज़ Item ]। अब आप अंग्रेजी keyboard की मदद से हिंदी में टाईप कर सकते हैं! ये सुवीधा अभी पूरी तरह से develop नही हुई है, परंतु काफी अच्छी है। यदि आप इस पृष्ठ को Firefox में पढ़ रहे हैं, तो कुछ शब्द ठीक से दिखाई नहीं देंगे - जैसे की हिंदी (Hindi) और सुविधा। समस्या छोटा 'ई' लिखने/ पढने में होगी और अर्धाक्षर ठीक से नही दिखाई देंगे। मगर आशा है की यह सुवीधा जल्द ही सुधरेगी और भारत में लाखों हिंदी Bloggers को जन्म देगी। External Links (बाह्य तीर): Hindi में शब्द ढूँढने के लिए यहाँ जाइए Desktop Based Hindi editors के लिये कृपया यहाँ जाएं. Blogger कि मदद लेने के लिये यहाँ जाइये.

India is a true melting pot - and the language we speak are true representations of the same. In any given location, the way people speak (the dialect, the accent and vocabulary inclusive) is a wonderful mix of local, regional, national and even a bit of international influences. To take some examples: Bangalore lingo: "Enjoy Madi!" Mumbai lingo: "Its all over Akhha Mumbai yaar" Some International sprinkled in: "Dude! Hows life yaar?" All in all - India has been pretty successful in integrating its regional disparities with nationally pervasive trends and a bit of International lingo as well (thanks to its diaspora). The same has happened in terms of the numeral terminologies that we use. In India - even with the English media, we use terms like a 'lakh' (= hundred thousand) or a 'crore' (= ten million). But what is surprising is that beyond these, the media usually follows the international numeric term - billion. This is in spite of th...