A marathi playing the role of a Chandigarh'ite, a Garhwali that of a Haryanvi, a Kerlaite that of a Bengali; isn't that the best example of National Integration? But even more, it is testimony to the script and direction of the movie - Chak De India! . Chak De India, indeed excels in both the screenplay and direction. The story of Mir Ranjan Negi, rehashed as Kabir Khan's tale is inspiring - but the way each character in the movie is etched, is what makes it even more interesting. Whether it is the brash Komal Chautala (played by Chitrashi Rawat), the bright striker Preeti Sabarwal (Sagarika Ghatge) or the no-nonsense Nethra Reddy ( Sandia Furtado ) - each character is believable yet far from being stereotypical. The story is based on the life of Mir Ranjan Negi - but the writer (Jaideep Sahni) has also successfully integrated issues like regionalism, groupism, and arrogance of seniors into it. Shilpa Shukla gets full points for her portrayal of the arrogant senior Bindiy...

I was Googling for B.A.G. films - a medium sized production house, but was surprised when I did not find their homepage among the first few entries on the search page. I scrolled down the whole page, went to the next page - still only external page mentions to it. Astonished, I went back to first search result - it was amusing- why should Dynamic HTML Central turn up when I search for BAG? And then I realized - this was indeed the homepage for BAG, but the developer did not even bother to change the 'title' of the page. He picked up a template from Dynamic HTML Central, changed the text and the links in it and lo - the page is ready. He didn't even bother to edit the 'Title' of the page, which in the Google listing appears as 'Dynamic HTML Central ...". The internet is the epitome of collaboration and open source. Huge number of scripts and templates are available for reuse for free. So using one of these scripts on your company's website is no crime. ...

IEB has put up two posts [ 1 ] [ 2 ] on increasing divide between the rural and the urban. My own interpretation of it is of the divide between informed and uninformed - either way, there is no denying to the fact that there exists a gap which is further widening with the influx of technology and development. Many a times we debate as to how to reduce the gap, the whole system of communism is based on reducing the inequalities in the society. However, time and again it has been proved that inequalities are bound to occur; a fallout of Darwinism - they can only be reduced but cannot be eliminated. In fact, as the failure of communist system has shown - any attempt to eliminate inequalities leads to lack of motivation in individuals to compete and succeed - thus leading to stagnation of the society at large. Yet, if socialism exists -what does it mean? I interpret socialism as a just system where every human being is guaranteed basic rights and comforts. A socialist society will have in...

IEB has a classic post based on Game Theory - explaining how expectations affect results... some quotes: We behave to a large extent on how others expect us to behave. People expect trash on the streets in India. That is they expect others to throw trash. That expectation allows them to feel free to add their own (small amount of) trash. Aggregated over many people over an extended period of time, the trash accumulates as the expectation itself gets reinforced. Eventually you have Singapores and Mumbais. I had once written similarly , though from a different perspective. But the essence was the same - you are what you believe to be - so the essence to success is to raise your mental bar first!

Ever since my batchmates M & A (who are married to each other) moved near my place - I often have the Sunday brunch at their place. Today too Somnath and I went for brunch. By chance I carried my camera and took some snaps ... here are results of the random shoot! Somnath and Milind Me .. sitting under the cuckoo clock The Tiger walking along Streets of Hiranandani (Somnath's nickname is Tiger) Me on the Street ... a new building in backdrop At Naturals ice cream parlour - one of our favourite hangouts

Went to a outing with a few colleagues (and ex-colleagues) to a place near Khopoli . Our basecamp was at ' Tudor Retreat ' - a farm located by a Lake off Mumbai-Pune Highway. Tudor Retreat is surrounded on three sides by lush green forests and hills. The farm is a spread on 10 acres of land full with greenery, trees and plantations. We went to a waterfall about 30 minutes walk from the resort. Since I had wet my shoes playing football earlier - I trekked barefoot to the waterfalls. It proved out to be a session of rigorous acupressure - to be frank - 'twas was quite a torture; I am still nursing my feet. The waterfall was wonderful! Water was gushing from the cliff (about 50 feet high) with immense force - none of us could manage to stand exactly below the main waterfall. There was a smaller offshoot waterfall, which also was quite forceful - but just enough for us to take some acupressure on our head and back as well. It was raining, so unfortunately, none of us could ca...

“Morons! I know there’s nothing out there. That’s why I want to build the railroad!” – Dean Kamen, on J.P. Morgan’s hypothetical response to two non-hypothetical M.B.A.’s hypothetical objections to J.P.’s railroad Code Name Ginger Link Via: Nivi

Well ... here is another view from my window - this one is towards the right ... Click on the image to enlarge .. if it is not yet explicit enough - I have been spending quite some time in front of my window lately :-)

Click Image to Enlarge Description of the View Leftmost white building - ' The Renaissance ', Smaller Building between the two white buildings : ' The Residence ' Under Construction : New wing of 'The Renaissance' Yellow Buildings among the greenery : NITIE Hostel and Academic building White 'stepped' building on the right: New Hostel, IIT Bombay Water Body: Powai Lake Greenery near the horizon: Parts of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Borivali

I have started a new blog - ByteFeed - http://byte-feed.blogspot.com/ This is my ‘Tech Dump blog’ containing snippets of the Tech News and analysis I glean from the Web everyday. I track about 40 blogs, of which 10 are Tech blogs and some are themselves Tech News aggregators. I got hooked to reading Tech Blogs about 10 months ago - when I started using Google Reader . Slowly my reading list grew and I kept adding deleting ... then gradually not only did my reading list increase, my ability to read and filter more and more content daily increased. So, apart from reading these blogs, I started sending some interesting ones via email to Shubham and Hemant - occasionally marking a few other friends too. Of late, I realized that I had been sending too many such emails and I better start a parallel blog to record these 'filtered' blog posts. Since these 'referred posts' are mostly on Technology, I used to send excerpts of these via emails by the subject 'ByteFeed...