MJ is dead!

MJ is no more- no, its not Mary Jane of the Spiderman fame....kids of the current generation, in this age of the ubiquitous digital music and piracy, may not know who Michael Jackson was - but for those like me who grew in the '80s and '90s do not know of a bigger phenomemon in the world of pop than Wacko Jacko. I cannot forget how my sis used to drive us nuts day in and day out playing Bad all the time - Dirty Diana, The Way you Make Me Feel, Smooth Criminal..I hated those shrieks and grunts that she swore by. They, and George Michael's Faith were the flavor of the season in the summer of '87-88 in Delhi. We were after all a family raised on a staple of Indian classical, old Indian film music, western country (basically Jim Reeves, Glen Campbell, John Denver and Merle Haggard) and The Beatles, our musical gods. Every school used to have a Michael Jackson look-alike breaking into a breakdance in every Annual Competition those days. Later, through radio and hand-me-down cassettes, I got to hear some older Michael Jackson albums, and also some Jackson 5 numbers. And then I realised that this weird guy was a precocious kid who had thrilled the world many many times over than a lot of pop and rock icons before him. I loved Off the Wall and Thriller. It was such an original sound from the noise of punk rock that the early '80s was all about. That, or the spillover of the music of the '70s that passed as music of the early '80s - the Olivia Newton Johns, Sheena Eastons, ABBAs (though one of my faves), etc. MJ and Madonna were the colossi of the '80s. 41 million copies sold of Thriller - go eat your heart out!

MJ's '90s was not very hot. Dangerous, History, Blood on the Dance Floor...only the ardent MJ worshippers could take all that. It was not original. There were a lot of new genres available and thanks to the opening up of the music market in India, we could access a lot of world music. Even in his home turf, his heydays were all but over.

The last decade was very tragic indeed for the ageing celeb. It is something the kids of today's generation may be aware of. The notoriety, the shame, the fall. Allegations of pedophilia, of hideous facial transformations...everybody took potshots at the "King of Pop". His friends that pockmarked his Dangerous album jacket - Liz Taylor, Macaulay Culkin (who Macaulay, by the way?) - everyone knowing him started distancing himself or herself from him and his now infamous Neverland ranch. Then the once in a blue moon news of his trial, his selling his estates and moving over to Bahrain, his conversion to Islam, his n'th breakup/divorce.

The most tragic thing that I read today, as I read the numerous obits on the net singing paeans on that guy (after assassinating his character a zillion times over in the past few years), was that the poor ol' weird guy was living in a rented place. A person who was almost a billionaire a few years back had lost it all.

Its sad. But then, thats the way it is. RIP Wacko.

News of a plane crash: of fake photos and the net..

Truly, while a lot of people including Thomas Friedman talk of the internet as a flattener, making the world a flat place where there is no First World and a Third World (well, that is a very contentious topic, since as long as there is civilization and humanity, I believe there would always be inequality. Some would always claim to be Ubermenschen and some would always be treated as subhumans), its very difficult to accept anything the net dishes out as truth. Again, there are forces and anti-forces at work to ensure no one gets to know what the real picture is - perhaps there are low profile sites that are struggling to keep themselves clean - but its really difficult. The other day, I received a chain mail on an Iranian kid being punished with amputation of his limbs for stealing something petty (very Oliver Twistian tale)...and on googling I found many sites debating on humanitarian grounds around those pictures. And then some sites unfolded the fraud - that the pictures propagated were actually just a few snapshots of a series of pictures covering a street act in Iran (or perhaps some other mid-eastern nation) and that the kid is actually a street actor...Then the latest pictures purportedly showing the last minutes of the ill-fated Air France 447 crash from the inside, taken by an intrepid photographer (turned out they were snapshots of an episode of the drama "Lost"). An LA Times front cover some time back had an Iraq photo that turned out to be fake later (the paper fired the photographer, perhaps because he was caught)..so, how much of genuine stuff are we really getting? A newspaper atleast retracts from an earlier publishing if people start questioning the content and tries to ensure it gets its facts "correct"...

These days, whenever I receive a mail with some weird looking photos, the first thing I do is google up the key words in the mail and the word "fake". Not surprisingly, I get a full page of Google results.

Hot sultry summer days and cricket mania

Its almost 11PM and still feels like its noon! After spending the day sleeping and then going to the mall (a mall trip is oh so stressful with the roads choc-a-bloc with cars, humanity and cattle, and the building itself teeming with people more interested in windowshopping), I am playing scrabble online and watching the T20 World Cup match between India and England..even the AC refuses to cool the room in this heat..:"(

Interesting term I learned today: Parallel Computing

Guess I must be sounding quite ignorant and stupid, but I had never realized the new challenges the software world is facing as the Intels and AMDs of the world move to a new paradigm (not new actually), of manycore processors. Apparently, Andy Grove had coined the term "Software Spiral" (didn't know he had coined any other famous term besides "Inflection Point"..:)) to explain the relationship between chip manufacturers and software writers - that as the processing power of chips goes on increasing, newer softwares are written to exploit the increased computational capabilities. However a few years back, that relationship gave way. Till then, the concept of computation was akin to a single lane road that was being widened by the chip makers to support higher processing demands. But apparently, they all realized that their chips were generating far too much heat - for all the transistors that they were trying to fit into a single piece of silicon - and even causing them to melt in certain cases (can imagine. My 256MB NVIDIA 8600 GT itself never stays below 67-70 deg Celsius at any time). The chip makers had reached a "Power Wall". So they started adding "lanes" to the highway - by adding multiple cores to a single block. And thats where the "Software Spiral" ended. Till date, major IT powerhouses are struggling to exploit the potential of manycore and have not been very effective. Apparently, by late 2010, the world of personal computing may see 8 core processors in the market (and I was surprised to know iPhone has 3 processors!) and therefore there is frantic race in the IT world these days to be a first mover in this area...

An amazing trip to Shirdi

Two weeks back we had gone to Shirdi..took a sleeper "Volvo" and travelled overnight to the holy town..The trip was just amazing - we put up at a hotel called Kalpataru right infront of the gates of the Shrine. The 100 or so yard strip of road in front of the Shrine is the thoroughfare of Shirdi - choc-a-bloc with tourists, shop keepers, beggars and squatters. But the best part was that we were graced with two darshans to Sai Baba's samadhi, and multiple visits to other places in the complex, including the Chavadi, Dwarkamai Mosque, Lendi Baug and nearby buildings, etc.

We reached Shirdi on Saturday morning, at about 8.30AM. The journey was good - couldn't have asked for more. The bus was like a couple of double beds on wheels - very comfortable. And with multiple stops all the way, we couldn't have asked for more.

On reaching Shirdi, we took a rickshaw to Kalpataru, and waited for a few hours to check-in. Got to know that there are daily power outages of 6-7 hours there (and perhaps across most of Maharashtra). Anyhow, nothing could have been done, and we cared less. We left the confines of the hotel in a few hours and started for a darshan. I had been to Shirdi once before, but didn't remember much about it. So, we joined the long queue that crawled slowly through the large hall that has barricades to keep the queue in order, and that has episodes from Baba's life adorning the walls (everything in Marathi though). After about an hour, we reached the end-point of the hall, only to take a flight of stairs down to a basement and then a flight upstairs leading up to the Sanctum. The main hall housing Baba's samadhi is adorned with gold and silver, and in the middle of the wall on the opposite side of the entrance is Baba's majestic statue. In front of the statue is Baba's tomb, and then two priests chanting prayers as devotees pass by, touching Baba's tomb, offering their prashad or donating some money..the exit is quick. The best part is - you can feel His presence in the place, and infact in whole blessed town. After all, He took alms on the streets of Shirdi, watered the plants of Lendi Baug, leaned on the walls of Dwarkamai, slept in the Chavadi and died in Dikshit Wadi.

After the darshan, we went to the complex housing a museum (we saw the Kaafani and the kurta Baba wore that still has stains, some of his cheelums, a grindstone He used to make flour, and other objects of His daily use...amazing), went to a bookstore and bought some books (I bought Baba's biography in Urdu), went to Lendi Baug and to the well from which He used to  draw water and water the flower plants and shrubs he had planted.

We stayed for much of Sunday as well - some of our friends were to join us that day - and then went for a darshan again (this time, there was no queue and it seemed as if Baba was beckoning us and cleared the entire path for us!). 

We caught the bus back to Indore late Sunday night. The return was eventful as some of our reserved seats had been resold by some unscrupulous agent. Oh yes, that happens in India sometimes. But it was a blessed experience and we are thankful to God , to Baba for everything that we've got.

Losing weight at snail's pace..:-(

It seems oh so easy - movie stars keep doing that all the time and Teleshopping folks keep showing those shapeless beings transforming into handsome men and women - but a 1.5 mile treadmill walk or a 2 mile cross-trainer trek burns only a 100 calories...that, and some diet control..and yet I have lost only 2 kilos in 11 days...:-(..drat, and double drat!

Joined a Fitness Club!

Yeah, Yeah! Suddenly I have become a Weight Watcher, conscious of my sedentary life and a need to shape up! I have enrolled into a weight reduction program at a neighborhood gym that includes some power cardio exercises, sauna, physiotherapy and massaging. And ofcourse, a dietician who would be advising me on what to eat and not. For all the fatty food I had at the McD's, Chillies, Arby's, Papa Johns', etc, its taking quite a lot to get rid of the lard I collected. And to top it all, to sit infront of a computer 12 hours a day! Hope all that changes! Lets keep our fingers crossed for this guy..:-\

Twitter, Last.fm these days!

Twitter has taken the world by storm - and I guess its for people who don't get time to personally interact or socialize a lot, are always on the move and could only thumb a line through their smartphones. I have started twitting too - downloaded this nifty app called Tweetdeck that runs on the ubersleek Adobe Internet Runtime (AIR). So, while thumbing even a line of message seems oh-so arduous to me, I did not mind keying in a few tweets through the web. Oh, and another category (thats growing by the day these days) of people would love the tool - those who do not have the patience to scour through pages of blogs..it is fun and worth checking out (I feel like an old man these days in anycase, catching on trends when they are already very commong, passe or sun-setting)..
And the other thing - Last.fm. Thanks to the app available for my Nokia N95, could try it first on the phone. Now, my notebook. Reminds me of Pandora. But Pandora's dead for me now - I loved it so and now it is confined only to the US..makes sense though. Through the weekend, I tried out a lot of new age artists similar to Sarah McLachlan, Hevia, Clannad, Loreena McKennitt and the likes. Turned out there are so many artists in quaint scandinavian and far-eastern locations producing such top class music. Nilu usually is on top of genres closer home such as Goa Trance, etc, but for me a lot of it is new. The radio picked up some cool Karunesh, Prem Joshua, etc too!..would try some of it this week too. Can do a lot of work with such relaxing music playing..

Saw a flag saying "Objectionable stuff" in my blog

Whoa! Objectionable stuff? In my blog? Well, thats the hazard of using the net - you never know who hits you and why. Is it the talk about war-time Germany? Is it about a tainted company which was in the news recently?..Anyways, such flags make me wonder - how do journalists operate? Anyways, hope the good samaritan who marked that flag on my blog would be kind enough to step by and let me know, through a comment or a mail...

Ideas to Icons

Got to know over the weekend that a colleague and good friend, Sajal, won the Young Manager's Award instituted by the Indore Management Association. The annual presentation competition had as its theme "Ideas to Icons" and Sajal made a very innovative pitch - coming out with his own model combining Innovation with Character and Trust. Among other stuff, the presentation talked about Satyam (Idea to Icon to (bad) Idea??), Mr Obama, etc. What really made me think about this presentation was my subsequent discussion with a friend today who still works for Satyam, as a senior executive. Obviously outraged and bitter about the whole scam that has so badly shaken up Corp India, esp. the Indian IT industry, some of these guys are contemplating switching tracks through higher education - getting another MBA degree - possibly from a good US school. Living and wading through the current morrass in the industry is quite painful, especially when you carry the baggage of a tainted company. Perhaps we could see a significant surge in MBA admissions this year. Who knows? I guess it is a good time to go back to school and look for ideas.

Trying out Adobe Contribute

I am creating this blog using Adobe Contribute, an Adobe application that directly links to a blog or website server and lets you add images, flash files or Adobe pdfs to the page. A good way to spend the weekend. Its a little nippy today here and we just wrapped up a game of Lexulous, the Scrabble variant thats oh so addictive..

Diwali Exhibition time again!

Shveta's been busy all through the month preparing for Deep'08, the annual pre-Diwali exhibition in Bhopal. What is absolutely incredible is the ability of this girl to manage so much. Ailing parents, me at Indore, the showroom at Metro Plaza, and her exhibition. Did I count the 60 people who work for her? I recall how she owned up and managed the entire kitchen during the wedding. And she is barely 30. If she works for any firm, she would be a senior exec in no time. Well, I am absolutely privileged to be her hubby, and to observe her do so much. I will post some of her exhibition pics soon. God bless her. I really really wish her so much of happiness and bliss, and yes, knock on wood!

Are we at a Global Financial Inflexion Point?

The current global financial crisis rings a very strong bell for people who are aware of the 1929 Great Depression and the global socio-political and socio-economic climate then. The Great Depression was the lowest point for capitalism and preceded massive socialistic movements globally, including the rise of fascism. A major part of the world was still under imperial rule and was quite unaware of what was happening in the US and Europe. But the effect was there, and it changed the world significantly. It was certainly an Inflexion Point, using Andy Grove's term for a singular disrupting event that changes the rules of the game in business. It was not the first event that had repurcussions across the globe - the Great War, or the WWI as we know it, was the first one. And it led to major social upheavals and changes primarily in the participating nation-states. Turkey lost the Caliphate, blamed the Armenians for losses in Dardanelles and summarily executed hundreds of thousands in an uncannily similar fashion that the Nazis used decades later. USSR overthrew their Tsar and put in place the first Communist regime in the 20th century. European monarchies were abolished. Then in the '20s the Great Depression happened. Financial terms that were not very familiar the world over ,such as Inflation, became everyday household words. They led in a way to the coming to power of the NSDAP in Germany and the other fascist governments in Europe. 

We all know our history. And thats the keyword today - knowledge. That is the biggest differentiator between all the major events that changed the world earlier and now. Every major crisis is preceded by a string of sub-events. The Holocaust was preceded by the Kristallnacht, the WWII by the rising unrest in Germany over the Versailles reparation terms, compounded by the Depression conditions. Today, in a complicated, globalized world, everyone is aware and impacted by any financial event. Ofcourse, in the early days of the US sub-prime crisis, laypeople across the world, even in the US, did not anticipate the turn of events that have ensued since, but analysts the world over could sense something amiss. Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, Merill Lynch, AIG, etc joined a host of names that are now familiar in even quaint, remote towns in India. The first reaction in many cases was, has Capitalism as a concept maxed out? Even before Bear Stearns happened, we have been witnessing various crises the world over - and all of us are quite aware of them. Some global - like the Iraq war, the War on Terror , Al Qaeda, and some local - our naxal situation, the Kashmir problem. But these have been largely chronic issues gripping economies and nations over longer duration. A financial crisis ofcourse poses a much clearer danger - in the past few days, in India, we have seen a few major problems already. The Tata-Singur crisis, for one. But a more sinister, ominous event that seems far more disturbing, something that one could perhaps expect in and around 1929 but not in 2008. A CEO of an Italian Multinational getting lynched by a mob of retrenched employees represents that fear. Is this a one off event or could this be a sign of more to come? Things are not so simple today as they were earlier. Events or causes in those times could be stemmed at one place because of lack of awareness. Today, radical extremist organizations only need to use the email or the ubiquitous cell phone to reach out to their recruits, quite like corporate organizations. Rising inflation, spiked up gas prices, exponential rise of consumerism with every individual aspiring to have a better lifestyle, increasing disparity between the rich and the poor  have created a very dangerous cocktail that is laced with other myriad local and not-so-local issues such as ideological or communal differences. Any measure to bridge this apparent gap, by way of reduced/competitive pricing (an oversimplistic example), only results in reduced margins for organizations and further layoffs - like in the case of Granzino Transmissioni which saw the recent unfortunate incident. And that makes the current Global Financial crisis truly ominous. We can only wait and watch how this unfolds.

Won a medium AI skirmish in C&C3!!

Played a C&C3 skirmish and defeated the GDI forces, playing as a Scrin unit...and that too in medium AI mode!! Finally!! Lots of learnings - moving the drone ship to the blue tiberium field early, creating multiple warp centers and producing multiple harvesters, and then queue up scores of vehicles - esp. anti-aircraft ones..Well, I still need to play and win a Kane's Wrath game though.
By the way, this is my 101st post! And to think I opened this blog in 2005/2006 - well, its been a slow start but a good one though. I love blogging now..:-\
Shveta's mom is recuperating, by god's grace. And I hope she really recovers fast. She has an indomitable willpower and she should sail through easily...

Delhi Trip

Just returned from a great trip to Delhi. It was basically meant for my medical examinations at AIIMS and fortunately turned out good - no abnormal condition, but I guess I would need to reduce my weight fast. Nilu is around and we could spend some quality time together - talking, watching movies, playing C&C3-Kane's Wrath over the wi-fi LAN (and did I lose the games royally!), and ofcourse, sharing data with each other. Nilu has a very good repository of stuff and it was a pleasure checking it out. I also got to check out Bapa's new office - at the Bhikaji Cama Complex. A sea change from his earlier offices, the new office is located in a major market complex (which surely is also a matter of concern looking at the importance of his new post and the lack of security there). But what has been inspirational about Bapa always has been his taking everything in his stride without any apparent betrayal of emotions. Ma recently witnessed this oh so prestigious event where the National School of Drama staged one of her plays. Could anything be better than that??

And also could watch Buli mamu and his family for a whole week on TV. The last day was rather eventful - with the Delhi blasts. Bonnie apparently travelled that day via Barakhamba Road, one of the blast sites and we were naturally quite worried about her. My thoughts were also with Shveta and my mom-in-law, who still continues to be sick. I was constantly in touch with them. Bonnie landed up on the last day and spent a few hours with us. She is looking very sprightly and pretty now - which is a great thing. Hope she also manages to get a guy of her liking soon - which would be so much better for her, esp. because she is so well educated and smart....

I also got to show some of my Steven Seagal movies to Bapa and Ma, and also one of the gems of my prized collection - the World at War. 

Lastly, our dear pets - Chaman and Godot - were looking their cutest best - playing around with their baby beanies and trying to hump each other (jeez!)..hope the horny Chaman gets a real mate before he dies humping an occasional human leg and a distraught US returned , male, Shih-tzu much older than himself...

I headed back to Bhopal on Sunday after having a rather good break. Wished my dear parents-in-law were better because I feel quite guilty thinking about all the good things as they suffer from ill-health.

Another Lazy Weekend

Spent the weekend downloading Spore, watching TV, playing some Scrabulous and listening to some music..The speed of the net was so bad, I thought our broadband's Road Kill compared to the US' Road Runner. Anyways, as I posted earlier, the lowside was my mom-in-law's getting hospitalized. Got to know she threw up. Poor girl Shveta is all tied up and emotionally distraught right now - I guess a few diseases, such as coronary ailments, cancers and tumors, refuse to let go that easily. They almost always resurface after sometime. Perhaps its like an appliance or a product that  - once it goes out of whack and gets repaired -never remains the same again and has something or the other cropping up that is in some ways related to that ailment. In anycase, the worst part about old people is that they don't stop worrying about their children.

Shveta's mom

Today got to know that my mom-in-law had a relapse of the brain clot she had earlier. For the whole day today, as I was trying to divert my mind elsewhere, my thoughts were with them and I could not stop myself from calling Shveta again and again...I feel so so bad for her and imagine how difficult it is to see one's parents age and suffer from ailments...May God give them strength and quickly heal her..

Swamped with work today!

The last two days have seen a frenetic time in the office, and am inundated with a lot of new projects getting set-up...would have 2-3 more projects setting up by next week and I would be ending up supporting at least 10 projects, and 5 teams besides them!..:((

Memento, Anterograde Amnesia...

Today I saw Memento, another one of Christopher Nolan's psycho thrillers - the last I saw was the American Psycho. The great thing about this movie is its near accurate depiction of a person suffering from anterograde amnesia, a form of short-term memory loss, in a murder mystery setting. The end result is a confusing story that moves backward..I guess IMDB and Wikipedia contain enough spoilers and synopses so I would spare us the details, but it surely is a must see. Thanks, Betu, for recommending this one...

World At War IV

Finally...wrapped up the last two episodes! Whew! I wonder what effort must have been invested in collecting all the information, editing all the footages, sewing all that together into a hell of a series! The advisor to the series was Noble Frankland, the then director of the Imperial War Museum. The last two episodes, though, were not that impressive. Ofcourse, there was no dearth of material, and the first 24 series talked in detail about various aspects of the war: for all the theaters, the scope of the series was covering the strategic, tactical and operational aspects of the war on land, air and at sea. Episode 25 dealt with the aftermath - the process of reconstruction in the devastated lands, the epicenter of all the battle. Huge swathes of refugees moved across continental Europe, quite like zombies. Permanently displaced even at home, since their homes were bombed out. The episode also talked about how other Asian nations, still under European colonial rule got inspired by Japan's exploits - Japan had routed the British out of Malaya , Singapore and many other places, restricting them to a few strongholds such as India. Nationalistic aspirations of many of these countries compounded by a weakened British/European presence made things easy for many to break free. The episodes show colored footages of celebrations across England and many other places, of the American homecoming. Absolutely invaluable stuff, this series. The last one talks about Remembering the Dead - 55 million died officially. Add to this figure the millions who died before the war in related events such as the Great Purge in USSR, the Japanese invasion of China, the partition of India in 1947. All within +/- 5 years of the war.
Back to life post World At War. Spent some time reading some books and playing Scrabulous before dozing off...