Garfield the cat is a famous character. The wise cracking, lasagna eating, Monday hating, cat napping cat. I think I missed some of the qualities in there. But anyway….
The life of Garfield is an esoteric one. He eats and sleeps when he wishes. I remember the episode in which he sleeps after eating on a stack of hay. This inspires a sage till then. He feels that someone who can sleep on a hay is at a lot of peace of mind. The sage feels that he has been inadequate in his search for peace by leading a life of ascetic, quickly changes his life to follow that of our protagonist. He also asks his student to do so, who is shown smacking his lips at the sight of his teacher offering him a pastry instead of the usual advice.
In real life this seems so unrealistic yet so desirable. Everyone would like to eat and sleep and rest all the while they can. But then there is a Jon who is behind this luxury laden life of Garfield. Some of us deliberately choose to be Jon, some are forced by circumstances.
Jon’s hard work and love for his pets G & O is undoubtedly leads him to complying to every one of their wishes.
Bottom line is that some of us will need to work hard, but the love for our loved ones should keep us going untiringly.
Yesterday’s attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers outside the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore was definitely a black spot on the face of the cricket.
Cricketers have been much respected in the Indian sub-continent; they are almost like semi gods here and only people who come close in popularity are few film stars. Cricket is my religion and Tendulkar is my God was a popular banner not long ago.
Terrorists usually target a particular place or people based on the returns that they achieve to get. An attack on Indian parliament meant a chaos in the governance in the country. Killings in the valley are for purpose of occupying the state of Kashmir which cannot be obtained in a legal way.
But killing of cricketers is a little puzzling in that sense. They don’t stand to achieve anything prima facie. Many cops have also been affected. Kudos to the driver who is being credited by the entire Sri Lankan team for saving their life.
The state of Pakistan cricket is already not good and this wouldn’t do it any better. However, this attack does mean that whatever recuperation had started to happen will be stalled again. It is very difficult to predict however, when the next test series will happen in Pakistan. This however, seems to be one more in line with the extremists agenda of curbing any progress and development in the region. Similar to preventing education in girls and asking for women to marry terrorists and so on.
Only time will tell whether this is bad or worse.
Most of us have faced or encountered policemen of the wrong type.
Cops who have put their hand out for some petty cash and once you have helped them, put that into their pocket in the blink of an eye.
And more often than not we have hated them for we felt duped.
We felt that we got a bad deal.
Worse if the cop was not gentlemanly in his behaviour.
I am not supporting corruption, but think about it this way. The bad guys out there have no rules. And to counter them we need someone who is equally insensitive when apprehending them. This is the job of your neighbourhood cop. And he cannot be sensitive in his feelings for this might cost him his life. The US army has faced most loses in ground war; a place where the soldiers need to be most brutal and have no feelings or pain. This is a job for a soldier. He cannot choose to not kill or shoot or stab for that is his duty. We don’t criticise them, but rather call them brave. When then have double standards with the cops. Their job is equally challenging and risky. They need to be as emotionless as need a soldier on the battlefront.
So next time you find a cop not showing the necessary gentlemanly attitude, forgive him for that might be just what he needs to survive.
He is just trying to do his duty.
When I was at school, I was taught a lesson.
A father tries to teach a son a lesson about bad company by bringing 2 baskets of raw mangoes. Then he puts 1 more mango in each one, only that one of them is ripe and the other one rotten. After keeping the baskets closed for a day when he opens them up the next day, the basket in which the ripe mango was put contains all good mangoes and the one that contained the rotten mango now contains only rotten ones.
That is all the mangoes have now gone bad because of a single bad mango.
The lesson is true in life as well. This is the lesson he teaches his son.
This is also true in software. A product can go bad because there is just one person who is bad or incompetent. He is contagious. He gives rise to more incompetency in the team to save his own place and hide his own flaws. This can in turn result in spoiling the entire software development. Especially, if the person is in charge of something. We have all seen such cases in our own life.
But here I am talking about a very big product, which has just undertaken this journey. I am talking about the product that is most widely used by software professional all around the globe. A product that is ubiquitous across all operating systems for the last 10 years. This is the most downloaded product and the company which owns it is surviving primarily because of the money it earns on this. But now a manager in this team has undertaken to ruin the complete life of this product. In 2-3 yrs time this product will stop earning money that it does now and the company will dry out. I think we all know what product I am talking about.
Many developers are eating their daily bread from this, this is a warning to you. Please update your self in the next 2 years for something different
Indian IT industry has improved a lot, or so is the thought.
However, there is another side to it and that has been widely accepted as well for some time now. People (read experts) have argued that for most of the time now, indian software engineers have been doing a yes man job. Work is passed on from foreign countries be it a MNC company having an offshore office or a client paying an indian software services company for getting their work done.
This has been the channel for growth of the industry. The growth is in numbers rather than maturity. Thousands and lakhs of young engineers are satisfied with their needs for daily bread (and if I may say beers) and luxuries are being fulfilled by their salaries. An aspiration is to become a manager at some stage and rest as they say is history.
However, looking at abroad markets we see that there is an on going analysis for what direction the market will move and appreciate.
These sense is not prevailing in Indian engineers which needs to change.
A deal was approved yesterday, by Satyam to buy out Maytas.
However, the public opinion of the shareholders and analysts alike both resent the deal and are against it.
Maytas is also promoted by the same family members of Mr Ramalinga Raju’s family and close relatives. This is the main cause for concern in this deal.
Satyam says it is trying to diversify its business, but analysts believe that investing this kind of money in a family owned business is detrimental to the core business of IT and is not in the best interest of the shareholders.
A lot of MF’s also say that they will go to any extent to stop the deal from going through.
Mr Raju had a long conference call with the shareholders that grilled him on a lot of question. his main driving point was that they see value in the business and share holder will realise in the long term that this is a profitable deal for them.
Some of the questions that Mr Raju however kept on dodging were.
- Who are the promoters of Maytas?
- Wouldn’t it have been better to return this amount of money to the shareholders, instead of investing in another non related business?
- Had you considered buying out any other company particularly any IT firm to expand the core business instead of venturing out in an unknown and unrelated territory?
- Why buy or invest in a sector that is facing impact of the slowdown?
- Why buy maytas, when this kind of money could have bought DLF or Unitech or something equally big?
- Amravathi constructions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Maytas, how do the books look on that?
- Who is money going to – Maytas the company or the promoters pockets?
There were a lot of questions like this that Mr Raju chose to avoid.
Only time will tell whether there is any vested interest in this deal or is it what it is made out to be.
Roger Federer won the US open for the 5th consecutive time. This is a record in itself. He is the only player to have won 2 Grand slams 5 times in a row.
It may seem simple on the face of it. But tennis greats have been many, but this man stands tall on certain counts above the rest.
His interview after winning was particularly spectacular. He had me all ears at the French Open this year, when both he and Rafael started speaking in French on the stage.
At the US open, he said 2 things.
First, There are a lot of guys who are behind me and now in front of me as well and the competition is great with a lot of great athletes around there.
He is no longer number 1 and that is definitely nagging him. He also lost out of the Olympic gold chance in the singles, which would have been his most prized medal I am sure.
And that he is not superstitious about number 13 which makes him only 1 short of equaling Pistol Pete’s record of GrandSlams.
I am sure he will have a different year in 2009, but it will be great to see him win either the Wimbledon or the US open for a 6th time.
New Wimbledon champion Rafael Nadal now shares his name with a recently discovered asteroid. The asteroid was previously called with a number 128.. something.
So what does this mean to him and to us. Does this mean that Rafael Nadal the asteroid will be remembered for more time than Rafael Nadal the tennis player. Who is more important the guy who worked hard for making ‘Rafael Nadal’ a brand or the asteroid who earned it because it was discovered at the same time the player made a record after 1980 (winning 4th French Open and both French Open and the Wimbledon in the same year). The only point where the asteroid scores is it will outlive the player for a much longer time span.
This follows Roger Federer’s name being given to a star. The main question is how much does this affect the interest of the common man or the fact that people remember it like the Sun or the Moon or even Jupiter or the recently controversial Pluto. People will usually forget the name except for the time it amuses them.
Does this serve like a steroid for the names of famous people? Perhaps the people who name such cosmic bodies with famous people think that they solve their problem for naming a newly discovered body.
But the fact remains that mankind will always remember the man more than the machine or the asteroid in this case.
After a long time, I had a chance to catch up with Jaane tu…. ya jane na. A movie which I have seen in a theatre in a very long time.
The movie is a simple love story and a very engaging one. A rare feature right now, is the simple and non vulgur comedy is the most striking part of the movie.
Riding on the bike we went drenched to the movie, but this was offset by the cheap ticket price at Rs40 only and the full worth of the movie entertainment.
