New face of Indian Administration

Source: The Indian Express, July 2
Scene: A flood affected area of Vadodara, Gujrat

Cast: Joint Commissioner of Police, K. Kumaraswamy, riding on the shoulders of a Constable to evade flood waters.

I don't think I need to eloborate on this. Read the full story at
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=74383

Bloggers' meet @ Boat Club, Chennai

Boat Club: Though I had lived close-by (R.A.Puram for a year), had gone past numerous times around that area, and read about it in some of the articles in the newspapers, I never had an opportunity (or should admit as laziness) to visit the boat club. But the news of bloggers' meet at that place on July 23rd made me to cash in on the chance. A big thanks to Kriba for organising this meet, without which, I would not have bumped into so many other bloggers, couple of journalists, and a representative from Royal Enfield who sponsored the meet. It was so nice to be there during the evening when the weather was very merciful and even threatened us with dark clouds hanging over.

It was interesting to meet and know few age old bloggers led by Kriba Shankar, and newer ones with interesting and catchy blog names. It was nice to meet up persons like Ravikumar who had written an article on that day in the newspaper 'The Hindu' on the bad habit of spitting on the roads, Chinmayee, the singer who has sung for the film 'Mangal Pandey', journalist Liffy from New Indian Express, Samanth - the quizzer and freelancer journalist, and few others. I want to mention many more, but it's just the matter of time that I am not able to list them down (no, no .. not bad memory)

Reading a person's blog after knowing them makes it more interesting and some times, addictive also as it indulges you to read more and more blog. I was just kicking myself on my late entry to bloggers' community. But as the saying goes - 'better late than never'.

PS: Chandra choodan, another seasoned blogger took few snaps and has uploaded them in his blog.

Reunion with college fine arts gang friends

Happened on 9th July, 2005

After writing about college days, this is about the reunion that we had at our college. Though the turn out was small, meeting at the college and talking about vintage days was neverthless sweet.

After passing out of college, we were still in touch with each other through e-groups. We have got settled in various areas - IT, BPO, HR, Advertising, Media, Social service / NGO, Chartered Accountant, Bio-Medical research and few more. And in various places in India and abroad. Usually, we meet maximum twice a year when Vivek used to come down to Chennai from Delhi for a vacation. But we never tried to meet with all of us who are in India.

The idea of reunion at the college where we studied started when Vivek said he is planning to visit our college before he flies off to Syracuse University to pursue his Ph.D. Then we thought of how we can make the reunion a better one. Three of our gang members from Bangalore said they will also join. Then we thought of meeting up the students and share our experiences and provide them a sort of career guidance. We spoke to college management and they were very ready to have us there. The date was decided as July 9th, Saturday. Each one of us prepared PPT for the various areas and got PPT's from those who are not able to make it.

It was very good when me and Vivek landed at our college on 8th July. It gave a good feeling when lot of professors still remembered us and chatted about the old times. I should admit that we were taken by surprise by the onslaught J. It gave us an immense amount of satisfaction that our team had created such an impression that it is very difficult to erase from their memories. It took us almost one and half hours to come out.

July 9th - Myself, Vivek, Alan, Isaac, Prabhakar, Neville and John Suresh met up at college. The program started around 10.15 AM. The crowd was much more what we had expected and in fact more than what the college management thought. The venue was filled up to the last row and it would be definitely close to 350 students – from ours plus couple of adjacent colleges. It was equally well received. The program got winded up around 1.30 PM and then took few snaps to make meaning of the reunion and parted ways with fond memories.

Pic: Standing(L-R): Issac, Arumugam, Alan, Rajsekar, Vivek, Prof.Suryakumar and our beloved Prof.G.Balakrishnan. Sitting(L-R): Neville Smith, myself and John Suresh

Sethu Samudram project: Is it needed?

I have been hearing and reading about this project for quite some time and the advantages as claimed by the authorities is that it cuts down the distance (420 odd nautical miles) and time taken (approx. 30 hours) by ships than navigating around SriLanka, indirectly also saving fuel expenses.

To make that happen, the sea bed is being deepened (dredged) for the ships to pass through and hence the whoopla is all about. This project is estimated to cost Rs. 2427 Crore. Let's break that up and see - One crore converts to 100 lakhs or 10 million i.e. 1 followed 7 zeros, written as 1,00,00,000. Multiply this number by 2427 and my goodness – that’s the amount estimated. So we have 2, followed by 10 digits!!!

Some basic apprehensions ...

Do any of our politicians / bureaucrats / authorities know this mathematics? I sincerely doubt. God only knows how much is going to be really needed for this project and how many people are going to be more richer.

How were they able to estimate this much big money when we don’t have previous experience of performing such an exercise? For example, If ISRO gives an estimate for satellite launch; we can deduce that they have experience in launching satellites earlier and that helped in arriving at the estimate.

What do they do with the soil and other particles that are being dredged? I see that it is just thrown through a huge pipe, but where do they go?

Will this not have an adverse effect on the surface of earth and trigger land slides or under sea quakes because of the force applied?

How much impact the dredging have over the innumerable fishes and other creatures living in that area?

Finally, do we need this project when we still haven’t built the basic infrastructure of providing facilities such as adequate drinking water, drainage, electricity, better roads, PDS, communication systems in the event of calamity, etc. to our own country men.

My trip to the USA

This write-up may not be as big as my Australian trip; the only reason that can be attributed is it happened 5 years back. But if you thought it will be small – eh! No. I have still managed to tickle my grey cells and come up with a not so long type.

This article is dedicated to the team members at Ramco's PMG during that time.

I was with Ramco Systems then when I got this opportunity to travel to USA for four months time (Jan 2000 – May 2000). I traveled with my manager Mr.Sankaranarayanan and a colleague named Nandakumar. Later, my team mate Vivek and another manager TS Krishna Kumar joined us. Our destination was the city of Ontario (one and half hour drive from Los Angeles). We had stop over and change of flight at Singapore and Hong Kong en route to the US west coast.

The Indian airlines flight that we boarded at midnight had some technical difficulties; the door wasn’t closing properly. I was thrown aback when I saw one of the crew member bringing in a hammer kind of thing. It was my first flight and I was surely expecting things to be not scary like this. Fortunately, the hammer wasn’t used and things became normal and we were on. The change over time at Singapore was a grueling 9 hours. We spent the time taking the free trip of Singapore and roaming the airport and sleeping for some time. Then we boarded the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong and from there to LA. We reached LA around 9.30 in the night and reached our place by taking a shuttle as advised to us before we started. We landed at LA and after clearing the customs and immigration, took the shuttle as told earlier to take us to the hotel where we will be staying for 2 weeks or so. The first things that struck me were the sheer size of the airport, roads, and supermarkets compared to what I had seen in India. But yes, I got used to it as the days went by and I guess this is the similar feeling each one gets when they land in US. Our colleague Srinivasan had prepared good south Indian meals and it was consumed in moments by us after been starved of a complete food for more than 24 hours. Another colleague Suresh Mangalath was there who took the great pain of getting us everyday to the office and dropping us back. My boss, after two months, took a car and rental and started reducing the load of Suresh.

The work was very hectic (believe me; it was like being in furnace). The customer was Sunkist, a company that produces all orange related items from juices to chocolate. Basically they try and make all possible products out of orange. They had implemented our ERP solutions and we were there to migrate to a newer version particularly the database part which had undergone major change. The initial two months was literal firefighting, and usually it stretched late into nights almost everyday and consumed few hours on Saturday also.

Pic: @ Sunkist (L-R)- Srinivas, Padmanabhan, Sankaranarayanan, Vivek, Krishna kumar, myself and Nanda (sitting)

L-R:Vivek, myself, Suresh Mangalath, Nanda, Krishna Kumar and Srikanth


But we did have fun and didn’t want to miss out visiting some places. The two places that I missed were Golden Gate Bridge and Las Vegas. Other than that, the colleagues (especially Suresh Mangalath) were very helpful in taking us to various places.

Sea World: They had tamed and trained killer whales and Dolphins. It performed so many feats as instructed and it was just amazing to see those big fishes executing some commands perfectly and after every feat, it will skid to the area where the instructor is standing to get a mouthful of fresh water fish as a token. We also saw the bird show where they had trained preying birds like Eagle, Vultures to obey their commands and entertain the crowd.

Pic: At Sea world with my boss and Nanda Kumar


Pic: Dolphin show



Disney World: We were given a map of all the rides and entertainment places. The Indians Jones ride was thrilling end enjoyable. It was a good day

Universal Studios: By this time, another manager Krishna Kumar and my team mate Vivek had joined the gang and six of us went.

Pic: Universal studios – Entrance


Pic: Universal Studios - Shark mouth


Pic: Universal Studios - Climbing to the top


Pic: Universal Studios - Roof top


Pic: Universal Studios - Enjoying Cafe Mocha


The studio drive was impressive where we were taken through the sets that were created and some of the spectacular scenes that were filmed – the killer shark that comes in Jaws, the bee that appears in Mummy, the sudden flash of flood, Apollo 13 landing, the infamous ‘Motel’ that appears in the film Psycho and Terminator. It was very interesting to know how those scenes were shot and funny that it produced such an effect whereas it all looked miniatures in actual. The climb to universal studios took almost 45 minutes after going through five stages of escalators. It was a spectacular view from the top and surely, it was a memorable day.

My boss was kind enough to grant me 2 days off. I coupled it with a weekend and visited my brother & family at Houston and had a good stay – nice food, learning to shoot basketball at my brother’s place, visiting the Rice University where my brother worked then, driving a Toyota (of course, within the small lane, but sure to give me the excitement).

Whenever we know that we are going to stay late, we used to go to the Dennys / McDonalds / Taco Bell. Otherwise, almost every weekend we used to drive us to the Balaji temple at a place called Malibu (don’t know if there is a connection to the liquor brand). We had three Business Champions testing and certifying the functionality after our work - Venkatesh, Balaji Ranghachari and Srinivas. Whenever we visited the temple, Venkatesh used to take us to Udipi restaurant where our standard order would be South Indian thali food – compensating for the whole week.

Pic: Card Session at the apartment.


Apart from that, we used to hang around the Ontario mall during some of the weekends. It was so big that we used to cover fewer parts of it and have the remaining for next time. Similarly the other places where we used to hang around and buy groceries / things to be brought to India were Wal-Mart and Costco supermarkets, 101 direct factory outlet shops where we bought good cordless speaker phones at 20$ a piece, the 99cents shop and so on.

Pic: At the Ontario mall after done with shopping


Interesting Incident: since we always work late at nights, we were given the access to the company by means of secret numbers which we need to key-in every time we enter. Only then, the alarms set will get disengaged. One fine day, Krishna kumar walked first punched the keys and the door opened. Just when we crossed the verandah, the alarm got activated and it started the siren. The alarm goes to security agency. Unfortunately, no one picked up there and so it got routed to 911. We were not sure on what happened and so kept walking here and there to contact some one. Meanwhile Krishna kumar went out for a smoke and suddenly he was on the spotlight, with a helicopter above him casting a white beam of light on him. KK froze and luckily he just stood still without doing any action that would have invited a gun fire. Moments later, a tall well built police officer came to him with a hound like creature (actually it was a police dog) and after knowing what we did, explained and advised us on not to repeat like this in the future. For few moments, we were like mice being rattled by the snake.

Good Samaritan: I had bought lot of things during my four months stay to be taken back home and given as souvenirs / mementoes / gifts. On the day of leaving, I had packed everything neatly, but at the airport, to my shock, I discovered that I had excess weight for check-in and had to unload close to 8 kg. I didn’t have anybody to see me off as it was a working day and so I was clueless on what to do. Just then one of the airport authorities, a Pakistani, came to my help when he saw me struggling to juggle around the suitcase trying to figure out which of those items to leave behind that would make up that 8kg. I was the only one in the LA airport who was sweating like hell, frantically packing, unpacking and readjusting. Finally, with his help, I got the right weight (was still exceeding the limited weight by 2 kg), but since he knew the airline authorities, he talked to them to allow me through. I still had a big carry bag and backpack. He advised me not to take both of them as it would invite a scrutiny. He suggested me to leave one of them behind, get a boarding pass and when the call comes for boarding the flight, get in as one of the last passenger so that they wouldn’t be keen to check the last few passengers. His suggestion worked.

Had it not been for him, I don’t know how I would have cleared the check-in at LA. For a moment, he forgot the nationality and helped me like a friend in need. I will never forget his timely help.

That's what my US trip is all about - Thanks for your time!!

"BLACK" is beautiful !

A good, strong story conveyed in little over 2 hours in a stunning way.

I didn’t get to see Sanjay Leela Bansali’s Devdas, but I felt lucky not to have missed BLACK. It depicts the story of a child who is born blind, dumb and deaf and how she gets a teacher / guardian who transform her life from poltergeist like, arrogant child ill-treated by her father into an educated, cultured and a graduate, very well portrayed by Rani Mukherjee.

Amitabh, as I came to know through some of the magazines, didn’t receive a single penny for the role he played, brings the real teacher before our eyes who displays a ‘never-say-die’ attitude even when the child’s parents had left all their hope on reforming their child. For the girl, her teacher is ‘the world’.

Unfortunately, the teacher gets gripped by Alzheimer disease by which he forgets his past and the story ends with the girl slowly repaying her debts by nursing and bringing him back to his senses in the same lines of how she was taught by him.

The director could have still taken the easy route of performing a surgery to bring back her visual senses (the family of the girl is portrayed as a rich family and question of affordability could not have risen) and taken the story, but some essence of message conveyed would have got lost.

This is a serious movie and not an action oriented or romance filled type. So get a copy of VCD / DVD and watch it before it gets BLACKed out from your memory.

My college days (being part of the Fine arts team)

JAM (Just A Minute): It is my pleasure to admit that this is a big passage as I have tried to condense and present the six years of my fine arts life.

This article is dedicated to my fellow fine arts team members of St.Joseph’s college, Trichy.

One of the most fascinating phases in one’s life is the years spent at college. It adds more enjoyment and brings in different kind of experience by staying in hostel. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was a day scholar right through six years of my college life. I would consider myself lucky to have got into a college like St.Joseph’s for the particular reason that it helped me to instill quizzing capabilities in me and take it to further heights. I have recollected below, how my quizzing career started, and how it bloomed.

Fortunately my college had been blessed with good quizzers before me and they were able to help me to become a decent quizzer at an inter-collegiate level. I was never into quizzes till my school days except watching Siddartha Basu’s India quiz in the national channel every Sunday 9 PM. During my first year, we classmates (3 of us) casually participated in an open quiz conducted by Rotary club where over 100 teams participated. A total of 25 questions and we just managed to get 3 correct. We were just ogling at the girls who had come to participate and eager to watch the finals. In the list of six finalists that was announced, to our shock, our team was one of them. Another team from our college was in the finals. Of course, we finished last. Later, for the annual inter-department meet in our college, I managed to represent my department for the quiz. One of the members of our college quiz team, Lego Joseph, who was two years senior to me, felt that I have some interest in quizzing, took me for inter-collegiate and inter-department quizzes in the town just to give an exposure to quizzes. It drew me more towards quizzing and started reading newspapers and magazines with the intention of collecting information whatever I felt apt. That’s how my quizzing appetite started.

My senior Lego was doing his PG and he always used to give a run for money to opponents. In the inter-collegiate meets, the quizzers from other colleges would frown on seeing his face. Usually every quiz has written prelims and then followed by finals. Towards the first half of my second year, I managed to get into the finals on few occasions. That was the time the annual Gandhi Quiz came around hosted by our college. Lego asked me if I would be interested and I gleefully nodded. I took the Louie Fischer’s biography on Gandhi from our library and memorized the facts inside out. On the day of the quiz, there were 10 teams (2 per team). I just blasted my way through and when the quiz got over, our team had secured 130 points (10 for direct, 5 for pass over) and the next score was somewhere less than 50. We won the overall shield and were given mementoes. This was my first prize. After some time, the professor in charge of Quiz & Debating club asked me if I would be interested to participate in an inter-college quiz at Gandhigram University, Dindugul. Why the hell I would refuse? He told me that a guy named Ramprasad doing his third year Commerce will be my team mate. We won that quiz there by a whooping margin and it helped me to firmly establish as a successor to Lego and continue the quizzing fraternity of our college. Qualifying for the finals, then, became a formality for me in the quizzes conducted in and around Trichy. When I was into my third year, Shrinivasan, who earlier did his UG, joined M.C.A and he, also being a good quizzer like Lego added strength to our quiz club and along with the juniors – PK Vijay and Mukunth, we were set to rule the roast for next 3-4 years to come.

The third year started with an inter-collegiate hosted by Aptech computers (competitor to NIIT). Our team had qualified for the quiz finals and so many of my college mates whom I don’t even know came and wished me good luck. I was surprised and butterflies started churning in my stomach. It was purely due to the reason that our college was neck-in-neck with Bishop Heber College in overall points. We put up a good performance, won the quiz beating Bishop Heber and paved the way for claiming the overall trophy. There was no looking back after that. I began to flourish in lot more inter-college festivals winning quizzes or securing second or third prize.

I have tried to highlight few of my inter-college experiences (though not in specific chronological order)...

CECRI, Karaikudi: The inter-college meet in the name of ‘KALA’ was purely literally events with mild touch towards arts such as vocal music and instruments. The quiz was tough since IIT students from Madras used to participate. They dominate all literary events in a ruthless fashion. In our two years of participation, we were able to put up a good show. Our team won the second and third prize beating a team from IIT in the buzzer quiz. It was a nice and nail-biting experience as every question has to be answered on buzzer; 4 points for right answer and -2 for wrong answer. We also put up a decent show in other events such as JAM where my college mates Sherwin and Vivek reached the finals, GUESS WHO where our quiz team won the second place, Vocal solo – bagging the first prize in both Carnatic and Light music category, and Painting where our college’s trump card Antony Maria Joseph left his incredible marks.

I simply couldn't forget the night when we were returning from CECRI, Anto and Sahayaraj were drunk and smoked beedi due to non-availability of cigarettes. In the middle of night around 1.00 clock, we were all deep asleep due to tiredness when couple of us felt that the train has stopped and to our shock, it was Trichy junction. We all hurridely wanted to get down before the train starts, but Anto and Sahayaraj simply refused to move and semi-aware of the urgency. Lego cursed Anto and Sahayam using bad words in tamil (only occasion on which he was forced to use) and somehow we were able to get you two down.

Agricultural College, Madurai: This is an unforgettable meet. We were just 6 – me, Fredrick, Vivek, Antony, Kingsley, and PK Vijay. There were other colleges who had come with strong contingent of 15 members or so and honestly we were never aiming the overall shield, but wanted to put up good show in literary events. There was a variety event and though none of us had been part of that team, suddenly struck upon the idea of putting up a show. We just managed to recollect some of the jokes that our college team staged did some tweaking and introduced some new things at top of our head and our show was decently appreciated by the audience. When the results were announced, holy s***, we got the third prize. We then just went for the kill. PK Vijay and I cracked the quiz, Vivek and Freddie won the debate, Anto won the painting events, clay modeling and soap sculpturing and on the final day, we were topping the points table with just couple of events like light music and fashion show to follow. We decided we don't have the expertise and so didn't take part, thus helping American college to take the lead, but looking at some of the other teams that put up the fashion show, we were banging our head for not taking part. Had we had done a walking on the stage for the 10 minutes time, we would have surely got the third prize!

A special mention on soap sculpturing done by Anto – he had never done that before. But while relaxing a smoke on the main road after lunch on the second day, Anto bought smallest Rexona soap available in the petty shop. We didn’t bother to enquire why he bought it for and then in the late afternoon, he was into the event. He carved the figure of Gandhi so beautifully and accurately in the tiny space that it deserved to be given the first prize.

Saarang '97, IIT Madras

I don’t think there needs to be an introduction to what Saarang is all about. Riding on the euphoria of the success at Bardfest and following it up with runner-up status at Festember ’96, we thought we should give a shot at Saarang and create an impression of what SJCT is all about.

Around 25 of us went in from here lead by Prof. Jayaraj for a 6 day gala. We were given accommodation in the Brahmaputra hostel with five rooms to share. But the events were tougher than we thought. The awful part of Saarang was that it allowed the host to participate in large numbers and they also qualified for prizes. I have never seen the host college participating in such a large number and there were no external judges for any of the competitions, at least literary events. The only place where the host college participated was at REC Festember, but they won’t make up more than 50% of the finalists and don’t qualify for the prizes. IIT students are better than many other college students when it comes to literary events such as JAM, Debate, Extempore and Quizzes, but here, it was exceeding all such limits. I wonder why they should invite other colleges when they have enough people to get those prizes.

I, Mukunth and PK Vijay managed to get into the finals of a quiz called ‘India Quiz’; there were six other quizzes which we couldn’t get into the finals. Imagine how it would be when we were one of the six finalists, the rest 5 teams from IIT Madras itself. Somehow we grabbed the questions that came our way and there were some thrilling moments till we secured the second place. The team that came third started to claim that they got second and we were actually third in spite of the scorer announcing the scores. Luckily, I was keeping track of the questions we answered and scores at the end of each round. I then showed the sheet of paper to that team after which they had to shut their mouth.

The prelims of ‘sports quiz’ was conducted in a large open area with the quiz master sitting under a tree trunk and firing questions and the participants required to find their own place to sit and write answers in sheet of paper they have got with them. His voice was never heard properly because of the mike system and breeze blowing around.

In JAM, it was so pathetic to see the JAM master in the first round becoming a participant in second round. Eventually all the JAM masters participated in at least one round. We were deprived of prize in debate, although our debating team was given good reference on their performance indirectly before the results were announced. I wonder why they didn’t give the prize then.

Anto did a superb rangoli, a huge sized one which impressed every on-looker. Just we thought he will get, it was given to some other painting which was artistically much lesser than what Anto had done. Finally, all Anto got was a consolation prize which contained a huge cash prize of 25 Rs!!!

In dance, we got lot no. 12 and to our shock, our famed dance song ‘Cotton eye joe’ was staged by at least 4 teams before our turn came. It became boring for the judges and naturally didn’t get the attention it deserved. Probably we didn’t had the hindsight to have prepared for alternate songs, retaining the steps.

We did enjoyed the six days stay at IIT, the food, numerous bush-walks we did in the sprawling campus, seeing events at OAT, consoling Anto who was so dejected that he didn’t get the prize (he spent the 25Rs on drinks and it was tough time to make him come back to him senses) and so many other small incidents.

Overall, it was a good learning experience for each one of us and we decided that 'it was not our cup of tea', after seeing the way the competitions were organized and amount of host participation.

Pic: The train journey from Trichy to Chennai

Relaxing in the hostel room at IIT:


More to come...

Festember, REC

Confluence, Bishop Heber

Bardfest (University selection)

Version, All India MCA meet, REC