Saying...

A post i saw on my frnds orkut:)

says "My heart says NOW... My mind says NEVER... and I say its OVER
says "Your mind is the Scene of the Crime and Your body is the Victim


Hows it?

Just like that...

yesturday evening i was talking to my sister and in the conversation talked abt some funny SMS-s.

On the wine shop:

If u lover her a lot .... then u'll definitely love me later 

An Sms reads as follows: 

If u like this SMS then u r agreeing that i am smart,

if u have forwarded this Sms to ur frnds then u r agreeing that i am smarter,

but incase u delete this... it means u r jealous of my smartness

 Hows it?

Gautimala

Tourists climb Pyramid II to reach the Temple of the Masks in the Maya city of Tikal.

 

One of the most beautiful countries of Central America, south of Mexico and north and west of Honduras, Guatemala offers forested mountains, glimmering lakes, exotic birdlife. • The Maya make up more than half the country's population, and Mayan languages are spoken along with Spanish, the official tongue. • Maya ruins dot the landscape, drawing tourists, archaeologists, and anthropologists. • A four-decade civil war that pitted Maya insurgents against the country's army left many thousands dead. • Today, poverty plagues the countryside in particular, and crime remains a problem.

55 Fiction

 

A short story.. expressed in simple crisp words.. well narrated.. i liked it so much.. here it is:: http://www.gingerchai.com/2009/09/03/love-is-blind/

 

Check Mate

yet another good story from ginger chai... check mate.. where he projects an arrogant king who doesnt accept his defeat... is finally forced to accept it. A nice one.. i liked it.

Future Japanese cars

Renault.. Zero emission cars :))

:)

Images of india.. 

Ragging: anguish of a parent

I read this post on the google reader... it shows the pain the parent has undergone...

If my son, Aman Kachroo, was not ragged, he is likely to have been a happy kid today and, perhaps, a great doctor tomorrow. My wife and I and the parents of 12 other kids who died in the past one year did not deserve to suffer the pain of losing a child, and the boys and girls who got ragged in colleges across the country did not have to live with the shame and suffocate in helplessness. 

You might be thinking that I am not man enough to argue my case and that is why I have chosen to use an emotional tool. But that is not true. Let me draw a parallel. Let us consider a situation where a drunk husband comes home at night, beats his wife black and blue, has forcible sex with her, and then goes off to sleep. The next morning he wakes up and puts the entire blame on alcohol. We all know that alcohol is just an excuse. This man is a sick person who derives pleasure from inflicting pain on others. 

The man knows that his wife is an easy prey because she is a prisoner of her own false beliefs. She believes that matters of home must be kept within the boundaries of home, and to maintain that belief, she is ready to suffer pain and humiliation. For the husband, alcohol provides a convenient shield. 

Ragging is similar. Mentally sick students, like the drunk husband, indulge in their perversions under the excuse of ragging and the students who suffer are like the wives who believe that matters within the family must remain within the family. Clearly, the students who suffer are equally at fault as the students who inflict pain on them. 

Today, I want to tell them that they do not have to suffer for no reason. They can lodge a compliant on a toll free number 1800 180 5522 and action will be taken. I also want to tell you that if you feel that they are embarrassed or scared to talk, then you can file the complaint on their behalf. Please help them. They need your support. 

I know many of you must be thinking that I have created a monster out of something that is a bit of harmless fun and laughter. I agree that ragging, for most of you, is just that, but remember that those with the perverted mind are always on the lookout for something else. Something that you might have started for fun and laughter can get very quickly out of hand and turn into an ugly incident of rape or death or injury. Would you be able to live with that guilt for the rest of your life? Think about it. 

You must know that last year Supreme Court passed an order to ban ragging in all educational institutions, including private hostels, cafeterias and lodges that are outside the campus. Ragging is banned without any exceptions and there is nothing like soft ragging or hard ragging. Ragging is ragging and it doesn't matter where the act is performed. It is illegal. 

University Grants Commission has published what constitutes ragging. The details are on their website and on the website of the Aman movement for eradication of ragging, amanmovement.org. Basically, what it says is that you cannot force your will on any other student, regardless of whether he/she is your senior or junior or is in the same class as you. 

All of you know that if you get involved in ragging, you will be punished severely. But what you may not know is that from now onwards your college authorities too are culpable under the law if they do not act on a complaint of ragging. This means that the officials too can go to jail if they do not act and naturally they are not likely to shield you any longer as they used to do in the past. 

Also, UGC regulations place the burden of proof on the accused. What it means is that the person accused of ragging has to prove that he/she was not involved in ragging. The accuser has to only lodge a complaint. It is, of course, very tough on the accused but it only goes to show that the authorities are very serious about clamping down on the evil practice. 

We all know that making laws is necessary and punishment is a deterrent but we also know that laws and punishment alone do not solve the problem. There are many who break laws because they seek excitement and there are others who break laws because they like to oppose everything. When such people get caught they, of course, regret it but, unfortunately, it is often too late. Please do not come under peer pressure and get thrown out of the college. Ragging is an act of shame. It is nothing to be proud of.

Lesson learnt: What u do... is what u get!

 

i work for a product based company and i am responsible to help out people get their things done by providing java apis around the DB. I tried to make things as simeple to them as possible... gave the documentation, code generators (see both of these are not part of the project, and i did them on my own.. added they were not even considered for my appraisal.. so bad.. it hurted; so stopped updating them any more :) ). Recently the usecases requiring this apis are growing off.. almost 3 usecases a release and every time i see a newperson i need to update him every thing.. do debugging etc etc. Gone frustrated.. i stopped responding.. when some issue happnes i first try to hide off.. trying to be unreachable.

Recently i was put into the client project where i need to interact with the Gameserver. Here comes the problem... They are almost since 6 to 7 years into this and find it tiring to tell why the things are failing... what is the server expecting from client so that i can do the necessary debugging... more like non cooperation. Things go so tuff.. that i sat down debugging the server side as well... trying to get the data i want.. and a simple problem is eating off 2/ 3 hrs of time. Suddenly i noticed something!

I was with the same attitude when pple wanted help from me... may b i was too frustrated/ overloaded to help... or the documentation was available over wiki... still if i could spare some 15/ 20 min with them.. it would make their life so simple. Today i wold meet a guy and try to fix his issue. lets see what happens next!

 

Black hole

Astronomers think the object shown in this Chandra X-ray Observatory image (in box) may be an elusive intermediate-mass black hole. Located about 32 million light-years from Earth in the Messier 74 galaxy (M74), this object emits periodic bursts of x-rays at a rate that suggests it is much larger than a stellar-mass black hole but significantly smaller than the supermassive black holes found at the centers of galaxies. Few such middling black holes have been discovered, and scientists aren't sure how they form.

Photograph courtesy NASA/CXC/U. of Michigan/J. Liu et al./ NOAO/AURA/NSF/T. Boroson

Black holes are the cold remnants of former stars, so dense that no matter—not even light—is able to escape their powerful gravitational pull.

While most stars end up as white dwarfs or neutron stars, black holes are the last evolutionary stage in the lifetimes of enormous stars that had been at least 10 or 15 times as massive as our own sun.

When giant stars reach the final stages of their lives they often detonate in cataclysms known as supernovae. Such an explosion scatters most of a star into the void of space but leaves behind a large "cold" remnant on which fusion no longer takes place.

In younger stars, nuclear fusion creates energy and a constant outward pressure that exists in balance with the inward pull of gravity caused by the star's own mass. But in the dead remnants of a massive supernova, no force opposes gravity—so the star begins to collapse in upon itself.

With no force to check gravity, a budding black hole shrinks to zero volume—at which point it is infinitely dense. Even the light from such a star is unable to escape its immense gravitational pull. The star's own light becomes trapped in orbit, and the dark star becomes known as a black hole.

Black holes pull matter and even energy into themselves—but no more so than other stars or cosmic objects of similar mass. That means that a black hole with the mass of our own sun would not "suck" objects into it any more than our own sun does with its own gravitational pull.

Planets, light, and other matter must pass close to a black hole in order to be pulled into its grasp. When they reach a point of no return they are said to have entered the event horizon—the point from which any escape is impossible because it requires moving faster than the speed of light.

Small But Powerful

Black holes are small in size. A million-solar-mass hole, like that believed to be at the center of some galaxies, would have a radius of just about two million miles (three million kilometers)—only about four times the size of the sun. A black hole with a mass equal to that of the sun would have a two-mile (three-kilometer) radius.

Because they are so small, distant, and dark, black holes cannot be directly observed. Yet scientists have confirmed their long-held suspicions that they exist. This is typically done by measuring mass in a region of the sky and looking for areas of large, dark mass.

Many black holes exist in binary star systems. These holes may continually pull mass from their neighboring star, growing the black hole and shrinking the other star, until the black hole is large and the companion star has completely vanished.

Extremely large black holes may exist at the center of some galaxies—including our own Milky Way. These massive features may have the mass of 10 to 100 billion suns. They are similar to smaller black holes but grow to enormous size because there is so much matter in the center of the galaxy for them to add. Black holes can accrue limitless amounts of matter; they simply become even denser as their mass increases.

Black holes capture the public's imagination and feature prominently in extremely theoretical concepts like wormholes. These "tunnels" could allow rapid travel through space and time—but there is no evidence that they exist.

 

Neutron star

Photograph courtesy NASA/Andrew Fruchter (STScI)

 

Neutron stars are ancient remnants of stars that have reached the end of their evolutionary journey through space and time.

These interesting objects are born from once-large stars that grew to four to eight times the size of our own sun before exploding in catastrophic supernovae. After such an explosion blows a star's outer layers into space, the core remains—but it no longer produces nuclear fusion. With no outward pressure from fusion to counterbalance gravity's inward pull, the star condenses and collapses in upon itself.

Despite their small diameters—about 12.5 miles (20 kilometers)—neutron stars boast nearly 1.5 times the mass of our sun, and are thus incredibly dense. Just a sugar cube of neutron star matter would weigh about one hundred million tons on Earth.

A neutron star's almost incomprehensible density causes protons and electrons to combine into neutrons—the process that gives such stars their name. The composition of their cores is unknown, but they may consist of a neutron superfluid or some unknown state of matter.

Neutron stars pack an extremely strong gravitational pull, much greater than Earth's. This gravitational strength is particularly impressive because of the stars' small size.

When they are formed, neutron stars rotate in space. As they compress and shrink, this spinning speeds up because of the conservation of angular momentum—the same principle that causes a spinning skater to speed up when she pulls in her arms.

Pulsing Lights

These stars gradually slow down over the eons, but those bodies that are still spinning rapidly may emit radiation that from Earth appears to blink on and off as the star spins, like the beam of light from a turning lighthouse. This "pulsing" appearance gives some neutron stars the name pulsars.

After spinning for several million years pulsars are drained of their energy and become normal neutron stars. Few of the known existing neutron stars are pulsars. Only about 1,000 pulsars are known to exist, though there may be hundreds of millions of old neutron stars in the galaxy.

The staggering pressures that exist at the core of neutron stars may be like those that existed at the time of the big bang, but these states cannot be simulated on Earth.

 

Hidimbi

Very often i use this word.. Hidimbi.. to describe some body to show that they are mighty and are killing pple with their attitude. So thought of knowing what this actually means.. amm i using it in the right context... so here is the extract form the google... :)

        

Hidimbeswara Temple, Chitradurga, Hidimba and Hidimbi are said to have lived here.

Manali temple dedicated to Hidimbi

 

Hidimbi or Himdimbā, in the Hindu epic Mahābhārata, is a Rakshasi. She met Bhima while he was travelling in the forest with his Pandavabrothers and mother Kunti. After fleeing a burning palace at Varanavat, which was set up by their cousin Duryodhana to burn them alive; the Pandavas were wandering in the deep woods at night. Hidimbi's brother, Hidimba, an alleged cannibal, had sent her to bring him manflesh, but when she saw the handsome prince Bhima sitting in the glade she fell in love with him and could not bring herself to kill him. She transformed into a tall, dark-skinned and immensely beautiful woman dressed in ornaments and garlands and approached him. When Hidimbi was late, Hidimba came to kill Bhima himself. He tried to attack Hidimbi but she was protected by Bhima, who killed Hidimba after a good fight. Hidimbi then asked Bhima to marry her, at which he was reluctant initially but finally ensued after being repeatedly insisted. He agreed to spend the time from dawn to dusk with her on the condition that during the dark hours he would remain with his brothers, and this would continue till they had a son. She eventually bore Bhima a son, Ghatotkacha. When the Pandavas left the forest, Bhima had to leave her as they were on a war campaign. It is not clear whether they ever met again.

It is suggested by the similarity of their names that Hidimba and Hidimbi were twins.

It may be noted here that in certain parts of Himachal Pradesh Hidimbi is worshipped as a goddess. There is a temple dedicated to her inManali.

 

 

 

Marriages are made in heaven (part 2)

 

such a nice one.. so well written.. i congratulate the author: Anney Thomas for it.

its posted at: http://www.gingerchai.com/2010/07/14/marriages-are-made-in-heaven-part-2/comment-page-1/#comment-12816

 

Team Work

:)

Photography...

Grand Canyion

Dustbin of lights :)

WOW:

Pizza.... :(

recently i subscribed to this blog: Ginger Chai. Few articles i read were really good and entertaining esp: Anney Thomas P.S. I Love you; Marriages are made in heaven... etc etc.. The headlines showed making of pizza, now comes in the motivation. Why not try this out this wekend? i thought... and so this post...


Its very difficult and time consuming thing... however... i didnt want to giveup. The small point i overlooked was to have it baked in Oven at 450-C. I thought my microwave will do. But a big NO! I now discovered that he is only for warming up... and nothing nire....

btw.. i was taking photoes periodically.. i think ill post them :(

Managing stress

yet another story from the net i was reading this morning,....

::Swami Sukhabodhananda::

One youngster comes to me very depressed and asks this question "Why is God creating so many difficulties for us? How to handle stress?" I tell this youngster to reflect on this beautiful story:

A man goes to a shop, picks up a beautiful cup and says "my god this cup is so beautiful" and suddenly the cup starts talking to the man. The cup starts saying "O man, I am beautiful right now, but what was the state of my being before the pot-maker made me a beautiful pot?

Before I was sheer mud and the pot-maker pulled me out of the mud from the mother earth and I felt why that pot-maker is so cruel, he has separated me from mother earth. I felt a tremendous pain. And the pot-maker said, "Just wait." Then he put me and churned me, when I was churned I felt so giddy, so painful, so stressful, I asked the pot-maker "Why are you so cruel?" the pot-maker said, "Just wait." Then he put me into a oven and heated me up, I felt completely burnt. There was tremendous pain and I asked the pot-maker "Why are you so cruel?" and the pot-maker said, "Just wait."

Then he poured hot paint on me and I felt the fume and the pain, I again asked the pot-maker "Why are you so cruel?" and the pot-maker said, "Just wait." Then again he put me into an oven and heated it to make me more strong, I felt life is so painful hence pleaded the pot-maker and the pot-maker said, "Just wait." And after that the pot-maker took me to the mirror and said, "Now look at yourself". And surprisingly I found myself so beautiful.

When god gives us lot of trouble, it appears god is very cruel but we need patience and we have to wait. When bad things happen to good people, they become better and not bitter.

So, all difficulties are part of a cosmic design to make us really beautiful. We need patience, we need understanding, we need the commitment to go through in a very calm and wise way. So, all difficulties are not to tumble us but to humble us. 
With this understanding, let us not be against difficulty. Understand difficulty is a part of a purifying process. A purifying process at present which we cannot understand and hence we need faith and we need trust.

Let us understand how to handle stress with this background. You can be affected by stress from two angles. There is an internal stress and there is an external stress. Nobody can avoid stress; one has to only manage stress. Managing stress can be internal and also external.

The internal stress is; your thoughts can create stress, your values can create stress, and your beliefs can create stress, meaning thereby your stress is coming from your mind more from the outer world. Many people suffer not from heart attack – they suffer from thought-attack.

For example, when somebody says you are an idiot, we get so hurt, we get so victimized. My boss has called me an idiot and I am feeling tremendous pain. Now where does this stress come from? If my boss has called me an idiot, I have to ask myself "am I an idiot"?

If I am an idiot nothing to be upset about; and if I am not an idiot, then also nothing to be upset about! It is the perception of the boss. But why do we suffer from that stress? I suffer not because my boss has called me an idiot but because of the thought-attack.

I may say the boss has called me an idiot; therefore I am suffering? It is true that the words are unpleasant. But what hurts is the interpretation of the unpleasant word. The thought in me interprets. That is pain and therefore it becomes pain. Much of our stress is our mind interpreting it as pain. So we suffer from thought-attack more than heart attack.

Marriages are made in heaven????

This post (http://www.gingerchai.com/2010/07/07/marriages-are-made-in-heaven/) i just read it over the net.. such a nice & entertaining one; well written.

The blog crossed 1000 visitors..

hey!.. 

i was waiting for this to happen since a long long time... see the site counter.. shows the total visitors > 1000.

I added the counter.. may b couple of years back...

2nd attempt: trying out google chrome

i am a fan of mozilla firefox.. i love it the most.. the extensions.. the flexibility it gives.. plugins.. speed all are so nice.. but wait! recently my office changed the proxy server.. i dont know what happend this fellow started cribbing.. for every site i need to add exception and only then i can use it.. still fine.. i still like it.. now comes another problem! My fav plugin: delicious (by yahoo) fails. On start up .. i need to add an expcetion.. and this is so painful.. it first cribs invalid certificate.. for abt 10 times.. and then allows me to add the certificate.. still mozilla is ok.. but things started irritating me.. as its mundane job every day.. 

previously i used chrome.. i liked it.. mainly for its simplicity in design.. and quickness in user response.. but wait.. google has his own problems.. its not flexible as firefox.. he gives delicious plugin but it has usablility issues... i think this is because of chromes architecture itself, i think he doesnt allow the side panel as firefox does. Also the plugins are limited.. and evenif they are available.. have usability issues (ok alreay said this still). However few plugins are gud like scribefire.. or i need not add exceptions for every simple site.. like google/ blogger/ delicious, as it happens in firefox.

now i m trying it again.. atleast i see firefox tyring to smoke me out.. lets see how it goes.

What a wonder ful morning...

Aaaha!.. today is a great morning.. i liked it the most.. yest night it was raining here.. not heavily though.. a biker can ride home.. and today morning.. the day was great... cool.. nice..  atleast i ride to office by byk.. so didnt feel the traffic jam much.. or it was ok.. taking the climate/ atmosphere into account.. 

i like the flyover at hyderabad central.. such a nice one.. a long one.. so smooth.. i enjoy the travel on it.. 

gud one

Once, an old man and his 24 year old son were going from new york to texas by train. The son sat next to the window with his father beside him. The son looking out from the window shouted,"Dad, look the trees are going behind!"

Dad smiled and a young couple nearby looked at the 24 yr old's childish behaviour with pity. Suddenly he again exclaimed "Dad, look the clouds are running with us!"
The couple couldn't resist and said to the old man,"why don't you take your son to a good doctor?"

The old man smiled and said, "i did and we are just coming from the hospital, my son was blind from birth, he jus got his eyes today".

MORAL:
Dont jump to a conclusion directly cos wat u see is most probably not the truth.

... again got this from some blog i was reading this evening..