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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Mon, 15 Dec 2003]
No complaints....yeah, riiight...
Too-much-pain-in-the-neck ex-roomie too-many-fundaes-for-his-own-good and self-described-better-looking-than-Arshad-Warsi and your (at least, my) pun-nightmare, has his own blog now. Copycat!
"Hasla la vista"!!! Arrrgh....
All this new-fangled stuff...
Seems like Indian Railways is introducing swank new coaches for their
"elite" Rajdhani Express trains. The coaches look damn cool, compared to
what used to be. However, traveling in A.C. coaches is just not the same
as traveling in 2nd class (atleast when the weather is good). The
smells and sounds and the option to sit on the door with your feet
dangling are just not there...
Indian Banks Too Hot ?
IHT has an article wondering if Indian banks are being too free with their credit and if it will lead to a spectacular collapse in 2 years, a la South Korea. The article goes on to say no. Essentially, it argues, the proportion of earners to dependents is much higher in India than in South Korea and it'll keep rising, unlike South Korea. And India has pretty low debt-levels right now. As an aside, I never realized Indian economy was, in dollar terms, only 7% larger than South Korea's. Ouch! or Wow!, depending on the way you look at it.
Heh
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a flock of pigeons flying with a load of compact flash cards :-))
Morons
Every once in a while one looks at a bunch of people and wonders how they
ever got so dumb. Here's the deal: vedic chanting is a dying art in India.
Not too many people know it and not too many people want to learn. Yet
this oral tradition is one of our oldest traditions. The central govt,
with help from NGOs made a proposal to UNESCO to have vedic chanting
classified as an intangible world heritage- thus getting new sources of
funding for helping to keep this ancient skill alive. One would think
"what a neat idea" and wish them all the luck. I wish...
Enter a bunch of morons calling themselves Navya Shastra, "a global organization of Hindu whatnots based in U.S.". They're irritated that a hallowed Hindu tradition has be degraded to the level of a mere cultural artifact (ignore the stupidity of that statement, for now). They'd rather not use the money of heathens to finance this. Let organizations based in India take the initiative, they say. Riiiight. And this from a guy who's based in New Jersey. And they are worried non-Brahmins might be shut out. If official endorsement, of a fund, by Govt of India *and* UNESCO is not enough to indicate that the money is untainted by such casteist motivations, what is ?
[/rants-and-raves] permanent link
Ponting Panting
U.S. media has an odd fascination with using puns as headlines. The
disease seems to have caught on to Indian media as well. Aargh....
CNN is definitely the worst offender. Once I caught this headline in their ticker-tape: "The Reproducers: Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker have a baby [boy/girl/whatever]". Of course, the pun was on the hit Broadway show "The Producers" in which Broderick had a starring role.
Nerd-Xing
Guardian has an article about how being geekish is now considered
mainstream. Well, they use the word "nerd" but "geek" is better. Video
games now bring in more money that the box office collections for movies.
Mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek cover cool technologies and
science with a devotion thats decidedly geekish. Another thing that the
article sorta mentions is how more and more people are "domain geeks": movie
geeks or music geeks or cooking geek or whatever...
Oh, nerd-xing.mit.edu is one of the Athena machines meant for logging in remotely. MIT does have some cool machine names. The best machine names, in my book, were the names given to machines in my (erstwhile) group at Accelrys: wail, bang, thwack, swoosh, buzz, screech etc. "Sound" words :-)