I came across this really touching video recently. Instant karma in action. This video is produced by ‘Life Vest Inside‘ a non-profit organisation with a mission to spread kindness. See how kindness is passed from one person to another person making a mutually positive effect.
And, in case you really like the background score in the Kindness Boomerang video, here is the original version of the song “One Day” by Matisyahu.
Keep spreading kindness 🙂
Happy New Year 2012!
2011 has been the year of protests. Be it Tunis or Theni, they had one thing in common: protests!
1) Arab spring: The beginning of 2011 saw the protests in Tunisia topple the autocratic government and ouster of the ruling president Ben Ali. Soon the protests spread like wildfire to other Arab countries under autocratic rulers. These series of protests were termed as Arab Spring. Egyptians ended the longtime dictator Mubarak’s rule and reinstated democracy and Tahrir square became world famous. Yemen’s Tawakkul Karman was awarded the Noble peace prize for her contribution to the Yemeni revolutions. Similar protests were held in various other Arab countries but failed to achieve any significant change. One country that saw the protests escalate to a full scale civil war was Gadaffi‘s Libya. Gadaffi’s 41 year old regime came to end with his brutal killing.
2) Ombudsman Bill protests (Anti-Congress) in India: Indians finally responded to the decades of corruption by the government (Congress party). Thanks to the civil society, media and their demand for the Citizen’s Ombudsman Bill or Jan Lokpal Bill, protests were organized throughout the country demanding for a corruption-less government. It should be noted that these protests were unlike the Arab spring which occurred for the want of democracy. Indian protestors who participated in this movement were against any political party and any form of government and especially the Congress government. Corruption is so rooted in Indian government organizations that the only way to satisfy these protestors (or protest organizers?) is bringing an autocratic authority to punish all evil-doers in the government and society. May be the participants of these protests have not put much thought on this but the ultimate aim of the organizers seems to be establishing an autocracy in New Delhi.
3) Anti-capitalism protests: Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests were organized against the 1% by the rest. The 99% has suffered so much in the flawed economic system of USA that they started to revolt against the 1% who is rich. Even though these protests had very good reception among the public, the government was successful in curbing further growth of this movement. This is mostly because of the media’s non-cooperation to the movement since the media itself is run by the 1% and the occupied parks were cleared of the protestors by ‘casually pepper spray everything cop’ technique!
 4) Koodankulam Anti-nuclear protests: India decided to build a nuclear power plant with the help of Russian technology in the southernmost region of Tamilnadu more than 25 years ago. After decades of delay when the plant was getting ready to be commissioned, local people started to protest against the nuclear reactor citing the adverse impact it would bring on environment and livelihood of the locals. The latest Fukushima incident and the Chernobyl accident were used to educate the people about the impact of nuclear disasters. Continuous protests and hunger-strikes attracted media attention. The protestors were successful in gaining recognition from the state government. Meanwhile, in the power hungry Tamilnadu where nearly 4 hours a day of power blackout has become the norm (except for Chennai where it is 1 hour), pro-nuclear groups which are generally small business owners are protesting against the anti-nuclear protestors. The anti-nuclear protests are not whole heartedly supported by people in the rest of the state other than Koodankulam area since the need for power is still not fulfilled. This is a very crucial ongoing protest not only for the people of Tamilnadu but for the whole world since the technology in question is the dreaded nuclear energy whose ills at any time and condition exceed the benefits. Will the 14K crore project be decommissioned by the government of an emerging country like India? 2012 may hold the answer.
 5) Mullaiperiyar Dam row: Another protest involving a future problem the whole world is feared to experience decades from now. Water is going to be scarce and water wars are said to be inevitable in the future. This Mullaiperiyar (Mullaperiyar) dam row can be taken as a precursor to this. Tamilnadu derives water from the Periyar reservoir by diverting the flow of the westward flowing river with the Mullaiperiyar dam which is located in the Kerala state. Since Tamilnadu owns and maintains the dam and the catchment area, the breach of its sovereignty is irking Kerala. Due to the current setup, Kerala’s plan to generate surplus electricity from its hydroelectric plant downstream has been unsuccessful and the illegal settlements, resorts in the catchment area risk being flooded. Now Kerala wants a new dam citing that lives of 3lakh people is at risk. Tamilnadu people who depend on the diverted water for their livelihood became agitated and started protesting. Theni district solely depends on this water along with 4 other districts in the south of Tamilnadu. Theni’s daily water consumption for day-to-day usage and agriculture is from the Mullaiperiyar water. From the first few days of protests in October 2011, Theni hasn’t seen a day without demonstrations and processions. Soon protests spread to other districts which are not even directly affected by the dam row. Some group or the other stages a protest against Kerala each day in many towns of Tamilnadu. This is one of the largest people driven movements Tamilnadu has ever witnessed.
Okay, enough with the protests! I did not participate in any of these protests. So looking back, I blogged a little bit in 2011. The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.
The local body elections to choose the mayor and ward councillors for Chennai city corporation council was held on october 17th 2011. Surprisingly, only 48% of the voters turned up to cast their votes. Here are some of the typical reasons the 52% who did not participate in the most important democratic process usually give.
P.S: I am the first guy 😛
I like the following two ads so much mostly because of the songs that make the background music. These two songs from Hindi cinema’s different era’s stand as examples for the quality of music made those days.
First one is a very hilarious ad. No need to explain the concept. So funny and creative. The originally-made-as-a-romantic old song seem to be complementing the situation portrayed with utmost compliance. Also not to ignore the fact that the song is remixed.
The song used in the ad is ‘Jawan hai mohabbat’. This song from the 1946 movie Anmol Ghadi was sung by the legendary Noor-E-Jehan and also features her. Easily becomes one of the gems of Hindi cinema’s black and white era. Now enjoy the song…
What makes me wonder is that how such a romantic and happy song helps this ad to be as funny as it is meant to be.
The next one is the Nestea ad featuring animated kangaroos. Surely a hit among kids, this ad is also an example for India’s very own sentimental marketing. Original song is used in the first half of the ad and then its remixed version. Both rock.
This song comes from the 1969 Hindi movie Aradhana featuring Sharmila Tagore and sung by another legend of Hindi cinema, Lata Mangeshkar. Till date no other song of this kind is made which qualifies to be compared with this one.
Unfortunately very few songs these days are worth a listen. I bet that is the reason ad film makers use old Hindi tracks for their ads.
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meterâ„¢ reads This blog is on fire!.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,200 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 5 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 15 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 56kb.
The busiest day of the year was January 13th with 197 views. The most popular post that day was Ring ring ringa Lyrics Translated to English.
The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wordpress.com, facebook.com, google.com, search.bearshare.com, and google.co.in.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for ringa ringa lyrics translation, ringa ringa lyrics, ringa ringa, pongal, and pongal wallpapers.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Ring ring ringa Lyrics Translated to English January 2009
33 comments
On a shopping spree… June 2009
Epic Browser: Reviewed by a fanboy! July 2010
Invasion of the Zoozoos May 2009
About January 2009
4 comments
Isn’t it the start of a brand new decade? I am bored of wishing the same ‘Happy new year’ greeting year after year. Let’s start looking at the future with much more certainty. Wish everyone ‘Happy new decade’, unless you are a ‘2012’ believer. Happy new decade 🙂
Epic is a brand new browser specially made targeting Indian netizens. Complete with a tricolor orb icon and a default peacock theme, it promises to become the favorite of Indians. Bangalore based company Hidden Reflex has developed this browser based on the Mozilla technology. As there are already enough number of players in the browser market, the developers must have chosen to create Epic as an Indian specific browser. And it has turned out as a great browser, satisfying the needs of a typical Indian user.
Epic is all about India. Right from the icon you get to double click on the desktop to the themes to the sidebar news content RSS, everything is custom made with an Indian flavour. The sidebar is topped by the tricolor India Content icon, clicking which slides and expands the sidebar where all the news from India can be viewed as RSS and upon selection from a drop down menu bar, state-wise news headlines from region specific websites can be viewed and that too in your own language. With the Devanagari ‘ka’, there is the Indic Text Icon which enables the user to type in Indian languages. This feature is supported by the Google Transliteration Service. Also a drop down menu appears whenever the user proceeds to type in a textbox. Typing in your own Indian language is not going to be difficult task anymore. For sure, this is going to make the Indic script usage in the Internet to increase.
The Epic sidebar is built with shortcuts to all the features it has to offer. It has this word processor called ‘Write’ which opens itself in a new browser tab and the user is suddenly equipped with all those features needed for creating a formatted document. And there is the Snippets feature which can be invoked by clicking its own sidebar icon letting you grab anything from text to image in the webpage next to it and make a mash up of the stuffs and tag it as you want.
And the big surprise is, it comes with a built in Antivirus suit which lets you clean up your system right from the browser window and download virus definitions as they are released. Isn’t it a cool feature? This special and unique feature is powered by ESET.
Coming back to the colorful stuff, there are hundreds of wallpapers and themes. Each and every one of the collection comes with the Indian connection. With such awesome reflections of India in each and every bit, it keeps the Indianness intact no matter wherever the user surfs on the World Wide Web.
Also awesome are the video feature on the sidebar which lets you search and view Youtube videos right on the sidebar, the My Computer feature that lets you access your files right from the browser window, To-Do, Timer, file Back-up powered by Gmail, Collections feature that lets the user save a couple of open tabs as a group, online games and numerous apps to make the browsing experience comfortable and more efficient.
And not to forget the cool feature that enables the user to access their Facebook, Orkut, Gmail, Twitter, Yahoo! accounts and see the recent updates on the really handy sidebar. You can also make use of the Travel, Maps, Jobs features that fetch you online content based on your query on the sidebar.
Usual essentials like the elaborate bookmarking feature with yellow star buttons right next to the close button of every tab that is open, one click private browsing facility (in the toolbar, an orange icon with a lock), easy web history management, file download support, error console, and simpler Add-ons management among such other things are also there. Every new tab comes with a text box and button to make a quick custom Google search and results are shown along with the WOT (Web Of trust) rating identified by colored rings. The ring also appears on the address bar right next to the address of the current web page. If this is not enough, you can go ahead and kill the Flash cookies, Epic is the first browser ever created to kill them.
And the final verdict is: Epic is a cool new Indian browser with lots of awesome features and it has lot of potential to give the biggies of the browser market a run for their money.
The most popular European music contest Eurovision was held last month. Obviously conducted for a Pan-European music extravaganza, some countries in the Caucasus, Middle East and North Africa are also take part. Each country sends its competing song that will be performed live on television by the artist(s). The winner is announced by tele-voting in which viewers from participating countries can vote their favorite.
Eurovision 2010’s winner is the German entry ‘Satellite’ by Lena Meyer-Landrut. But I am completely shocked by the results, since I was hoping that the Azerbaijani entry to the contest, ‘Drip Drop’ by Safura will garner the coveted prize this year. Safura’s on-stage performance singing the song ‘Drip Drop’ managed to get only the 5th place.
‘Satellite’ is just an ordinary song when compared with ‘Drip Drop’. Lena has no formal vocal training, yet she managed to deliver a superb performance. Safura, the Caucasian beauty not only gives life to her words by singing so awesomely but also gives a unique beauty that Lena misses to give. Lena’s way of singing is a happy-go-lucky i-don’t-care-what-emotions-are type. She sounds like an over-enthusiastic school girl mimicking a famous pop song. Yet the song is enjoyable.
‘Drip Drop’ is an emotion-heavy song. Safura puts all her energy into her voice to bring out the agony of a girl who recently had a breakup. It is really a touching rendition that goes straight into the heart and stays put there. It sort of leaves a pain in there. I believe such a song that really makes an impact is the best one rather than the ill-judged winner ‘Satellite’.
Since this a televised song contest, people are let to vote and choose their favorite song based on popularity. The countries that have given ‘Safura’ the most points are from Eastern Europe and Caucasus. Countries in the mainland Europe favored Lena’s attempt at singing a jolly song. What could be the reason behind such widespread negligence of a superb song? Is it the European mentality that is reluctant to leave the title of Europe’s most liked music artist to a Caucasian Islamic girl? It is certainly not the lack of musical knowledge that makes them refuse to appreciate good music. Or is it a petty reason like lack of promotion of the song among western, northern and southern European audience that became advantage to songs like ‘Satellite’. The only reason that I could frame is that majority of Europeans are not ready to accept a foreign entity at the expense of their national pride. When such an international music contest is conducted, Europeans must open up a bit to accept foreign talent.
Azerbaijan debuted in the Eurovision song contest in 2008, when it was placed in 8th in the final voting. In 2009, Aysel & Arash’s peppy number ‘Always’ managed to get 3rd place. Then it was impossible to win the contest because of Norway’s Alexander Rybak’s blissful performance of ‘Fairy Tale’ with all that awesome violin skills. There could not be a more convincing performance than that. But this time it seems that a biased judgement is given by Europeans. Only because a German girl is able to deliver a good performance, they decided to dump a much better Safura.
Azerbaijan has got a lot of talented people in the music scene. Safura, Aysel, Arash and the lesser known Irada are superb singers. Anyways, even including a not so European country like Azerbaijan in the contest and helping artists like Safura, Aysel & Arash get their part of worldwide attention through the Eurovision platform is a great thing. So I will restrain from anymore Europe bashing and listen to the music. Drip Drop…. Drip Drop….
Lately i have been feeling a sense of distance between Google and me. I have been a hardcore Google fan for years. But not anymore!
Yet, i am still a Google fan. As far as my searching habits are concerned, Google search is still my default search engine. I am not taking any other search engine seriously. Google fetches me what i want, even if it takes a couple of clicks on the next link, i am preferring the results from Google only. As far as Youtube is concerned, i am still a patron.
Google’s Orkut was my favorite social networking site until a couple of months back. When the Facebook phenomenon happened in India, as many Indian web users did, i also jumped to Facebook. Google as a measure to sustain its users, revamped Orkut’s look resembling to that of Facebook. Still, i migrated to Facebook and deserted my Orkut profile. No reason is needed to justify this craze over Facebook, yet i have blogged about this a couple of months back.
I almost have all of my friends on Facebook. Hence it become obvious for me to dump Google Talk for i had chat facility on Facebook. Another Google software finds its way out of my desktop.
I always blogged on WordPress. I have never done blogging on Blogger except for once when i signing up for a now forgotten blog. WordPress was too good to leave behind. Even if i blogged very less, i spend a lot of lot of time reading blogs on wordpress. Blogger is not a good sport.
iGoogle was a very nice home page to start with but now i enjoy My Yahoo more. iGoogle adhering to the simplicity principle of Google started to bore me. Yahoo was a very slick and good place to read and comment on news articles.
And since i have my primary email account on Yahoo, Gmail is only occasionally useful.
Next comes that which i never expected to happen. Ever since Chrome browser was released, i was a sincere user admiring its simple features. But when my Google Chrome browser started behaving differently, i had no other place to go other than Opera. Opera, after i started using it for a couple of weeks is becoming more dearer to me thanks to its elaborate speed dial and friendly nature. I always wanted more thumbnails on the Chrome new tab page, but only Opera offered that.
I am not sure whether Google Chrome OS will kindle my love for Google Once again. The so called monopoly of Google may be true in the case of masses, but i have crossed that stage and learned to embrace others too. Or is it Google’s reluctance to improve, that made me do so?
Today, 21 of March, is observed as the World Forestry Day. Obviously, the reason behind this is to have a day for the forests, so that we could have an excuse to think about its importance and to spread the word about deforestation.
And why this day? Is there anything significant about it? Yes there is! Spring Equinox falls on this day. It is one of two days in a year when length of day and night are equal, the other being September 22.
On this day, the Spring season starts. And association of this date with forests seems most appropriate. Forests on the other hand are facing extinction. Urbanization wiped out almost every forest area around a city giving place to concrete jungles with no life at all, even though lots of lives are liven in them. Forests in far away places from the cities are no escapists. They are being exploited for the number of resources they contain. Cash crops are grown by destroying wild forests.
Nilgiris, The Blue Mountains in Tamilnadu are victims of greedy people who want to mint money by making use of the thriving tourism industry there. Forests are set fire and destroyed, making some more space for the tourism business to grow. This in turn had disturbed the natural balance of the region. Recent rains wrecked havoc. Unprecedented path taken by the flood water caused landslides and road blockages cutting the area from the outer world for days.
Go visit a forest nearby, you may probably miss one!
![Lake Dillon and a Tree [In Explore]](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53731226172_4004cbfea4_s.jpg "Lake Dillon and a Tree [In Explore]")
Reverie 