Water water everywhere, not a place to move…

This was how Bangalore was paralyzed after a rain that lasted just for 5 hours. Water was logged everywhere and normal life went in for big spin.

On my way to from Chennai to Bangalore, the bus took close to 5 hr and 30 minutes to cover the 350 odd KMs and an extra 2 hrs just to pass a 5 km stretch on Hosur Road.

If this city gets to such shapes with rain, trust me, it would have been out of the world map if it got any close to what Mumbai received.

This city has been crying for basic infrastructure and now it’s evident. It’s sad to see that despite all these, politicians are busy fighting petty power battles with the definite visionaries of this city. I’ve already described the plight of Bangalore in earlier blog (The BIG BANG(ALORE)).

Here are few snaps to know I really meant what I said.
Few snaps are from my friend Kaushik, will the rest are from a forward…

Wipro office - Under water Adventure i guess :)

Call Superman... HURRY!!!

This is no hovercraft.

Hum honge kaamiyab...

Hm, was the wall built on Ambuja cement ??

And for the best (i mean worst)...

Water water everywhere.. not a drop to drink.

Name... Not for the sake.

My friend became a proud father on October 1st early morning. The nine+ months of waiting finally paid off; both the mother and the baby (boy) are safe and sound. The wait for the infant to step into this world may be over but now comes a bigger issue, how do you call him?

5 or 7 years back things were much simpler, where parents called their children with some fancy god’s names prefixing or suffixing with their ancestor’s names. I still remember my Andhra friends whose names extended something like “Satyasai seelamanjula satyabaskara venkatakalyana Rajendra Prasad Reddy”. Despite being long and virtually impossible to fit in a passport, it was an easy task for the parents whose only work was to respect all their family deities.

But those days are over, man may have even gone to the moon on a joy ride but god knows where did we Indians pickup this sudden craze for nameology (MsWord give a red underline for this word). Parents run haywire just to keep a name to their new born. Sometimes these names are so weird with many fragments that they would lack any sense when kept together.

The kid had barely opened its eyes, by then the grand father had already checked the birth-star using the time of birth and downed on the syllables the name should start. It was “Mo” “Da” or “Du”. South Indian names hardly start with “Da” (as in Darling) or “Du” (as in Duplicate) and leaving the kid’s fate at the mercy of the syllable “Mo”. “Mo” is not a very flamboyant syllable and has very little to offer namely the 1980s fame “Mohan” probably with some suffix. After searching the cross sections of the internet we could hardly boil down to 4 not so interesting names like “Mohit”, “Mohin”, and two more in the same flavor.

The kid's father now has a new taste, he wanted his son’s name to be purely in Tamil, of course the “Mo” restriction still holds good. We went back to the internet to find refuge. Again not many names to choose from, except for names like “Mokkachamy”, reminds me of this popular Tamil Vadivelu comedy “Mayannae vandhurukkaha, Maapla Mokkachamy vandhurukkaha… Vaamaa Minnal…”

With half mind we chose “Mohit” as the only name that sounds somewhat fine, by then the grandfather came with a different game plan called “Numerology”. Every English alphabet is given a value and we need to derive at a total value that’s right for the child. What’s right is decided by experts in that field and our new born and still anonymous got his number as 41.

The number calculation goes like:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
A B C D E U O F
I K G M H V Z P
J R L T N W - -
Q - S - X - - -
Y - - - - - - -

Using information technology’s advantage, somewhere close to 3000 names were extracted from the internet and values calculated for all of them.

Scanning through all of them we finally got one good name “Harshavardhan”, name of a famous and fierce Indian King of the medieval times. The father was happy with this name and when he conveyed this to his father, and got another bombshell, the name’s calculations are to be done with the initials as well. The initial added 4 more to the name “Harshavardhan” and value changes to 45. Flop again.

We were so rigid on this name that we decided to tweak it a bit instead of finding a new one.

Out goes the middle “h” and now value is 40. We need to and a one. That is, A, I, J, Q or Y should be added. And so the final draft has been made and he’ll now be named “Harshavardana”

It’s easier said, but only we know the scanning we did across thousands of names to get here. My aim here was to euphemistically convey the hardships we undergo by not taking any chances and putting our best to make sure the kid’s life is great, keeping aside the argument of how valid this concept truely is.

A DEAL 2 BUY: Buy an Organ and get some Mind Free!

This is a great piece of information I learnt from the Discovery Channel recently.

When Ms. Debbie Delgado-Vega, a committed floor broker of Walls Street was first diagnosed with Chronic Active Autoimmune Hepatitis(a fatal progressive inflammation of the liver), she was told it would prove critical if she doesn’t get it transplanted soon. After a long, patient and yet a desperate wait in the queue for 2 ½ years, she finally got her Liver transplanted, donated by a family who’s inmate just committed suicide.

This new liver no doubt gave her a new sense of rejuvenation, but also gave her some new traits, foreign memories, their personal preferences and unexplained emerging talents. She had a new found flair for kick-boxing and eating peanuts.

With no proper explanation to this recent change in interest, she researched to find out that the donor of the liver has liking for kick-boxing and eating peanuts.

In TRANSPLANTING MEMORIES, prominent medical experts attempt to explain why some organ recipients adopt these memories and emotions, also known as "cellular memories". While a handful of scientists are skeptical dismissing this strange phenomena as post-surgery stress or reaction to anti-organ rejection drugs -- they are also countered by a growing number of experts who believe cellular memories are indeed transplanted with organs. Dr. Candace Pert, a pharmacologist and professor at Georgetown University believes the mind is not just in the brain, but also throughout the body. This school of thought could explain such strange transplant experiences. "The mind and body communicate with each other through chemicals known as peptides", says Dr. Pert. "These peptides are found in the brain as well as in the stomach, muscles and all of our major organs. I believe that memory can be accessed anywhere in the peptide/receptor network. For instance, a memory associated with food may be linked to the pancreas or liver and such associations can be transplanted from one person to another".

Hm! Looks like nature knew the art of paging memory much before we thought of it.
In future, there will be a day when donors can sell their organs containing some talents; you can shop for your aspired talent from them.
To know more.

Mumbai Vs New Orleans

I just got this forward, and couldn't resist posting:

Mumbai Vs New Orleans

Inches of rain in New Orleans due to hurricane Katrina: 18
Inches of rain in Mumbai (July 27th): 37.1

Population of New Orleans: 484,674
Population of Mumbai: 12,622,500

Deaths in New Orleans within 48 hours of Katrina: 100
Deaths in Mumbai within 48hours of rain: 37

Number of people to be evacuated in New Orleans: entire city… wooh!!
Number of people evacuated in Mumbai: 10,000

Cases of shooting and violence in New Orleans: Countless
Cases of shooting and violence in Mumbai: NONE]

Time taken for US army to reach New Orleans: 48hours
Time taken for Indian army and navy to reach Mumbai: 12hours

Status 48hours later: New Orleans is still waiting for relief, army and electricity
Status 48hours later: Mumbai is back on its feet and is business is as usual

USA: World's most developed nation
India: third world country...

Oops! Did I get the last fact wrong???
Jai Hind!

Happy B’day Take it ezzz!

It’s been one year since I started blogging, Thanks to Echo, who was my primary inspiration. I still remember that day last year when ‘echo’ introduced me to this blogging world and forced (I wont mind using that word) me to write something. Having lost the habit of diary-writing, this sudden push to post something almost extempore was quite a task. At last I was successful on this day last year when I completed my first article as and with a ‘Sigh of relief’. From then it’s no looking back.

Although I neither have the time nor patience nor the substance to write much, I make sure I post at least one article a month even if it calls for a battle with thoughts to make sure I don’t get rotten eggs flying from the other side. From travel-logs to sports, from political perceptions to film review and from sports to finally a Story telling, I tried them all. I even fiddled a bit with my native language given to say that I never formally learnt it.

Thanks a lot folks, for patiently reading all that I’ve scribbled here.

New looks:
After hours of battle with templates and divs, I finally settled with this new look to celebrate the Birthday of my blog.

New Blog Release:
I am releasing a new blog site herewith.

http://krazykars.blogspot.com (CrazyCars flavored with my obvious obsession for “K”)
In this blog-site, I’ll be posting my personal reviews and a fair idea about cars running in India and abroad based on my personal experience in them, initially with a frequency of one a month.

Suggestion, Comments, Questions and Good Jokes appriciated.

Keep reading and encouraging me.

Thanks!
Karthik

Oxford speaks bindaas Hinglish

The fusion of Hindi and English words in random permutation to bring out a sentence using the best of each world that is well-formed in grammar and sense is globally known as HINGLISH. This is common not only with Desis abroad but also with the 350 million strong local urban population of India.
With English being a language of popularity and choice in the Urban and Semi-Urban population, it was matter of time before it fuses with the local languages and have its own local flavor. In fact, Hinglish has become so much a part of us, that we fail realize that we are actually talking something butler-ish.


For Instance “Mai Office Jar raha hun” has become more common than replacing Office with say “Dafhar”.
Again, “Abi TV may kaya programme hai?” sounds far easy that to replace their Hindi equivalents.

The new edition of Oxford Dictionary of English includes several common words of Hindi origin like bindaas, tamasha, mehndi, desi, lehnga and of course, Hinglish. Few words of Indian English like agitation, off-shoring, tom-tom are also making appearances.

With Hinglish makings its presence felt, the other native equivalents will soon join this race. May this infiltration last!
Click:
>>To read more
>>To see the full list

The BIG BANG(ALORE)

It looks as though I just took my train from Chennai to Bangalore on the 18th of June ’04 and it’s already one year past since. This is how I described Bangalore after 1 week’s observation,

“As of Bangalore, it’s a boring city. Life here starts really late and ends quite early, and the climate makes people really lazy.
The roads are too small but people are damn rich. So there are too many self driven huge cars congesting the already chocked roads.
Each traffic signal can stop you for a minimum of 100 seconds and thus to travel 8 kms it takes close to 30 mins... (By bike you can travel 25Km in 45 mins in Chennai).
Bus network is not applauding and totally undependable... No where else can we see bus conductors stopping busses for adding natural manures to the soil... (So much for the garden city) ”

And after a year, I find my observations haven’t changed much, I am still sticking to my point that Bangalore is not up to the mark.

Bangalore’s best asset is its chill weather; the temperature strives hard to reach early thirties for most part of the year. This is what attracts people from all parts of the country and the globe. Still sometimes it could make our lives a misery. People who frequently travel in and out of the city would know the ear-cracking chillness early in the morning.

Bangalore is truly cosmopolitan, even a fruit vendor can talk a minimum of four languages and language is never a barrier for survival. Sharp eyes would have noticed that vehicles from other states (with their respective state registrations) equal the number of vehicles from Karnataka, and of course this has led to less road space and motorized vehicle not even sparing the pedestrian pavements.

The once retired man’s paradise suddenly woke up late to discover its population gushing beyond the threshold and yet the infrastructure remained the same since times immemorial. Traffic snails the whole day and it takes 45 minutes for bikes to commute 10 KM, I leave it to the reader to guess the plight of the car commuters.

I have to point out that a flyover at Domlur, the heart of a busy junction on Airport Road that was in-progress for 2 years then, recently celebrated its third year of dormancy. The issue was that the contractor (UP State Bridge Constriction Company) and the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) had some issues on project commitments. The BDA terminated the contract and the contractor dragged BDA to the court. After some lull the court commented that “Contracts are not shirts to keep changing often” and ordered the contractor to resume work but the BDA has decided take it to a higher court. What about public nuisances caused due to that? The BDA is still having its Eyes Wide Shut.

One of the most affected is the aviation industry, with frequent delays and ‘no show’ cases triggered due to heavily inching traffic. Since they are unable to persuade the government to get it resolved, they inevitably delay the fights and also they advice the passengers to leave early.

Real Estate values have soured up multifold in the last few years. A two bed room apartment in city limits, that was rented for anywhere within 3 to 5 thousand two years back is now rented for 10 to 12 thousand. The IT industry that attracts people with un-realistically high salary increases paying power of this small section of the public and thereby forcing the local urban middle-class to move out of the city. The owners of these houses have a policy “You earn more so pay more”.

There was an interesting incident when the Finance Minister of India recently visited Bangalore and looking at the plight of the infrastructure, advised the Government to take necessary actions. The government cleverly put the ball back on his count demanding for more funds and the FM shot back by offering some finance classes to the government on handling the situation with the available funds.

Bangalore has a pet of its own, none other than man’s best friends the canine mutts. Every inhabited locality in Bangalore has a comparable mutt population. And they consider the night times as their own and consider man walking during the nights as an intrusion to their privacy.

And the worst is yet to come, if Government and bureaucracy haunt Bangalore from within, security issues have shook the living hell out of the city. From petty thieves to terrorist, from mobile phone theft to the threat of mobility destruction, Bangalore has it all. If we have thieves who go up to stripping you naked to steal all you possess, we also get news that if London was a victim to these blasts, Bangalore is not far behind.

Will the authorities act before this city explodes? Will the projects like the New International Airport and Metro Rail that is still on papers ever become reality ? Will Bangalore be safe for human movement? Only time has the answer.