PURPOSE OF EDUCATION
Thanks to Vijay, after a real long time happened to read something from The Hindu Magazine.
This time it was Kalpana Sharma's What happens to girls?. A nice article, although I feel, I should have read her previous column on women and science.
Honestly speaking, I am a firm believer in the G.B.Shaw principle, an opinion that was formed during my four years of undergraduate education.
Among the many curses in our country is the consideration given to the stupid society. I don't understand why a person can't live unmarried through life, especially, for any parent, one thing that gives prime satisfaction is marriage soon after education, and its really painful to notice that many of the educated youth still believe in this as the most important thing to happen in one's life. Before I continue, I tell you, Iam no misogamist and am waiting for the day to get married, though my interests could change, but, if someone feels his/her future'dn't be as rosy if (s)he gets married, then why on earth 'd ppl not understand that? Why's this ritual so very important to anybody's life? Are all these cowards, who'd let their tongues flap behind my back, more important than my own interests? What have those ppl achieved with their marriage, except for the everyday bickerings and the offsprings whose interests wud soon be curbed? I am in complete agreement with this paragraph from the column, "The reality is that most women want to get on with their lives but cannot. Even women with the highest of qualifications are often hampered. The worst off are those whose hopes are raised with education and skills and then crushed when they realise that the men they are forced to marry or even choose to marry do not share their dreams. " But, it just isn't just girls' goals, and the misconception that men are a whole lot better is definitely untrue, only that a few of them are more gutsy and can choose their own path, like our President and Mr.Vajpayee, but hasn't there been an Avvaiyar? When will we ever do justice to our education? There is no point in being educated, unless the person understands, respects and let's take another individual's path. It becomes incomplete, when an opinion is forced on someone else. Above all, it hampers the growth of the self, the second person and everything around you, when you voice your opinions to everybody except the person you're talking about.

PALINDROMIC PONDER
The new bloggle (google blog)is all about this... This man has written an algorithm to beat the existing record for the longest palindrome, and if there's anybody aspiring to working in google, with a good dictionary on your silica heap and good enuff time to waste, you can get into google with a bigger palindrome, what with google looking for programmers and your blogspot (and google's) being great launchpad(s)...
God, please give me the time of raapi and intellect of unni for just one day.......

THE TERMINAL - Steven Spoilberg's latest
I have seen a number of movies with stupid concepts, but, the if the whole central concept is flawed and the movie becomes a major hit, well, there's something lacking with the mass...
Ayudha Ezhuthu for example, let's please not give credit to the movie only because it was Maniratnam's, let's accept it was a badly made movie.
Here's a movie, where a man, Victor Novorsky, from Kracochia (whatever the spelling is) comes all the way to New York to get an autograph from a jazz player! When he's on flight, his country gets into a deep crisis and the USA does not recognise the country, therefore, Victor can't enter NYC and becomes "unacceptable". He's asked to stay in the international transit lounge, from where he's expected to escape so that the flight authorities can disown him and can hand him over to the cops or somebody else. But, he wins hearts when helping another Eastern European take medicines for his father, again the stupidity of nothing-off-the-book american attitude, brought to the fore. In the airport, he befriends an Indian, who's supposedly killed a policeman in Madras, 'cos the policeman had to be bribed everyday, and escaped to the US!!!!, and two other guys who also have blackmarks against them. Victor doesn't speak english well, neither does he understand proper english, but carries a PLANTERS tin of peanuts (which has just the signatures of all those jazz players Victor's father had the autographs of) and has english letters on it!!!
Finally, with the help of a flight attendant and his friends in the airport, he manages to get into NYC and get the signature of the jazz player!
I expected there could be something nice happening atleast towards the end of the movie, some justification for the two hours that had been over, absolutely nothing, though I should admit the movie wasn't boring. My rating to the movie would be 4/10, 'cos if you don't expect a proper storyline, you can kill 2+ hours.

QUALITY JOBS!!!

DISCLAIMER: THE CONTENT HERE DOES NOT INTEND TO OFFEND ANY INDIVIDUAL/ORGANIZATION/PRINCIPLE

I have been hearing a bit too much of the lack of quality of jobs back home (India). Honestly, I never feel or have felt that these jobs were lowly, and this may solely be because I have been in a job, bracketted into this league.
Giving a serious thought about it, the majority of the jobs fall into the following categories (I mean the close-to high-paying jobs for freshers)
1) Designer/Architect (Any job that _exactly_ fits an engineer or someone higher qualified)
2) Software Engineer (You, me and anybody else can sit there, but they somehow prefer engineering graduates)
3) Call Center Reps (This does not discriminate on your degree)

Looking at these openings, which are abundant in India, the first one is the dream job that every Engineer would want to find himself in. But, just as things should be (as otherwise the balance'd be lost), they are limited and (though not necessarily true) its the cream that gets these jobs.
The Second Class, is no mean. Taking a deeper look at it, today every person does every damn thing with a computer and almost all things need some programming knowledge. It just matters as to what the outcome is, some of us code for insurance agencies, some of us for banks, some of us for the best telecom companies, some others for the chip manufacturers, some on testing a machine/software and a few others for the local shops, but, its all the same work and the difference is only in the pay. The whole concept now comes into what more can I(/YOU) do from that position? If you think a little more than what actually that particular job needs, you can come up with great new ideas and more often than not, we get the time and resource we need. Ofcourse, it'd be great if you worked full-time on what you've studied all your N years of life, but, that thing has not been completely ruled out from other positions. So, saying these jobs lack the quality is humbug, in fact, I've seen a few people present their theses here and I'd say (my thesis could be more stupid and worthless) more people without any kind of departmental assistantship have done better things than those useless stuff that come out from internships and co-ops (no offense intended) from some of the biggest names here.
At the bottom most rung of these 5-digit-payers comes the Call Center (CC) Representative position. Its nothing but hypocrisy if someone would say, I'd wanted to be a journalist/reporter/blah blah blah, but came into engineering, because my countrymen did not count these positions high enough as an engineering, and then the same person 'd call the CC Rep jobs to be lowly. Actually, I count this job a lot better, especially when you work for companies like HP, DELL, etc. where you get to know a lot about the functioning of the OS (although, most people get to know that only to fulfill what their position demands, if all these people begin to understand what exactly happens within the microprocessor when these commands are typed, they'd get more knowledgeable than these hyped BEs and MS's). When my system dumped core a few months back, I happened to talk with one such person (from India) and I felt how much more he knew than me, despite my bragging myself to be a computer savvy techie. The growth of Michael Dell and the current stature of Dell computers should put things in their right place.

After all these, I am not going to go and take up a job as Call Center Representative, for more reasons than interest, but, if I happen to be jobless for 6 months or so, I'd definitely not be against this option. How many Indians working in the US can honestly say they do something that's _completely_ related to what they studied and they knew what it was, even during their college education???

HERMIONE GRANGER and THE TIME TURNER
I have always been amazed by these Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series... When I watched the Prisoner of Azkaban today, my liking only got more intense... It was a nice movie, only towards the end, it seemed like Harry and Hermione were left in a forever loop of going back in time ;) One of the most interesting things in these movies are the fabled creatures, the hippogriffs, animagi, werewolves, unicorns, etc and the transmogrification... Nimbus2000 has probably been outdated and hence the cut-short Quidditch, in this movie, had it broken for Harry to get another broom. It has always been difficult to get these names sink in, the professor of divination for example.
Overall, it was nice two hours, when you could become a kid and enjoy the movie. Hopefully, I would get to read J.K.Rowling and J.R.R.Tolkien soon and be capable of explaining the story to my kids ;)

Bungling BCCI
A few months back, there was so much hullabaloo about the tour to Pakistan, security threats, safety concerns and everything but cricket, did not want the tour... Now, it looks like, another India-Pakistan series needs to get underway, for Money and Money only. For this, the BCCI is trying out everything, ending up spoiling its own reputation, feeding something for the ICC to grab...
A few days back somebody propounded the stupid option of no test matches and now, when UCBSA doesn't agree to that, BCCI wants the tour extended... Something is terribly wrong somewhere. What the heck is going on??? Makes no sense to me.
Would love to watch a test series between these two teams, but will that happen???

Cricket in Turmoil???
What's happening to the world of cricket?
If the BCCI has been making a fool of itself by changing schedules, WI have been struggling to win at home over Bangladesh and Lara's threat to quit, SriLanka is caught in the Murali-doosra quagmire, England's management has real tough problems and the resignation of Nasser Hussain is claimed to have more reasons apart from cricket, Zimbabwe has more problems than can possibly be explained by any one person, South Africa has been drawn into the muddle with BCCI's stupid actions, the latest being the probability of Gibbs and Boje being questioned when they tour India!!!, Pakistan trying to show Shoaib his place even as the row between Imran Khan and Ian Botham is being re-dug.. That leaves only NZ and Aus (and ofcourse Kenya) out.. What's exactly happening here???

Bridging the Gap
hehehe... actually, this is just a filler... has been quite sometime since something worthwhile happened and have nothing interesting to write... Went on a trip to Colorado (there were too many ifs and buts and nos, but, finally finished with it) and it was GREAT... The world's tallest suspension bridge, Mesa Verde National Park, White water rafting on the Animas River and Indian Food in Santa Fe made the weekend zip thru, now back in school, with a little more motivation to work on my thesis and getting it done asap
Things seem to be not as worse as I expected it to be for India. The TN CM and her attendants have given the right answer to the wrong action, and very soon we're going to see more of these :(
Hope to catchya with something better soon...
obVSly...