Letting people fine other people

Why are cops not turning people against each other ?
It isn’t very hard for local public to click photos of vehicles breaking the law – For example, parked in no parking. I understand speeding tickets by people may not hold any value as speed calibration varies from one car to the other – but people can definitely report cars parked on no parking strips, texting while driving (of course, you’d have the sense to take the photo only when you are not a driver), no indicator light. All of this is very simple to do and verify. The government can send the notice to the offending party and give 10% to the reporting party. Hows that for a win win?

Gmail is dot blind – but it isn’t double dot blind

If you did not know gmail is dot blind – meaning- if an email address was a.b@gmail.com you can either email it to a.b@gmail.com or ab@gmail.com. Same thing.
However, gmail is not double dot blind. If someone gave you their email address as a.b@gmail.com you can email it to a.b@gmail.com or ab@gmail.com but not to a..b@gmail.com

Fire this man – Rajan – Reserve Bank of India

I whole heartedly wish that this man goes.
He and his team have lost touch with reality.

A common man now pays charges on
a)if some one deposits cash into his account
b) If he makes an online (NEFT) transfer
c) If he makes more than 5 transactions on an ATM. Given any ATM machine in India cannot dispense more than 40 bills, if one wants to withdraw over 100k from his account then one pays a fee !

Etc. The above are the only ones that I am aware of and I am surprised how all of this
has been passed by the RBI. I even tweeted to the idiots at RBI and asked them if they havent
implemented a policy where the banks should upgrade their machines from disposing at most 40 notes in a transaction,
why should a common man pay for withdrawing a lakh of rupees in a month. Now I can understand withdrawing a lakh of rupees a month may not be common place but the question still remains. Who is coming up with all this mindless bullshit ? I dont care if his resume shows him to be a superman – if a person at his level doesn’t have this basic vision, I don’t know how qualified he is to be the gov’nor.

When world over, the reserve banks are reducing interest rates, the man has failed in doing the same for India. Who needs this duck head ?
And there is a petition online for his second term ? Get a life !

Green Card on an Airplane

Whenever I come across people who have a vision for their lives, I have laughed to my hearts content. None of them seem to factor in the God-affect. You never know when the shit hits the fan. Nevertheless, it is very important to have a plan for life. To at least live peacefully in a hallucinated form of existence. That gives the mind some peace. To know you are going somewhere. This may or may not be the case, depending on the school of thought you subscribe to.

I, never have had plans. Seeing such dances of life around my existence, some part of me always resigned to the fact that everything is destiny. Though I very badly have wanted to plan my life and its life events. I guess I have lived 30 years just wanting to make a plan. When I was 20 all I wanted was to retire by 30. Now I am 30 and am still in the planning mode. To top it, I am now married and still have no clue how my life (finances and planning and all) is gonna turn out.
I am now drifting away into writing something about a planned life, where as all I wanted to write was about this little tiny 30 second incident that happened on my flight back from India to US. 25+ hours of flying with an Indian crowd and only this 30 second event so strongly influenced me that I only kept thinking about it over and over. I just kept making unsuccessful attempts at trying to understand the sadistic joy humans enjoy.

While descending into the Dallas Airport the beautiful ladies handed over the customs/immigration forms to be filled. As I started filling my form and declaring stuff truthfully, I could see from the corner of my eye the couple (travelling with their baby which kept crying all the time !) next to me kept looking at me with very intent eyes. I was sitting next to them for over 15 hours and they hardly had noticed me. Now, I was the center of their world. They looked at me like I was writing a charitable cheque and they wanted to be the first ones to know the amount the cheque was for. I finished filling the declaration form and as soon as my wrist swung – as it proudly signed my name on the truthful declaration of items and my fingers subtly loosened the grip on the pen while my left hand searched and flipped out the I-94 from below the declaration form, the man from the couple spoke. He came from the corner of my eye to the center of my eye. Now he was the center of my attention. What is that one question that this man sat on for 15 hours ?
I could see his lips part – letting a storm of bad breath let loose and his sleepy eyes took an expression of wonder. He asked ‘Are you not a Green Card holder ?’ ‘No’ I replied and shrugged my shoulders and made a smiley face of whatever. As soon as the muscles on my face completed the expression and as soon as my vocal chords relaxed after uttering the word No, there was an eruption of joy in his entire being as Chariots of fire started playing the background. He was one with the Super Consciousness of God. Nothing could pull him down at this moment. He knew, he had sipped the magic potion of elixir. His face transformed and he was now in raptures of ecstasy. His wondering eyes now had a peace I have seen only in the eyes of true sages. As a catalytic affect, the plane hit an air pocket which caused his hair to bounce and his head slowly bounced on the back rest of his seat. He entire being was bouncing in pride. I could see that even lips can talk. His smile conveyed a deep sense of pride as he lay in his seat with his eyes closed and a sense of achievement all over his being. It was a surge of emotions I have never seen. The couple were so happy to hear that one word. No.

Whatever, I thought to myself and filled up the I-94 waiting anxiously for this long flight to be over. Now, it was his turn to fill out the forms. As he pulled out three passports one of them slipped and fell in front of me. Lo and behold it was a US passport. He looked at me asking me to pick it up for him. While I made an unhelpful attempt and wiggled in my seat he reached for it himself and uttered the golden words in his blissful voice. ‘My daughter is a US citizen.’ I think he was expecting that chariots of fire will play in the background of my head and that I will plunge into divine ecstasy knowing the great feat he had achieved. His daughter was indeed a US citizen. I had to break his little heart. All I said was ‘good for you’ and looked outside and enjoyed the Dallas morning sun.

I kept wondering about these 30 seconds. What is it about an American passport that can give such joy. I have heard that the human mind derives great pleasure from another mans misery. This must be true. But how do you define another mans misery. Is it something you have achieved for which you struggled and strived and finally got it, which the other man did not ?
You keep thinking that the lack of this thing is causing misery to the other man whereas the truth is that may be this thing was very important for you and not the other man. So this thing was never really a desire for the other man.

I wish I had a vision. A plan. An ambition in my life. At least to get a Green Card. Alas, I still will drift in the wind like a dry leaf and put my faith in the Lord and His will.

Roll Tide !

Medical Image tagging

I wonder if what I am about to write has already been done before. A google shows it hasn’t been done. This is inspired by the tagging feature on facebook. I have never tagged my friends in photographs and neither has any one else tagged me in any of the photos, talk about quid pro quo huh.
So, I do understand that tagging can recognize a person in a photograph. So it can pick patterns based on many factors.

My idea is to propose a similar thing for the medical fraternity. There are a lot of diagnostic tests which are based on medical imagery. Or images, in short. Medical reports like X-Rays or CT scans or even ECGs (EEG). There can be a sample set of images which can be tagged under a ‘normal’ category. There can be a certain sample set of images which can be tagged for special conditions. For example, a broken rib or something like that. So the sample set for ‘broken rib’ tags will contain all the images which will have a collective sample set of tagged images for a broken rib. So if a chest x-Ray is passed in for a tag, the tagging software can easily predict what the x-ray really is trying to say.

Or, there can just be a group of doctors on facebook or some place. Any body can upload an image and the doctors can give their opinions as comments.At least this can be used as some guidance to the people in whose countries the medical facilities may not be so advanced.

Recollections of a residential program

So I was on a residential training program of a company who is currently enjoying my services. It was a new thing to stay in a hotel overlooking a pond across which my house is. All the soft beds and rich food is alright, I still need some junk food to carry on with my daily existence. Now, who could I confess this to in a band of people posing with facades of nonchalantness of their fella human being. They could talk a ton of shit about things useless, but a conversation of just a minute or two and the real wolf starts tearing out the sheep’s garb. And I have to run away. I can force people to get back to their originality, I cant stand them as such, you know. May be because I just dont care. Ok, let me repeat, I dont give a fuck 🙂
..So, although the stay started being exciting for the first few hours, it lost its sheen as soon as I started missing my daily cuppa Irani chai

I started missing the simplest things of life. My favorite mint tea with my morning news paper. Even practising switching between G to C to F to D chords of my acoustic guitar became such a great thing.For once, just once, I wanted to strum my guitar. For once, I wanted to practise my broken bow over my violin lying in some corner of my room. For once, I wanted to turn on my 586 pentium with 256 MB RAM and wanted to curse my laptop in comparission which is an i5 with 4 gigs of RAM. My 586 starts faster than the laptop. Overclocked it while I was learning the finer nuances of overclocking, and it has been one hell of a supercomputer of its times. I guess if all the 586’s got talking my fella would be proud of his processing speeds.

Met many people,well, some control freaks, some true laid back Hyderabadi’s. For once I had begun to feel that love at first sight may really exist. Most of us are adults enough to know that life aint a Bollywood movie, yea. But I guess, lonely sensitive pisceans shouldn’t really let their hearts out. The world is filled with people who can crush you out anytime. May be they have been giving you that lead, so you can bring your heart fully out, so they could just go one thud and crash it out all together ! Be careful my fellow piscean, I understand the bane and the boon. Say, how hard is it to be a man who wears his heart on his sleeve ? I guess many people(women) weren’t wired to be that way. They cannot take someone who likes to keep it simple, me thinks.

Team work is another important thing I learnt. You can give me what is required and give me the tools for it, and I can go all out and make something kick-ass on my own. I have always loved to play an individual game. I can set the expectations for myself and if I am falling behind, I can pull myself up, if I am surpassing I can pat my own back. I like to repeat this over and over, I am the one! Working with a bunch of people, on the same thing, is however a very different experience. So many egos, so many ideas, careful construction of words so no one gets hurt or demotivated. I mean, we have been a country which has been obsessed with getting rid of our egos. We have made many saints out of this concept. I guess, if renunciants practising the dissolution of ego are brought to the conference rooms in our organizations, and asked for ideas, boy, those guys are gonna have to take another couple of reincarnations to get rid of their egos.

Finally the rolling of the ball came to an end. Somethings learnt somethings lost. I was out in the sun, the burning fella looking down at me and saying, haven’t seen this bag of flesh for sometime. Let me roast him
up ! It was a strange feeling to be coming back home from home to my own favorite city, my dear Hyderabad. What a city to be in.

Cheers,

Review Disclaimer

My reviews based on personal experiences and experiences related by people I know. These are just MY views, my interpretations. I am not responsible for anything arising as a result.

Yashoda Secunderabad

You think who can write a review on hospital services ?
Well, I can.
After a few repeated experiences, it is very easy to categorise hospitals.
I would only want to narrate an incident rather than give a review on the gamut of services the hospital offers. One of my friends N had met with a road accident which left the right side of his torso traumatic. Which means, his kidneys (liver and ribs) took a hit. The kid had some problems with his right kidney specifically. So, he underwent treatments and after a few weeks he was discharged from the hospital saying he was good to go.
After a few years, his blood pressure went for a toss. After a couple of obvious to-do things like reducing salt and starting exercise etc, he was adviced by a doctor to go in for a Renal Doppler test.
And lo, what does he find, his right kidney missing !!! After a couple of tests it was found that it had shrunk its size to 4 cms. When this boy went back to the hospital he only thought it was his good lick to meet the doc who had treated him, Gangadhar. However, to the kids surprise, the doc put the blame on the kid. Saying the kid was never bothered to come in for an evaluation after the discharge (which the kid was never asked to do). The doc also said, this was the most common occurance in most of the kidney trauma cases.
I wonder if this is true, why would the doc not ask the kid to come in for a review ? So whose ever fault it was, the young boy lost one of his kidneys these way. Talk about super specialty !

Sigree

So, I had planned a dinner at Sigree, Hyderabad (B.pet) and we went there.
No doubt it is an over priced restaurant. A dinner for 4 at 2000 Rs. is expensive in Hyderabad !

The food is okayish and I felt they did not really have a wide spread of vegetarian dishes one could choose from. I had eaten at Sigree in Pune a year or so ago and was probably guessing what I was getting into. The food there was okayish. Nothing really to brag about. In Pune and Hyderabad. For a change, yeah you can visit the place. The alcohol though, is terribly over priced.

cheers,

God and Its formats

To know that the Gods as idols and human imagination projected as idols can be misleading. How can we be sure that the image that we see of Lord Krishna or Shiva or any other God, today, is the exact way They look ? If tradition of the Lords is to be believed who have been worshiped since eternity then there is marked difference between how Lord Shiva would have looked in the yore and how He ‘looks’ today. So if Lord Shiva had to manifest to someone, I am betting He will manifest in the way His image is seen these days, or the way He ‘looks’ these days. Which then forces me to wonder, is it our mind that is making these things up for us ?

The Muslims were clever, they never kept any photos or idols.So, no one manifesting there huh.

There are many schools of thought which say if you dedicatedly call on Him for 48 hours or so, rest assured He will manifest. I am not a doctor nor a big deal into neurotic disorders, but I am guessing, since the manifestation is of the current image of the Lord that we have made, it is our mind which is making us believe that He is here. I mean, look at it from the minds point of view. You have tortured that organ for so long. It wants some relief, so it will give you what you want. Its like mountain expeditions where the lack of Oxygen produces hallucinations. You want to see Clint Eastwood, you will see him.

Also, if the manifestation formula is to be believed, i wonder what a Buddhist sees. Nothingness ? Well, then that nothingness is manifesting everyday ! Lucky you Buddhists.

Also, if there actually is a conglomerate of the Lords, who ever decided to make the universe ? Did They divide the work ? Did They even exist before the universe was ? I am sure there was some religion and God even before Jesus Christ paid a visit. Still the man was believing in ‘something’.

The other day I was at a Christian faith healers place listening to a sermon and he was correctly pointing out a few fallacies. He was also of the opinion that one should not become an idolater and keep praying to the cross all the time. Well, after some time, it was prayer time. Where people got down on their knees and were being led by this brother.
I also went down on my knees and started praying with others, a minute into the prayer and I was shocked to hear the prayer words that were being said. I am a sinner and do not deserve mercy but my Great Lord Jesus is so great that He loves me. Lord forgive me.. I am a sinner… sinner sinner ! Damn. I could not take that anymore. I am not a sinner. I did nothing wrong! For a moment I opened my eyes and looked around and I saw people weeping. Inconsolably. I thought man, most of them look like normal everyday people, they probably have never even conned the government and people around. A few lies may have been said but they have all been due to the consequence driven fears that the society has fed us. But I only wondered if all people around me were really such murderers or killers or mother/wife beaters or evil doers that they felt so repentful about. After another minute or so, I felt like a sinner myself. For not crying with the others. ‘God save me from evil’ they said. I wondered, if evil is a force outside of God. What can one be saved from really, when everything is Him ! I wonder what mental phenonmenon can this be termed as.

To pray and to get closer to divinity is always associated with pain and suffering. Of course, praying itself really means that you have separated yourself from God and that you accept and acknowledge that there is a God who will show some mercy if you beg and plead.
If we all have ultimately made God in our images, I would really like to have a motherly image of my God. With whom I can be at peace with and who will just want me to be close and thing would be smoother.