Did it....

Atlast I completed "The Alchemist" overcoming my impatience associated with reading books. I read the book here and there, left it behind for a week and all of a sudden decided to pursue with it this weekend and was done with it yesterday. I really enjoyed reading the book, the book talks about stuff which we all know but fail to realize. Definitely recommend to people who like me have trouble to read books. This would be a good start, a small and interesting one..... I still have not decided on my next book.... I want to go into a non fiction one and my target date would be before the New Year.... Going forward I want to do 2 books per month...... Lets see how far I go with this....

Welcome back DADA

He is back with a bang, a gritty 51 to lead India's charge in the 1st innings against the South Africans. There were good signs during the tour match when he scored that 83 runs against a good South African reserve side. I have always liked him for his aggressive nature and the way he molded Team India, especially when he took it to the Aussies in India and in Australia. To me the best captain India ever had, he bought in the aggresiveness in the otherwise meek Indian side. All can draw inspiration from his comeback, almost everybody wrote him off, I thought he would never make it back and now he is the top performer for the Indian side. I know this is an very early talk but when I watched him play there were glimpses of the Ganguly of the old. As he once said " We are the lucky few and all we need is one good day to turn things on", thats exactly what is happening to him. Players like Ganguly, Lara, Steve Waugh are good for the game just for their arrogance and to that they add their batting prowess. Good to see him back and hope he stays and performs for the next few years. India are in desperate need of some strong personality in the team......

Nth Attempt

I am talking about my attempts to read a book and eventually develop the habit..... Am I really making an attempt? If I had I should have done something about it... Do I really want to read books... I don't know... I have started a new chapter in another book leaving behind several others that needs to be completed..... This book "The Alchemist" looks interesting and if I follow the philosophy of the book, probably I should not be reading the book itself.... It talks about chasing your dream and following the path you want to follow.... Is reading books the path I want to take..... Lets see whether this book takes me in that path......

Pictures

My new Love

After few weeks of negotiation and test driving, I finally fell for the 07 Nissan Altima. I signed the deal yesterday and the car came in today. I just went around Dubuque for a while and came back home. Thinking of driving more this weekend. Will post pictures later.....

Finally made it....

The question was when and not will they enter India and was personally following the progress closely and the news was broken yesterday that Wal-Mart is going to pair up with Bharti to set up retail stores all across India. Though Wal-Mart is gonna be in the background taking care of the cost aspects of the supply chain, eventually they would take over the store front. Is Wal Mart's entry into India good for India's economy ? I want to post some of my opinions on this tie up....Wal-Mart's entry opens the gate for other foreign retail giants like Target, Home Depot to put their foot into India... All this means more employment for the Indian public, improvement in technology, better quality of living. There are some argument that we can see the same problems existing in the US with the small time vendors and retailers in India also with the entry of Wal-Mart. I feel otherwise, in India, Wal-Mart could face serious problems from the small time vendors. It would be interesting to see what kind of niche market Wal-Mart would be targeting in India, because the lower and the middle class the primary niche of Wal-Mart in the US does not possess cars or vehicles to go to the supermarket to make purchases, they prefer the local markets where they have the power of bargaining, prefer the comfort of the vendor delivering products to their houses but don't be suprised if Wal-Mart delivers groceries to individual households.Other challenges they could face are that the roads in India are not the best and this would definitely affect the lead time of the trucks reaching the stores on time, thus affecting their cost and hence the final price, (hope they would work to make the roads better) in the US most of their stores are in small towns but this techinique would backfire on them in India... It would be very interesting in the coming days to see how they perform and what kind of strategy they would hold in India...

What ever happens I feel this is a good thing for India and this would encourage the local giants like Pantaloon, Reliance to come up with innovative ideas to tackle this huge challenge..... The proof for this lies in the fact that Reliance announced plans to open stores all across India this year when Wal Mart was trying to get into India... Now that they are here we can expect more announcements and there lies a good future for the Supply Chain Industry in India. Lets hope for the best for India with this venture.....

Speechless

I always proclaimed India as the greatest Democracy in the World and basically it was pride rather than anything that made me take that path. Thinking about it, is India the greatest democracy ? Do we really have freedom of speech in India, is the media as powerful in India as in the US.... Will there be a day in India where a Daily Show with Jon Stewart take place with the local politicians... Will he survive over a week ??? How many restrictions are placed on the media ? Advertising agencies can't mention their competitors name but can only make hints ... Had a conversation with some friends about it a few weeks back and would like to discuss some points over here. Everybody would remember the Mumbai Bomb blast and the restrictions placed on writing blogs in India.... Was'nt the basic rights of an Indian taken away when that happened... The other side of the argument was security reasons for that act as information could be passed on through blogs... I could not understand that, then all forms of communication should be hindered, no phone calls, no email or no internet, who draws the line for that ? There is a severe restriction when publishing controversial articles about past leaders... the claim that it is not appropriate to tarnish the image of a person no longer alive... But on the other the same politician is used to attract vote banks... The balance does'nt seem to exist..... How could I finish a blog without movies... Movie titles.... Man so much of crap is going on atleast in the Southern States.... Some vague politician decides what should be the title of a movie... what alphabets need to be in there and what should not be in... Can we do anything about it ? First of all I would like some feedback .... Does everyone agree that we do not have freedom of speech...I promise that I would publish all the comments....

Back to Blogging

After a short hiatus I have decided to get back to blogging. Think I do not have anything better to do in my new home Dubuque.... Today I witnessed real snowfall for the first time in my life.... I had some exposure towards it when I was in Austin but nothing close to this.... The whole city or small town, however you want to call it was white and it was beautiful... I was paged at my work and asked to come out of my cubicle.... Then they took me out to show the snow flakes... Similar to the Pudhu Vellai Mazhai song in Roja.... Hmm I need to stop bringing in this kind of analogies..... Could not take a whole lot of pictures, have attached some here..... I would like to blog more regularly... am gonna try to do atleast one per week.... Would like to make the blog more meaningful but as of now have no clue what to do to get there...Suggestions are welcome....

The Village - Original or Inspired ?

Though this is not the burning issue of the day, I wanted to share something good about the Indian film industry which we always feel inspires movies from Hollywood and lacks originality.This would be a apt time with Shyamalan's new movie releasing today."The Village" - for many would bring back memories of a edge of the seat thriller with brilliant visual and sound techniques but for me added to that it also brings back memories of an Indian movie Anveshana (was dubbed in tamil too). The plot of this movie is very similar to "The Village" with excellent background music by Ilayaraja.This telugu movie released couple of decades back has striking similarities with "The Village". The whole movie takes place in a village/forest background,the villagers avoid entering the forest citing a man eating tiger in the forest,2 investigators disturb the pact by going into the forest causing fear amongst the council of elders in the village, a twist in the end of the movie(very similar to "The Village" or should I say the climax of "The Village" was very similar to Anveshana), even the mood in the music seems to be close to the "The Village".Vamsy, the director of Anveshana is pairing with Raja again and this should be good news for Raja fans, as this combinaion are known for some great melody numbers.Listen to the last number and it should remind you of another famous number.I would recommend "Anveshana" to viewers interested in crime thrillers.

Wake up.........

We need to draw a page from Israel's book. Look at the way they have responded to the kidnapping of few soldiers from their country. They have made the enemy pay for his mistakes. Now the enemy would think twice before striking, they have put the fear back on to the enemy. Should'nt we be doing a similar thing, how many more people are we going to lose due to these acts of terrorism before we actually do something about it, the enemy is on the free, he knows all we do is issue statements and forget things. We all talk about the Mumbai bomb blast, we feel for it but bomb blasts in Jammu and Kashmir has become a part of life for people living there, think about the trauma they undergo everyday, what has the Government done about it for the past 50 years.What is the solution ?? I would say if we know who are responsible for these acts of terror we need to destroy them completely rather than just issue statements. We still believe in the government and are waiting for it to do something purposeful against this act. I also wanted to say at this point that I am proud of the people of Mumbai for helping out each other and staying united at this crisis. My appeal to the political parties is to learn from the people of Mumbai to stay together at the time of crisis and try to achieve the common goal of eradicating the unseen enemy. JAI HIND...

KISS

We had a meeting on Friday(14th July) regarding the design of a new building. The general feeling amongst the audience was to keep the design simple and easy to use. After the meeting our CEO took me to his room along with the other engineers and presented us with a book "The Design of Everyday Things" and was going over the various blunders made in designing simple everyday things. He explained to us how smart people while designing does not think about the end audience and complicate simple things. He was referring to an air conditioner(AC) unit which works on an algorithm which would automatically start and stop the AC at a desired time and would require a lot of toying around with it to change the settings. Do we need such complicated systems ? All we need is couple of buttons showing up or down to adjust the temperature. I now know what is expected of me in this project and would work towards attaining maximum effciency with utmost simplicity. I browsed through the book and it looked very interesting. Lets Keep It Simple Stupid

A Day to remember

Today my predictions were spot on. Federer won his 4th consecutive Wimbledon title and Italy went on to win its 4th World Cup.

Will an Indian win the World Cup ??

As we near the grand finale, as I always do am wondering when India would win the World Cup? Though it is not possible this year, atleast there is a chance that an Indian could lift the cup.Will he be the first and last player of Indian origin to win the cup ? Forget winning, when can India atleast qualify for a World Cup ? We have one of the biggest human resource next to China and yet we are not able to produce quality sports persons.The entire nation celebrates if we win a bronze or silver in Olympics,even in cricket which is the biggest sport in India where every Tom, Dick and Harry can talk for ages about it, with the richest board in the world, we have won only one World Cup and managed to reach the finals only one other time. I may sound very negative but I think to solve issues we need to accept that we have an issue.
What actually is the problem.............
Politics involved in selection ?
No encouragement from parents for budding kids ?
Lack of fitness - People eating loads of rice and caring the least about fitness
Bleak future for people who fail to make it to the top
Or people like me who talk about problems and do nothing about it ??

Let's share our thoughts.........

LES BLEUS vs AZZURRI

The world's most popular sports event is reaching a grand finale tomorrow. After 24 years two european nations are in the finals of the Football World Cup. Interestingly both these teams struggled in the initial phase of the tournament, gained momentum and now would be giving out all they have. Going by statistics Italy has an edge over France, but statistics has little or no value in such a high pressure game. Italy has scored 11 goals with 10 players this World Cup equalling France's record of scoring 16 goals with 10 players in 1982, Italy went on to win that World Cup, does this give us a hint? This will be the final game for ZiZi for France and what better farewell can he get than winning the coveted trophy. Its going to be a great game,I feel that Italy's defense would give them the edge over France. GO AZZURRIS!!!!!!!!!