Life without…

One of those days when your loved one leaves you. She slipped into the Goan waters on the beach of Vagator on a bright sunny day. I couldn’t see the brightness on the face as i picked her up from the water. The bright light had vanished. I patted her on the back a couple of times hoping to get that bright light flashing again, but in vain. I thought ‘She’ll be okay. Just a little water has entered, and she’ll be fine if dried in the sun for some time.’ I thought i’ll resurrect her. I was confident of this.

I returned to Bangalore with her, and tried to resurrect her. A day after we returned from Goa, she responded well. The bright white light was back, but flickered a little. I was sure she’ll recover soon. But, i was proved wrong. I realized the water had entered little too much for her comfort and had shorted the motherboard. My cellphone was dead!

I found it funny and weird when people had their cellphone in the list of things they can’t live without. I always felt i could manage without the agony of missing a cellphone since i bought my first phone about 6 years back when it was a fancy, and something i wished to have. Even then, neither was i addicted to my cellphone nor was i totally detached. Cellphones, the very gadget which was an expensive toy of the rich and show-offs soon became a ‘necessity’. Oh, you ought to have a cellphone. How can you live without that!?

I wanted to live without a cellphone, just for kicks, but didn’t get the chance until my working cellphone got conked. And the substitute cellphone had to be given back. I did live without a cellphone for a little more than 3 weeks beyond which i couldn’t as i succumbed to the pressure from my mom, and the one who threatened to work in a cafe to buy me a phone. :)

The three weeks don’t make a huge difference when you have your landline at home and desk phone at work. Unfortunately, the desk phone at work stopped working around the same time. In these three weeks, i managed to go for a treat with few friends at a distance more than 10kms from my home. I also managed to go, with few colleagues at work, to Nandi hills to watch sunrise atop the hills. Leaving home at 4 am on a Sunday morning and without cellphone to contact people was not much of problem. I also did most of my routine work. It worked out fine. I missed my desk phone more, as i had to walk more to talk to team mates about work, than cellphone.

Finally i bought a very low-end, minimal featured handset Samsung C160. I simply didn’t like any of the phones in the market. Either they are bulky or they don’t have any significant improvements other than the higher megapixel or more flash memory. The exception being GPS, which has caught my eye for now. This too is very primitive, and didn’t excite me enough to buy a set with this.

Anyway, with this experience i realized i can live a non-materialistic life. Things i haven’t tried living without are quite a few. On top of the list is a vehicle, the maximum i have lived without that is about 2 weeks way back in 2002. Next is a computer without net connection, the maximum without this being one week. I know i can live without these things more than the achieved maximum, but haven’t got such an ‘opportunity’ yet. Now, temme what are the things you can live without?

Rest in peace, My Nokia 7610.

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Bonjour le monde!

Je m’appelle Sandeep. Je suis ingénieur. Je travaille dans un démarrage à Bangalore. Je suis etudient à l’Alliance Francaise en Vasanthnagar, une partie de Bangalore. Je parle la kannada, l’anglais, la hindi, la tamil et le français. C’est mon blog.

J’aime la musique et les sports. J’adore le tennis. Je joue au tennis de table et de cricket. Aussi, j’aime l’équitation. Mon groupe de musique préféré est Pink Floyd.

J’adore écrive aussi. Mon préféré animaux sont des chiens, des tigres et des chevaux. Je déteste rien.

Mon coup de coeur est Coming back to life par Pink Floyd. Priya m’a marqué. Je baliser Priya, Meghana, Nikhil, Vishesh et RJ dans ce message. Je sais qu’il est tard. Mieux vaut tard que jamais.

Bisous tout le monde, gardez blogging!

­

P.S.: This is all the french i’ve learnt so far. Tag tip: You guys write a post in your mother tongue or any other new language you’re learning. Programming and scripting languages not <included> :)

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Connecting the Bangalore International Airport at Devanahalli

Why of all the places in Bangalore, connectivity to the new Bangalore International Airport so important? Is there no road to BIAL or is the airport built in some fairyland to which only the angels have access to!?

Of course not. The airport is at Devanahalli, at a distance of about 35km from the city. There is a good National highway (NH-7) connecting to this place. Along the way are many malls, luxury apartments, international hospitals, and IT parks.

Reaching this highway from the central parts of the city, and ‘more importantly’ IT corridors (Electronic city et al) is a pain, time wise. Our government, as of now our governor, and all the smart people ‘leading India‘ are only concerned about providing good connectivity to the Airport. I don’t understand why! The connectivity to Airport is not more important than decongesting traffic in central parts, at least when the traffic is as shown in the image below almost everyday.

How often does an average person with an average job in Bangalore use the Airport? Not more than twice or thrice a year. Even the Narayan Murthys and Azim Premjis would not be flying more than once a fortnight, except may be our beloved cricketers who take short haul flights for their IPL matches more than twice a week. :)

Now consider, how often does an average person travel within the city? More than once a day. What Bangalore lacks is good roads within the city where people commute everyday to work, and not to some outskirt which is used for flying to some other part of the world, once or twice a year.

How much delay would be caused to reach the airport with a not so great expressway and a metro link? Half an hour or one hour on an average. The flights would, on an average, be delayed up to an hour not just during the foggy days of winter.

Building the connectivity to the international airport is causing terrible inconvenience to commuters within the central parts of the city. In making the route from MG road to the Bangalore International Airport signal free, the north-central parts of Bangalore has become a mess with traffic diversion causing total chaos with riders going on footpaths in certain residential areas. The BDA junction magic box under pass has made the life hell for millions of commuters on these roads. Adding to the problems of the commuters is the road widening at Race course road, and along the golf course.

These are the projects which had to be taken one at a time over a few months, are taken up all at once trying to finish everything in a month or two. Delay in opening of the new Airport adds the time limit. The incapable, only money-minded coalition government with betrayal by Gowda and sons gave no interest in answering the traffic issues either in the city or to connect to the International Airport, construction of which started a good two years ago. Hope a clear majority in the current elections will form a stable and sensible government.

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Bangalore Royal Challengers hire Mandira Bedi as coach

Wouldn’t that be great to see on the news channels as breaking news? The whimsical show-off Dr.Vijay Mallya is capable of doing such antics with the god forsaken Bangalore Royal Challengers.

Having Rahul Dravid as an icon player for a Twenty20 tournament, buying aged ‘star players of the yesteryears’ ignored by the cricket boards of their countries at exorbitant price (read Jacques Kallis), with the ‘first ladies of American football‘ showing off their talents (and assets) and serving liquor in the stands was he expecting to trash other teams in a game cricket? Why does he fire the sober looking sane and not-so-pretty guy in the whimsical Vijay Mallya’s stable, Charu Sharma? Probably he wanted to get Yana Gupta, or maybe Negar Khan as the CEO of the Royal Challengers team, only saved by sane decision to have Brijesh Patel when he was not so high on RC.

When you are in it purely for business, why would you wanna make a mockery of the esteemed sports personalities and commentators like Venkatesh Prasad and Charu Sharma? No doubt Venkatesh Prasad has done an excellent job as a bowling coach for the Indian side, grooming talented youngsters like Praveen Kumar and Ishant Sharma in the tour of Australia. Vijay Mallya thinks he is not good enough to coach the bunch of test-players lead by ever so slow, run-a-hundred-ball getter Rahul Dravid. Charu Sharma is a former national diving champion, and a good commentator. If he wasn’t good enough for you, why hire him in the first place?

A team performs as the captain leads. This has been proven by the dazzling Delhi Daredevils‘ skipper Virender Sehwag. So has Shane Warne with a bunch of mediocre players. The attitude of a leader gives a much needed morale boost for the team, and Rahul Dravid is not able provide that in T20 games. No doubt Dravid is a class player with technically perfect shots but T20 is not the arena for showcasing such hard-to-get talents. T20 is for the Dhonis and Afridis, where the bat speed matters more than the technique. VVS Laxman is another class player who fails to lead the team to success with worlds best hard-hitting star cricketers.

If BCCI would permit, Mallya would want to sport a team of 11 bikini clad Kingfisher calender swimsuit models instead of cricketers but unfortunately this is suppose to be “cricket”. Hope the game remains and not become entirely business, that too in the hands of crazy liquor morons.

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Girls are better

The title of the post makes you happy? Read on..

Girls are better at cramming. Right from the KG classes to graduate exams girls top in the class, of course with some exceptions. In my 8 years of co-education, barring the KG classes, girls were the toppers in 4-5 years. The exception being in the engineering, where one guy did better than the closely matched 2nd ranked girl. On an average girls got more marks in the exams than boys. Does this mean girls cram better? Hell ya for the way the tests are conducted, testing nothing but how well one could read and remember without understanding.

I was in my college last week, the congratulation message on the notice board were for the toppers, all girls. 3rd, 5th and 7th semester toppers were all girls!

Girls seem to have a natural tendency to read more, remember better, and reproduce faithfully without actually trying to figure out how it works. Where as boys are more inquisitive. The pass percentage of girls in board exams of 10th, and 12th is higher than boys in all these years i have seen. But the entrance exams like CET, JEE, AIEEE and others are cracked better by boys. The nature of these exams tends to make a point. Since the entrance exams are more analytical/logical than theoretical boys do better? The first rankers in these tests are the boys, unmistakably year after year. Does it mean girls have lesser inclination to analytical stuff? I don’t need to answer that, isn’t it?

I’ll take my class of engineering as a sample set, constituted by 40% girls roughly. At least 75% of them would score more marks than 85% of the guys in my class every semester. The top ten list would have at least 7 girls each semester. They tend to cram better. I’m sure almost all of my classmates would agree that the tests and exams tested nothing but cramming. The campus placements gives a hint that girls can cram better and boys can solve problems better. The companies would test your problem solving abilities, and logical reasoning capabilities for recruitment. More boys got better offers than girls.

There are plethora of cases to prove that girls cram better. The admission to BITS was based on the board exam scores for many years. In all those years there were more girls in a class than boys, and since the mode for admission has been changed to an entrance exam, BITSAT, there has been a gradual decline in the percentage of girls getting in to BITS.

Learning new languages also comes easy for girls as it does not have any logic but only remembering stuff. I have seen this in my French language class. More girls would do better than boys, be it in remembering the meaning of a word, forms of a verb or the pronunciation. More over, most of the teachers for these courses are women. :)

Another example, i have seen so many girls performing better in Verbal part of GRE than the Math. No other exam would require more cramming than the verbal GRE. Learning all the 3000+ words for GRE comes easy for girls than guys. On an average, among the people i know, guys have scored 750-800 in GRE Math, and 450-550 in GRE verbal. Girls have scored 680-750 in Math and 550-700 in verbal. I don’t need to say more.

There are exceptions to almost everything i have mentioned above, but on an average the cramming comes easy for girls. I admit, girls are better than guys. :)

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