The Local Guardians

He woke up and stretched his legs trying to get rid of the laziness of the early morning. The city was still asleep. Not everybody get to enjoy the silent morning that will soon be ruined by the vehicles. Looking at the path, he waited for what has become the most important time of his day. Atlast Siri arrived looking happy as usual with Mr. Raj. She walked past, barely noticing him just like any other day and Mr. Raj as usual gave a look of hatred.  Siri, has been his crush for the past two years, apparently lean, deceivingly calm and incessantly beautiful. She has a silky hair and seems to be a little proud about and keeping tossing it every now and then. Ooops!!! masala, tangential to the primary story which is supposed to be just about men. Bruno was on the other side noticed Mr. Raj and Siri, and growled out of fear. Mr. Raj was prepared. He hurled the stones in hand like missiles targeted at enemy. Bruno vanished out of sight, with a wail, think he got hit. Mr. Raj glowed with happiness. It is for this reason, he hates men like Mr. Raj. Like Bruno, he was an Indian mongrel, born on the streets but now under the shelter of humans. Most of the times it is the kids who give names to the dogs on streets, and that is how Bruno got the name, Bruno.

Mr. Raj loves dogs. But to him Mongrels don't come under that category. His love for dogs comes with **conditions apply. Just like any local products, mongrels not preferred by most of the local people :-) They are loyal, adorable, possess all qualities of dog and come for free.  Probably somebody should attach a price tag to them to make them valuable to men. Not that he wants men to take them  home and feed them, the best thing the humans can do is at least not bother the poor street dogs A doctor nearby tests his air gun every now and then by firing at the mongrels in streets. He usually gets disturbed when he hears the wailing sound of the dogs running after getting hit. Irony is that the doctor  too owns a dog and claims to love dogs. Mr. Raj and the doctor would discuss about dogs for hours, about different breeds, their rates and what they are planning to buy next. They do love mongrels, but the expectation is not to bark at their dogs by any chance, and to submit themselves and let the men and their pets do whatever they want.

The life of Indian mongrels is one of the toughest to endure. At times born on the sides of the road, the initial days depend mostly on luck. Mistakes are fatal. The curiosity to explore the world ends under the tyres of two wheeler or four wheeler. Men seem to have evolved a very complex process to survive and these vehicles help them a lot in running behind too many things that they consider important, which he cannot comprehend. Though the ultimate purpose might be just like him, to live and sustain their species, their process process is simply complex.  Most of the time, it would directly or indirectly affect nature and make men look like weapons of mass destruction. Co-existence is unknown to men. Men have made so many species extinct. Funny part is the campaign which they start at the end to save them. Most of the time they are not sure whether they want to kill or whether they want to save. Anyway, the most powerful species does whatever it wants.

Though the dogs have managed to live with men, still life of mongrels in street is a big challenge. The daily hunt for food, escaping the vehicles, tackling the different moods of men is difficult.  At times they run searching for a hiding place, when men come in huge vehicle to catch them,  and get them killed/sterilized. A check by humans to make sure that the dog population stay in control it seems. They could have avoided a lot of problems if they had controlled theirs in first place. Anyway, he is not intelligent enough to understand the ways of men, and he is grateful to god for the same.

Pets at home have the best life. Keep wagging the tail, and live comfortably. There are few owners who spend a huge money and find a powerful mate too ;) Life will be smooth, till they become old. He had seen few people taking their old dogs away and leaving them at remote places to spend their final years. Had always wondered what happens to them, how would they cope at the old age without any idea about the rules of the street. Anyway, Can't complain, humans do the same to old humans too. Some are very kind, they make sure their pets don't suffer the old age, and end their life.  So Kind.

His life has been smooth from the day he moved into this family. Struggle has stayed outside his life. But for other mongrels, they continue to be the unappointed guardians of the streets, waging their tails to every human, loyal to the biscuits shared, guarding their home, at times guarding the kennels where their pets are sold, not expecting humans to adopt them and give a luxurious life, but expecting some mercy to let them lead their lives.

Costly Affair

Was talking with my niece over the phone. Though she utters few words over the phone, this is the first time she was telling me some rhymes, that too completely, with a lot of enthusiasm. The reason behind the change is she has been going to school for few days, her first step towards interaction with a lot of kids around her. Since she had spent most part of her first two years inside the house, with minimal interaction with children, the idea of meeting a lot of children kept her excited i guess.

Good that they had the play school concept, which allows kids to get accustomed to the school environment, with interest. But the cost at which it comes, exceeds the cost that we might have spent during the entire engineering course. 45K for just two hours of class everyday. Looks like it is the same in Bangalore too, could be a little higher also. That is more than the total money i spent in a yyear doing my B.E. From what i heard from few of my seniors, they completed four years of Engineering in half the amount now collected in Play School.

Few Parents seemed a lot worried it seems, about the performance of the child. Worries about performance at two years is very early i guess. Education and Medicine are two things, where people wont take a chance. Which also gives the businessmen a chance to reap rich which they are doing without fail. Cant say whether the parent's views are wrong, but what is clearly wrong is the schools using the opportunity to smuggle in the name of education. The situation is not likely to change, i might end up doing the same mistake in future, but still could not stop thinking at present.

Ponniyin Selvan

This is going to be a review of the first ever Tamil novel i read recently and not about a junk tamil movie that got released in 2005. The book turned out to be quite interesting one. I was struck by Kalki's imagination, it appears as though everything happens right in front of the eyes. His depiction and the way the characters are introduces is awesome. So elaborate in explanation and so poetic in description kalki wins easily in delivering what was intended. The book also gave a great insight into the Tamil Nadu history and about the medeival chozha empire. The book gives a good description about most of the kings, clans and habits that existed during that time period. Kalki makes use of every available opportunity to provide some historical reference. His characters also highlight the practices that was followed during that time. There were places where Kalki changes the history for the sake of the story, but they were acceptable.

The story starts with "Vallavaraiyan Vanthiyathevan" a vanar kulam prince, taking a message from Aditya Karikalan to his sister Kundavai and king. Later the story plunges into the fight for the chozha throne with  unimaginable stories inter wined which keeps you thinking till you complete the end of the story. Believe me even after the story ends, you might be confused about few parts of the book.  He takes you through the city and Kalki explains the history and beauty of the cities through his eyes and thoughts. His job does not end with that and he gets tasks one by one and we are mostly introduced to the characters through him. Just like the cities,  Kalki explains the beauty of the princesses and their nature through Vanthiyathevan eyes. Kalki provides a very very elaborate description about the characters when they are introduced into the story, so that you get a mental picture of the character. That is the strength of the novel. Kalki has the strength to make you like a character or make it detestable. Kalki imagination seems to gone a bit higher whenever the princesses are involved. The comparisons he makes to compare their beauty is unmatchable.  One more interesting character is Azhwarkadiyaan, it is through him Kalki portrays the feud that existed between  shaivaites and vaishnavaites at that time. Vanthiyathevan is the most adorable character in the book  and at times he steals the limelight from the actual "Ponniyin Selvan". The princesses Kundavai, Vanathi, Poonguzhali and Nandini are lovable. There are many other characters involved in the book who are important in their own aspect, which you will know when you read the book. Once i started reading the first volume, i could not control my curiosity and i kept reading till i completed it. I am planning to read it once again, as i am completely mesmerized by the book. It does deserve a second reading. Also next in line is "Sivakaamiyin Sabatham" and "Parthiban Kanavu" from Kalki.

Suggestion: Better grab a copy instead of searching for online copies. The book is too good to get disappointed and does not cost much also.

Trip to Jog, Murudeshwar, Kollur and Sringeri

I am yet to recover fully from the effects of the trip, both physically and mentally. Physically it was challenging and it is not a trip to forget so soon. It was not a well planned trip but it turned out to be a great one with every piece falling into place at the last minute. The trip started with the journey to Jog falls, through the orphaned roads of Karnataka. Any road that is outside bangalore is neglected and looks like government rarely notices those roads. Anyway after few hours of bumpy ride, we reached Sagar where we spent sometime to clean ourselves and finish breakfast, before we headed for the most gruesome part of the trip. We reached Jog falls and then started the journey down to the abyss of the waterfalls. The cataract falling from around 900 ft height is the highest waterfall in India, and the journey to the bottom of the fall s through the half constructed steps tested the physical fitness. The view from the bottom of the Jog falls is worth taking and view and the  cool breeze is all too great to ignore and the pain is worth taking. Climbing back to the top required arduous efforts.

After that we went to Murudeshwar, a silent sea shore with a huge siva statue. Rest of the evening went in mini football. If you are in doubt what was mini in that, everything was mini right from the team, playground to the ball. Yep, we played football with a tennis ball in a small area with four members per team. But it turned out to be an interesting game. After few months, it was good be involved in some fat burning activity.

Next day we went to two temples kollur and shringeri. While kollur potrayed kerala architecture and look, in shringeri it was fully Hoysala (borrowed from Prabhu's IP). Sringeri temple is  located on the banks of River Tunga. This river deservers special mention because on the shores you will find huge school of fishes of size which i had never seen till now.  After that started the most difficult phase of the the trip, sitting in van for several hours and being rocked like a baby because of the narrow turns on the way to chickmagalur. Putting all together it is an wonderful trip to remember.

Before i fall asleep without switching my laptop, here are the links for the photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/kpraveen85/JogFallsShimoga
http://picasaweb.google.com/kpraveen85/Murudeshwar
http://picasaweb.google.com/kpraveen85/SringeriKollurAgumbe

For my share stay in touch with http://picasaweb.google.com/sens2003 It would take a little more time before i upload the photos. Before last half of the left eye closes, i am signing off now.

Santhosh Subrmaniam

Saw the movie santhosh subrmaniam last week which turned out to be a good one. Fast paced and filled with comedy, it was a good entertainer. For those who have seen the telugu version "Bommarillu" may find it to be  an exact copy of it. Since i had not seen the telugu movie, i could not find any issues. But comparing the pictures of both the films i could see that there is not even a slight difference in the costume of telugu and tamil version. Genelia had done the role of an innocent girl with ease and impresses all the way. No wonder she is offered the role in Hindi also. She looks beautiful, gorgeous, lovely and add all other adjectives that describe beauty. As for Remake Ravi, he seems to have a liking for remakes. As usual he has danced well but in this movie his dance steps seem to be different and attractive. For Prakash Raj, it is a cake walk and he fits into the role of the caring father easily. Kousalya, cricketer Ramesh's appearance go without notice.  Comedy track is too good with special appreciation to Baskar who comes as the college professor in few  scenes. Yet another remake that could turn out to be a hit for Ravi.

Few funny phobias

Was reading through the list of phobias, and these are some which i thought to be funny or weird.

ablutophobia - fear of bathing
callophobia - fear of beauty
neophobia - fear of change
pantiphobia - fear of everything
xenophobia - fear of foreigners
polyphobia - fear of many things
musophobia - fear of mice
demophobia - fear of people
acoustophobia - fear of sound
lalophobia - fear of speaking
logophobia - fear of study
phronemophobia - fear of thinking
basophobia - fear of walking
plutophobia - fear of wealth
ergophobia - fear of work
cibophobia - fear of food
geliophobia - fear of laughter
venustrophobia - fear of beautiful women
Eisoptrophobia - fear of seeing oneself in mirror :D
Somniphobia - fear of sleep

Last but not the least, the phobia of many bachelors

Phalacrophobia - fear of becoming bald

My Tamil Blog

I started a new tamil blog a week back. No specific purpose behind starting that blog. Felt like starting a blog in tamil. Hence the result is http://ssenthilkumaran.wordpress.com. Using the TamilKey plugin for Firefox to write in Tamil. Heard about the tamilkey plugin from my friend subamani. Click here to see his tamil blog. What does it contain, as usual my rants about movies, life, songs and everything that manages to catch my attention. Other than all these, something that you can find in that blog is spelling mistakes. Never in the life i was able to get rid of the spelling mistakes in that blog. Hope to reduce and produce some good posts in tamil soon. Till then bear with me :)

World Cup Atlast :)

Finally found some time to blog. So many things to blog about but could not find the right time. Finally had to sneak into browsing center near my home to post about the topic that half of India is chanting now. The victory of the Men in Blue against their arch rivals. I did not get an opportunity to see the match as we did not have a TV at home and was looking at my system's monitor eagerly waiting for the scores to get updated. Finally had to call my friend who managed to settle in a hotel to hear the commentary. He did a fine job indeed in updating ball by ball status and also in describing  the

If i am right this is the first time India and Pak are meeting in final of a great event like the world cup. If it was some other team the fans here might have digested a defeat, i doubt whether it would be the same against Pak. Anyway the end result was great and Men in Blue continued the winning streak against Pak in both the world cup and the T20 World Cup. Hats off to them. I don't know how the Indian team handled the pressure during the final overs but we were at the edge of our seats when the final over was bowled. When the final wicket fell, crackers lit up the sky. The celebration continued late night.  Finally India has won the world cup.

The Diwali Rush

This happened on Sep 7th friday. I went to office as usual and got prepared to book the train ticket for going home on Nov 6th for diwali. I expected that there would be atleast some tickets left but the entire calculation went wrong. By the time i opened the page to book ticket it was all over. Later learnt that most of my friends in office had the similar fate. None of them were successful. One more news is that, a person who stood third in the queue in railway station was not able to book the ticket

If this is the status of those who have internet access, think about the status of those who don't have access to the technology. If you ask any bangalore local here about this, the first reason he would site is the "explosion of s/w industry" here in the garden city. It has changed the entire life style of the people living here. There exist a visible partition between the techies and the other section of the people. Though the software industry has helped in the growth of the city it has created an apparent division among the two classes of people.  Though most of them will have difference of opinion in this regard, think this is the reason for incidents where techies get beaten up for no reason. The matter to be worried now is "booking ticket successfully for the return journey". Hope i am lucky this time :)

Outlook -> Thunderbird & Thunderbird -> Outlook

After many filed attempts to configure Thunderbird as the mail client for  M$ exchange server, atlast succeeded in the attempt. Will give a  brief overview of how i configured Thunderbird for MS exchange server. The process was fairly simple all you have to do is

1) Select Incoming server type as POP mail server
2) Dont forget to select "Never" in "Use Secure Connection" column.

These are the two options that need to be taken care, all other options are straight forward. The outgoing SMTP server address should also be given, which might the same as that of incoming server. With these options i was able to configure Thunderbird for M$ exchange server. One problem i encountered while using Thunderbird for M$ exchange server is that i was not able to keep track of calendars and meetings.  Found one good addon for keeping track of meetings and appointments, called as RememberFox. RememberFox is a addon for firefox and thunderbird, that is used to keep track of meetings and  appointment. RememberFox looked really cool to me.

Since i used outlook for one month was unable to keep track of the sent mails, deleted mails etc and finally decided to switch back to M$ Outlook. This is where got stuck with the format clashes. Outlook uses the proprietory .pst format to store mails while thuderbird  uses .mbox format and stores it as a separate file called Inbox. The method was to export the .mbox file into .eml file(which looked more like plain text file with all mail headers) using a tool  called IMAPSize. Then using Outlook express as an intermediate the mails can be exported to Outlook. Check out the IMAPSize home for a detailed description about the process.

My aim was to configure GNUS or Mutt and to use them as my mail clients but still i am not able to do that. Probably should try that  after bringing my system here to my new home.

Fedora 8.1 Testing Released

The alpha or testing edition of Fedora 8 has been released yesterday. It  was interesting to see the screenshots of Fedora 8. Fedora 8 comes with a  lot of features and newly released softwares. If everything  goes well we may be able to enjoy Fedora 8 with KDE4.0, Firefox 3.0 etc etc when the stable  version is released on November 8. Here are few links about Fedora 8.

Screenshots - http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.php?linux_distribution_sm=Fedora%208%20Test%201
Fedora 8 wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/

With the gusty gibbon gearing up to be released, we could expect some healthy competition.

Letting the luck decide

1568 in Maths, around 150 in physics and 150 in chemistry. Thats the number of centum holders in the subjects in +2. Total pass percentage is around 81. The first three marks with Tamil as first language are 1182, 1180 and 1179.With other languages it is 1190/1200.  All this is great but what follows this may not be. The selection process for Engineering seats seems to be laborious and old fashioned pushing aside the importance of marks and bringing in the other factors. From  what i heard, the engineering and medical ranks are decided based on the aggregate of Maths, Physics and chemistry and biology. If the aggregate is same then rank is based on individual marks in Maths, Physics and chemistry in order. If still there is a tie then choice of first language and marks in Tamil come into picture. If tie still exists then the seniority or DOB is used to break the tie. It the tie is still unbreakable then ranks is decided using lots. So it is like lottery where lucky ones get the seat.

So getting marks alone may not be sufficient to get Engineering seat or medical seat. Students need to have a lot of luck. Thousands may be getting the same aggregate for sure and luck will have a greater role this time. Happy that i did +2 before four years and i got last Computer Science seat in TCE by mere 0.01 difference. Thanks to the Common Entrance test we had, as engineering seat allocation was not by chance but by marks then. Abolishment of CET has done nothing to improve the situation but has successfully worsen it to a greater extent.

Google Papers

This is about the latest news from and about google but a little late also. If you know about this you know what to do. Google after establishing its supremacy in the email world with gmail has turned its attention towards postal mails. Google has started a new service called google papers. Google will send hard copies of the mails you want and will let you keep the paper copy of the mails apart from the electronic mail stored in its server. That means you can get hard copy of the emails your girl friend sent you and read it again and again whenever you want. Check out this page to know more about the Google Paper.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/index.html

If you feel elated and impressed with this, i request you to take a look into the comments. This post is incomplete without the comments.

Top ten observations about megaserials

Out of blogging for a long time due to some DNS problems with my ISP. Anyway i am back and here is my post after a long time. This is just some of the observations made by me about mega serials and it is also the opinion of most of the youths here. I never watch megaserials and i usually get a glimpse of them while having dinner . Most of the observations are made when i am in extreme moods which occurs after i see the serial. So i don't claim them to be true or false.

1) Most of them are about a woman who has nothing in her life except problems. Problems of all sort come from all directions, from her friends, foes, relatives, passer by, dog, cat, ant, shit, bullshit ...

2) The role of heroine is mostly played by a retired movie actress and a whole bunch of others whom u can find in almost every serial from morning 10 to night 10.

3) Though there exist problem in every move, the heroine remains undeterred by those. She seems to have almost all good qualities that one could think of.

4) The number of people who dance for the title song exceeds the total number of characters in the serial.

5) The director seems to concentrate only on one thing, that is creating problems.

6) No problem has a solution. The problems exist till the very end and are usually solved at the final episode when the life long enemy suddenly becomes a dear friend . The older problems are pushed down the stack when new problems arise and are later popped out when the director runs out of ideas.

7) If director could not find any problems with existing characters new characters are introduced and new problems are created.

8 ) There is only one background music, the dull music that assists the sad atmosphere and puts the viewers in deep deep distress. 90% of the episodes have someone crying for something.

9) 10 minutes ads follow two to three lines of dialogue.

10) 90% of the guys are like me who have no other option other than something like this.

Book exhibition in Madurai

Went to the book exhibition that has been going for the past few weeks in Madurai. Mayoor and myself went to the exhibition. The exhibition has attracted a lot of madurai dwellers and i never expected to see a crowd like that there. Some were not interested in books and were spending their time like in picnic, eating panchumittai and millagai bajji. There were numerous stalls displaying wide varieties of books. Though there were a number of stalls for english and technical books, the number of tamil book stalls out numbered them. Did not look more into the details of the books available there. Most of the them contained biographies, autobiographies and small stories.

The english books were hosted in stalls of famous book stores like Malligai, Turning point, HB etc. These were the stalls that attracted me a lot. When i saw Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham etc neatly arranged in shelf the lost desire of reading novels like this resurfaced. I remember reading a lot of novels during my school days and the habit slowly died out. The reason my school library was a huge repository of all these books. I would say that it had enough books to fuel the thirst of hungry students. Thats where i started reading Enid Blyton, Hardy boys, Nancy Drew and later switched over Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham etc. That habit slowly died out once i left the school. Still i would like to visit the school library once again just to see the collection they have.

Coming back to the book fair, i left the stalls with the desire of getting a novel increasing every moment i was waiting there. Managed to collect some tamil books and left the stalls. How we got out of the stalls is an interesting story. The entire place was fully packed and no effort was needed. The crowd kept pushing and we were out after some struggle. The stalls should have been little larger. Other than that is a good place to spend some time.

Hello World

Hello world. This is my first post in wordpress. I was a blogger user till now and recently switched over to wordpress seeing that wordpress has some really good features when compared to blogger. Blogger has not changed a bit and i hate adding an external hit counter and calendar to my blog. What really impressed me in wordpress is the categorization of posts. I dont know whether blogger is great or  wordpress is. I started to lose interest in blogger and i am here blogging in wordpress. Wordpress looks cool to me now. That explains why i am here. To know more about me and about the what u will find here click the 'About' link.