Big Boys do cry!

23 years old, driving in the world rally championships, earning millions. Well, he surely must be one of the happiest men on earth. Yes, but only in times of glory. When faced with failure, you don't have the crowd behind you, you don't have hundreds asking you for your autograph, you are left all alone, to face your failure in loneliness!

This is what happened to Daniel Sordo, the driver of the Kronos-Citroen car in the Cyprus Rally. He crashed very early in the DTS stage of the rally and was forced to retire. This stage was set through the narrow streets of Downtown Limassol. In fact, minutes before the start of this stage, the officials had informed the teams that this stage was changed into a non-competitive stage, as they felt that it was too dangerous to "race" through the narrow lanes. So, this stage became academic in nature and this was run to please the spectators who had bought tickets to watch this exciting stage.

There he was, sitting in the dark bylanes of downtown limassol, with tears in his eyes, listening to the showdown he was getting from his senior co-driver. When the co-driver left him alone, he burst out into tears while talking to someone over the phone. Some people who had gathered to have a look at the wrecked car, felt sorry for him and even walked over to him to have a talk and offer him some drinks.

Kronos' boss, Marc van Dalen wasn't too impressed with his actions. But, it seems that all things are now patched up and he is on his way to the next rally.

However famous you might be, your real self shows through in times of hardship. I hope that Daniel puts this crash behind him and goes on to big successes in the WRC.

Technorati Tags: cyprus rally car+rally cyprus+rally WRC Citroen daniel+sordo kronos limassol

Filed under: Cyprus, Sports

How to conduct an effective training/presentation

Trainings are boring, usually. The trainer projects a presentation and endlessly goes on talking about the topic, interrupted by the rare question, when a person suddenly wakes up and finds himself totally lost. I have even attended trainings where people doze off completely (with their heads hanging down) and the trainer pretends not to notice them and continues with the rambling.

But, today's training was different. This was a training on "Managerial Skills". So, i was kind of ready for the usual doze on employee appraisal, conflict management and the like. But, I was surprised, pleasantly so. The trainer, an Englishman, bought along with him lot of trinkets like a slinky, a rubbery piggy doll, some connecting blocks and distributed some to all of the attendees. None of us knew what they were for, but we were just playing around with them, while listening to his lecture. Later, during a break, I asked him what they were for. He said that the human brain works well if as many senses as possible are put into play. So, while listening to the lecture, if we were playing around with all those trinkets, it seems that our thinking process would be better in place and there is a very little chance of us dozing off, even during the boring parts. It worked like a charm. This is probably the only training where I have seen such participation from the attendees and no one dozed off!

The session just after lunch is usually the toughest to navigate through. Your head feels heavy and starts to automatically fall down and your eyes start to close! In probably all the trainings I have attended, I have had the need to take a small break and wash my face to avoid going to sleep. Not today, though! After we had assembled after lunch, he asked to take positions around the room and he threw a ball to one person. That person had to throw it to someone else and that person in turn, to someone else who has not yet received the ball and finally it came back to the trainer. He started this with one ball and eventually went up to 6 balls. Well , not everyone's catching skills are as good a Jonty Rhodes and we had the frequent drop and searching for the ball before the next one comes through. This went on for a couple of minutes and we were all very involved in the game. Then it abruptly stopped when he said "Good, now all of you are wide awake and ready for the next session"!

I am looking for more tricks of the trade he is going to unleash over the next two days!

Technorati Tags: amdocs effective+presentation training

Filed under: amdocs

"Bright" Theme for Photofriday contest

I have submitted this photo for the weekly Photofriday contest. The theme for this week is "Bright". This was taken at sunrise at the Salt lake at Larnaka. I asked my friend to hold a feather (that is a flamingo's feather!) against the sun. I went a long way back, kept my lens at 300 mm (effective 450 mm on 35 mm film) , focussed on the feather to get the "blurred" sun.

Technorati Tags: Sun Bright Photo Photography Photofriday Larnaka Cyprus Photo+Contest flamingo

Filed Under : Photo Cyprus

Outrageous Umpiring at the Sunfeast Open

Yesterday evening, I happened to watch the closing moments of the 1st round doubles match between Sania Mirza/Liezel Huber and a rather fat pair of Ragini Vimal/Archana Venkatram in the Sunfeast Open at Kolkatta. In the penultimate point (actually forced to be the penultimate point), one of Huber's shots was returned by one of their opponents along the side-line and fell almost half way between the singles and the doubles side-line i.e comfortably in. This was a break point on Huber's server. Huber, on seeing the ball land correctly, immediately threw the other ball she had with her (for the second serve) and decided to prepare herself for the next game. Vimal and Venkatram also enjoyed the moment. Suddenly, the chair umpire called "Deuce". All were surprised!

Vimal and Venkatram tried to argue with the umpire, but to no avail. The commentators were blasting the line-umpire for such an atrocious decision. Ultimately, after few minutes of commotion, the game continued and Huber served to win the match.

The commentators called it "The worst decision they have ever seen". Huber commented about this after the match "It is the umpire's fault. She has not given the decision rightly. But it is neither mine nor Sania's responsibility to point out the mistake to the umpire. We are only concerned about our game"!

Shame on the umpire!

Technorati tags: Tennis Doubles Kolkatta Sunfeast+open Sania+Mirza Liezel+Huber

Filed Under: Sports

"Distance" Theme for Pxite Contest

I have submitted the above phtography for the weekly Pxite contest. The theme for this week is "distance". This photo was taken during the trek on the Curium Cliffs, here in Cyprus.

Technorati Tags: Trek Photo Photography Pxite Curium Cyprus Photo+Contest

Filed Under : Photo Cyprus

Lage Raho Munna Bhai - Watch it!

Watch it.

• not for the comedy
• not for the deadly combination of Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi
• not for the beautiful Vidya Balan
• not for the cameo played by the stunning Diya Mirza

Watch it for the excellent way in which the director has been able to reach to the masses carrying the message of Gandhiji, the Father of our Nation. There are not many movies which leave you with a feeling of having second thoughts about your way of life and your contributions to your homeland.

No, I am not talking about tear-jerkers whose sole aim is to make you feel sad about the happenings in your country and portry India in a poor sense. Lage Raho Munna Bhai made sure that the movie-goer has had his share of fun in the first half and slowly proceeded to give the message it intended to, in the second half. I guess it was very successful in doing so, because the medium adopted for this was comedy and comedy sells! Some of the scenes made me feel as to how materialistic my life was and how different and useful i could be, to society! Hats off to Rajkumar Hirani!

Btw, if you had come here looking for a longer review of the movie, you better do a blogsearch. You will find zillions of reviews. By the time I get to watch a movie, here in Cyprus, sources say that a google search for the movie name returns an overflow error on the google servers !

Technorati Tags: sanjay+dutt, arshad+warsi, Rajkumar+Hirani, Lage+Raho+Munna+Bhai, Vidya+Balan, Diya+Mirza , comedy, Gandhi, Father+of+the+nation

Filed Under: Movies

100 Rupee Quiz Results

The first edition of the 100 Rupee Quiz is over. The answers can be found here. If you still want to see only the questions, go to the original 100 Rupee Quiz page.

The Scores (In random order)

Anusheel Shrivastava - 20.5
Sameer Nafey - 32.5
Pranav Shetty - 23
Shishir Shashidhar Kedlaya - 30.5
Aniruddha.Biswas - 17
brijesh nair - 25
ingit tibrewal - 28.5
Vineet - 3.5 (attempted only 4 questions)
rajesh mohan - 28
Prasoon Ranjan - 24
Ramachandran V - 5 ( attempted only 6 )
Murali Duggineni - 36
Sandeep Mathias - 17.5
Karthik Narayan - 22
Anirvan Bhadra - 33.5
Manikandan Kumarappan - 36
Harish Shanthinikethanam - 37
biju james - 16
Akhtar Ali - 30
mitrashankar biswas - 33
K T R - 28.5
rohit agrawal - 30
Rajiv D'Silva - 29

The winner of the 100 Rupee voucher is Harish Shanthinikethanam. Coming "a very close" second are Manikandan Kumarappan and Murali Duggineni with 36 points. I had to recheck their scores 3 times to ensure that i got the total right!
Thanks to all the 23 people who attempted the quiz. Hope you enjoyed it.
The next edition of this quiz will be on October 2nd.

Technorati Tags: quiz , 100+Rupee+Quiz

Filed Under: Quiz

Dumb Charades (dumbc) words & movies

I have got lot of hits to my post about the Dumb-C event from people searching for Dumb-Charades or dumb-c movie names or rounds. If you are interested to know about interesting rounds for dumb-c, other than the usual movie, quote or song round, then check my original post.

Since most of the searches are for the actual words or movies used in Dumb-C, i have listed below all the ones i used in my event. Since the list is very long , I have provided links to another page , so that my blog post doesn't become annoyingly long!

• Movie Names
• Quotations
• Words

Or, if you want to browse the entire list (segregated according to the rounds), go to the dumbcharades page.

Technorati Tags: dumbc, dumb+charades , party+games , movies, quotations

Filed under: Party Games

What is it with Punjabi Songs

that people, on listening to one, immediately raise both their hands and one leg in the air. See the two photos below taken from the Diwali Party at Amdocs. Notice the obvious difference? If not, better consult an optician.

The second one was when a Punjabi song was being played. Even the non-Indians did the same act! So, over the last few weeks, I researched lot of materials on the web and also spoke to Punjabis and non-punjabis about this strange phenomenon. I was surprised at the amount of information that turned up. So, here are the various theories and urban/rural legends that I came across from this investigation.

• Punjabis were the first Indians to use deodorants. The rest of India was still backward, as in, using natural substitutes like saffron, Thulasi etc. So, this meant that their underarm always had a bad odour.So, they couldn't raise their arms to dance. Whereas, the Punjabis, after using the deodorants, had nothing to fear and felt safe to raise both their arms.
• It is a known fact now that peeing, while your bladder is about to burst, is one of the best sensations one can experience. But this was documented only in the early 19th century.The Punjabis, even as early as 3rd century AD, had domesticated the dog and were the first to do so. They had noticed that their pets, while peeing, used to raise one of its legs. The Punjabis had seen the satisfaction on the faces of their pets after they had pee'd. But, they didn't know then , that this was because of the post-peeing satisfaction. They assumed that this pleasure was because of the fact that one leg was raised. So, they incorporated this into their traditional dances and hence it is, as we see now.
• The Punjabis as such are known to have a big bottom and are prone to falling backwards when they dance. So, they raise their hands to balance themselves and also lock their one leg with the other person's leg in the front to avoid falling backwards when they dance.
  

I am just done with my initial investigations and am still getting feedback from Punjabis around the world.Will post more logical reasons for this act as and when i get them.

Tags: Punjabi diwali amdocs Bhangra

Filed under: India

Baby, one more time says Britney Spears

Britney Spears gave birth to a son on Tuesday, this being the second one for Spears and her husband Kevin Federline. Her first son, Sean Preston's first birthday falls today (Thursday, September 14th). Looks like they didn't waste much time. Hope that Kevin Federline doesn't feel that its time to move on beyond Britney, as he felt so , after having a daughter and a son with actress Shar Jackson.

Their story makes an interesting read.

Britney has one previous marriage to Jason Allen Alexander, her childhood friend which happened in Las Vegas in 2004 and ended up in annulment 2 days later! Technically or legally, this is not regarded as a marriage because it didn't end in a divorce, but in an annulment. Crazy laws! I guess, annulment means "I was drunk at that time and hence didn't know what i was doing". Something similar to "Insanity Plea" used in criminal cases for high-profile defendants to justify breaking the law.

This is "technically" Kevin's first marriage as he was only engaged to Shar Jackson and the two children he had during his engagement don't count!

I love America!

Filed under: Movies

More pictures of Surya Jyotika Wedding

After being linked from Chennai Central through one his Blogger Round-up posts, i have been getting lot of hits for my original post on the Surya Jyotika wedding in Chennai. Also have a look below at the top twenty search queries which have brought people to my site (Click to enlarge). All the twenty of them are combinations of surya, jyotika and the word wedding!

So, to please the appetite of all the people browsing for their wedding pictures, I have posted more (Courtesy: More email forwards). Enjoy! Btw, these pictures also contain lot of other celebrities:
The lady in the second picture (to the left) is Surya's sister. The third one has Prabhu and his wife. The 4th one has Sarath+kumar , his wife Radhika. The 5th one has actor Prasanth. The next one has our dear Amma, Jayalalithaa. Next, the superstar Rajinikanth. The last one has Kamalahasan (his usual dashing self) and the guy next to kamal is Karthi (Surya's brother), soon to debut in Paruthiveeran. You can see some more pictures of Surya and Jyotika at the wedding of Prabhu's son Vikram here.

Filed under: Movies

Archive of my posts based on keywords

I have not yet been given the option to move to the New Blogger Beta with the option of tagging posts with keywords. So, I have implemented my own version of it. Though pretty rudimentary, it serves the purpose. Henceforth, links to all my old posts can be found on the archive page. The links on this page would be classified based on few tags. I shall also tag all new posts with keywords and put a link for the post on this archive page.

Filed Under: Blogging

Surya Jyotika Wedding in Chennai

The much-in-news jyotika surya affair finally ended in their wedding in Chennai today. I hope that they don't settle down in US of A sometime in the future, because if they do so, they will be celebrating their nth wedding anniversary on a day when the whole of America will be mourning the (n+5)th anniversary of the September 11 bombings.

NDTV had a huge coverage on this event. It lasted for exactly 4.2 seconds, much too less for me to run and get my camera out. Below are some pictures I got from an email forward. The whos-who of chennai seem to have been there including manorama, ajit and shalini and even our Chief Minister M.K.Karunanidhi.

Update: More pictures of their wedding (posing with other celebrities) can be found here.

Surya's younger brother Karthi (changed his name from Karthic) is to make his debut in Director Ameer's (Of Raam fame) movie, Paruthiveeran. Priya Mani is Karthi's heroine in the movie. It was supposed to have been released in July 2006, but has been delayed due to various reasons. The movie Raam was chosen for screening at the Cyprus International Film Festival in March 2006. Director Ameer along with Karthi had visited Cyprus then. Many of Amdocs' employees had gone to the screening of the movie and happened to meet Ameer and Karthi. I was introduced to them the following day as they wanted to know about places to visit in Cyprus.

I took this opportunity and took the day off and spent a day taking them to many places in Cyprus. We even visited North Cyprus and its castles. One of my friends in amdocs, Kanagaraj, also accompanied us. Karthi is not the kind of movie hero one would expect to meet. He had completed his engineering and also done his M.S in USA. In fact, many of my college friends were his seniors in M.S. I learnt a lot of photography techniques from Ameer and he was patient enough to answer hundreds of my questions of the various shooting techniques and styles. Below are some of the pictures. Btw, the guy in the yellow t-shirt is Karthi and he looks that way with that overgrown beard because the shooting of paruthiveeran was going on at that time.

Update: Paruthiveeran has been released and is declared a big hit! See more pictures of the new hero Karthi in his paruthiveeran look here.

Filed under: Movies

BlogStreet Top 100 Indian Blogs

I was, as always, doing random browsing of random blogs and I landed up on BlogStreet.com through one of the links. Whenever i see a "Submit your Blog" option, that is the first thing i choose on any site. So, i submitted my site to BlogStreet few weeks back. This weekend, i find my site listed on the top 100 Indian blogs, at position 76.
Was Blogstreet's server hacked by someone? Not by me, though. My "web-savvy" skills stop at writing "absolutely-static-hardcoded" html pages, nothing more! So, how did my site land up in the top 100 list. I am going to watch their site for the next few days to see if it was indeed a mistake on their part. Until then, I shall bask in the fame.

Below I have listed the top 10 blogs on blogstreet's list. The comments accompanying them are strictly my own views and might and will most probably not match with the rest of the Indian "Blogosphere":

• India Uncut: This is an OHT(over-head transmission) blog, at least for me. His blog resembles a newspaper, reporting on all the current events and happening, with lot of links to articles on the net. Anyone who is interested in the early morning dose of the "world today" would love his blog. I look for something more down-to-earth, something which could help me unwind.
• Kiruba: Probably, the most famous Indian blogger and also probably the most hated one too! His blog is light-hearted and a good read. He writes the occasional travelogue about a biking trip. His blog is one which could be given as an example for an "online-extension-of-oneself". His most famous post; has to be this one about him clipping his toenails before a marathon. This post has been used by one and all to condemn his style of blogging and he often has to post ripostes for such attacks.
• Vantage Point: I knew about Gaurav Sabnis' blog much before, through his other quiz blog, Interrobang. Btw, I maintain a collection of many quiz blogs. His blog exemplifies what I have told as blogging is. It contains personal experiences, movie reviews , poems written by him and anything and everything else. A good read.
• DesiPundit: This started off and I guess, still is a link consolidator. There are many contributors to this blog (mostly the top bloggers) who post links to worthy blog posts. This is good, if you just want to catch the cream of blog posts. But, what i noticed is that most of the posts belong to other top bloggers, who might not necessarily post content to your liking.
• YouthCurry: This site is from the Editor and Publisher of JAM - Just Another Magazine. The magazine's site is good timepass, but a little cluttered with lots of links. I usually go there to read reviews of cultural fests of various colleges. This blog provides an "Insight on Indian youth" (as it says on the title - rightly so). This blog is a good read on all issues affecting Indian youth today ranging from fashion to education.
• Chennai Central: Invariably the first blog I visit everyday morning, as a platform to begin by blog-reading. One of the three nice guys to link to my blog in their blogrolls! Sometimes, his posts are very big and I drop off at the middle. Otherwise, his blog is a good read for an assortment of topics. He also regularly posts links to other interesting posts in the blogosphere. His Blogroll is impressive and you can spend hours browsing the links.
• Future Cars: Cars, cars and more cars: That is what this site is about. This guy is a SEO by profession. No wonder his blog gets a high listing. Anyway, guys love cars and engines. So, his blog must have a regular readership base.
• Anil Dash: The sub-title on his page says "The second Greatest blogger of all time". Should appreciate his modesty though! It seems that he has been blogging for 7 yrs. Well, i started work in the IT industry back then and was getting used to unlimited space and unlimited forwards on the company e-mail!. I don't know much about his blog, as I am visiting it for the first time through the blogstreet link, but he looks to have a large international following.
• Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets (as the link says). Looks to be a hard-core tech blog. So, i shall skip this one.
• Known Turf: New one for me. Writes Looooong posts, so shall take me a looong time to read his posts and decide whether i like his style or not.

So, that was it, the top 10 blogs on BlogStreet India. Well, I am at number 76 and happy about it!

"Boy" theme for Photofriday contest

The above 3 photographs are the ones I have submitted for the weekly PhotoFriday contest. The theme for this week is "boy". I know that the first one looks better because of the good bokeh and ample lighting. But, the other too looked good to me because of the eye contact made by the kids.

Cheerleaders for my site

Through a friend living in the US of A, I managed to get a group of cheerleaders to support my website by displaying the letters on their t-shirts. Definitely a cool way to get noticed. There are others too who have made use of this promotional offer. Check out ganga at Dexterous Doings.

If you too want to do the same, head over here to contact them.

The new Pepsi advertisement

Pepsi's new ad campaign doesn't star shah rukh khan or aishwarya rai or any other celebrity, but Rajeev Bakshi, the chairman of Pepsi India. This must be a bold move on his part, coming on-screen and talking about Pepsi's quality processes and refuting the claim of pesticides in Pepsi.
I have always admired the absurdity of the ads in which the owners/bosses/proprietors appeared. Some of the classic ones which i remember are ones of MDH Masala (with a nonagenarian doing a namaste), Saravana Stores (with a dhoti-clad-want-to-become-a-politician kind of guy) and of course the famous Ramesh Cars - Car vanga vikka en kitta vanga (To buy or sell cars, come to me). It is history that this Guy (Ramesh) was caught in all sorts of scandals and went underground.
Pepsi's ad is not so bad. It is clear and to the point, more aimed at the parents of the kids who might be drinking pepsi, rather than the kids themselves. Well, for the kids, they have the other ads with "blue" celebrities talking about the virtues of Pepsi TV!

What happened to zatang.com ?

More than 6 years ago, zatang.com was a popular website, having many sections catering to various hobbies/activities like quizzing, trekking, cooking, movies and even on religion. The sections were authored not by zatang staff, but by anyone who was interested. The owner of a section was called ZZar.

What lured me to become a zzar was the prospect of getting a zatang.com T-shirt. Those days, my only job was to play contests, quizzes, whatever on the internet to get a gift or a prize. Zatang.com offered a cool t-shirt to anyone who became a zzar and owned a section. Fresh from college, the only real hobby i had was solving the hindu crossword. So, i mailed to them saying that i would start a crossword section. Within a week , my request was approved and i had my own place on the internet. I was thrilled !

I wrote few pages on crossword solving by including lot of examples from past Hindu crosswords and also some of the ones which i had seen in crossword competitions in college. Shown on the left is the photo which was included on my page. Well, the copy-paste work from the passport-sized photo which i had submitted wasn't too bad, except that i would have sent a better photo , if i had known that they would be doing this!

After i started my Hindu Crossword Blog (not regular in updating it now, because I have been busy in extra-curricular activities at work!), i wanted to include these tips and tricks also in my pages. But, zatang.com was not to be seen. The latest that i could remember seeing zatang.com was in early 2005, when they had revamped the site. Then i started searching for zatang on google, hoping that i could find some news on it somewhere.

Then, during one of the searches, i chanced upon the internet archive. I had used this long ago for searching puzzles from defunct websites for The Hunt. I didn't realise that this site could prove so useful in my search. I was able to recover all the content i had written for zatang, way back in the year 2000 !

So, here they are, the tips and tricks for solving the hindu crossword or for that matter, any cryptic crossword.

New Quizzing Section

I am poor at managing favourites on my Internet Explorer, so i decided to put all the links online. I have started a new quiz section, where i shall post links to quiz blogs and popular quizzing sites. I shall also update these pages with the quizzes i post on quizzing groups and also the ones i conduct at my workplace. If you got a worthwhile link, drop in a mail to me and i shall add it. The quiz page is here.

How to win a million dollars

Millionaire With Style - video powered by Metacafe

Sania Mirza loses

Sania loses here. Sania loses there. Sania loses everywhere. Suddenly, I saw a news item mentioning that Sania had won rather than saying that Sania had yet another loss. Then, when i read the close print, I saw that sania had won an exhibition tennis match against her 9-yr old neighbour 7-6, 0-6,7-6. Sania's promoters felt that this match was needed to rekindle the passion about Sania in her neighbourhood, at least. In the past few months, the world has come to know only about Sania's losses and her promoters felt that this win might put her back on the front pages.
Well, this almost didn't happen. Her promoters had scoured the neighbourhood to find a girl who knows a lot about Sania, but doesn't know a lot about tennis. After weeks of screening, they chose Diya Mirza (whose father had incidentally named her so because of his crush on the actress by the same name). Playing against Diya Mirza would also get lot of publicity for the match, as many tongue-wagging teenagers would assume that it was the actress Diya Mirza who was playing and would turn up for the match. When Diya came to know that she was chosen for playing against Sania, she informed all her schoolmates, who promptly turned up for the match. What the promoters didn't know was that Diya had ordered the Rapidex Tennis Learning Course and increased her tennis skills manifold. Luckily for Sania, Diya contracted Conjunctivitis (also known as Madras Eye) and had to keep her one eye bandaged. This was what made the "easy" win for Sania possible.
Update: Sania Mirza's fans were found on the streets of Hyderabad celebrating her victory by burning posters of the actress Diya Mirza.