I would not have written this piece but for this cute little bushy tailed sweetie who comes everyday to visit us. Mom has been feeding her for sometime and I have got used to her presence now. I am talking about a squirrel who has become like a family member now. Her favourite area is the pot where we have a flowering plant standing tall amongst the other lot.
She’s (I presume its a female) very shy and timid and shoots off at my slightest move. I have captured some pictures of her with my NIKON 5200. The excitement, while doing so was the same as shooting pictures of wild animals in the jungle. Where would one find the joy of watching animals in this concrete jungles?
I went over to Wikipedia to read more about the squirrels & I discovered, to my surprise, that it belongs to the rodent family. It can also be a potential carrier of the plague virus too. For the time being, my mom seems to be content in giving the squirrel her share of peanut shells, which she gladly chews.
On other fronts, I read Dipanita Sharma (model & actress who is herself an Assamese) saying that Indians have no respect for the north easterners & we should consider whether Mumbai infact is really safe for women or not. She adds that Indians (read rest of India) discriminates them on the basis of their mongoloid features. She was referring to the dastardly act of a guy who attacked 2 Manipuri women with a chopper at Gateway of India recently. One of them succumbed to her injuries while the other was critically wounded. A point to be noted here was that none of the bystanders came to her rescue for 15 minutes, which is a typical Mumbaikar attitude towards looking at human calamities. Hit and run cases and bodies lying astray on the roads are very common.
Whereas I have no mercy for the guy who did this and also for the bystanders who just stood there, I firmly consider Mumbai to be the safest metro city in India for several reasons. To pass such a judgement on a stray incident of a madman attacking a woman, is cruel and unjust.
August 18th, 2005
It can’t get any auspicious than this. After 4 days of no internet, I got it back, right on our Independence Day. The problem apparently lay in some cables which might have got snapped due to the ‘Big Splash’. The cable guys at
Hathway worked today to repair the cables and set my internet working again :-) Thanks a ton to them.
I had the opportunity to watch Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades on STAR Gold. Coming soon after the tremendous success of ‘Lagaan’, it must have been difficult process in making a film which would live upto the expectations of the people and Ashutosh has not disappointed. Swades is about Mohan Bhargava (Shahrukh Khan) a Project Manager on Global Precipitation Measurement at NASA. He comes to India to see his nanny in a small village in Uttar Pradesh called Charanpur where he meets his love life Gita (Gayatri Joshi making her debut on the silver screen). The story unfolds when on a trip to a neighbouring village, he sees how people are living under abject poverty and decides to do something about it. He helps in breaking the shackles of age old traditions of caste and creed which are so prevalent in rural India even today. By contructing a small hydel electric project in the village, the protaganist gives the villagers a reason to cheer. Finally his motherland beckons him to come back and the rest is history.
The highlights of the movie are just too many. The narrative itself is very simple and well tackled. The cinematography is excellent and gives one the feeling of being in a rural setting. AR Rahman & Javed Akhtar do it again after Lagaan. The Ramlila song is the highlight for me since it’s written by a non-Hindu and I am too proud about this fact.
Lastly I hope we have a Mohan Bhargava hidden somewhere inside us who can create a revolution and bring happiness to everyone’s hearts. I know that we have become too cynical about the way things have been happening about us but cynicism will only pull us back into that quicksand called hopelessness.
August 15th, 2005
India will turn 58 this coming Independence day and my nationalism gets the better of me and I suddenly get very critical about the country where I have stayed all my life. In particular, are the events which happen in Mumbai. For most of us our city surroundings have a great bearing on our thoughts. Avinash and I have regular arguments on how India is bad and China is good. I always defend India to an extent where I convert it into subtle humour when the bad points start taking centrestage. Now he will be happy because China is going to be the new entrant in the world of cricket very soon and India will lose it’s only reign of superiority in sports.
Continue Reading August 11th, 2005
This HAS to be the most frustrating of experiences for every avid internet lover (like me). I am still facing constant problems with my internet and I spent 2 days without it. This has become routine now and I am wondering how I am going to spend the longgg weekend which comes this week.
Anyways the good news is that I have started to take a lot of interest in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). I had said earlier that I want to make my career in HCI and Usability and thankfully there are a lot of resources available on the internet to read. I presume I might also buy some books on Interaction Design in the coming future. Essentially interaction design could b the difference between a good and a bad systems design. The very term ‘interaction design’ is vast and has a lot to do with how humans are adept at using interactive products.
In the coming months I would contribute to this blog by presenting some of my thoughts on HCI. Likewise I am pleased to announce my partnership with Cybaba. We have realised the need to give an impetus to HCI and usability and we will be focusing mainly on thses issues on the cyBLOG. So do keep visiting the website :-)
August 7th, 2005
Let me be honest and confess that I lost the URL of this fabulous website and lost all the hopes of finding it on the superhighway. I only knew a few things about it on my first visit which were “portuguese”, “designer” and the fact that it was made entirely in “WordPress”. I managed to “Google” the keywords and I ‘excavated’ this website once again :-) The website is called
WeBreakStuff and I always mispronounce it as “Web Break Stuff”.
Interaction Design as I see it is all about generating experiences for the users and making their stay more pleasant. In this case Frederico Oliveira has done a brilliant job of creating an interface that we beg for more. The navigation is clean and sharp with an arrow pointing downwards when clicked, denoting the page on which the user is.
The ’spotlight’, as I call the box showcasing the main feature of the website, is also neatly placed with eye catching colours. There are not more than 5 news items on the home page which eventually lead you to the Weblog (yes, we are just starting now). In the Weblog section, one finds all the usual treats which are associated with it such as archives, categories, RSS/XML subscribe feeds, etc. Not to mention the design here which is a graphic of a newsprint paper :-) My favourite though, is the About page which lists in detail what Fred does as a professional. Credits such as the usage of the blogging tool are listed out here as well as a contact address in case you want to hire him :-) The only problem I had was in understanding the favicon of a skeleton which typically would signify ‘danger’. I wonder if the word ‘break’ had anything to do with it but it certainly does look very mischievous :-(
This website is definitely going to be a part of my Favourites. Enjoy WeBreakStuff:-)
August 2nd, 2005
