A 'Test' Match with a difference

India is playing a test match with Pakistan these days and on similar lines my faculty would be playing a ‘test week’ against me starting from tomorrow. I have got 6 tests in 5 days.A test of engineering skills like… mugging up everything and vomiting it all in answer book, something I never managed to do all my life. As expected most of my class-mates are busy studying and I don't even know the course for most of my subjects , wasting my time writing useless things like these!!.

“One night stands” as I call them, probably one of the best studying techniques I have learnt in 1.5 years of engineering I have done till now, are the only means I have in this one-sided battle. (Now this too much ….keep a standard of your pjs anubhav…)

Needless to say as much as I expect India to win (or probably draw) I expect myself loose badly.

Anyways I’ll follow up with a more detailed account of this now certain disaster, later this week :).

Here are some interesting links.

This audio piece is a recording of the famous first line Of Nehru’s Independence Day speech. It also has an extract of Jinnah's speech.

This is Nehru announcing news of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination on the AIR.

This site has a great collection of Swami Vivekananda’s quotes and some of his rare pics.

Would you have invested...

Having a hard time identifying the pic...Well it is Micrsoft corporation in 1978.The leftmost person in the bottom row,with a very childish face is Bill Gates and the bearded guy rightmost in the same row is Paul Allen..

Guess money changes a lot of things...

Jesus and me....

Statutory Warning: Please think twice before reading this, I don't take any responsibility of the consequences.

"He is the only man ever born by way of God putting a seed in the womb of a virgin (Matt. 1:18; Luke 1:35). God put a perfect seed in the womb of Mary so that Jesus would be born without the sin nature that every other human being inherited from the First Adam."

"He is the only man who is called “the Last Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45). As the only-begotten Son of God, Jesus was the genetic equivalent to the first “Son of God,” Adam (Luke 3:38). As the only man born without inherent sin."

Caution: The words below are just my thoughts; they don't represent any community in general. I don't intend to hurt anybody's religious sentiments.

The two pieces of text above I never understood, and nor did I ever understand the concept of original sin. What is so sinning about the natural birth of human being? Is the anguish a woman bears while giving birth sinning (or as they it is penance for the original sin)? Or is the act that leads to birth sinning.

Why can’t MY GOD be as I am…..a Human being?

A Human Being who stood out, because of his deeds and his qualities, a human being who loved one and all.
That is what is Jesus for me; not somebody who was unique because he was born to a virgin. I would probably never believe in this theory of his unusual birth, even if the gospels say so.

Let's just remember what he taught us ,not what they think of him.

Here's to the crazy ones....

This one I read somewhere on the web....

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?We make tools for these kinds of people. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do".
--Apple Computer Advertisement

"Cheers to crazy ones, who change the world,the world that they made beautiful before I was born and hope they make it even better before I die".
--anubhav,march 21,2005.

hey was that quote or misquote....... ,probably regret writing that.4.30 in the morning I am really sleepy don't know when I am going to get up for college..lazy as I am.

Google Bombing

OK, if you don’t believe what you see, try this before reading on, go to http://www.google.com/ and type “miserable failure” in the search box. The first result will be a link to biography George W Bush.

This is called “Google Bombing”.

So, How The Hell Does it work?..
A Google bombing is attempted to influence the ranking of page, for given query, in the results returned by Google. The technique takes advantage of PageRank technology. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started by working on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. This is the stepping stone of the PageRank technology. Google defines Page Rank as …

“PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.”

Now don’t bore me anubhav….

Ok, in simple terms, for example in our case of “miserable failure” if they are many sites which link to Bush’s biography under the name “miserable failure” then his biography(site) gets the top rank for the query “miserable failure” even if the site does not have the term “miserable failure”.

Frankly speaking in itself PageRank is a great Technology, but as the say “For every crack there is a Hack” …. We have Google bombing.

Apart from spoofing on famous people, Google bombing can also be used for commercial purposes to upgrade a rank of your own site.

So how do I Bomb Google…

The most common way of doing this, create many blogs having links pointing to particular site.

Google Bombs (those for meant humor) are self destructible, because when they become famous, they find a note in many web journals and articles on various websites and the bomb is knocked out of it’s top spot.


Some famous Google Bombs…..

1. “Weapons of mass destruction” - Internet Explorer Error look-alike joke page saying "weapons of mass destruction cannot be found".

2. “French military victories” - hoax, Google look-a-like page saying "no results found for French military victories, did you mean French military defeats (hey this one still works).

3. “Miserable failure”, “worst president”, and “great president” - whitehouse.gov biography of George W. Bush.

4. “"More evil than Satan " returned Microsoft's home page: This was one of first bombs, but doesn’t work this days.

They are many more but these are the more famous ones.

Unity and relativity

Well I don't know whether the game would unite us or not but it will surely bring the people from the two countries closer to each other.In the past three years Indo-Pak unity has taken more successful strides than ever, after the partition.I think that people from both the countries want peace and probably it's just the political circumstances that have lead to such a bloody history.

Shake Hands

U.S. secetary of state of Condoleeza Rice arrived today in India and had meeting with country's external affairs minister K Natwar Singh.India expressed concern over the sale of F-16 fighters to Pakistan and Rice said at the press conference said they were discussing sale of F-16 to both India and Pak....(great strategy ..isn't it...don't we see this policy as a classic derivative of what was used by British....And they said they always wanted to end terrorism and establish peace in south asia he!he!.....humour at it's best)

Albert Einstein

He really seems to enjoy the ride.....

Ten Commandments for an engineering student

My last two posts have been, more on the serious side….so here’s something more light (Well it throws a lot of light on my engineering side)

1. Thou shalt study only during the preparatory leave.(Well this doesn’t apply to NIT ppl like me coz we don’t have a pl…so here’s a sub)/Thou shalt study only the day before your exams.

2. Thou shalt never write thy assignments thyself(Protocols like FTP and GT(Glass tracing ) rule).

3. Thou shalt begin writing thy journals only on the morning of submission. (And it should never be written thyself...don't violate the 2nd Commandment)

4. Thou shalt treat all marks above 40 as bonus.

5. Thou shalt have at least 70 per cent attendance in the canteen.(I have 80% ….after all I am an electronics engineer)

6. Thou shalt pass GRACEfully.(You can always console thyself by saying “There’s always the next semester, until of course the last semester”)

7. Thou shalt give thy attendance without being present...PROXY is a MUST. (And vice –versa….mutual co-operation)

8. If thou can't convince them , confuse them.(Probably the only way I manage to pass my vivas)

9. Thou shalt always do night-outs.

10. Thou shalt bunk classes on a regular basis and actively organize mass bunks.

Any additions to this list are invited....hail the engineering spirit.

Sex(y) journalism

We all know that nothing sells like sex and probably recent dare bare acts in pop videos and Hindi cinema established this beyond doubt. But should news media also use this formula, if so, then we are surely moving in the wrong direction.

"Shakti Kapoor caught on tape, cries foul."

This is today's front page, bottom half, headline of a newspaper which claims itself as the best in the country. Astonishingly in the same issue news related to a bus accident just manages to get some place on page 3.Well, talk about page 3 journalism (which probably is another waste of newspaper media…hey but the movie was gr8..Get back to topic …anubhav) we soon might have all pages 1,2,3 occupied with stories like these.

This is just not the state of newspapers but all T.V. news channel are replete with such stories. Recall Kareena and her beau Shaheed’s kissing stint which was broadcasted over on electronic media for days, with even the prime time news showing the whole smooch, the D.P.S. scandal which was probably the hot news for more than a month. The list is pretty long and I would have to consider writing another blog If I were to write about all of them.

Danger Ahead: (why do I write this, all the part above this in my blogs are facts and below are my thoughts)

A country with a population running into billions; downtrodden by evils like rapes, kidnapping, political scandals I think that the news media has more important matters to report than the sleazy stuff it is getting into these days. Does this actually refer the mentality of the people this media reaches? Probably they would argue that this is what readers are interested in (dude don’t tell me u were not interested all the above scandals…), but even then the importance given these matters is just too much! Journalism is a very important industry of a country.
What the Indian industry is doing these days is probably not journalism

PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD, PLEASE USE IT JUDICIOUSLY

P.S. hey I forgot write about politically biased nature of Indian news media, if you would have realized some of the T.V. channels or newspapers are more biased towards a particular political party, probably that is even more very dangerous, but then you can expect anything politics.

75 years ago...

Wednesday, march 12 1930
6.30 am:
The great man, sets out on foot for dandi from Ahemdabad, a journey of 240 miles, to break the salt law.75 years later they try to retrace his path.
'Mahatma' as we know him, perhaps the greatest Indian ever, did more than anybody else for India’s independence. (Now don't write an essay on him...you already did that in your 7th grade).


CAUTION: DANGER AHEAD
75 years later we retrace his path; we remember his sacrifices, works, hardships, achievements, failures but not his teachings. Perhaps in the case of every great personality, be it anybody from Guru Nanak to Jesus Christ or Martin Luther King to Mahatma Gandhi, we remember their birthdays, death anniversaries, but we forget only thing they would have wanted us to remember: their teachings. We started fighting day after Gandhi died and continue till this day. We put their portraits in offices and houses (Hindi film inspiration eh...?) But never honor them by practicing what they taught us. INDIVIDUALS HAVE BECOME GREATER THAN PRINCIPLES AND THEIR OWN IDEALS. You would say when we remember them, we remember what they practiced and preached, but that never seems to happen. IDEALS have become what they are meant to be “Philosophical teachings which are abstract”.

sane start

"Life,they say, is trying things just to see if they work"

This probably sums up my new endeavour : Blogging.