Abhinav Bindra makes history at Beijing 2008

Bindra is the first Indian to win a GOLD at Olympics in an individual event. Abhinav won the Men's 10m Air Rifle with a total score of 700.5.

Congratulations Abhinav for the great show. You made my day! I was very excited :-)

The match was so close that, Abhinav overtook Hakkinen of Finland and scores got leveled at the pre-final round. When it mattered the most, he hit a magical 10.8 in the decider.

More interesting to see was his composure and behavior even after making history.

I could enjoy this see-saw contest just because of the pouring rain that held me from leaving to office early.

Way to go, hope to see India vaulting in the medal rank this time

Doing the right thing

Good quote from Benjamin Franklin

Just knowing the right thing is not enough. You must do the right thing to get results. The person who does things makes many mistakes, but he never make the biggest mistake of all: doing nothing!

Good to know more about the Nuclear Deal

Entire nation is divided over Indo US nuclear deal. Every one can be an expert in topics such as the nuclear energy (deal) where both sides of the coin could be true and justifiable.

The need of the hour is a well respected, reliable and highly intellectual expert (I mean a real expert) who can weigh the pros and cons for us so that we can either feel comfortable or voice our concern.

Though I am not fully convinced, following articles eased a bit of my confusion

The Deal and Its Impact

Nuclear Power, pros and cons


Curtsy IndianCurrentAffairs for pointing me to the above TOI articles

Very Good Article on Farmer suicides — myth and reality

Very well written article that gives a good picture of how numbers are misused for self interest Farmer Suicides - myth and reality @ ET

Bears take on Sensex... What do you do?

If you are an investor... don't miss this article.

Market dynamics always had short term impact on equities. All one need to keep in mind is patience pays (of course, only if one is not greedy and invests in good companies).

What if the Sensex falls below 10k? Still invest @ rediff.com

I can't do any better

Cute little baby singing Janaganama....

Cartoons and thinking out of the box

A movie director will have 2+ hrs to present his story/crap, a TV commercial director can have the luxury of a few seconds. What about the news paper cartoonist? all they can afford is a corner of a page to present a story which is relevant, thought provoking, sarcastic, and laughable.

One has to think out of the box to produce some brilliant work (cartooning) under such constraints.

This cartoon is from today's (22nd June) Eenadu Magazine by famous Telugu cartoonist Mr. Sridhar. Its about the state of current tussle between UPA and Left on the Nuclear Deal with US.

I enjoyed it a lot :-)

Monsoon and its joy

Great captures Of Monsoon Masti & Misery

Enjoy

month of IPL

Have been following but yesterday's Rajasthan vs Mumbai Indians is the most nail biting ... during the last over, scenes from Aus vs S.A @ Eng W.C were rolling in my head. Unfortunately MI failed to do a Aussie feat to at least end the game for a tie (dear Dilhara, and Sanath what did u do?).

Every thing looked great till the 17th over, Pollak and Raje bowled extremely well and were looking to finish off the game in style. A few glitches with the ball and the fielding cost the game for the MI. My heart has tanked with their defeat... I wanted to see Sanath and Sachin in the next round too, and more importantly I wanted to see RR's defeat (cheer the underdogs :-)).

The major debacle of the IPL team Deccan (DACCAN) (de) Chargers topping the losers chart. My home team :-( is a bunch of big hitters but got hammered by every one else (pity u ppl), including Royal Challengers.

Owners of the DC might be praying for a better bargain on sale of some BIG players :-)

Well now, Rajasthan Royals, Punjab XI, Chennai Super Kings, and Delhi Dare devils are in the semis. Though Punjab is looking good, feel the finals is going to be between RR and DD.

Mothers day

I have come across this article yesterday Amma Vardhillu (sorry for those who can't read Telugu). The narration presents the daily routine of a mother and yet passes the message for us.

I could connect so easily with this article because it almost reflects the routine of my mother too (for that matter almost all will concur).

They sacrifice, does over-work without selfishness and derives pleasure out of serving the whole family.

Whether we acknowledge or not time will keep rolling and mothers will be mothers for ever.

Achieve goals by becoming a self leader

Every one aspires to be a leader, and achieve heights. Here is tool to help us realizing our dreams, a book titled Self leadership and the one minute manager.

Leadership can't be taught any better than the story presented in this book, grab this book for your betterment (this looks like the gist). Simple, elegant narration makes it a good read, the volume of the book makes us more interested in finishing it in a single go.

The Key points for me are

- People are not mind readers, so don't assume things and ask for what you want or convey how you feel (i.e challenge assume constraints)

- Become empowered by making use of points of power (relationship, task, personal, and knowledge etc)

- At every state, based on your competence and commitment, seek direction or support to get things done. Such a practice should make us a self leader

- Any one who can provide us the required support, or direction is a leader

- Never turn away from responsibilities

- Measure your competence and commitment at every stage, seek what you need to proceed

- Collaborate with people for fruitful results

- Make better use of the most powerful sentence in English I NEED

Height of time passing

TV channels can degrade to any level :-) though it looks funny, reflects how they are thinking (treating) about the viewers..

I couldn't recall who's wisdom, but said "Front page of a news paper is sufficient to cover the days NEWS from around the world (i.e news are rare)

Then we have TV channels competing to cook news out of anything (or should we say trying to re-define the meaning of news?). I simply hate the current set of private news channels....

Steal deals

Visited CROMA over the weekend (At Eshaanya Nilayam, Pune). The prices were really luring. Many electronic gadgets were being disposed at steal prices as part of their year end sales.

I couldn't believe My Book from Western Digital (250GB EHDD) was tagged at 5K. Had I not taken an assembled piece earlier... damn.

undeserved victory

The Sydney (2nd) test match is definitely one of the most controversial, its no less than a match fix. Indian team has played some excellent cricket in this match (excluding the last session, they should have ended it well for a draw).

In the end it looked like, 15 (Ind) vs 25 (Aus) due to the pathetic umpiring (any county umpire could have done a far better job). Australian team has lost the respect all over the world due to their immoral behavior.

Former Aussie players batted for the current team saying that, its the way cricket is played in Aus and visitors needs to understand.... it sounds like we are not going to care for you, but you should. how stupid!

Another former says that morality only applies to taking catches but not for batting. how discriminating...

Someone rightly said, down the line people will only look at the stats (India lost the match) and never at the circumstances. Had umpiring been normal India would have won this match by a big margin (I am sure, Australian players were not able to handle Kumble at all).

The best innings of this match is definitely that of Laxman's magical and flawless century

Few more... here

Kumble and Co. have been cheated

Sack arrogant Ponting, demands Peter Roebuck

Australia's attitude lacking in appeal

Kumble questions Australia's spirit

It's blunder Down Under!

Sporting greats upset by Australia's behaviour

India-Australia thrillers

Courtesy Rediff.com

Taare Zameen Par

Aamir Khan delivered it again but as a director. Its an awesome movie with great screen play, direction, acting and lyrics.

Kudos to Darsheel Safary for his life like acting. I could relate his acts to many kids I have acquaintance with.

The bonding between the kid and his mother was depicted so neatly using simple lyrics through the song Mere Maa (my favorite song, if a kid's soul can speak would have been the same song).

Its close to picture perfect, will recommend this movie to everyone.

Heartbreaking week

Last week has been a heart breaker for many reasons. Just returned from Diwali vacation, and was shocked by the outcome of RIF. Watched the movie Happy Days, enjoyed it a lot.

In the end, after entertaining us for years, Yellow Pages decided to stop airing Amrutam. My only favorite Telugu TV serial. It so disappointing to hear this news. As far as I could re-collect, I enjoyed the following episodes a lot

- No Happy Days
- Parody of Premiste (donno the title)
- MCH related
- Telugu classes

T20 - Dream seris so far

I don't care about the result of today's final. It has been a fairy tail kind of journey in the inagural T20 for India. I enjoyed it a lot, though many of the matches were exiting, only the matches involving India ended up the best. vs Pakistan, Eng, SA, and Aus all were a suspense till the end.

Though Pakistan has a good bowling attack, India seem to have an edge over Pak in batting. Indian bowlers done a tremendous job. My man of the match against SA were R.P Singh and Yuvi, where as the the semis should have been shared by Sreesanth and Yuvi. Harbajan impressed one and all with his clever bowling, so is Yuvi's superficial form at the right time .

I am a bit worried about Joginder Sharma, he might be the key in the finals.... Final would sway India's way if he bowls like he did in the last over vs Aus.

** So far India never lost a game to Pak in any form of World Cup

T20 Recap

Nothing short of a Thriller

During my return journey from Warangal (on 2nd Sept) we encountered a situation which was nothing short of a suspense movie. Myself and Kranthi boarded the bus earlier than usual at Hanamkonda, we had a train to catch at Hyderabad at 8.40 in the evening...

We were inching close to Hyderabad (almost 35 km away). Suddenly we found a huge traffic jam on the highway, reason being a lorry broke down on a small bridge completely blocking the road. Traffic kept on growing with each passing minute and it took almost 2 hrs to get the traffic cleared... and those 2hrs were our buffer time for such eventualities :-(

In the end we missed our train by 4 mins and had to take a rough journey to Pune by Bus

During the break on the road, I have taken these pics with my mobile.. the sky was amazing.

3rd Barcamp Pune

Held at Persistent Systems, Pune on July 7th, 2007 http://barcamp.org/BarCampPune. It's my first ever barcamp, found it interesting and useful.

A real brief of the sessions I have attended

- First session was on online TV guide for Indian television by codewalla.com. These guys were one of the event sponsors. It was a nice and interactive session and they seem to got a good and useful feedback from the room.

- Rapid prototyping with PyQt: To demo something quickly, choose a set of tools using which one can directly start working on the demo rather worrying about the intricacies of using the tools themselves. As per the speaker, python bridges the semantic gap between what we want to develop and what python as a tool has to offer.

- Open Source Education: Freeman Murray, presented his work in promoting open source education for school children in India. He captures lectures from good teachers and makes copies of those media and distributes them across other schools with the aim of improving the quality of education.

- Registering companies: This topic is presented by a lawyer who works for a consultancy. As per him its better to register a company with US due to various reasons/benefits, bureaucracy, taxation, time delays, service, respect/brand name etc.

- Tools for Startups/small teams: This was slightly offbeat, ended up being discussing the tech sites to read/watch daily for news updates, tools required/used for tracking reported issues, efficiently tying things associated with issues, managing resources etc

This session resulted in the following pic



















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