BRAToSPHERE

Category: ARTICLE

  • Happy New year 2014

    At the outset, I wish you all a very happy new year. I know am a little late in posting this, but well it is better than not doing so at all.

    I know I have again faltered in my promise of posting regularly. Three months of absence from the blogosphere (or is it BratoSphere?) is complete inexplicable. I agree. The rapidness with which things have been happenings and the ups and downs of everyday life has led to the delay.

    The last three months have been a crazy, emotional period which I would sure remember for a long time to come. I was home for a good one and a half month on a holiday (probably my longest visit home after I have started working). Overall, 2013 has been one crazy year which for sure has changed my perspective on life forever.

    Every New Year brings with it a new hope for a new fresh beginning, and this year promises to bring in a lot of positive change. There are a couple of initiatives planned for this year, which I hope see the light of the day as planned.

    In addition to the social and professional promises, personal life also promises to be fulfilling. So, 2014 sure has a lot to look forward to.

    I am totally geared up to lap up all the opportunities. Are you?

    With this, signing off, wishing you all once again a very Happy new year 2014. See you soon.

  • Back after a four month hiatus

    Hi all. Have been wishing to scribble something here for long, but saying the last couple of months were hectic would be an understatement.

    Right since May, or was it End April, have been running around across all places. No wonder last that I got to write here was about my travails at the airport.

    Whatever said, four month gap is just not acceptable. I Agree.

    Again, usual of my old promises (I should just stop making them!), I again promise to be regular and more prompt. Of course, such a long hiatus is unprecedented and will remain without one. I Promise. Er!

    A lot of things have been happening in the last couple of months or so. The dollar went through astronomical heights and returned to a new normal, A Pakistani girl is close to winning the nobel peace prize and a past winner of the same prize got close to bombing a chemical nation, leaks resurfaced the intriguing cold war and Snowden is not a den filled with snow any longer.

    No matter what changes and what does not, some things do not change and for good.

    Leaving at that, I again promise to return super quick! I Promise. (Pinching my neck with my thumb and index finger! )

  • Stuck at at the Airport

    Sitting at the airport lounge, and typing fastidiously over endless cups of coffee has now become a norm. With all the travel, airports sure have become a second home, and airport lounges, an extra room to my own 1 bhk in Mumbai.

    No kidding, but I actually used to love the feeling of being at an airport. I have always liked it. Guess it stemmed from my love for traveling. The airport gave me the peace of mind and the relaxation hours that was otherwise tough to find. Airports (and of course airplanes) were the perfect venues to catch up with reading. Airports were always fun.

    The above still holds true and I still completely enjoy the experience of flying, unless of course it is on a Saturday night!

    The agony amplifies with the fact that there is a party on in the metropolis and I am getting late, really late to get there before it is all out and dry! I was anyways getting late to the party, and now with the delay I hopefully would not be disturbing puking slumber!

    To add to the fire is the fact that I was not available in the metropolis last weekend too due to work commitments. This weekend too, one day is spent working and the Saturday night is spent typing away at the airport.

    The final straw to the fury – the flight gets delayed by a full one and a half hours and counting. So the initially scheduled time of departure of 9:55PM now stands at 11:30 PM, and the crew thinks she is being sweet by saying, “this is the time of departure is as of now”.

    So now I have an additional 95 minutes to kill to the previous 115 minutes( i had come to the airport at 8PM itself for a 9:55PM flight!) and 210 minutes are long even by Hindi movie length standards. At this time I was had made up my mind of leasing a private jet about which I read on this website, but as the ticket was in my hand and I had given my bags as check-in, I could not do much.

    Technical snag they say, Jet Airways, why don’t you just discard the plane, or maybe have a standby plane for such exigencies. Maybe you can charge a 100 buck more on each of your tickets to pay for the standby aircrafts. 100 more bucks to the already expensive flight ticket would not pinch greatly.

    Oh! Jet Airways is busy sleeping around with Etihad and such “small” difficulties to a “domestic” passenger would not really matter to Mr. Goyal anymore.

    So what exactly can one do in such situations, other than staring at fellow passengers that is. I can maybe :

    • Browse through the bookstore and make mental and maybe digital note of all the books you want to read. (You can of course later check up the prices online and then consider buying them!)
    • While you are at the bookstore, you can actually read up all the interesting articles from The Economist. This is if standing and reading is your thing.

    Well, you cannot do the above two if you are the Ahmedabad Airport, as the book store owner rates his sleep at a higher priority than catering to stranded passengers like you. The bookstore is shut!

    • You can sit at the free access lounge and keep ordering food.

    This option again cannot be exercised at the Ahmedabad airport, as some smart architect thought having the lounge before the check in area made more sense than having it after the security check in.

    • Convince those noisy over fed rich Gujju kids for a flash mob. Not really recommended again at the Ahmedabad airport.
    •  Keep munching all that you can eat at the airport. Well, would not take long if you are the Ahmedabad airport departures. How much could one possible take to taste from Subway, HavMor icecreams and 2 tea shops?
    • Do something that you have wanting to be doing for long, but have not been getting the time for – BLOG!!!

    You know which option i chose!

  • Google Reader Killed, Long Live RSS

    Google is a wonderful company and no doubt it has changed the way we browse internet. This sometimes has led to contemplate, has it become too big for comfort? Are we gradually becoming over dependent on the Search company that eventually it would be able to completely control our lives.

    Think about it, everything that we do online has a google imprint on it. Right from the moment we start our computer ( load google OS on a google desktop) to browsing on Chrome, accessing email on Gmail, life completely revolves around google. These are the commonly used applications and I am not delving into google analytics, adwords, etc.

    Even the Mobile phone has google run android on it.

    Last week, Google has announced closure of its very loved Google Reader. All it took was 130 words on its blog to announce shutting down a system used by more than hundreds of millions. http://googlereader.blogspot.in/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html

    “About eight years back, Google launched Reader in 2005. By offering it to users for free, it undercut, and ultimately eliminated, all substantial competitors in the news-aggregation business” (Source : http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/03/end-google-reader) If all it had to do was to get people use it, love it, get addicted to it and then kill it, why make it in the first place?

    Of course there are other alternatives to it, and everyone who seriously used reader would gradually shift to it. But was it really necessary for google to shut it down?

    The ones using it would gradually shift to other networks, but what about the independent bloggers and other web journalists who have built a dedicated base of subscribers over many years. All of it would be gone in a whiff!

    Of course, Google is a “for profit” company and if a product does not make money the most sensible thing you do is to pull the plug. But seriously, how much resource was being used on this?

    All those who are signing petitions to Google  (and even one to The White House!) are missing the bigger point – this is a victim of the company’s DNA, one that’s accelerated under Larry Page’s management.

    With this move, Google has lost a lot of my trust and I would seriously consider getting used to a google product. If it is reader today, it could be email tomorrow. Why not?

    After a couple of years, when google realizes that a majority of us are addicted to gmail, it could simply threaten to pull the   plug or force the users to cough up money. By then most would be very used to the email address provided by Google and would be forced to pay up.

    Google has so much of my privacy data, it knows who are my contacts, what do I talk, what do I like and dislike, where all I go and many other things, that I am now really worried. Would I entrust it with all of this?

    Thank you Apple and Facebook for slowing down google’s intentions. Imagine what bigger force google would have become had it ruled over us in Social Media too!

    Google has 450,000 servers all over the earth, with no central nervous system. This is very similar to the skynet shown in the movie terminator. Is google the actual Skynet?

  • How tolerant are we?

    I was at the Jaipur literature festival last week, and just when I landed in Jaipur on Sunday I hear that Ashish Nandy had to leave the place. He was supposed to be in a session on Sunday at 11AM, but he could not be present.

    On my flight back to Mumbai, the newspapers mentioned about Salman Rushdie not being allowed to the Kolkata literary meet.

    The whole of last week and this week we have been hearing about Viswaroopam, Kamal Hassan’s latest movie, not being allowed to release in some of the south Indian states. This is inspite of the fact that the censor board has given it a clean chit.

    Why? Why have we become such an intolerant state? Why do we assume that the religious sentiments of the public would be hurt at the slightest provocation?

    Were we always like this? Not really. This is the country where KamaSutra has flourished. Religious tolerance leads to creative thinking and as a famous poet put it, where the mind is without fear.

    In my opinion, we are still a very tolerant state. What else could explain our “chalta hai” attitude towards the daily hurdles in our life. The hurdles which are created by decades of corruption and mismanagement by our leaders and we still admire, respect and forgive them. We tolerate them.

    It is the same people in power, our so called leaders, who most of the times use the innocent amongst us to instigate fire to further their own personal agendas. This is what we should be wary of.

    Coming back to the topic, What exactly is religious tolerance?

    Religious tolerance is the policy to extend religious freedom to people of all religious traditions, even though one may well disagree with their beliefs and/or practices. Having tolerance toward another religion does not require one nto endorse that faith group’s beliefs; it simply indicates one’s respect for its right to exist and for its member to hold different beliefs without being oppressed. In simple words, it is “Live and Let Live”.

    In our 21st century globalized world it is all the more important that each one of us possess this quality for a harmonious living.

    For India to be a superpower, we need to encourage people of all dissidents to our country, and this would require a huge amount of cultural sensitivity for everyone to co-exist and flourish. We would all have to strive to ensure such a culture of mutual respect develops into the daily mindset of everyone and some vested forces cannot influence it.