bachche ka blog

The car that runs on air man!!

2007-03-21T04:12:00.000-07:00

Rediff had an article today showing a car that runs on air (no it doesn't fly, compressed air is the fuel)

"A car that runs on air could soon be a reality for Indians.
Tata Motors has signed an agreement with Moteur Development International of France to develop a car that runs on compressed air, thus making it very economical to run and be almost totally pollution free."

I have a few doubts about its success though firstly it looks odd

i mean who will be tempted to buy that?

And secondly it will need to make special counters at gas stations/petrol pums to refuel so this will create a chicken egg situation what should come first; no one will buy a car if theres no fuel station readily available and petrol pums wont open a special counter for air refuel unless theres a good enough demand for this.

Thirdly going by the tata motors record of the Rs 1 Lakh car, it will take a long time to come to India. Also looking at the story of reva till now such cars would take a very long time before it can be called any success.

For more info on car follow the air car.

Google homepage themes

2007-03-20T00:15:00.000-07:00

Google added themes to the personalized homepages. looks great and changes with the time of day (ofcourse according to your location).

here's a look at my homepage (click to enlarge)

2007-02-10T10:45:00.001-08:00

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

The ultimate dream gadget !!

2007-01-09T21:48:00.000-08:00

Its a widescreen video iPod with touch sensitive controls

Its a mobile phone with quadband, edge and bluetooth capabilities and a very innovative contex sensitive screen with conference calls made easy

Its an internet device with full function safari web browser and wi-fi connection and comes loaded with Mac OS X

Its a dream.... its iphone

Dhammo ki shadi

2006-12-19T02:51:00.000-08:00

dhammo ki shaadi

(click to view the album)

This was one of those big fat indian weddings that I had the chance to witness.

to know more see this

George Carlin on Religion

2006-12-05T20:53:00.000-08:00

Now this is really funny, but can be a bit too crude for any religious person. So hear this only if you are a total atheist, you will have a lot of fun :).

She Walks in Beauty

2006-11-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

She Walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o'er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o'er that brow.
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

George Gordon, Lord Bryon.

A poem as printed on the back of the wrapper of chocolate i just had. Chocolove is the name, got 77% of pure dark chocolate - tastes great.

Zune!!

2006-11-03T03:57:00.000-08:00

The Zune is gonna release!!! and I want it, I want it, I want it .......

San Francisco ho!

2006-10-26T02:07:00.000-07:00

Luck, it seems likes to play snakes and ladder with me a lot. I still manage to reach the end goal by doing nothing extra-ordinary and just going with the flow, you see the only thing I hate more than people asking me to do something is situations forcing me to do something; I like to follow the laws of nature and remain in the state of rest until driven by a force greater than my weight (which is increasing by the day).

So, lets roll the dice shall we? First roll and I am already on a ladder; I am invited to attend a training in the US and that too in the beautiful state of Colorado. And as Luck would have it, got bitten by snake on the next move; there is no Visa interview dates available for next 3 months!! I am back to where it started and was just going to give up when by some lucky roll of dice landed on a ladder again; suddenly on 20th of the month previous to my scheduled departure I decided to check the visa site and to my disbelief found visa interview date available just five days before my training date, I hurriedly booked it and informed my manager that I finally can make it to the US.

It might seem like the road is all smooth from here on but no, the snakes were still not giving up. Though the visa interview went fine and I was promised that the visa will be delivered to my office address within 2 days time, this however never happened. So here I am ready to leave next day with all my packing, air tickets, hotel reservations done and yet No Visa. Some good luck was still on my side as when I called the visa services office, they told me that there was some "technical difficulties" so they could issue the visa on time but now they have issued it and I could collect it from their office next day.

The next day BTW was the day when I was supposed to leave, one roll of dice should take me to the end goal it seemed no ladder of luck required here right? Well wrong again, I collected the visa alright but there was this snake in form of FOG waiting for me at the airport. I was supposed to catch a flight from Kolkata to Delhi and then after an hour's break the flight to US, Almost all flights from Kolkata to Delhi got cancelled due to heavy fog at Delhi Airport, except IA flight which was the flight I was booked for. Phew!!, managed to dodge this snake. In your face snakiee!.

One thing I totally forgot till this time and was brutally reminded by the snake bite at the last square, ie the check in counter of IA's flight to Delhi - my ticket was booked under waiting status and was still in the same status. I tried explaining that I have a international flight to catch and a very important business trip to make :D, but all seemed to be in vain. I was just rolling my dice in hopelessness when suddenly just 10 minutes before the flight was going to leave I got on to the ladder direct to the goal and my name was announced along with two other names at the check in counter with the message that one seat is available now as one of the passengers did not show up and luckily for me the other two persons whose name were announced before me also did not show up.

From here on it was all smooth, Colorado is a beautiful state and Colorado Springs is a great place to be. The people there are very nice and friendly and the view of mountains is simply amazing. For some of the pics I took there visit this and this.

The trip above was made during Jan this year, and what reminded me of that trip is that I am going to the US again, San Francisco this time. I already have a visa that is valid for next 10 years, I am taking a flight direcly from Kolkata, via Singapore this time no chances of fog at either of these places and have checked that all the flight booking status is confirmed no waiting this time! So lets see what plans luck have got for this time!!

Concept phones

2006-10-11T21:27:00.000-07:00

Was just looking around to decide upon which mobile phone to buy for myself and stumbled upon these few concept phones. These phones do not have any key pad and its all touch screen which can change according to the context. Nice idea!!

First there was this BenQ Black Box concept:

and now there's Nokia 'Aeon':

Awesome!! Dunno when such phones will be available but whenever they will be I guess it will be too costly to afford :(.

BTW if anyone is looking for purchasing a new mobile phone in India, the best site to start your search is indiagsm; it gives the list of all the mobile phones available along with its latest retail price and the list of phone features. Another such site is India-cellular but it does not give a lot of required information.

Home!

2006-10-10T23:33:00.000-07:00

So I was at home last week, by home I mean the place at which my parents live I don't call the place I go every night to sleep 'home'. The place is village basically may be not so by the strict definition of village but I don't know what you call a place with not a single internet cafe these days. And on top of that I didn't carry my laptop there (I call the laptop provided to me by the company I work for mine, its just a feel good factor you see !), so in all it was a very strange experience being offline for whole 10 days !!.

Apart from not having any internet connection another interesting point at this place was the power (electricity) situation there, which was very good. They followed a very strict schedule of power cuts so no matter if there was any electricity during the day or not the scheduled cuts of morning 5 to 10 and evening 5 to 10 were followed very efficiently. It was nice to see that atleast for one thing a government office followed a schedule.

So with no internet, no electricity and no work the means of entertainment were very limited. Thankfully my sister decided to come down to same place for my rescue and along came my 1.5 yr old nephew. Kids, I don't know why, like me. Somehow I believe they see beyond my hairy existence a kid inside me too hence behaving as if I am of their age and some times to my horror even younger!!. My nephew, his name is Dhruv, no not the Super-Commando Dhruv, just Dhruv, like all other kids treated me differently then all other adults there. It was not clear if the treatment was as he would other kids or not but none the less it was different. Like he had a very limited vocabulary of not more than 10 words and most of the words being the relations; as in he can call his dad 'papa' his grandfather 'dada' and so on. He could even call his mom a very affectionate 'mummaa' but refused to utter a very similar sounding word 'mama' to call me. He also had a very cute habit of following whatever his dad does like for example see this pic below:

cute na!!.

This kids treating me like one of them have led me to many embarrassing situation, like when I was in 8th grade and a young cousin who had just started school used to go school on a same bus. Now this young kid didn't see me as of same age as her but she took the matters to another level and took me as even younger, this was clear to me when she insisted to play 'teacher-student' on way to school in the bus and I was to be the student according to her wishes. So here I was a student of class 8 writing away A-B-C-D in a bus full of other students of same age. Inevitable happened and other guys of my age noticed what I was doing and started laughing their lungs off!!. I tried to control the situation by saying things like "I am writing this just to improve my hand writing, you see as writing in a moving bus will give a better stability to my hands!!" but all in vein, the kids those days were not the gullible sort I guess.

Long time no sea!

2006-10-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

Its been long since I have written anything here. I guess the 'creativity' required is lacking somewhere or may be I am just plain lazy. People who know will vote for the later but I believe its the first, whatever might have been the reason I'll try to be more regular now and I guess the best way to do that is to post about anything interesting that I come across while 'surfing' the net which I do a lot and thanks to this I feel so good about it too.

A friend just asked me if we can go on a trip to sikkim during Dec this year; now that reminds me of one other thing that I have been missing on ie travel, not counting the going-home-during-durga-puja as travel, it have been more than a year since I have gone on some real tour. It was October last year when I went to Mysore, it was dussehra time and at mysore it is the most important festival. The whole city was decorated with flowers and lighting specially the Mysore Palace, it was a beautiful sight. On the d-day every year there's a procession that goes round the city mostly comprising of people dressed in traditional dance costumes and performing the local folk dances. At the beginning of this procession there was a rally of all the old vintage cars and bikes owned by the royal family of this royal city, it was funny looking at all those old cars.

After Mysore we visited a close by hill station named Madekkiri, on route to which apart from the usual beautiful natural views to look at, there was this very beautiful Buddhist Monastery built by Tibetan people and a waterfall around which a small zoo was build; serves the purpose of a great place for picnic. (for pics from this trip visit this, this and this).

Tell no one !!

2006-06-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

I was up till 5 am last nite. Its wasn't the first time I was up all nite, but the reason for that previously have been mostly watching movies, TV serials etc on my comp, there was a flood of all those thing when we got lan at hostel rooms in our second year; we got very less time to finish off all ten seasons of friends and then there was sienfeld and many more.... This time it was different, I don't think the people who know me would believe when I say why I was up all nite.

One must be wondering why all this suspense about telling the reason for such a small thing, well you see I was up reading a suspense thriller last night and the feeling have still not left me. So coming to point now the novel I was reading was "Tell No One" by Harlan Coben. It was the first time I read a book from start to finish in one go, it was so good I even missed dinner for this (its a different matter that I have had a heavy snack at 7 but still). One can compare this book with those of Dan Brown, so much of twists and turns you are not sure till the very end whats going to happen next. So a page turner in true sense.

The story revolves around a pediatrician, whose wife died in some mysterious cicumstances and was later found to be murdered by a serial killer (nicknamed KilleRoy, I found that funny somehow). Suddenly after 8 years of her death the Dr starts receiving some strange emails from someone claiming to be his wife (did I tell you she was dead), and not only that the FBI is re-investigating his wife's murder after they found two more dead bodies at the same place where she was supposedly kidnapped by the serial killer. Now the main suspect is this Dr, with not only FBI but also some very dangerous people are after him, not to forget his own "dead" wife. A lot more twists and turns follows, it gets really interesting, you just cant put it down.

And by the way i am looking for more novel by the same author.

My latest frustu

2006-06-02T03:19:00.000-07:00

After reading about the world's best chocolate, and also reading this article, I cant resist my urge to eat chocolate, which will be the first thing i'll do after office today. Shall have to settle for some cadbury's variety as i am sure none of Amedei's is available here in Kolkata. (if some one knows where i can find that anywhere in India please do comment)

Apparatly this chocolate got so popular after that article was published in msn travel website that almost all the internet chocolate store (which includes this dedicated chcolate only store) have gone out of stock on most of the Amedei's chocolates. They even have a 'note' on the official website stating "Due to overwhelming demand, we regret to report that all products are temporarily backordered.".

So i am making this post as a reminder now, so that the next time I visit US I am gonna buy one 'Chuao' variety.

PS: and before i forget a note to MA, plz try to find one before you come to India

Summer Special Offer !!!

2006-05-24T03:30:00.000-07:00

So finally its here. me on my vehicle for all the laddies to gorge upon. now see the first one features me sitting on it. oops its more like sitting in it and whoa where this car come from. sorry gals its just one of those wishlist pics, i wish i had bought a car. (this car is actually maruti swift that one of my colleague just bought).

see theres our handsome, dashing (and all those superlatives used for good looking people) guy sitting on a honda unicorn. WHAT, you dont see any good looking guy in the pic, look again ....still no....well see its my blog and i can say whatever i wish.

Disc breaks yay!! thanks to this i am still in one piece roaming about freely in this alien planet.

875 kms in 30 days, not bad huh!!

By now (in case you have read the topic), you must be wondering what the summer special offer is? So here it comes .... (sounds of trumpets)... the offer is the first three people who comments on this blog will get to go on a dinner with the most handsome guy on this planet (to make it easy to guess its the same guy you see riding a bike in this post).*

*Condition Apply

Billos ki Daal

2006-05-09T00:18:00.000-07:00

Went to a restaurant named "sanjha chulha" for dinner a few days back. For the people who love Punjabi food, its one of the best place to go for non veg Punjabi food in kolkata(1), and also ofcourse the Lahore daal they serve is yummy.

This always reminds me of the daal we used to get at a restaurant named "billos" at college. It was used to be a nice break from the UEOs(2) served at our mess. The shrewd sardar, owner of billos used to have this peculiar habit of increasing the prices way too often. Almost every second week, we had to go through a new gali fying session, cursing the sardar with the most innovative galis we could generate for increasing the price of daal, but still even that could not stop us from being more regular at billos than classes.

(1)advt
(2)Unidentified Eatable Object

Trips around Kolkata

2006-05-02T23:36:00.000-07:00

A new vehicle always seems to make the owner open to suggestions involving long rides. Same was the case with me when I agreed to suggestion from a colleague of mine, that I should visit a temple close to his home, which is around 20 - 25 km from the place I stay, to do the pooja for new bike, so I promptly kept logic on side table and agreed as if there were no temple in the locality I am staying in.

Anyway it wasn't such a bad decision after all, the route to his place, unlike most of kolkata roads, have good broad roads, where I can actually reach the speeds this "mean machine" is actually made for. Although this being a new bike and as advised by the showroom mechanic, should not cross the 40 kmph mark till the first service, I was restraining myself and driving at just 60.

Crossing second hoogly bridge for the first time was a great feeling, its connected to roads through some crisscross of flyovers and have a good height which makes the crossing this bridge even better, feels like you are on top of some tall building. The cable stayed structure adds to the thrill.

the next day was also off and as usual I had nothing to do, so mullah went to masjid I mean city centre; there again got bored. At this point there was one spark in my tubelight with a pop-up saying "why not explore some new markets in kolkata" . Now the only route I know was to reach gariahat . After going off the route for about 1 -2 kms and then coming back I finally reached the place. The boring feeling still not leaving me, I decided to explore more. A few more turns later I found myself standing close to the rabindra sadan metro station. After this I took a left turn and an incident* later I was at park street. Now this was unbelievable for me; here I was thinking I'll have to tag along a friend who knows the route to this place and will have to plead with him to come with me here for atleast n times before I could remember the route, and now here I am actually at park street and all I had to do to reach here was loose myself on the road and just keep going with the flow/traffic.

*Leaders don't follow the crowd they make their own roads. This quote have one exception "Kolkata traffic". One must always follow the crowd never take a turn that no one else is taking as that might lead into the long arms of law ie the traffic police. So as I was just flowing with the flow, got another spark in my tubelight to take some turn other than the usual flow of traffic and no later than when I realized my fault and stood there wondering what to do next; a dark tall and not handsome man dressed in white uniform just appeared from nowhere and grabbed me by the hand. He said something in Bengali first, waited for a reply, looked at my confused face and said "yaha kaha ja rahe ho dikhta nahi ki no entry hai" and pointed me to a board which was all messed up, some heman or any other big bang man must have played with it in a show of strength, anyways there was this board which in its previous life must read "no entry". Next thing I know I was handling over my driving license to this new guy, who again seemed to have appeared from thin air. Next the two guys were explaining the process to me, which according to them you get a traffic ticket, your vehicle will be taken to nearest police station and you need to pay up a hefty fine before you could go. This is very painfull and lengthy process and you end up paying a lot for that to happen to you. In the whole explanation the emphasis was on a fine of Rs 2000/-. All along that I was just going through the drill of being an innocent idiot making repeated use of phrases/words like "sir" , "pehli galti samajhkar maaf kar deejiye" , "nayi bike" etc etc. So finally after a lot of bargaining I was able to convince them to leave me for a fine of Rs100, which I was asked to submit under a hat that was lying on a table (to give it a dramatic feel I guess).

I feel I did not get the good bargain in the end, my doubts were first aroused when one of the guys instead of looking at me like some kind of plague to the society while I was leaving after making the "payment", actually thanked me and told me that his brother has same name as me. May be this was one of his ways to get back at his brother, while he cant afford to be another praveen mahajan.

Pics

2006-05-02T02:15:00.000-07:00

This is the pic of idol in a Kaali Maa's temple where I did the pooja for the new bike last Sunday. The temple was more than 20 kms from where I stay, and it was the longest bike ride I have had till today. I traveled for more than 60 kms that day (More on that and one more interesting trip later) .

I actually agreed to perform this pooja mainly because it involved this long trip which included crossing of second hooghly bridge. that makes one feel like on top of the world :). My father, who is very religious by nature was very happy to find that I actually went ahead and performed this pooja. It came to him as a very unexpected ...ummm... thing. So it was like killing two birds with one stone. whenever I say this phrase I remember about this hilarious book by P. G. Wodehouse, in which the hero was left to counting on how many birds one shot can kill after a rather lucky turn of events.

Finally here is my bike all dressed up in garland of flowers after the pooja, it also have some decorations (not visible from this angle) done with "roli" as done by the priest of the temple above. The priest was quite interesting man, had a quite infectious smile on his face and was very much aware of the latest trends in bikes.

Joblessness

2006-04-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was asked to give a presentation on some technical stuff - a ten page chapter for which I took a full day to read and I wish I had read it in full before going for the the presentation.

the presentation though went well thanks to some good intelligent people who were attending that or may be I just bored them so much that they just pretended to understand everything.

I also roamed around a few places in salt lake, this is one thing I have been doing religiously for past one week since I bought that bike. This roaming around always includes city centre, where I go like a mullah goes to masjid. Even this whole week of roaming around could not put the routes of all the different places within salt lake in my thick head, may be I should concentrate more on the roads and some landmarks than just how am I riding the bike (and ofcourse the cuties that come across) .

today my work diary looks like this
Things to do:
1. Do some testing on previous bug fix. Time required 30 min
2. Read some technical documents
...

I don't know why people say you should count sheep if you are unable to sleep, I say read some technical document if you cant sleep theres no way you wont sleep before you could reach the end of first page.

ok bye for now I'll just catch up on some sleep I mean some reading.

My first bike

2006-04-26T05:15:00.000-07:00

After a rather shaky start let me get used to this writing blog business.

so one topic as suggested to me was writing about the bike I bought last week.

As far as my experience goes in the knowledge of bikes, I think you can take a guess from this post's topic. Now how can people expect me to give some funda on a bike even if I own one. Anyways let me tell about my experience in buying one.

after a lot of "research", read watching TV ads like the awesome "fear the black" for pulsar and "real men" for unicorn the final shortlist was decided upon:
1. Pulsar
2. Unicorn

small list rite, choose one from two ... Easy? NO. This involves talking to friends who already own those bikes and who will never stop glorifying the one they own over the second choice with all big words like performance, power, acceleration etc thrown in ...suggestions also come around from people who themselves don't own any but seem to have great knowledge in this particular field ... they seem to be hell bent to lure me into buying a bike that either looks like fresh out of race track or the one that looks like an out sourced project from Harley Davidson to India... and then finally deciding by doing a inky minky monkey ...

So you see wasn't an easy job and after all that toiling and giving atleast one million signatures on some random papers thrown in by the financier (I wont be surprised if someone from hdfc bank comes along and tell me that all my salary from next month will be transferred to his account). I am now finally a proud owner of a bike

my first blog

2006-04-26T00:24:00.000-07:00

okay.

so here it goes. my first blog. yay!!!

now how you do it? should i tell something about myself here. who cares???

what about who inspired me to start writing blogs?? well as i am a simple guy who loves to have fun so in general "surfing" the net timepass activity i stumble upon a few funny ones like

mydayzwithmyself
(this guy is a great writer i believe he must write a book, which i think he prolly will)

and a few posts on dilbert.com & phdcomics.com which i visit everyday to give a fun start to my otherwise mundane life. so why not have a blog for myself.

here i am starting on a blog. lets see if something better comes up someday.

c iao
(hope i learn to write better).