it happens only in india
During Navrathri, where Maa Durga is decorated in the resplendent glory of Lakshmi Devi. For the unitiated, the decorative paper pieces are replicas of Indian currency notes of 50 Re denomination.
durga as lakshmi
adios mj
The first time I saw him it was on a TV news show in the home of my dad’s friend. A thin, tall, feminine looking white (not fair!) man with a long curly mane tied in a pony was dancing and singing wildly on stage with screaming crying girls all around him in the audience. The image of a man dancing wildly was not new to me at all – had seen too many heroes doing much non eye-pleasing steps lip syncing to songs in the indian movies by that time. What was surprising was that a man was with such long hair and with that painfully pale white skin. My dad, his friend and the friend’s wife were commenting on him along with the news reporter. About a man who had done too many plastic surgeries on him… ‘The craze of a black man for white skin’. The image stuck and so did the words.
And then a couple of years later, I started hearing about him more frequently, learnt his name. My friend with MTV were already part of that growing bunch of English speaking English importing generation. Some grew up on him, his videos, his songs. He was one of those idols that one of my friends idolized, loved him to bits. My friend though was butt of our jokes for many years. Or atleast it was fun invoking anger from him by making fun of his idol.And slowly school ended and I grew up.
Occasionally a video of his would come up in my random surfing, and I would love that and fall in love once again with his work, his music. The media loved his eccentricities, for me it was just noise as was him. The man was not important but his music definitely was. In some of my dark moments his music made sense. In some bright moments, they were nice. He remained an outlier all my life, but he was part of a life I treasure being a part of. It was nice seeing my friend idolize someone with all his heart. And then that love transferred to me. Not fully though. Seeing his songs Bad, Heal the World, Stranger in Moscow, Scream, Black or White, Earth song was always great entertainment, he made music videos an art form. I remember then he was THE source of break dance. Not one school annual function was complete without a customary MJ song. Not one would be dancer good unless he could dance to an MJ song. Now they are all part of my drive-list now. I was always on the sidelines, looking at his eccentricities, the multi million dollar music deals going sour, his numerous attempts at making a comeback shadowed and tampered with.
Yesterday, I regretted not having known his work when I was much younger. I knew him for his eccentricities; I shall only remember him for his music.
MJ, Adios.
Hmmmmm…
Life is good. Life is great. Life is unbelievable. Life is hard. Life is cruel. Life is so beautiful. Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!
That’s just some of the first few words of that silly neat song by LFO. Unbridled optimism and silly fun to listen while driving that car in a midnight rain on a darkened truck filled highways.
What makes some people tick? For days together? And what makes some go in circles every few days? They are like the sunny sides up for a few days that mysteriously turn into that dark gloomy clouds that none wants to go under. Gaaaaaaahhh earthlings! Them and their flawed decisions. Them and their blunders. Them and their silly decisions. The more I seem to talk to people, interact with them and be a part of their lives, the more I seem to make observations, the more I seem to take random calls on their decisions, the more I come to a concrete truth.
That there is no absolute truth. There is nothing thats called truth. Up until a few months ago I had this strong belief that there are certain immutable truths. That some stand the test of personal scrutiny. There is no such thing as a subjective belief as long as one is patient and persistent to test them on the personal scrutiny. But all I can conclude now is that such a expectation of personal scrutiny and introspection for finding the truth is just plan impossible. What distance can a ruler measure if the ruler itself is flawed? What truth can a person explore if the flaw is inherent? As an observer, its tremendously interesting to see the assumptions broken at unexpected moments? Its humbling actually to note people changing in front of the eyes. Long live voyeurism! LoL.
–
After seeing (too) many of my friends succumbing finally to that haloed institution called marriage to finish their single lives, I’ve baptised this year hereby as the ‘Year of the Marriages’. Way too many marriages, too many life long brothers deciding to end their life of freedom as known, this year shall be reminisced for single handedly crushing with the peer pressure the remaining singles into agreement for a marriage. Or that just tells me guys are or atleast the ones I know are getting married at the age of 26-27.
Startup Saturday Hyderabad Roundup 11th April 09
Before I jump to a quick review of the SS Hyd I’ve decide to replenish my writing skills and try resurrect its ancient glory…
Oh! What fate a job wrath upon a mere mortal! Things have changed quite a bit on my side after my move to a job. My social life and social graph has pretty much come to a standstill and has rotten to a unrecognizable and more worrisome undesireable gob of lifelessness and directionlessness. Anyways, summers have come early to Hyderabad bringing with them the powercuts and buckets of sweat. So has come the early and even a cynical realization and precognition of the shape of things for future – changing and totally unpredictable weather patterns, snowy winters, dry rains, wet summers, no fresh water to urban non-rich and just a ever lasting dry waves of hot arid air.
Yanyways, so back from the doomsday predictions. The day started off in Room 119 of IIIT Hyderabad with our ubiquitous Hyderabad startup circuit person Ramesh giving the keynote and welcome note. What was impressive to me though was the strength of people attending the session atleast about 30 odd people – well balanced set of wannabes, students, entrepreneurs and working professionals.
Moorty, Microsoft, BizSpark Program
The first talk was by Moorty from Microsoft giving a quick overview of the entrepreneurship, the challenges facing the startup and the widespread opportunities. The personal view that the next Google will be from India was a hard to miss point in his talk. My personal opinion is that this has become a moot point by now, beaten to death in the last in the last 3 years by almost every business and every VC who has identified the latent talent, the unmistakable lack of real amenities still out of reach of 80% of the population. But as always, I digress.
He was here also to tell about Microsoft’s BizSpark Program which is for any startup less than 3 years in existence and whose revenues are less than a million US $s. This leaves almost every Indian startup eligible for the BizSpark program. As part of the BizSpark program, the selected startups will have be given Windows software to support their complete development process. They will also have be given free license to the production environments most notably to Azure, MS cloud offering. In addition, the startups will have access to MS partner ecosystem and their MS product dev teams.
In spite of the great help it will do to the startup, its hard to not admire MS’s business minds – almost like seeding the first few years to get a loyal customers for the years to come.
Also as my personal note, I would love to highlight Sun’s Startup Essentials program which mostly would for the FOSS crowd. The qualifier for that is less than 6 years in existence and less than 150 employees.
Kavita Vemuri, CIE, IIIT-H
To sum up this talk in 10 words or less “Is India ready for hi-tech startups?“. Kavita has been manning the Entrepreneurship Cell of IIIT-Hyd working closely with students of IIIT, helping in conceptualizing the ideas, helping out in ideation phase and working on getting the first clients of the startup. Kavita’s talk actually spawned two different points:
- India looking VCs, angels not even daring to look at high technology startups. Many examples abound of VC rejected startups going on to being successful and acknowledged for the technology superiority most notable of them.. Sloka Telecom. Whats disturbing even is that the VCs dont even believe that India is capable of producing high technology startups. Clearly, its a lot tougher to walk the talk than it is to talk the talk. Just looking at the list of VC investments in the last two years and its pretty clear what technology differentiators do each of them have built into them.
- Lack of a set of professionals called ‘technology evaluators’. Evidently clearly at least most of the noveau investors are not VCs and more than half of them are even clueless of even the current state of the art technology. The highlight? The governement officials/ scientists are much much more aware of state of art tech and even accepting of high technology startups than any of the VCs, angels.
Saurav Patnaik, Tell A Friend, Pramati
We first heard of this product in Barcamp Hyderabad hosted in Amazon Campus. Tell A Friend is a html widget which helps send the article link to your contacts through email, IM, social graph connects in Facebook, LinkedIn and the like. Very similar to the now ubiquitous link sharing widget: ShareThis. As of now Tell A friend boasts of close to 140000 publishers.
This was a completely market oriented talk where Saurav pointed out their approach in productizing their product to each of their consumer demographic as per the need of their consumer (Thinking by being in the consumer’s shoes):
Approaching the content providers like online news sites by packaging the application as a ‘extra media estate’ instead of as ‘word of mouth application’, the value to the new site is clearly apparent.
Approaching blog service providers by giving them a free channel to virally spread the reach of their bloggers thus earning each of the parties additional revenue.
The highlight: Tell A Friend also has a paid service and their conversions are in the range of 40%. (Wow!). To know more: hop on here
Mamta Banerjee, Founder, Investment Yogi
Mamta is one of the founders of Investment Yogi, a personal financial portal. My first brush with Investment Yogi was during their focus group discussion with their advisor in Taj. Anyways, the portal now boasts of a tax planning module ready to be used for the FY09 – FY10. As has become a ritual at SS Hyd, this talk was about the sharing of the experiences of a startup founder with the attendees.
- Co Working rocks. Investment Yogi shares its working space with two other Hyderabad based startups which according to Mamta has kept their costs pretty much in control. Added incentives include great working partners, good fun times and people who really understand the journeys of each other.
- Getting people is easy. Getting good people is close to impossible.
- Getting employees on equity sharing basis is almost impossible in India. Without enough examples of employees also getting rich along with the startup founders, this deal will more or less remain the same for now.
- Close deals as quickly as possible. ‘Nuff said.
- Handling paperwork by startups is work away from work. Its always going to be tough for founders to put equal concentration on paperwork. But any lackadaisical approach in paperwork will be hurting the company in longterm. Can definitely empathize with this. Is this enough of a biz opportunity for a service company?
I’m back
No no no no no. Not in that schmucky telugu Billa style. More like that warrioresque Terminator style!
Back to full-time employment
I’ve been an entrepreneur for two years now and it’s been a really great deal of fun and excitement. Not to forget the tears. For me, being an entrepreneur meant having the freedom to pursue my dreams – to be able to have a career on my own terms, unleashing my creativity, meet interesting people, learn a lot lot more than a normal job would ever allow me to and being able to work with some really fantastic folks. Technically it has been a ride – learning PHP, Flex, Erlang, Rails, Python, Ruby, JSF, Irrlicht, C#, Javascript and couple more – and then working on such systems as Garment Simulation, designing websites, ERP, couple of interesting products, and many more prototypes. Meeting potential investors, clients, negotiations, and then looking almost everything from the big picture mode – it was fabulous.
As all good things come to an end, so did this. Of course it was only going to be a very special opportunity that a spoilt bloke like me would take up. I believe I found that opportunity in Cozy Games and after a month of working there I do really believe it is so. I’ve joined fulltime as solutions architect on their development team collaborating on their some of their ambitious projects. This is in an area I know very less of, but never the less have been interested in for a very long time.
The last few weeks have been a great rush and have had a particularly good ride. And really looking forward to have more times like these. Looking forward to talk in future about things we’ve been working on in the next few weeks.
Thank you one and all who had been a part of the interesting journey of the last two years. We shall have many more – that I promise.
Announcing Barcamp Hyderabad 7!
Short notice. The next in the series of Barcamps in Hyderabad is going to be on Cloud Computing, SaaS, PaaS and Virtualization.
With SaaS gaining mainstream recognition, amplified by the advent of virtualization platforms and web based computing options,, the enterpirse infrastructure is rapidly morphing into a large a computing cloud. This spans dedicated servers, virtualized platforms, web based hosting, solutions in SaaS model, solutions built on PaaS, and much of these ready for interactions in a Web2.0 model , and integration using the SOA backbone. This brings forth new possibilities for solution architectures, infrastructure and tools, and a deployment considerations for applications and business applciations/products. This camp will discuss different facets of this emerging space.
Clearly India is geared towards this model by design and strategically. Many firms in India are still in very pre-nascent stages with lack of any computing infrastructure to support their blazing growth. Outsourced technology and infrastructure handling is the best value add for them from the Cloud Computing Platform.
What are your viewpoints and ideas on the same? Have an opinion to share, a view point to put forward or clearly a new point everyone has sorely missed on the Cloud Computing bangwagon. Why don’t you drop in at the Barcamp Hyderabad 7?
Theme: Computing on cloud 9 (SaaS/PaaS/Virtualization and more)
August 9th 2008. Saturday 30th Aug 2008, Saturday
Venue : IIIT Hyderabad, Gachibowli Amazon Development Centre (India) Pvt Ltd
9th Floor, Maximus 2B,
Raheja MindSpace (Next to TCS Deccan Park)
Madhapur, Hyderabad
Note: Startup Saturday that starts at 9.30am will precede the Barcamp proceedings on that day.
The Dark Knight
Scary. Very very scary. Every time the Joker appeared on the screen I was just shit scared about what he would do next. Joker is so believable, it almost makes me believe he would do anything and the director would not even take a step back to reconsider if he would not want to show the scene. Unbelievably good action sequences – I just lost count of how many times I muttered the F word under my breath.
A tad dense storyline – too much content here… but that just means I would watch the movie at least a couple of times more to let the movie sink in completely. Its a shame Two Face got so less a screen space. I was just hoping that Joker would end here and the third part would be setup for the entry of Two Face. Anyways so, now I am really looking forward to the Riddler. And hoping there is going to be a Batman III.
The weakest link still is Rachel. Maggie is worse off than Katie Holmes. Sorry.
Heath Ledger is posthumously headed for a best actor in a negative role nomination. We will have to wait longer to predict for the Oscar. Overall, as IIITians would say TDK is ‘Okhaaa Raaaaange’.
IT professionals of AP. Unite against the injustice meted out to us…
Background
- Mr. Krishna Madiga had raised objection to scenes in movie Kanthri for depicting the SC/Backward castes as criminals.
- Mr. Krishna Madiga had also raised for another scene in the movie ‘Gorintaaku’ for haivng a dialogue which showed physically handicapped in bad light.
- Mr. Eeshwara Rao has raised objection to scenes in the movie ‘Ready’ as objectionable to the art of Kuchipudi dance form.
In the light of the above objections raised and in anticipation of many many more objections that will be raised for depicting anything in bad light in movies, I, a IT professional in AP hereby propose that all movies depicting IT professionals in bad light (ugly, with paunches, losers, balding, dowry hungry, comic) be banned immediately. Some of the movies depicting us all in very bad light are Pokiri and Pellaina Kotthalo and many more. We also propose that henceforth no comedian be made to depict our profession as that goes on to show that every IT professional is a good for nothing, loser, ugly guy. We also propose that henceforth only well educated, good looking actors only be used to enact the roles of IT professionals. This is a very serious demand considering the significant contribution IT has done to GDP of India and its image abroad.
I, also propose an amendment to our Constitution to add the 8th Fundamental Right to the already existing rights – the right to feel offended.
P.S: I just hope this revolution will shake the foundations of the Government and make all future film makers take notice of our objections.
PSPS: This form of writing is called ’sarcasm’.
Recent Comments