Blog of Parag

Indian Cricket team

Here is the current roster of Indian Cricket team:
# *Rahul Dravid
# Sourav Ganguly
# Virender Sehwag
# VVS Laxman
# Yuvraj Singh
# Mohammad Kaif
# Jai P Yadav
# Suresh Raina
# Venugopal Rao
# +MS Dhoni
# Anil Kumble
# Harbhajan Singh
# Irfan Pathan
# Zaheer Khan
# Ashish Nehra
# Lakshmipathy Balaji

1. What is Ganguly doing in the official team when he is banned from playing by the ICC?

2. Ever since I remember, the Indian cricket team contained one or two or sometimes even more players from Mumbai. They have always played major roles in successes and failures of the team. In the current team, there is not even one player from Mumbai. Is it because suddenly there are no good quality players from Mumbai or is it politics?

First harvest

A visitor

We found an uninvited visitor in the veggie garden this evening. Ashwini was happy to see a real life version of the hero of her favorite book, The very hungry caterpillar.

Desktop widgets

While seeing ads for Apple's new OS X, I was very impressed with the desktop widgets that came as a part of the OS. The company that made these widgets, Konfabulator, was recently bought by Yahoo. Now, they have a windows version for the widget program and it is free.
Download your own Konfabulator and experience the widgets.

Yellow stain

I was standing front of the mirror, brushing teeth, this morning and noticed a yellow spot on my t-shirt. Realised what it was right away. Must have spilt some juice while eating mangoes last night. Just a look at that spot, and I had a severe flashback to childhood summer days that I spent in Konkan wearing white malmal (thin cotton) shirts stained with mango juice.

Don't know how long I was standing over the sink with toothbrush in my mouth, dreaming about childhood, summers and mangoes....

Personalised Google

Check out personalised Google home page. Pretty soon, it will look like "My Yahoo" portal. Still doesn't have all the content of Yahoo, but editing is done by supercool javascript. Looks good. Eagerly awaiting GoogleOS for PCs, which is not too far away in the future, I suppose.

How to get into a college

There are many many ways:

• If you are a God-fearing meek individual, you should study hard, try to do well in exams and with your marksheet, you can get into college.


• If you are not so good at studying but a resourceful person, you can try to cheat in exams, get good marks, and get into college.


• If you can qualify for reserved seats, you are in.


• If you have access to political influence, you are in.


• If you have a rich daddy, you can buy your way into the college.

But, don't try what these students did in Meerut. Even in a lawless state such as U.P., rushing into admissions office with a gun doesn't work. This has only escalated the situation. Now, the professors are going to carry a gun along with their books. I am so glad that I am done with college.

Yesterday

• Woke up at 5:45 am to find thunderstorms and rain. Had to cancel 6:30 am tee-time. The rain stayed on through most of morning. We had to keep the lights inside the house on even at 10am. I just love days like this. Wish we get a few more.
• By afternoon, it got sunny and hot like hell. Evening was so hot and sticky. Standing outside without moving a muscle was good enough to get soaked in sweat. Yuk! Thank God for airconditioning.
• V and I cooked two new dishes. Recipes from Sanjeev Kapoor's book, Khazana of Indian Recipes. V made a new kind of kadhi with sprouted Moong and I made Kadhai vegetables. Both turned out to be lipsmacking good. I overate beyond my usual level of overeating.

Cool animation

A couple of links to cool animation...

Industrious clock

pinguin

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Continuing our Summer of concerts, we went to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, last night. It was at the DTE energy music theater, north of Detroit. It is an open-air theater and was great for a Rock&Roll concert on a Summer evening. Due to horrible road construction and traffic jams, by the time we reached the venue, we missed almost an hour of performance by the opening band, "The Black Crowes". It seems that Tom Petty's plane got delayed and he reached the venue with his band about half an hour after us. So, they started playing at 8:45 pm, right after getting out of their limo.

Tom Petty didn't release any new music recently and so, was not promoting anything new. Within first hour and 15 minutes, we got to hear all the songs that we knew... breakdown, free fallin', won't back down, mary jane's last dance, etc. It was a lot of fun to hear them all live. While in graduate school, we used to call "won't back down", the PhD song.

At 10pm, we decided to leave the concert and head home to relieve our babysitter. Overall, it was a great concert. Looking forward to U2 in October.

Bunty aur Babli

If someone tells me that the producers of this movie bribed the news reporters to write good reviews, I would believe it in a heartbeat. How else could you explain such rave reviews for a movie that doesn't deserve even 10% of the accolades?

The movie can be described by one marathi word: "AacharatpaNA". I am unable to translate that in english. Someone with better grasp of english, please help.

Starting the movie off with a useless song was not a good idea, at least according to me. Then, the hero of the movie insulting his father and telling him that his (father's) life was not worth living, didn't go very well with me, either. The story just didn't go anywhere for a long time. They just keep fooling people with one trick after another. The only interesting one was the washing machine job. Selling Taj Mahal was a little too far fetched. We just couldn't watch it after the drinking scene by Bachchans and I don't think we missed anything. Don't really care to know what happened in the end.

Amitabh Bachchan exemplified how to be obnoxious on screen. His performance was a perfect example of overacting. I hope he was doing it to help upcoming actors to learn what not to do. Rani Mukherji was a total miscast. She was good in Veer-Zaara. Rani should accept the fact that she is not Aishwarya Rai or one of those new svelte young actresses and continue to do roles like Veer-Zaara. If I want to see a flabby jiggly gut, I can look in the mirror.

Overall, I was quite disappointed with the movie.

Oh yeah, just remembered something... Every time Bunty & Babli were about to do a job, there was a 'ttrrr ttrrrr' sound in the background. It was so annoying. First couple of times, I thought that a frog or some insect got into our house.

Why don't they listen?

Update: I don't understand why people are flaming me for writing this post. From my own experience, I can say that Grand Canyon is a very beautiful place to visit and the wilderness makes hiking there, very exciting and dangerous if precautions are not taken. If one fails to respect nature either due to ego and arrogance or sheer ignorance, that person pays a price, sometimes it is a very big price. It doesn't matter who that person is or what s/he has done through rest of their life. If this was ignorance, I could understand the lapse in judgement, but, not following advice from an expert is not excusable. I was really surprised that an intelligent individual who was a post-doctoral fellow in Physics at UCLA would committ such an act. I feel sorry for Xxxx's family for their loss which was unnecessary and could have been easily avoided.

Also, some of my friends are planning a trip to GC. This post is supposed to caution them.

Grand Canyon, AZ Date: July 14, 2005 – A 28-year old man collapsed and died on the Bright Angel Trail yesterday at approximately 5:00 p.m. Xxxx Xxxxxxxx from England and a hiking companion started a rim to river to rim hike yesterday at approximately 7:30 a.m. The two started their hike on the South Kaibab Trail and had hiked to Phantom Ranch near the Colorado river. At Phantom Ranch they talked with a National Park Service (NPS) Interpretive danger and were advised not to begin their hike to the rim until later in the evening due to the extreme temperatures. The temperature at Phantom Ranch in the shade yesterday was reported to be 113 degrees.

Despite the advice the two hikers began hiking back to the South Rim on the Bright Angel Trail by mid to late-afternoon yesterday. They were approximately three miles north of Phantom Ranch in an area known as Devil's Corkscrew when Mr. Xxxxx collapsed. His hiking partner then hiked up to Indian Garden, which is located approximately two miles north of where Xxxx collapsed, to report the incident. He arrived at approximately 5:30 p.m.

National Park Service Search and Rescue Rangers arrived on scene at approximately 6:00 p.m. Mr. Xxxxx had already passed away.

His body was recovered and flown to the South Rim this morning and will be transported to the Coconino County Medical Examiner's Office in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Get a cheap date...

Looking for the love of your life? He/she may be walking in the next aisle. Make a run for him/her before someone else does.

A few months ago, Walmart stores in Germany started 'singles night' on Fridays 6 to 8 pm. People who are participating in it get to use a shopping cart with a red bow on it. The program was wildly successful and is being expanded to stores in Puerto Rico, England and South Korea. It will come to US stores in the future, too.

One nice thing about it is that even if the date doesn't work out, you can return it to the store, without a receipt.

Golf

My best performance of the season so far. 62 strokes on 9 holes, even after losing 3 balls. I got my first par on a par-5 hole. Quite happy about that.

25 years behind bars

Bernie Ebbers sentenced for 25 years imprisonment for his involvement in $11Billion accounting scandal at WorldCom. Yaay!

Ebbers "was clearly a leader of criminal activity in this case," the judge said.

Women's rights

I had made a post earlier, about Hudood law in Pakistan. If one thinks women in India are in better condition, they are wrong. The plight of muslim women in India is equally bad if not worse than Pakistan. There is muslim personal law in India which seems to be as ridiculous as Hudood law. Recently, the case of Imrana made news in all the media. I heard about this case in this Op-ed by Salman Rushdie in New York Times. (Thanks, Mayuresh).

Imrana, a 28 year old woman with 5 kids was raped by her father-in-law. The panchayat and clerics decreed that she would have to leave her family (because after the rape, she was like a mother to her husband) and get married to her father-in-law. There were no consequences for the father-in-law to face, other than getting a new wife.

The All India Muslim Personal Law board supports the clerics decision too. They went as far as conducting their own investigation and concluding that Imrana was not raped. They have always supported all issues on the side of Muslim Personal Law.

This happened in Muzaffarnagar, U.P. The current CM of UP, Mullah Mulayam Singh had these pearls of wisdom to offer about the case:

Today, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav also endorsed the view of the Darul Uloom at Deoband on the issue that she can no longer live with her husband.

"The decision taken by Muslim religious leaders in the Imrana case must have been taken after a lot of thought," said Yadav.

"The government will not interfere in the case till we have more details. The leaders after all are very learned," he added.

If this doesn't make a case of Uniform Civil Code, then I don't know what will. But, considering how the Shahabano case was disposed off by Rajiv Gandhi's government to appease the muslim minority in India, this case wil not do a damn thing.

A quote from Rushdie's article that I agree with wholeheartedly:

at the risk of being called a communalist, I must agree that any country that claims to be a modern, secular democracy must secularize and unify its legal system, and take power over women's lives away, once and for all, from medievalist institutions like Darul-Uloom.

While nothing happens with the Imrana case despite all the outcry, it is happening all over again.

Terrorists?? NOT!

If you were enraged after learning about the terrorist attack on the Ramjanmabhoomi complex and were cursing those terrorists. You should stop it immediately, according to Teesta Setalvad.

These individuals should not even be called "terrorists" or "jihadi terrorists". Some organisations are trying to malign them. I suppose they were just misguided youths that were playing with some guns and explosives in Ayodhya. They didn't know what they were doing and the consequences of their actions. They were hoping to walk away after shooting at the Indian BSF jawans. yeah.. and pigs that look like Teesta really do fly... (no offense to pigs.)

More about this from Rajeev Srinivasan and JK.

Police leadership

Framed: Indian Administration
A strongly worded article, criticising the Indian police and political leadership by former director-general of police of Punjab, Mr. K.P.S. Gill.

...in India’s caste and status-obsessed society, you may get a man to risk his life but fail to convince him to clean a public toilet.

Thanks for the link, Sujit.

The arrogance

Sometimes, the justice system in U.S. just doesn't seem to work. While crooks like Dennis Kozlowski and Bernie Ebbers were convicted of their crimes, Richard Scrushy and Michael Jackson were found not guilty. Someone had pointed out to me that 'not guilty' and innocent are not synonymous. 'Not guilty' is a legal term saying that the charges couldn't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. There is no doubt in my mind and in the minds of millions of Americans that MJ molested those boys and Scrushy was involved in the $2.7BB fraud at Healthsouth. It is just that the legal system failed to prove their guilt. After all the courtroom dramas, MJ at least decided to stop the sleepovers with boys, but look at the arrogance of Scrushy. He wants his job back.

IPO

My first ever experience with an Initial Public Offering (IPO) is paying off quite well. I bought some shares of Morningstar, Inc (MORN) through their IPO on May 30th, 2005 for $18.50 per share. Today, MORN shares traded at $28.60. A nice 54.59% gain in just over one month. I can only imagine the excitement with technology IPOs in the 90's when the share price increased by 4-5 fold in one day.