Please welcome ....Jade "tormentor" Goody..clap clap clap

Chaosrules links to this Hindu article, which reports of an open letter by department of tourism inviting Jade Goody to India. Oh lovely!, I for sure whole heartedly appreciate this move by our Indian Tourism Office.

News is that the tourism office recently had sponsored a all India survey and found a very distressing trend in India, inside sources say that the highly confidential survey report paints a grim picture for India for coming decade and warns that if proactive steps are not taken then India would face a severe shortage of people who can come up with "Racist" slur like calling SC/ST's "candidates of poor calibre" or discriminating people based on skin colour.

Grim, indeed is the situation. So as steps to mitigate this issue, Indian Tourism Office has embarked on 'EEE' mission, which in layman terms is "Education, Experience and Exposure". The tourism office, is said, will leave no stone unturned to make sure we don't face any shortage. So as a first step in this regard, it has decided to rope-in services of a foreign consultant, who can bring in wealth of experience.

After the recent Big-Brother incident the tourism office has found the right candidate in Jade Goody. Her skills in making stinging comments find no parallels. Also her recent experience working with a Indian has been a great value addition. She has shown beyond doubt that she has done her research and has a very deep understanding of Indian psyche or how else can someone know that all Indians stay in slums(of course in monkeyland), cannot speak English and all their names end in "Poppadom". How illogical can we Indians be.

As the demand for the above skills is really high these days, the tourism office has moved in quickly. Wasting no time they have written a open letter requesting Jade Goody to visit India and share her expertise with all of us. The open letter reads;

Dear Jade Goody,

Once your current commitments are over, may we invite you to experience the healing nature of India. ... As a beauty therapist, you may be especially interested in visiting one of the many spas where you can cleanse your stresses away, enjoy yoga in the land that invented it and experience Ayurvedic healing, which promotes positive health and natural beauty. ... We look forward to welcoming you soon,

yours sincerely,
India Tourism Office.

For every Indian's good luck, she has expressed her desire to come to India along with channel 4 crew. If you are wondering why channel 4 crew, some reason it out by saying, as her career is in neck-deep of shit, she and Channel 4 are planing to stage a PR stunt in order to salvage what ever they can.

But who cares, Have we ever invited Richard Gere, heck no, he speaks and does good things. Tradition has been that we only invite people like Benny Hinn and torch people like Aadhikanta Daliya and Graham Stains and the tradition still continues..... Welcome to India Jade.

Baawla hua re, Bajji Baawla hua re....

Hindu reports that Harbhajan Singh was having a special session with a bio-mechanical expert during a practice session at Nagpur. Holy cow! A BIO-MECHANICAL EXPERT! to me it sounds like a person who is transported from year 2020 to present time. I am truly impressed. On one hand I am impressed at the level of sophistication that we get to see in our cricket team these days.But on the other hand it was feeling of bitter disappointment..just one expert! Looking at our teams performance in South Africa I believe there is certainly scope for more experts. I say the A Grade contract that Bajji has got should include the service of these experts as a part of compensation deal...

Rajma...that too home cooked Rajma and if you throw in some rice..hoi hoi hoi. Now Rajma and Chawal being favorite of our Bajji also, a Nutritional Biochemistry expert along with Structural Molecular Biology expert and Enzymology expert are a must. They will analyze how bajji's body will break down the rajma chawal he had eaten previous day and they will also be responsible for making sure that Bajji has all required supplements that can digest rajma and chawal in case his body enzymes fall short.

Biomaterials expert who would suggest the best shoe material so as to minimize the risk of slipping when he accidentally steps on a rotten orange which will be aimed at him by a spectator if he gets clobbered for six either by Lara or Jayasuriya or both

Computer aided Modeling and Simulations expert who can do a predictive analysis of most likely places where Bajji's ball is going to go when clobbered by West Indies or Sri Lankan batsman. This report is going to be shared with Captain Dravid and coach Greg so that they know the places where they cannot place Bajji for fielding. Last news is that Dravid and Greg are taking this matter very seriously. They are skipping their practice sessions and spending more and more time with these experts working out all possible scenarios where Bajji can be subjected to "Nagpur-rotten-orange" attack. Behavior Profiling experts and group behavior experts will also be called in to mitigate this risk.

Decision-Making-techniques experts will educate Bajji on various coin tossing and dice tossing techniques by which Bajji can decide what ball to bowl next. Experts believe if these techniques are brought into practice by Bajji it will at least bring in some logic to otherwise clueless blowing he does these days.

Deficiencies-in-Nonverbal-Language experts will help Bajji with non-verbal cues that he needs to demonstrate so as to cheat the captain into thinking that he is still confident of picking up that crucial wicket and needs to get full quota of overs.

SO inspite of all this expert guidance, running commentary will still say

Harbhajan Singh to Lara, SIX, this time Harbhajan bowls a delivery a bit wider and a bit slow,Lara who had decided to go for the sweep,but when sees the juicey ball, the elevation and the distance duly obliges by pulling it away over the ropes

....so much for BIO-MECHANICAL EXPERT.

Why do they hate me? woooaaaaa ..sob.. sob..

Last couple of days have been different. When I enter the office these days, I no longer hear questions like which brand of liquor will Salman endorse in his new Devdas avatar after Ash marriage or was the visit to Varanasi temple by the big B familily a cleansing ritual for Ash after the liplock scene with Hritik in Doom 2, but these days its..what are the odds of Danielle Lloyd(of Big brother fame) calling our bollywood tinsel town "babe" Shilpa Shetty(now of big brother fame) a pig?

Its amazing how there is such a emotional upsurge in our country when a bollywood actress is involved..firstly with 24*7(almost) live coverage of Aishwarya's engagement saga. Such was the coverage that it took a personal request from big B himself to convince the camera crew to at least blur parts of footage which was shot while Abhishek was taking a leak in between the engagement and I was personally unhappy and felt let-down by the government because a national holiday was not declared on account of such a important occasion and now the whole Indian media Juggernaut is all guns against Big Brother. How dare some moron calls our babe a dog? Our babe and dog!! Maa Kasam! Woh milgaya tho, Main uska koon peejaunga uska koon test karake peejaunga(there goes another enlightened citizen, thanks to "Know AIDS, No AIDS campaign on Doordarshan)...

So what is this Big Brother show?

Its pretty simple contest, you hand pick a bunch of half wits, generally less than 15, lock them up in a house that has nothing that belongs to the era after Adam&Eve(no pen, pencil, mobile, music players etc..), for say couple of fortnights and film every move they make so that the rest of half-wits who were not fortunate enough to qualify can derive voyeuristic pleasure watching the film. If any participant is unable to deliver that punch(something similar to e-orgasm or i-orgasm depending on who is reading) to the viewers then he is voted out of the competition and the one left out at last wins loads of cash.

Is it sleazy? I mean is there racism and content that needs to be watched only after all at home are asleep?

you are kidding right? Who knows such things, only Sharmila Tagor(i.e. if its beamed in India). But from what I heard, the show packs in a healthy dose of sex, nudity and "borderline" pornography. Today we can add racism to this enviable list.

So why did our bollywood babe take part in spite of the reputation of the show?

With our babe's career almost over in Bollywood, she was looking for alternate way to earn her livelihood and 3 crores plus 25000 pounds, hey common you understand right, its hard to resist such things and for our babe it was good enough to shove the previous reputation aside. But I wont say that..nope its not in our culture to say such things. So here is the "Andar ki baath" as to why she accepted to participate.
there exist a organization called "Vishnu Sena" which has the whole and sole responsibility of saving and propagating Indian culture. After a high level meeting the saviors of Indian culture realized that there is very less representation from India in Briton. So they decided to send our babe to participate in this high visibility show as a representative of the Indian/Asian community. But our babe refused on the grounds of self-respect and dignity. So left with no choice Vishnu sena kidnapped babe's great great grand father and demanded that she need to take the 3 crore and participate in the contest. Rest as we all know is history.

When sick things were told against our country Why didn't our babe say anything?

Shilpa feels that she represents the Indian/Asian community and doesn't want to let them or herself down by retaliating...wow let me read that again. Look at it and we crib that our value system is breaking down. Again as we are Indians and the whole values thing that's inculcated in me is holding me back from saying; "represents the Indian/Asian community", bull shit. She does not represent me or my country, she went there to better her cash flow position.

What are the positives to come out from whole of this episode?

- As they say there is no better publicity than bad publicity..so Probably the biggest outcome of all this is our babe is going to win...Yepeeeeeeee.

- J*** T**** is a dolt with brains no bigger than the size of a pea. You hold and shake him, the sound thats produced when his brain strikes the inner wall of the skull can put even the Big Ben to shame. I personally feel Indian government need to gift him a atlas free of cost and teach him that babe is from India and India is not the same as "Paki"

- Really love the easiness with which you can vote some one out..I guess it would be a fine addition to our constitution..send a sms and give a laath to our non performing ministers


Look at this case, you have people burning effigies of housemates, PMO office and Ministry of External affairs voicing their concerns, Online petition being signed, Ofcom receiving highest number of complaints(not even Saddam's last video could achieve this fete), this issue being discussed in British parliament. But I wonder why the same billion voices which are crying for justice and equality for our babe get stubbed the moment we talk about the in numerable cases of discrimination based on cast, creed, language, sex, colour and what not that happen in our own backyard?

Data, Data, everywhere,.....

(source)

"Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink."

All are familiar with those popular lines from the 1797 The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, fast forward to present time and if it were to be re-written by a business manager today it would be like...

"Data, Data, everywhere,
Not a byte that's worth."

Accenture's recent survey of US and UK based large companies seems to confirm this. The results are there for all of us to see and they unequivocally point at one thing...we are not in control of the data we generate and you might also hear business managers saying IT is not doing enough to "add value" to the business .

If you look at it, the problem is this, we have huge amount of data and we need to make sense of it. Now what makes it so very interesting is the magnitude of huge...consider this;

* Comscore captures 50 attributes for every click the user does anywhere on its 1.5 million member network, that translates to 8 TB a year.

* Walmart adds almost one billion rows daily to its already bulging 500 odd TB sales and inventory data.

* European have linked 16 telescopes and its said each generate one gigabit of data per second.

* Nielsen Media Research found that 80-100 TB of data is added annually and guess by whom, a community of 12000 households!!

Now we don't have much say in amount of data that generated, the only way we can do better in that survey next time around would be to reduce the redundancy. Quite a few methods have been proposed..

* SOA - One of the top 5 bets for 2007 according to Accenture CTO. Concept is simple, if I have my Sales and Marketing application why don't they talk to each other and share the customer data instead of each maintaining there own? That is what SOA enables, access to resources without having to know the platform/implementation details.

* Better protocols - When a packet is sent over TCP, it does lot of checks with regards to the packet and that makes it slow to transfer huge amount of data, so probably a protocol that can deliver the packet with less overhead could help.

* Duplicating data is no longer a viable solution. Transaction tables to ODS, ODS to stage, stage to DW may not be a good idea going forward. Concept like EII could be a alternative.

* SAN and NAS could act as a central repositories thus reducing duplication.

* 40% in the survey said other parts of company are not "willing" to share data. If I read this correctly, it means that the data thats generated in other departments are stored in local media and hence not accessible to others. Its more to do with policies. We need IT policies and setup that encourage sharing. They should make it as easy to save the report I generate on a centralized repository as it is to save it in my local hard disk.

* We need good search algorithms. I understand the pain to look for a document on our intranet, it simply sucks. If I needed to create a document, I prefer to create a new one instead of searching for a template on the intranet and reusing it. Thank lord we are now allowing Google to crawl our intranet.

Now say the IT team gets to implement all or more of the above and we score better in the survey next time around, now the business managers will probably say;
well we are getting good data now, but you see, the IT department in competitor's company has also implement all or more of what we have done and their managers are also able to generate same kind of "intelligence" out of data as we do, so IT investments we made are not contributing towards making that differentiation. IT is not "adding value".

And thus IT starts fresh again in this perpetual cycle, looking for that new technology which will help the business make that elusive "differentiation".

Wishing you all a very happy Sankranti/Pongal

ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ
ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ, ತರಲಿ ತರಲಿ ಸುಖ, ಸಂತೋಷದ ಸುಗ್ಗಿ ತರಲಿ
ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ, ದಿನವೂ ಧನ, ಸಂಪತ್ಟಿನ ಮಳೆ ಇರಲಿ
ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ, ಬಾಳಲ್ಲಿ ಸಕ್ಕರೆ ಅಚ್ಚು, ಪಾಯಸದ ಸಿಹಿ ತರಲಿ
ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ

ಈ ಹೊಸ ವರ್ಷದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರತಿ ದಿನವೂ ಸುಖ, ಸಂತೋಷ ತುಂಬಿದ ಹಬ್ಬದ ಸಂಬ್ರಮವಾಗಿರಲಿ ಎಂದು ಹಾರೈಸುತ್ತೇವೆ. ಎಳ್ಳೂ ಮತ್ತು ಬೆಲ್ಲ ತಿಂದು, ಒಳ್ಳೇ ಮಾತು ಆಡು.

ಮತ್ತೆ ಯಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಸಂಕ್ರಾಂತಿ ಹಬ್ಬದ ಹಾರ್ಧಿಕ ಸುಭಾಶಯಗಳು.

New year and a new post...

wow....its been really long time. Last time I posted Saddam was still breathing...now, he is just another chapter in annals of history. Bush must have toasted after delivering his "Id gift to the Iraqi people". But I am sure who ever watched the loathsome video of all the action that happened in Khadimiya, will have one dangling question....Is this how real men behave?

I am by no means a sympathizer of Saddam, for what he did in Halabja and Al-Anfal, if it were to me I would resurrect him and throw him to gallows again and he deserves it all. Saddam, cruelty personified, who was responsible for debasement of life in Iraq like no one else, but rest of us are no saints with halo on top. So I believe he should have had a more dignified end. Anyways he is gone and its a closed matter now..

Its a new year again and as usual with the start of new year comes the time to make resolutions and as the tradition has been, the only thing that ever changes in the "resolution list" is the year column. So I successfully rolled the year column of the list to 2007. Voila!! list for 2007 ready.

So what's going to change(hopefully) this year...

1) Planned to put my finance back in place(man I am bad at managing money)
2) By end of this year, I should be in a position to play Tamacun. I simply love the way they play.
3) Lots of travel.
4) Lots of reading planned for this year, especially Kannada literature, which is so rich and beautiful.
and yep blog regularly..

Hopefully I change more than the year column same time next year ...