English in Hyderabad is another unique affair which defines this place...Here are two gems I found.

On the way form Hyderabad to Mumbai there is a small dhaba..The sign on it reads 'XYZ Capiteria'...

On the Drinking water container in my appartment here:
"Kamal Water suppliers, For all Types of water"

They never thaught 'types of water' in my school!!!!!!!

Today two compeletely disjoint one liners..

'Reality is an optical illusion'

'Truth is not stranger than fiction, we just suck at imagination'

Two new one liners coined by me : )

Truth is vulgar....

Success come with hunger for itself.....

Great people have claimed that heart is like glass, fragile and brittle..it breaks easily..Life thaught me something else.Heart is more like paper, its not so easy to break it but very easy to tear it apart, trust me it hurts much more.and when the ripped pieces get soaked in tears the whole existence of it vanishes.
What remains is the paste of the ingredients, mostly emotions and pain. Like every compund in a chemical reaction does not possess the collective properties of the reactants, the same is the case with this lump. It can be recycled into a new paper, this time with the strength to blot all the diversities in life..

A Brief History of God

I generally refrain from comming out in open about my ideas of God or religion in public. I found this blog would be a good place to share my thoughts. These are rather theories I have about the whole concept of "God".
I remember reading in one of my textbooks that long long ago any inexplainable event in nature, like a lightning or an earthquake was beleived to be the work of an entity more powerful than us. The unknown nature of this "entity" perhaps made it seem more mystical and larger than life. I may be due to the observation of the people in general or an idea from a verey influential person in a clan, that people started beleiving that if they did something some of these "undesirable" events be avoided.The whole concept of God probably evoled in this manner. "God" was more powerful than humans or other creatures, God could punish those who did not "obey" a certain code of conduct and reward when the code was obeyed. "God" soon became associated with religion.
Religion by definition is "A set of beliefs and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law." (www.wikipedia.com).
So we now had a set of people who beleived in a certain phenomenon "punishment on doing wrong and reward for doing right" and the ideas of right and wrong matched for all the people in the set. Such grouping and acceptance of ideas by so many people may have given all of them more confidence and phsycological strength to beleive them further to turn it into faith. To strengthen this faith these people did some things together, like prayer or celebration of events, like the harvest, which was supposed to be God's reward for them (they had no idea where the crop came from or how to prevent it from floods or lack of water, it was "God's" grace he knew better) soon these events assumed the form of festivals."God" was a control system to maintain sanity and balance in the society, this very concept made us civilized. Infact "God"'s approval about these words gave them the meaning as we know now. Without this whole concept I gather the society would be a chaos.
I am curious to know from when and how personification of God occured. Another thing I am curious about is how is it possible that so many different people in same time but different geographical location could think of concept so alike, like the concepts of hell and heaven, or modes of prayers, which i feel in many religions has striking similarities.

This is a interesting topic to study..and I am off to knowing more..ciao

Thought of the Day:
Exams give me mental paralysis.

With all the Rock and metallica and Pink Floyd, I had almost forgotten my most precious collection..The ABBA...I am listening to one of my most favorite ABBA songs as I write this post and I have no other proof to show how much I still like to listen to ABBA.

'I have a Dream' is perhaps my most favorite ABBA songs. Its a long time since anything non PF or rock has given me goose pimples. Its sung in chorus, the whole song and everything is so beautifully synchronized, the effect is like the whole world singing it around you. And the lyrics are nowhere near extraordinary, just simple teachings of life...like someone fixing you a drink of hope...here is a stanza from the song..

I have a dream, a fantasy
To help me through reality
And my destination makes it worth the while
Pushing through the darkness still another mile
I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels
When I know the time is right for me
Ill cross the stream - I have a dream
Ill cross the stream - I have a dream

(http://www.lyricsfreak.com/a/abba/i+have+a+dream_20002830.html)

Found these on http://www.stanford.edu/~dua/files/quotes.html
Too good.. Here are some of my personal favorites

Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill

Your lucky number is 3552664958674928. Watch for it everywhere.

The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will walk carefully -- Russian Proverb

Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side.

There once was an old man from Esser,
Who's knowledge grew lesser and lesser.
It at last grew so small,
He knew nothing at all,
And now he's a College Professor.

I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it -- Queen Juliana of the Netherlands.

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped

Art Attack....

For the ones who actually read my blog, I do not want to sound like I have all the time in the world and write blogs all the time, this had been long time I wanted to write this one but never had time. I am a great fan of a show that airs on Disney Channel. Its called art attack, hosted by Neil Buchanan. (http://www.hitentertainment.com/artattack/). Neil, in this show presents some really cool craft for kids to make themselves and enjoy their holidays. You can find most of them on the site above. I didn't actually try one of his toys but I must say I must have really got inspired by him.

I was watching a (completely different) series the other day and one of the scenes showed a room with many paintings on the wall. I like the concept of one of them and tried to imitate it, the the exact 'Art Attack' way, with whatever supply of water colors I had. I am not a great artist either so my painting looks like this. Which proves that I haven't forgotten to paint and that I still paint like I did in third standard which was the last time I painted.

(I like to call this painting Horizon, in like to think about it in this way, when kids play the boundary of the sky and land disappear. They hop, skip, jump like there is no depth which can hurt them. The same coloring on the background for land and sky represents the infinite area of the playground playground the children see)

The concept is pretty cool, first paint the back ground with an one color or a combination of more than one color(recommended), when the paint dries sketch whatever you like with a black sketch pen or black paint, whatever you prefer and you have a painting as good as a professional (of course you don't get that idea from the one above, but i know if I can do this you can make a better one). I will try improving on it and hopefully upload a new and better version of this.

Visit to an Exhibition

Thane Municipal corp has arranged an exhibition of plants at gaondevi maidan. This sunday I had an opportunity to pay a visit and now i guess this is definitely a thing on my 'what to do on weekends' list.
The exhibition had a display of various rare and common plants, flowers, bonsais and also miniature landscapes. The best according to me were the miniature landscapes made in those flat earthen pots. Also the pipal and the banyan bonsais were a sight to watch.
The pandal was divided into various rows each row for a different variety or a different display. So there was the first two rows were for the collection of rare plants, the second for home grown vegetables and so on. Though I can't remember which row was which, I remember there was a row for cactus, one for bonsais, one for flower arrangements, one for kitchen garden then other for hanging plants and so on. I also managed to collect the names of certain plants I had never heard before.
There was calendula- It is the pot marigold native to Mediterranean.
a variety of plants of the genus bromelia, which is a native to torpical America. Pineapple belongs to this category.
And a are category of succulent plants.

And I also finally know what a petunia looks like!!! :) (Though it grows in my college I never knew it was petunia).

A new project

I really do no write well and I do not have a good opening for this post, so I will directly start writing about the recent project I am involved in, teaching "English speaking" skills scientifically to a couple of students, whose mother tongue is Marathi. I was always into teaching and I like to think teaching actually helps to gain and retain more knowledge than reading and writing can. Here is a small summary of the project.
(note: In the following article "we" refers to me and my colleague, classmate and good friend Birinder Singh who is equally but more passionately involved in this project.)

New English school, Mand is one of the few high schools in Mand village near Hinjewadi, Pune.
Much unlike its name, this school is not a English medium school, but a Marathi medium school. There is not specific reason we selected this school as the lab of our first experiment. We wanted to keep our first project a simple experiment, the reasons being we weren't sure of the response from the management of the school and also about the success rate or our own future plans. However taking a plunge was exactly what was needed at that point of time.
Management didn't prove to be a hurdle as I had expected. The headmaster was the first person we interacted with and he gave us all information as needed. We did have to cajole him to give us at least three slots a week with a couple of students.
So we selected a sample of twenty students from standard eight. This was the first prototype for us. First two session were learning sessions for us more than the students, we needed to know their problem areas before even thinking of teaching.

We must have done a couple of sessions now and we see lots of students enthusiastic students ready to learn. What they lack is perhaps right guidance. Also I personally feel that vocabulary is not a huge hurdle as many people think it is. It is the sentence construction. We are currently working on the same area.
I will write more about the sessions later....

Self discovery..

Yesterday I discovered that deep down I am very shallow

The is no pleasure as great as the pleasure of lecture getting canceled at the eleventh hour..

My Favourite Read

These days its not only google I look for while doing my assignments, but I always find it helpful to browse through wikipedia before actually getting more information and most of the time the sources of the information are on wikipedia itself.
I see myself suddenly using wikipedia not only for work but just for fun reading and I enjoy it tremendously. I think it is the best place to prepare for general knowledge quizzes and game shows. There are certain specific features which need a special mention:
Variety, you have information about everything, however it has not yet got the status of an encyclopedia
The historical approach for all the articles, you look up a company and you have the details from the year it started. Same with countries and elements and all that has a history.
The links in the articles which help getting more information about the difficult words encountered.
The sources and additional links provided at the end of each article.(These are sometimes more useful than google results)
The layout of the pages, you can actually look for the most relevant information for the given subject by selecting the correct link at the start of an article.

Wikipedia is the best look up for something you may have to get introduced to or something which may not be related to the field of your profession but makes a very good trivial read.

I really wanted to know about wikipedia more, so I searched for 'wikipedia' on wikipedia, and it like all other articles is a great read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

One thing which i feel will be another good will be the concept of wikidictionary, which can contain the etymology of a particular search word. (Am I suggesting a 'Word Power made easy' online?)

The downsizing in TCS and IBM may have been a surprise to many. However it is not only because of the problem of the rupee getting stronger against a dollar (expected exchange rates 35rs to a dollar by 2010), but many software service industries in India have been exploring oppurtunities to improve profitability without increasing the headcount further.

Indian software industry is mainly a service industry. Indian firms employ people and bill customers abroad for the services that are rendered. The charges are proportional to the number of employees working on that particular project as billing is done on the basis of people hours. Hence employees become a major asset for these software service industries. The growth in the revenue of the company is thus, linearly proportional to the number of people employed. While this growth is easy to obtain by doubling the size of the company when it is small (headcount 500 to 1000) it becomes difficult once the size (headcount 50000-100000).
This problem is currently faced by bulk recruiters like Wipro, Infosys, TCS. The purpose of outsourcing work to Indian companies is to harness the cheap labour, which India provided. This cost effectiveness still remains a major reason of outsourcing jobs to India.
The work force in India is popularly described as ‘relatively cheap, English speaking and skilled’. Following observations give an idea of the nature of the major asset in the software industry, the manpower.

1. Size: It can be one of the major factors, which lead to the proliferation of the IT industry. Abundance of labour makes it cheap. The number of people available to get trained is large enough that it mitigates the risk of understaffing when a crucial project comes in.

2. Skills: Most of the IT professionals available are young with an average age of 27.5 years. This makes it easy for the company to train them according to the company’s needs. People in India are found to have good programming skills owing to their relatively strong mathematical background. Also, English speaking ability helps them to score over their Chinese counterparts.

3. Educational background: The talent pool for the software industry comes form a varied background. 80% of the employees are engineers, not necessarily computer engineers, and the remaining 20% are either diploma holders from IT background or certified professionals from private training institutes. Engineering curriculum is not focused on IT industry, which makes training in an organisation necessary. Special training centers have to be set up to train these candidates. This leads to the overhead on the company’s expenses.

4. Revenue per employee: It is the amount of the revenue, which employee generates for a company. Thus for maximum profitability the revenue should be maximized and the number of the employees should be minimized.

Some suggestion are made below following are the suggestions to improve revenur per employee.

Division of labour and time management: Dividing the workforce on the basis of Software development lifecycle (SDLC) phases rather than projects can be an effective method to manage the employees. It is suggested to train the employees for various software development phases and not only programming languages. Training in relatively neglected areas like ‘effective requirement analysis’, ‘designing’ etc can help tremendously in adding value to the company’s assets. Also the salaries of the employees can be kept varied based on the phase they are trained in. To make such a division of labour effective, time management has to be incorporated. Attempts should be made to manage the projects in such a way that overlap of same phases of different projects is minimized. Following example will illustrate this;

We first select three projects A, B and C, such that, A is in ‘requirement analysis’ phase (first phase), B is in the designing phase (middle phase) and C in the testing phase (final phase). Same set of employees will be assigned to all the projects. These will be a mix of people trained in different life cycle phases covering all the phases. So ‘requirement analysts’ will work on A, ‘Designers’ on B and ‘testers’ on C. the analysts finish the work on A, the designers working on B will take over. This will lead to optimal utilization of manpower. Another advantage is that employees are trained for a particular specialized task, which makes the process efficient. The number of ‘on bench’ employees can be thus controlled rising the revenue per employee subsequently. The challenge here is the increase in the communication overhead, as project is subjected to continuous change in the people who work on it. Good documentation and some overlap in the people of related phases will help to overcome this challenge.

Controlling attrition rate: Attrition can be defined as the reduction in a company’s customer population that happens as a result of normal turnover or because of some specific event like a good competitive offer or a failure on the part of the company.
Attrition rate in India is 25% to 30% as compared to the world average of 15%.
Whenever a project is given to an organization, it makes an estimate of the people and time, which will be required to complete the project, based on the requirement data, expert judgement and standardized cost estimation processes. When the attrition rate is high more employees have to be assigned to the project than actually required. This increases the indiscipline and unpredictability in the project. This can be elaborated with the help of following example; if a project ‘A’ requires 6 employees then due to high attrition rate 10 employees have to be put on the project. However if attrition rate is predictable and controlled the number of employees deployed on a project can be brought down to 7 or 8. Thus checking attrition will decrease the requirement of the non-productive back ups and help to maintain discipline.

High attrition rates can be attributed to the abundance of jobs. In contrast to the popular belief that job hopping occurs mainly for better monetary benefits statistics prove that people leave the jobs majorly because of dissatisfaction with their current work cultures and/or job profiles. Giving the quality of work the employees need to keep them motivated can effectively control attrition. This will also mean adding talent to the pool and increasing their worth. Effective training programs and in house projects are some of the means to add value to the employees retain them in the company and add to company’s assets.

Khalil Gibran Quotes...

...Simple, straight forward, funny and just truth in its birthday suit...

An eye for an eye, and the whole world would be blind.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

I existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.' (tooooooo good....i adore the attention to details of language here)

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer?

Thiger Khat!!!!!

The tiger (Panthera tigris) is a mammal of the Felidae family, the largest of four "big cats" (others being lion, lepord and jaguar) in the Panthera genus. Native to much of eastern and southern Asia, the tiger is an apex predator and an obligate carnivore (an animal that must eat meat in order to thrive). Tigers are up to 4 metres (13 feet) in total length and weighing up to 300 kg (660 pounds). Tigers live for 8-10 years in the wild and 26 years in captivity.

India holds over half the world's tiger population, Which rightfully makes it our national animal. However the number of these cats have fallen down by nearly 50%, from 3642 in 2001 to 1141 in 2007. Many of the tiger populations, particularly those outside protected reserves, are fragmented, suffer from intense poaching pressure, a dwindling prey base and over-used habitat. Most of the poaching is done for extremely valuable tiger skins, bones and body parts which are beleived to have medicinal properties.

Most if the reported tiger killings exclude the ones which were 'found dead' (most of them without skulls in their bodies). 27 tigers killings were reported in 2007 (thats 2% of the current population, in human terms it will be like killing nearly 26lac people per year )

For a country already plagued by so many grave problems, tiger killings may seem like a non entity to many, however the strongest argument I can make here is that, its India which is capable of providing the best and the biggest habitat for these royal beasts. Thus we are technically responsible if the future generations of the world have to visit museums and not zoos or scanturies to meet the 'Thiger Khat'!!!!

And this goes to the world's most favourite animal (according to the poll conducted by animal planet)

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger Tiger burning bright

I am a terrible wirter as far as full length articles are concerned, but I can manage individual, independent and intelligent sentences (though i am the only one thinking they are intelligent)
I think a lot and most of the time I think about myself..and today i realised
I could have been what I should have been, but I am not what I would have been. (and if anybody understanda what it means please share the information.. I am quite lost on it)

Years ago, we learnt a poem in school, I have been searching for it on the net since some of my sleeping brain cells woke up and the little voice in my head recited the some lines of this very unusual poem. I then decided to pass it on as my creation....However, I am curious to know the full poem..the poem goes something like this...

okie pokie crack me crown
king of island gulp em down...
(following is my creation)
one shoe black and other shoe brown
king of island gulp em down
If he can't swim he will drown
king of island gulp em down..
if anyone one decides to feel good about his/her own writing and hence reads the blog, you r welcom to add to this poem or post the original one....cheers...