गाँधी जी को क्यों याद करें?

दुनिया भी कितनी विचित्र है। यहाँ हम गाँधी जी के सिद्धांतों की बात कर रहे हैं, और वहाँ हमारे राजनेता इसी बात पर उलझे हैं, कि बापू के अन्तिम शब्द क्या थे? उनके पोते ने तो मात्र "हे रा" ही सुना था और गोडसे के अनुसार उन्होने सिर्फ "हाय" कहा था। लेकिन उनके अन्तिम शब्दों के विवाद में उलझे लोगों ने वो नहीं सुना, जो गाँधी जी ने जीवन पर्यंत कहा।

Interesting World

Three pieces of news, which caught my attention:

1. Some employee in NY, delete ALL her company's data from the system (worth more than 2 bn USD)
2. There seems to be two men hidden in the MARS-picture sent by NASA...not only this, there seems to be a huge lake also in MARS.
3. Do you often ponder upon the question of whether to wait for the bus or walk? Three crazy mathematicians have claimed to solved this dilemma and came up with this formula:



Anyone willing to load the equation in his/her lappy to solve it everytime he/she is faced with the question again?


And yet, people don't believe that it's a wierd world full of strange people :)

A nice poem

One song can spark a moment,
One flower can wake the dream.
One tree can start a forest,
One bird can herald spring.

One smile begins a friendship,
One handclasp lifts a soul.
One star can guide a ship at sea,
One word can frame the goal

One vote can change a nation,
One sunbeam lights a room
One candle wipes out darkness,
One laugh will conquer gloom.

One step must start each journey.
One word must start each prayer.
One hope will raise our spirits,
One touch can show you care.

One voice can speak with wisdom,
One heart can know what's true,
One life can make a difference,
You see, it's up to you!

So, start making a change in this universe. To start, just shut your monitor off, whenever you leave your computer alone.

Blonde to Bombed

This is a classic case of being a bombshell to being bombed and shelled:

What an irony for the daughter of tragedy.

<-- It's Benazir Bhutto in her happier days.

and this is an apt depiction of not only Benazir, but of the whole Pakistan -->

TATA's new nano car

This is the editorial published in New York Times on 4th November 2007 by Thomas L Friedman:

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
New Delhi -- India is in serious danger -- no, not from Pakistan or internal strife. India is in danger from an Indian-made vehicle: a $2,500 passenger car, the world's cheapest.
India's Tata Motors recently announced that it plans to begin turning out a four-door, four-seat, rear-engine car for $2,500 next year and hopes to sell one million of them annually, primarily to those living at the ''bottom of the pyramid'' in India and the developing world.
Welcome to one of the emerging problems of the flat world: Blessedly, many more people now have the incomes to live an American lifestyle, and the Indian and Chinese low-cost manufacturing platforms can deliver them that lifestyle at lower and lower costs. But the energy and environmental implications could be enormous, for India and the world.
We have no right to tell Indians what cars to make or drive. But we can urge them to think hard about following our model, without a real mass transit alternative in place. Cheap conventional four-wheel cars, which would encourage millions of Indians to give up their two-wheel motor scooters and three-wheel motorized rickshaws, could overwhelm India's already strained road system, increase its dependence on imported oil and gridlock the country's megacities.
Yes, Indian families whose only vehicle now is a two-seat scooter often make two trips back and forth to places to get their whole family around, so a car that could pack a family of four is actually a form of mini-mass transit. And yes, Tata, by striving to make a car that could sell for $2,500, is forcing the entire Indian auto supply chain to become much more efficient and therefore competitive.
But here's what's also true: Last week, I was driving through downtown Hyderabad and passed the dedication of a new overpass that had taken two years to build. A crowd was gathered around a Hindu priest in a multicolored robe, who was swinging a lantern fired by burning coconut shells and praying for safe travel on this new flyover, which would lift traffic off the streets below.
The next morning I was reading The Sunday Times of India when my eye caught a color photograph of total gridlock, showing motor scooters, buses, cars and bright yellow motorized rickshaws knotted together. The caption: ''Traffic ends in bottleneck on the Greenlands flyover, which was opened in Hyderabad on Saturday. On day one, the flyover was chockablock with traffic, raising questions over the efficacy of the flyover in reducing vehicular congestion.'' That's the strain on India's infrastructure without a $2,500 car.
So what should India do? It should leapfrog us, not copy us. Just as India went from no phones to 250 million cellphones -- skipping costly land lines and ending up with, in many ways, a better and cheaper phone system than we have -- it should try the same with mass transit.
India can't ban a $2,500 car, but it can tax it like crazy until it has a mass transit system that can give people another cheap mobility option, said Sunita Narain, the dynamo who directs New Delhi's Center for Science and Environment and got India's Supreme Court to order the New Delhi bus system to move from diesel to compressed natural gas. This greatly improved New Delhi's air and forced the Indian bus makers to innovate and create a cleaner compressed natural gas vehicle, which they now export.
''I am not fighting the small car,'' Ms. Narain said. ''I am simply asking for many more buses and bus lanes -- a complete change in mobility. Because if we get the $2,500 car we will not solve our mobility problem, we will just add to our congestion and pollution problems.''
Charge high prices for parking, charge a proper road tax for driving, deploy free air-conditioned buses that reach every corner of the city, expand the existing beautiful Delhi subway system, ''and then let the market work,'' she added.
Why should you care what they're driving in Delhi? Here's why: The cost of your cellphone is a lot cheaper today because India took that little Western invention and innovated around it so it is now affordable to Indians who make only $2 a day. India has become a giant platform for inventing cheap scale solutions to big problems. If it applied itself to green mass transit solutions for countries with exploding middle classes, it would be a gift for itself and the world.
To do that it must leapfrog. If India just innovates in cheap cars alone, its future will be gridlocked and polluted. But an India that makes itself the leader in both cheap cars and clean mass mobility is an India that will be healthier and wealthier. It will also be an India that gives us cheap answers to big problems -- rather than cheap copies of our worst habits.

This is my response to it:


I agree with the concern but totally disagree with the reasoning and solution provided in the article.

The author has tried to undermine the success on following points:

1. Traffic Chaos: Number one is that shutting down production of vehicles is no solution to traffic woes. Proper infrastructure is needed for it. Delhi has done; and is doing a great work in this regard. Other cities should follow it, and Delhi should improve it. Second point is that, it might actually solve some of the traffic problems. We just need to be more adaptive of a concept called car-pooling. Having one car, instead of 4-bikes, on the road, is anytime better.

2. Imported Oil: The car gives a mileage of 22-26, which is better than any other taxi/car/heavy vehicle. Having such cars is a much-much better solution for imported-oil than invading Iraq.
Also, the potential buyers of this car are small-medium sized families in the medium income group, which currently call a taxi or hire a car whenever they go on a family outing. Consider the additional distance that the taxi/hired-car has to cover to pick them up, and then again go looking for another passenger. Taking a generous assumption of just 100 meters this taxi has to cover and multiplying by a million owners of this car and again multiplying by the number of times, such an incident happens, and then again multiplying the saving on mileage gives us an enormous saving in fuel consumption.

3. Pollution: The small car not only passes all the regulatory norms, but as advertised, it exceeds them, hence the claim that it pollutes even lesser than a 2-wheeler looks to be true. Time will tell the truth.

Above all, the solution of heavily taxing this car, is simply autocratic, impractical, unjust and funny. If a car is taxed, all the cars get affected and this will again end up being the cheapest. If the government adds another clause in its already heavy IT law of taxing only the small cars, the opposition would simply kill them as this car is branded as the common man’s car and the tax burden will fall on the common man instead of the higher income segment.

Let the author realize that Indians are not following them, but instead paving a pathway that they might wish to take in a not-so-distant future.

Diwali Party - Survey Results

To refresh the memories of the Diwali Party, we conducted a quick survey to announce the awards in some of the popular category. Here are the winners:

Unforgettable Moment:

We started the party with a very funny event. All the big-shots (PLs, GLs, Managers, in common lingo) were blind-folded and asked to race to finish with hurdles in between. However, the catch was, there were NO HURDLES. Spectators were laughing to their hearts’ content watching them crawl/walk cautiously in the clean arena.

Best Movers and Shakers:

This award was closely fought, but in the last Abhijeet and Mrudul emerged as the combined winners, owing to their expert (some call it crazy) dance moves. Raga was a close second. Here is a glimpse:

The best dressed Lady/Gentleman:

Everyone was too smart to vote for themselves here :) , but the grapevine declares them as winners:

Quote/Unquote:

Believe it or not, TDC has its own Shakespeares (Sheikh-Peers), who keep entertaining with their ever ready wit and tongue-in-cheek dialogues. Hence, we asked for the winner of all dialogues and this was the clear winner with a veeeeeery big margin:

“You can go by a GO bus, but cannot come by a COME-bus”

You are wondering what it means!! Et Tu Brute…

Seasons

Seasons of Canada, as viewed from my apartment

TCS Picnic in Pictures and Poems

We packed a picnic with a peach,
A pear, a prune and a pickle,
There was a piece of pie for each
And a piece of pumpernickel

It's more fun livin' when you're having fun....
It's more fun golfing when you hole in one....
It's more fun dreamin' when your dreams come true...
It's more fun winning at whatever you do....

Candy and cookies and peanuts and cake,
Finding the frosting has run,
All of us knowing we've eaten too much---
Picnics are certainly fun.

Changing, fading, falling, flying,
From homes that gave them birth,
Autumn leaves, in beauty dying,
Seek the mother breast of earth.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Different moods

Sandalwood Suites..our first destination in Toronto

With Shreelaya...most loveable gal

at bachelor's room (or TDC-TQ, as we call it)

Look carefully...the sunlight, the moonlight and the streelight...all in same photo.