On A Loose End

Nooria Haveliwala was in the news today because she was driving after drinking and ended up killing two people. Ironically one of them was a bike rider who was being tested for alcohol level. The news report does not say whether they did find any alcohol or not. If not, it is really sad that the poor guy lost his life because of some moron stopping him without reason. Secondly the woman was apparently driving at 120 kmph on a road which is pretty straight. What was the traffic police (five of them) doing? None of them saw the speeding SUV from a distance and made any attempt to slow it down or stop it. How is it possible? Unless, they were too busy harassing the biker and trying to maximize their night duty earnings. I am in no way trying to condone the Girl's act. She was drunk and needs to be punished, not only for being drunk but also for killing people. Do I feel sad for the policemen? Yes, of course. But doing something for the heck of doing it goes much beyond sanity. It is t...

I guess it starts early in life. Infants and kids alike are designed to copy the actions, accents, behavorial instincts from their mothers and fathers and also any other human being in hand. I have not observed small kids with pets in their homes, but I bet the toddlers try to copy the actions of the pets they spend their time with. As they grow up they start copying their friends and heroes, who in turn again, have ingrained (copied and pasted) the habits from their parents. When they go to school the teacher tries to tell them to copy the alphabet she writes on the board. For most kids writing the alphabet, like rest of the learning process, is a dull chore, when they could be playing in the mud. The straight lines are still fine but the curves are difficult. It gets more difficult when our education system considers every child to be an potential calligraphist and the lessons on cursive writing start. I remember telling my child to "draw" the alphabet instead of writing. ...

Holiday packages seem to be the best way to travel to a country or a city in your own country. The holiday packages promoted by various tour operators do give the customers a hassle-free holiday in the sense that the customer does not have to plan anything, other than, of course, the destination, the travel dates, the period of the holiday and the amount of money which he is willing to spend. Besides that, the holiday packages are designed by the tour operator as per his own understanding of the place. It is like, the customer would actually be seeing and visiting the places that the tour operator thinks the customer should. The marketing department of these tour operators makes it sound like that they are covering the entire city or a country whereas in effect they are covering only the places which the discerning cutomer will recognize and get the feeling that all the important places have been covered. The customs, traditions and the culture of a city or a country are definitely no...

Education for all is a buzzword in almost all the countries in the world. In India too it has been gaining prominence for a while now and in Aug 2009 the government finally passed the Right to Education bill which guarantees free and compulsory education to all children between six and fourteen years of age. But there are two glitches and major ones at that. First is the fees being charged by the schools. Besides the state sponsored schools, which have a common fee structure across the board, other schools are not governed by any common criteria. The unaided schools can charge as they like irrespective of the facilities available. The well to do people can afford most of these schools and are anyway sending their kids to reasonably good schools, hence they are not the ones to really benefit from the Right to Education bill. They can benefit if the fees are standardized and maybe then they can send their kids to schools which thus far were beyond their reach. For example the Internation...

God, this world is getting more and more dangerous. If nature by itself was not difficult enough to live with, People around one make sure that one could never take his guard off. Now some genuine scamsters have taken the “people” danger to a new global level. Welcome to the Employment Scam I went through. It started with me putting up my resume on a couple of web sites, purely on an experimental basis, to see how good those were . The going was good and I generally did get relevant offers. Then one day I get a letter from another prospective employer apparently from Dragon Oil, UK, asking me to send in my detailed updated CV, which I dutifully did. A couple of days later I get a response from the same guy telling me that they have found my resume to be interesting and asked me to answer a questionnaire attached with the mail. The questionnaire was intelligent and looked like it was from a reputed firm. So I spent some time on it and forwarded the answers as requested in the mail. Fi...

Yes you can watch Super Bowl XLIV 2010 live online for free. The Super Bowl XLIV will be held on the 07 Feb 2010 at Dolphin Stadium, at Miami, Florida. The Kick off time is 6:28 PM and the NFL website will be hosting the live streaming of the game at http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/44/live/landing You can also watch the live online video streaming free at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0090hbk The finalists have not been decided yet as there are still some knock out games to be played. You can watch the games leading to the Super Bowl XLIV also live online. The road to Super Bowl is as follows Wild-Card Round Sat.-Sun., Jan. 9-10 AFC Sat., Jan. 9, 4:30 p.m. ET NBC N.Y. Jets Cincinnati Sun., Jan. 10, 1:00 p.m. ET CBS Baltimore New England NFC Sat., Jan. 9, 8:00 p.m. ET NBC Philadelphia Dallas Sun., Jan 10, 4:40 p.m. ET FOX Green Bay Arizona Divisional Round Sat.-Sun. Jan. 16-17 Championship Round Sun., J...

These two people I know are in the process of ruining my life. Taking turns, one by one, casting a shadow on me all the time, always contradicting each other. I really don’t know how I have survived the 40 odd years of my life, despite them. Or, Have I? God knows what makes them do this to me but somehow or the other they always succeed making me feel like a complete idiot. And guess what, if they were ever on the same side, I would know which side to take. But, as luck would have it, they have always managed to have differing opinions about everything. Being around these two has its advantages too. I am bright, witty, logical and entertaining. I am generally optimistic and enthusiastic like a child. I enjoy everything, never settling down for one. I am good at expressing myself, have good communication skills, and am versatile and good with my hands, adaptable and clever. The unknown intrigues me. I can do more than one thing at a time. I am a free soul. I perceive life as a game. I h...

Carl Sagan, the American Astronomer had come up with a cosmic calendar as a way for people to understand the history of the universe. He put the entire period starting with the Big Bang till now into an earth year (all relative) with the human history crowding in the last five minutes. Interestingly the earth formed after nine months in the cosmic calendar in the month of September. The homo sapiens appeared in the last five minutes of the day and the last five hundred years have happened in the last second which continues even now. If you see the calendar it becomes easier to comprehend what happened when and how long it took relative to other events. Have a look at the Cosmic Calendar: 01 Jan - Big Bang , universe formed 15 Mar - Galaxies and five stars formed 01 May - Our own galaxy, the Milky Way formed 08 Sep - Our Sun Formed 09 Sep - Our Solar System formed 12 Sep - Earth formed 13 Sep - The Earth's moon formed 20 Sep - Earth's atmosphere formed 01 Oct - First life form a...