Mitsukoshi is one of Japan’s oldest retail chain having branches spread across the globe including Munich, Paris and Shanghai. The company had recently implemented RFID technology in several stores in Japan witnessing a 13.3% increase in sales.

Mitsukoshi’s “Smart Shelves” scan the contents of the shelves and alert store employees when supplies are running low or when theft is detected

The technology is being increasingly experimented with by retailers like WalMart and Tesco. One of the earliest to start experimenting with wireless inventory was Metro Group’s Future Store Initiative. As with all new technologies, RFID has its own share of shortcomings with read-range and cost being a couple of them. But with stores like Mitsukoshi who go on to experiment and optimize business processes using the technology, we can hope for more good things to come. RFID’s potential is best realized when implemented across the supply chain, making inventory and logistics simpler and more actionable.

Read The Mitsukoshi Case : interaction design for RFID Retail

I’ve just finished reading Shantaram on the recommendation of a friend and its by far one of the most compassionate stories I’ve read.

This lucidly written book is a true story of the author Gregory David Roberts. His addiction to heroin after the collapse of his marriage, lures him to commit armed robberies that gets him convicted and imprisoned in New Zealand. He manages to escape from New Zealand and travels half way across the globe to arrive in Bombay which becomes the backdrop of this thriller.

Shantaram is a story on how he begins a life anew in Bombay. He learns to speak Marathi and Hindi, runs a clinic for the poor in the slums, works for the Mumbai mafia, falls in love, acts in Bollywood movies, fights with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, etc. Its a book that got me hooked right from page 1 and if I had to sum it all up in one word, it would be : Brilliant!

Actually, one of the other reasons that triggered me to get this book was while watching Jaan-e-mann. In the penultimate song sequence, Preity Zinta is seen sitting on a couch with a copy of Shantaram. Thats when a eureka moment happened with a friend sitting close by and suggested that this was one book that I shouldn’t miss reading. He was right.

Britannia has recently launched the new packaging for one of its most successful brands, the Milk Bikis. I’ve been addicted to this brand ever since I can remember and is a constituent of my daily staple diet. The blue and white and rather milkier packaging is a refreshing change.

The styling has undergone bold changes with the typeface being more bigger and heavier than the earlier one. The Britannia logo on the top left has decreased by almost 50% giving more emphasis on the brand than the company behind the brand as it should be. The new packaging focuses on the multi-vitamin goodness with a red and blue table on the lower half. The nutritional information has been neatly tabulated and pushed to the back of the package.

The old package on top vis-a-vis the brand new look

The biscuit itself has undergone a noticeable change. It now comes in a ‘grid format‘ that gives its more texture and better strength when dipped in tea or coffee. The earlier one would easily break off when dipped in piping hot tea, which was quite depressing if you’re the type who enjoys biscuits dipped in tea. The whole new packaging makes me feel happy and has also helped to sprinkle some good looks to my kitchen cabinet. As for the taste, its the pretty much the same thing we’ve all loved for years!

Previous biscuit packaging review : Parle-G

Dust in my bed is a video directed by Alhamad in which he essays the one journey everybody makes – death. I had goose bumps all over me watching this. Its funny, we take life for granted without realising that all of us will have to go one day leaving behind our family, friends, the wealth we’ve earned, the relationships we’ve built, etc. I like what Steve Jobs had to say about death -

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose

The song beautifully rendered by Mashary is soul stirring. The video is available on YouTube or as a download.

Above: A background image in Backupbrain.com – a joint project of Tom Negrino and Dori Smith which serves as the offsite storage of Dori’s memory somewhere to store all those links she knew she’d want again someday.

Below: The advertisement of IFMR, inviting applications for their 2007 – 2009 PGDBM courses. The following ad appeared on billboards in certain parts of the city in addition to ads in leading national newspapers and magazines.

So who did who? As Dori of Backupbrain.com points out, the two images are based on 19th century concepts of Phrenology – a theory which claims to be able to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head.

I am the wife of Mohammad Afzal, the man accused of conspiring to attack the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. Afzal has been condemned to death by the Sessions Court Judge, S N Dhingra and his death sentence has been confirmed by the Hon’ble High Court of Delhi. Now the case has come up before the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India.

All over India people have condemned the attack on Parliament. And I agree that it was a terrorist attack and must be condemned. However, it is also important that the people accused of such a serious crime be given a fair trial and their story be fully heard before they are punished. I believe that no one has heard my husband’s story and he has so far never been represented in the court properly.

I appeal to you to hear our story and then decide for yourselves whether justice has been done. Afzal and my story is the story of many young Kashmiri couples. Our story represents the tragedy facing our people.

In 1990 Afzal was attracted to the movement led by the JKLF, like thousands of other youth. He went to Pakistan for training and stayed there for a little while. However, he was disillusioned by the differences between different groups and he did not support pro-Pakistani groups. He stayed there only three months without getting any training. Afzal returned to Kashmir and he went to Delhi to pursue his studies. He always wanted to study and before he joined the movement he was doing his MBBS.

My husband wanted to return to normal life and with that intention he surrendered to the BSF. The BSF Commandant refused to give him his certificate till he had motivated two others to surrender. And Afzal motivated two other militants to surrender. He was given a certificate stating that he was a surrendered militant. You will not perhaps realise that it is very difficult to live as a surrendered militant in Kashmir but he decided to live with his family in Kashmir. In 1997 he started a small business of medicines and surgical instruments in Kashmir. The next year we were married. He was 28 years old and I was 18 years.

Throughout the period that we lived in Kashmir the Indian security forces continuously harassed Afzal and told him to spy on people they suspected of being militants. One Major Ram Mohan Roy of 22 Rashtriya Rifles tortured Afzal and gave him electric shocks in his private parts. He was humiliated and abused.

The Indian security forces used to regularly take Afzal to their camps and torture him. They wanted to extract information from him. One night the Indian security forces came to our home and abused all of us and took away Afzal to their camp; another time he was taken to the STF (State Task Force) camp Palhalan Pattan.

Some days later they took him to the Humhama STF camp. In that camp the officers, DSP Vinay Gupta and DSP Darinder Singh demanded Rs one lakh. We are not a rich family and we had to sell everything, including the little gold I got on my marriage to save Afzal from the torture.

Afzal was kept in freezing water and petrol was put into his anus. One officer Shanti Singh hanged my husband upside down for hours naked and in the cold. They gave electric shocks in his penis and he had to have treatment for days.

You will think that Afzal must be involved in some militant activities that is why the security forces were torturing him to extract information. But you must understand the situation in Kashmir, every man, woman and child has some information on the movement even if they are not involved. By making people into informers they turn brother against brother, wife against husband and children against parents. Afzal wanted to live quietly with his family but the STF would not allow him.

You should also know that the STF force is notorious in Kashmir for extorting money from the people and they have become so infamous that when Mufti Sayed became the Chief Minister he promised in his election manifesto to disband the entire force. The STF is known for human rights violations including killing people in their custody and brutal, senseless, inhuman torture.

It was under these conditions that forced Afzal to leave his home, family and settle in Delhi. He struggled hard to earn a living and he had decided to bring me and our four-year old son, Ghalib, to Delhi. Like any other family we dreamed of living together peacefully and bringing up our children, giving them a good education and seeing them grow up to be good human beings. That dream was cut short when once again the STF got hold of my husband in Delhi.

The STF told my husband to bring one man Mohammad to Delhi from Kashmir. He met Mohammad and one other man Tariq there at the STF camp. He did not know anything about the men and he had no idea why he was being asked to do the job. He has told all this to the court but the court chose to believe half his statement about bringing Mohammad but not the bit that he was told to do so by the STF.

There was no one to represent Afzal in the lower court. The court appointed a lawyer who never took instructions from Afzal, or cross examined the prosecution witnesses. That lawyer was communal and showed his hatred for my husband. When my husband told Judge Dhingra that he did not want that lawyer the judge ignored him. In fact my husband went totally undefended in the trial court. When ever my husband wished to say something the judge would not hear him out and the judge showed his communal bias in open court.

In the High Court one human rights lawyer offered to represent Afzal and my husband accepted. But instead of defending Afzal the lawyer began by asking the court not to hang Afzal but to kill him by a lethal injection. My husband never expressed any desire to die. He has maintained that he has been entrapped by the STF. My husband was shocked but he had no way of changing his lawyer while being locked up in the high security jail. It was only after the High Court judgement was pronounced he got to know about the way the lawyer had represented him. Afzal refused to accept the same lawyer for his appeal in the Supreme Court. I had no way of getting Afzal a lawyer. I do not know anyone in Delhi. Finally Afzal wrote to the Defence Committee set up for Mr Geelani. I am annexing his letter. And the Defence Committee helped Afzal to get a senior lawyer, Mr Sushil Kumar. However, the Supreme Court cannot go into the evidence and so I do not know what will happen.

I appeal to you to ensure that my husband is not condemned to death and he is ensured a fair trial. Surely your conscience will not allow you to be a party to the death of a fellow human being who has not been represented in the court and who has not had a chance to tell his story? The police have made him falsely confess before the media even before the trial started. They humiliated him, beat him, tortured him and even urinated in his mouth. I feel deep shame to talk about these things in public but circumstances have forced me. It has taken a lot of courage for me to put all this on paper but I do so for the sake of my child who is now six years old.

Will you speak out at the injustice my husband has faced? Will you speak out on my behalf? I am of course fighting for my husband’s life, for the life of my son’s father. But I also speak as a Kashmiri woman who is losing faith in Indian democracy and its ability to be fair to Kashmiri Muslims.

Tabassum

If there’s one company that can give Apple a run for its money, its got to be Sony. The Sony VAIO UX is an ultraportable PC thats fits comfortably in your palm. It features a a 4.5″ TFT LCD with a resolution of 1024 x 768, 2 cameras (one for video conferencing), Intel Core Solo processor running at 1.2GHz, 512 megs of DDR2 RAM, a fast 533MHz front side bus, an EDGE radio and all the works you’d expect on a desktop. Small wonder then Apple hired Sony VAIO engineers to work on the Intel based notebooks.

Mitchelle Thatcher of CNET does a (video) review on the device.

I’ve fallen in love. This is just the sort of device, I’d like to go to bed with ( considering I do that now with this)

A few weeks back Apple announced its new line of iPods which were basically souped up versions of the existing fifth generation ones. The launch didnt ‘wow’ me as much as it did a year ago when I decided to get myself one. Now I’ve stopped using it as much as I did back then. For the most part its in my car where I listen to it through the radio using Belkins excellent TuneCast FM transmitter. The iPod has become so ubiquitous that its no more that cool thing one could own. I despise lugging it around wherever I go – be it shopping or even walks.

The iPod’s success came from its form factor. When it was launched, no one imagined being able to carry so much of music in a device about the size of a cigarette packet. Thats what Apple got right. Later revisions saw incremental advancements in software and form factor but very little in innovation. Probably Apple is getting a little complacent because of iPod’s success. Its not about just music anymore. Its about being connected. Microsoft’s yet-to-lauch Zune (( Engadget has a nice writeup on the Zune )) is a step in this direction. With built in WiFi, it allows you to share your music/data with your friends. For all the arguments on having seperate music players from phones, the rising sales of made-for-music mobile phones should be a indication. It was just because, back then, the interface on phones used to suck when they tried to put in lot of features without a sizeable screen or useable keyboard – thats not the case anymore.

Sony’s MYLO is an interesting little device incorporating much of what I’ve been getting at. This little device allows you surf the web, listen to music, watch videos and even make internet phone calls. Although the design may not appeal to many, it does allow you to do a lot more than just listen to music. Apple can probably lift a cue from such devices and come up with something really innovative the way they did way back with the iPod.

I use Bloglines as my RSS reader of choice and have used it as my only feed reader for almost two years now. Its simple and lets me read my subscriptions without getting in my way. Off late, they seem to have upgraded the service with some fancy little changes to the feed tree on the left pane. They’ve also decreased the time for automatic updates so that you need’nt press the “r” hotkey to refresh your feed. I’d just like the font size on the left pane to increase a bit (back to what it was earlier). But anyway, I’m happy with these incremental improvements to my most visited site on the web.

On a related note, Google Reader has undergone some pretty interesting UI improvements. It looks a lot more like Bloglines now. The best part is the Gmail-like inbox view listing titles of the selected feed, although it appears a little sluggish with all the Ajax. It would be interesting to see where this is heading.

After having listened to the likes of Satriani and Vai for over five years, it was a refreshing change to hear Erik Mongrain (hat tip – Tariq). Erik has a rather unique style of strumming and tapping his original compositions on a guitar laid flat down, a technique believed to have been inspired by Michael Hedges. Erik draws his inspirations from the likes of Hendrix, Cobain and even Bach which motivated him to learn classical acoustics. Watch the following videos on YouTube, which I’m sure will speak volumes about him -

• AirTap
• PercusienFa
• Fusions

Its been over 5 years since the “terrorist attack” on the World Trade Centre in New York. The US govt. was quick to point, without supporting evidence, the people/organization responsible for it.

The US govt had gone to war with 2 nations on the pretext of “war against terror”. First the war on Afghanistan to oust the ruling Taliban regime and find the Sept 11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden and then with Iraq claiming them to possess ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ which they miserably failed to locate. Osama had repeatedly denied his involvement in the attacks. But the US govt insisted and were successful in convincing its people and heads of other nations behind its rationale in going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Loose Change (( The video is available as torrents online. You can also watch it on You Tube and Google video. Incase you want a copy, get in touch )) is a documentary that provides an alternative explanation of events during the September 11 attacks. Dylan Avery (( Watch the interview with Dylan Avery, Director – Loose Change )), one of the producers of the video, had originally been planning to make a fictional story about a possible conspiracy related to the attacks of 9/11. Avery claims that he began to believe that there was an actual cover up over the 9/11 attacks during research for this film, and that the genre switched to a documentary after discussing the events with his childhood friend Korey Rowe, a soldier who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and now one of the producers of that video.

One of the highlights of the video was analysing the fall of the twin towers. According to Physics911.net, had the fall been real, it would have resulted in pancaking effect leaving chunks of concrete on the ground below. But what was observed was fine pulverized concrete dust after the building collapsed in a virtual freefall. This is only possible in a controlled demolition, where each floor of a building is destroyed at just the moment the floor above is about to strike it. This method has indeed given near-freefall speed to demolitions of buildings all over the world in the past few decades (( Compare and contrast the results of controlled demolition and other forces. )). Now the question arises – who planted these detonators in the WTC? Was the plane hijacking a coverup for something more sinister than we were actually made to believe?

When I watched the video, I felt goosebumps all over my body. I knew something was amiss with the initial investigations when they claimed to have found the passport of one of the hijackers amidst the debris but failed to reveal the contents of the FDRs on the airplanes.

My uncle once made an interesting observation. He said, whenever the popularity ratings of Bush or Blair begins to hit a low, a terrorist plot will surprisingly surface from some part of the world. Take the recent transantlantic aircraft plot successfully foiled by British authorities, which would have otherwise resulted in “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. Prior to the “plot”, its interesting to note that Blair’s rating was at a 12-year low. Small wonder, why the successful thwarting of the plot became such a media spectacle.

I dont blame Bush or Blair for all the unfortunate things thats happening in the world today. They are mere puppets in the hands of few, who are masterminding all of this. People for whom power and wealth is more than anything they can bargain and for whom this very power that they are after, will one day backlash.

Noticed this chap staring intently at this magazine while shopping at Landmark.

It was more than a 100 days ago, when a bunch of us got together to spend an evening reminiscent of the BarCamp days, the idea for BlogCamp was born. BlogCamp was intended to be a forum for any Tom, Dick and Harry to learn about blogging – the who’s, why’s and how’s. Initially there was skepticism on why we should have such a forum in the first place. But considering the fact that Chennai happens to be the Indian city with the largest number of bloggers amongst other things, we thought why not.

Then on, there was no looking back. We had meetings almost every weekend to discuss the progress. Things started picking up when interest started brewing amognst some corporate biggies in sponsoring the event. People poured in from all over the country to help organize the event. BlogCamp in some sense is an open source event with people helping in every little way they can and that something truly fantastic!

Ironically, my blog went down for the 2 days that BlogCamp was held due to server maintenance, which by the way was really pathetic. Instead of having to deal with it, I decided to use that as an opportunity to meet folks who had come down from all over the country. These included Dina, Peter, Neha, Jace, Om, Ravages, etc. It was fun catching up with Abhinav, Amit, Shyam, Sathish and a few others (whose names I dont know) from the BarCamp days.

‘How do you feeel now?’ was all that we had to ask in the end.

Analysis of the event to follow. Stay tuned.

Software companies, BPO’s and other medium to big organizations across the country have adopted stringent security measures. (actually this is nothing new. They’ve been having this for quite some time but its only recently that I’ve been annoyed to the extent of me having to write this.) They’ve basically outsourced the work to various security services companies in the country. Thats good news. However, whats really annoying is the processes that these companies adopt in the name of security.

The ‘process’ begins the moment you step into the facility. Image capturing devices including camera-phones aren’t allowed in the premises. If you happen to have one, you need to surrender the phone before entering the facility and take it back on your way out. This is pathetic. For a person who’s work depends a lot on telephone, this really put me off. I’d rather ask the person I need to meet to come out instead. By asking visitors for phones, they are indeed inviting trouble. I was tempted to take some shots of the facility just for the heck of it and publish it online.

Then comes the register entries. Signing registers is a must and not doing so is almost sacrilige; before you actually get to the purpose of your visit. If your work involves moving to different floors within the same building, you need to sign-in and sign-out each time you move from one floor to another. They do this to track movement of visitors or contractors within the facility. All I see is, stack of register with pages and pages of crap. Small wonder, why forests in the country are fast depleting.

The point is, one needs to spend almost 15-20 minutes complying with these security procedures for a work/meeting that would hardly take 5 minutes. And this is repeated every time you walk into the building. A popular argument would be that this helps keeping trouble out. But does it really? Here’s the twist.

This particular organization (an MNC) that I’ve been frequenting for the past few weeks, have security personnel that work on a shift basis. I know most of them because of my frequent visits (duh!) and as such, they are quite easy with me on a few of the procedures. Now I happily carry my cameraphone, skip signing a few registers and even drink coffee whenever I feel like. Thats the level of security that we were talking about earlier. Now all I need is some RDX, a liquid that aids explosives (whatever that may be) and the media informed before setting off the bomb. The next morning, as we all can expect, the bombing will be somehow linked to Lakshar-e-Toiba/Al-Qaeda and the current peace process with Pakistan will come to an indefinite halt.

Ok, so whats the solution?

Instead of having a lot of security personnel hovering around each floor and inviting trouble from otherwise normal people (like me), they can reduce the workforce and increase the use of technology. Every visitor could be given a smartcard embedded with an RFID tag that gives them controlled access within the facility. Simply put, this means giving access rights to areas in the facility that the visitor wants to go. Other areas will be not be given access without prior approval. The access rights can be remotely programmed on to the smartcard. So all you need is a single card for entering the premises.

From the security company’s view, they can map the location of the visitor in real-time and even set alarms or activate closed circuit cameras upon intrusion into non-designated areas. The security company can maintain a movement log in a database and thus minimize use of paper. On leaving the premises, the visitor hands over the smartcard.

All this is an effecient and time-saving way of doing the same thing. It only invloves utilizing available technologies and making things work better.

While scouting for some services like netflix in India, I came across seventymm which by the way looks strikingly similar to the original. A little digging reveals that Eric Meyer – the ‘former co-founder of Netflix’, is on the advisory board at seventymm. Does that give them the right to emulate the design? I wonder.

The Original

The Inspired – with tabs shifted to the right and change in pallette. The type is painful though!

There has been a barrage of emails being sent back and forth since late evening from all over India over the supposed banning of blogspot.com and other related blogging sites by Indian ISPs. Is the government beginning to play dirty and curb freedom of expression? Or is this something to do with the recent bombings in Mumbai? Stay tuned as the investigation continues..

List of ISPs that have blocked blospot.com

Update : Airtel customer service confirms site blockage saying that there has been a TRAI directive this morning to block online blogging forums.

Update : Indian Govt. has instructed ISPs to ‘control’ access to blogspot. It seems that some blogs are being used by some terror units (read SIMI) to communicate.There is a crack down in place. IP numbers are being physically located and identified. All should come back to normal once this operation is over. (via mutiny.in)

Update : Are ISPs blocking blogs? – rediff.com does some digging.

Update : Slashdot picks the story on the censorship and so does Boing Boing.

Update : Feed readers like Bloglines and Newshutch can still be used to extract feeds from the blocked sites. Another alternative is to use the pkblogs.com an alternate blog gateway for blogspot.com sites. (via India Uncut)

Update : Several leading dailies including The Economic Times, The Financial Express and The Indian Express have reported on the ban. (via Dina Mehta)

Zidane, why did you do this in your final international game?

Update : UK based Times and the Daily Mail hired expert lip readers to decipher what Matarazzi said to Zidane that irked him so much to do the headbutt and this is what they revealed.

Hold on, wait, that one’s not for a nigger like you.
We all know you are the son of a terrorist whore.
So just fuck off.

Update : Zidane apologizes for his head butt during the final, saying he was provoked by insults about his mother and sister.

There’s a wedding in the family and this is precisely the time of the year when all us cousins get together and have a blast. The past few days have been fun playing scrabble and drinking coffee while its pouring outside.

I know this aint gonna last long but for now we are all geared up to watch the clash between the Germans and the Italians.

I got to watch Krrish at the preview screening last evening at Four Frames, the state-of-the-art studio of director Priyadarshan. The movie was crass. The narrative was un-inspiring and so cliche’d that sometimes make you wonder why people make such movies in the first place. Krrish is a movie that “might have clicked” somewhere in the mid 90s.

Krrish put briefly, is a blend of superman, spiderman, batman and zorro slightly garnished with minority report. The film was screaming with Special FX. Almost every frame in the second half had some special effect or the other that diverts the attention from the story. I get the feeling that they have used all types of special effects available to make the movie and thats certainly not the way a movie should be made.

I’ve always admired movies that used Special FX in subtle ways that adds more realism to the story. Infact there are movies that use Special FX without you even realising it and thats definitely how it should be made. Unfortunately, thats not the case with Krrish.

The story – no spoilers

The story begins with a little boy named Krishna and his grandmother. Krishna appears to be a genius at school and is even caught doing homework for his seniors. The school principal taking note of his extraordinary intellect confronts his grandmother to have his IQ tested. Krishna is cross-examined by a panel of teachers and thats when his grandma realises that the boy is indeed extra-ordinarily brilliant. She fears for his life and decides to move away from the town they were living and heads of to live a secluded life at the mountains.

The boy transforms into a handsome young man drinking Bournvita (which surprisingly doesn’t appear in the star cast considering the amount of screen time it got) and playing at the valley with his horse and a few boys younger to him. Around this time he bumps into Priya – a television journalist from Singapore on an adventure trip at the valley. Love blossoms and the young lad is soon beckoned to Singapore by his lady love. His grandma doesnt like the idea of him going and he begins to rebel. Thats when she tells him the story of his parents (from the prequel Koi Mil Gaya) and how they never returned. Finally, grandma gives in and lets him go to Singapore to get his woman but warns him to conceal his true identity *reminds me of Spiderman here; “with great power comes great responsibility”*

At Singapore due to a slew of incidents and remembering his grandma’s words, he becomes Krrish – a masked superhero saving lives. Priya’s intentions were however different. Realizing his potential, she wants to break the news to the world and make him a phenomenon while saving her career. When Krrish finds this out, he becomes heartbroken and decides to return to his life in the valleys and thats when there is “twist” to the story.

Bottomline

Krrish gets a measly 4/10. The only saving grace is that this is a first attempt at creating an Indian superhero and after having watched it, I am sure the Roshan team would have planned a sequel.

If there’s one site on the internet that kicks ass to this day, its got to be 2Advanced. Eric Jordan and his team have revamped the website after more than 2 years. The new design is the 5th release of the website and is aptly called Attractor. The “thing” about 2Advanced is the rich almost movie-like motion graphics and interactivity.

The good news is that they have finally launched their blog – PLAT4M which promises to give a behind-the-scenes look at the culture of 2Advanced. Here’s looking forward to much more from them.

Russel Peters is a comedian of Indian-Canadian decent. Apparently, he’s been gaining recongnition through the use of internet streaming videos. I got an email this morning from a friend (thanks Rabi) with links to few streams and it was good fun watching. Check it out -

• The white boy
• Indian Slaves
• Italians and body language

Somebody gonna get a hurt real bad.

Aamir and Kajol were reasons enough for me to watch Fanaa in its opening weekend. The last time I watched Aamir’s movie in its opening weekend was Mangal Pandey Rang De Basanti and I went in with a lot of expectation only to come out disappointed and I enjoyed it. This time around, I was careful not to expect anything out of the movie. And…? Well I enjoyed it too despite its skewed story.

It was pretty disappointing to see such poor storytelling in a big budget movie like Fanaa. But that apart, the performances were top class. Aamir is among those rare breed of actors who can emote really well. I mean really well. Which other actor can move the audience to tears without the help of a background score? Kajol, on the other hand has moved up a few notches on my list of beautiful women. The chemistry between the two was fantastic and I wouldn’t mind watching it a second time just for that.

Bollywood has always maintained this larger than life image in its movies and its this very image thats been drawing audiences all over the world. Fanaa is pretty much a Bollywood movie and its only fair to view it from that perspective. I’m not here to discuss which parts of the movie were flawed and how it could’ve been shot better. I’d leave that to the viewer.

So, is the movie worth watching on the big screen? For Kajol’s return, Aamir’s performance, the infectious music, the brilliant colors (lots of blues), it definitely is.

I’ve cast my first vote ever for the 2006 State Assembly Elections in TamilNadu.

This has been a first not only for me but also for my family. Its only recently that we’ve moved back to India (all of us) and I’m pretty happy that we exercised our franchise. We set out early this morning and were pleasantly surprised by the security arrangements made for the voters. My only gripe is that the entire list on the electronic polling machine was in Tamil – a language that I unfortunately cannot read or write. It would be better if they had English in addition to Tamil as it would help a significant section of the population in casting their votes. I did, however, know the symbol of the party I wanted to elect and that helped. Nonetheless, it was a good experience and there is a sense of pride somewhere.

Adobe acquires Macromedia.
P&G acquires Gillette.
AOL and Time Waner merger.
Daimler Benz and Chrysler merger, and the list goes on.

I’m a little worried about these mergers and acquisitions. Its scary imagining the kind of products and services we use everyday being controlled by very few companies in the world. The reason why I’m feeling particularly annoyed is because of the disapperance of Macromedia’s website. Its perhaps one of the first websites I remember browsing and was always a regular reader but recently, much to my dismay, the website has been taken off. vanished. kaput.

I’ve always felt macromedia to be a strong brand and they’ve made some of the best products in the world. Yes Adobe too has some of the finest softwares one can get, but I dont think re-branding macromedia as adobe was a good idea.

Somehow, I also feel mergers and acquisitions slow down innovation. Bigger corporations may have plenty of money to spend, but real innovation is done by smaller groups that are really passionate about what they are building. Too much money can sometimes get in the way of building great products and may even complicate things.

A minor digression..

If you’ve read some of Dan Brown’s books like Angels and Demons, or the more popular Da Vinci Code, you do get an idea about secretive groups like the Knights Templar and Free Masons. In recent years, the Freemasonry (whose origin is quite interesting) has become less a secret society and more of a society with secrets. The Free Masons are known to attract some of the most charismatic and influential people into its fold for carrying out its activities. The best part is most of these people are not aware that they are working for the Free Masons. A Free Mason can be anyone from your local club secretary to the president of a country. There’s a list here on some of the famous ones

Interesting. So, umm.. what are you getting at?

Well, while doing some research on the Free Masons, I came across a term interestingly called New World Order – a plan to rule the world as a unitary government. If the recent mergers and acquistions across the world are an indication, this could well be part of the plan. Its just a thought and thats quite disturbing.

The temperature in Chennai is at all time high and soaring. Its increasingly difficult venture outdoor these days without breaking into a sweat. For those confined to the cosy comforts of your home/office/home-office, it wouldn’t make much difference. However, if you’re the type who has to travel for work, then you’re bloody gonna find it difficult. Worry not, as I’m in the same boat and have a few tips to share.

• Fluids – Drink loads of water. Your body is continously working to keep its temperature down by sweating. This is an automatic process and nature’s way of protecting you from severe heat. In order to keep going, its important that you take in as much water as you can.
  Drink tender coconut water atleast once a day. This is by far, the best natural coolant that you can find. Helps avoid dehydration.
  As you sweat, a lot of body salts are depleted. An easy way to replenish lost salts is to have lemonade or butter-milk mixed with salt.
• Clothing – Cotton and linen are fabrics that breathe and are the best during summer. Wear loose fitting light coloured clothes as they’ll keep you feeling fresh through the day. Pastel shades and cool blues are in. Black and darker colours are out as they tend to show sweat marks once dried.
• Accessories – Wear sunglasses. In addition to making you look cool and sexy, sun glasses play a pivotal role in blocking harmful UV radiation that can lead to cataract.
• The other things – Wash the face regularly with cool water. This helps in cleaning out the pores which can get accumulated with dirt leading to acne and pimples.

These are some simple tips that I’ve been following to beat the heat. If you’ve got similar interesting tips to share, do so by leaving a comment.

So Salman Khan is out on bail. The Indian media has been in a frenzy past couple of days covering every bit of what it feels for a celebrity of his stature to be jailed. Its crazy if you ask me, but I guess thats how news is portrayed in India. If it aint sensational, it aint news!

A five year imprisonment is not the ideal punishment for killing a black buck. Yes, it might set a precedent to prevent poaching of endagered species in future but apart from that, there’s no value add to the problem. The livelihood of thousands of people connected to the film industry is involved as a lot of money (estimated to be over Rs.150 crores) is riding on him. In this scenario, a better punishment would be to slap a hefty fine on him and use that money in wildlife conservation.

Thats mini-me with Salman and dad in the picture. We’ve had the privilege of playing host to Salman many years ago in Dubai and if I remember well, it was shortly after his super-hit film Saajan. Salman has got this sort of cult following in Dubai among the localites especially the women. Whenever he was spotted outside, people would scream and rush to him like a swarm of bees. This was at a time when he was just tasting success. I can only imagine what it would be like now!

Salman’s visit home had also turned me into a sort of mini-celebrity amongst my friends. Some of them thought that he was related to me and I never really bothered to correct that notion. :) Funnily, I was invited to a lot more parties and my friends circle in the apartment block grew! Thank you Salman.

Last night, I was watching the news on Salman’s release. There was chaos outside his residence in Mumbai as hordes of his fans tried to catch a glimpse of their superstar. Salman stood on his terrace and acknowledged the support and love that he got. He began waving and in-between did some funny poses (some Bharathnatyam steps). He might be 40 years old, but he is still that young Salman that I met many years ago basking in the adulation of his fans!

And so, all the good things had to come to an end. BarCampChennai exceeded all our expectations and was one of the best events to have been organized in recent times.

The best part of BarCamps is the people it brings together. Everyone had something to contribute to and it cant get any better than to talk about things you are passionate about. I’ve always had a sceptical view of technology and how it makes people disconnect themselves from things around them. However, all that perception changed after spending 2 whole days at Anna University interacting with people from diverse backgrounds who came together purely for their passion to learn and share knowledge.

How else would anyone have learnt about the students who built a tool that will aggregate all your email and deliver it to your mobile devices; about the simple file tracking device conceptualized for utilizing small scale industries for its production; about news aggregators being built purely for the indian diaspora; about a new programming language being developed that will help visualize all your code; about desinging a large scale citizen database that will help governments in their logistics for delivering services like relief material during calamities, essential commodities for villages etc.; about how to make money blogging (yes!); and may more.

All of this wouldn’t have been possible (at least to the extent that it was) if not for the sponsors who showed tremendous support and encouragement on their part. I would like to thank Kiruba, our sponsors, the team of organizers (who by the way spent a lot of time discussing and shooting emails on Google Groups), the folks at Anna University who put up a fantastic show, making sure that things were running smoothly and all the people who came from different parts of the country to attend and make this event a one of a kind! I would also like to thank Gaurav Bhatnagar of Tekriti Software whom I met in Delhi (and Amit Ranjan of Uzanto, although I didnt get to meet him while in Delhi) for sharing their experiences on conducting BarCampDelhi – the first in India.

Here’s looking forward to much more exciting events in future. Cheers!

I spent some time playing around with Taazza – a yet to launch India focussed news aggregation site. Its pretty much in alpha stage but there are quite a few interesting things that we can look forward to, which I’ll be attempting to cover here.

Taazza is built entirely on Ruby using the Rails framework. There are also some subtle Ajax implementations, which appears to be the “in thing” nowadays in Web 2.0 space. Some of the things that are inherently built into Tazzaa gives it the “fresh” look to the site. By the way, ‘Taazza’ is a word of hindi origin, meaning “fresh”. Arjun and his team are working on giving a fresh approach to viewing news online. News aggregation is pretty much getting crowded, but it will take smart approach to stand out from ones that already exist.

One of the things that I really like about Taazza is this slidebar to narrow your news stories based on time. You can view news stories as fresh as within the hour to upto 2 days – this has been thought of really well as a way to retrieve the freshest of news. Taazza also extracts the latest quotes from all the news sources based on a simple algorithm which gives you a quick run down on who’s talking what.

Taazza also does this pretty impressive integration of Google maps. When you search for a particular topic/region, it displays a list of all the news stories based on the query and also a display of the map with balloons pointing to the source(s) of that news.

So, will Taazza be the next big thing in news aggregation? Its pretty difficult to say. I viewed the site from a designers perspective and there were quite a few glitches in terms of interface design. I strongly feel that the color scheme and the logo does not really gel with the word “fresh” and that needs to be addressed. Apart from all the geek speak, it is after all the ordinary user thats gonna help gauge the popularity of the site.

BarCampChennai is under session and I’ll be attempting to live blog it. This is my first attempt at Live Blogging and will be updating interesting nuggets of each presentation rather than the whole thing. Watch this space for live updates on BarCampChennai.

BarCamp Chennai – Day 1
Kiruba just gave a small informal introduction and started off the session. The room is filling up and there is a lot of energy in here. Amit Ranjan from Uzanto Delhi is giving his experiences of conducting the Delhi BarCamp

Question: Why BarCamp? Shouldn’t it be called a DhabaCamp for Indian audience??

Ganesh Padmanabhan of Voice Snap is giving a presentation on voice mail application. Sounds really interesting. Check it out at voicesnap.com
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Vinu from Emergic is presenting on MyToday.com – “Do you have Firefox?”, he asks!!! He asks again -”Why dont you have firefox here?” :) We learn that the chap from JustSamachar.com was hired for MyToday.com – nice!
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Vijay of LeadStep talks on Project Infranet (Infrastructure Networks) – he’s looking at developing a framework for streamlining citizen data. It’s a debatable issue and needs to be looked into more deeply.
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Balaji talks on a simple file tracking system that can employ small scale industries to develop it. Interesting little experiment and I’d really love to see it work especially after having worked in the RFID scene for quite some time.
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Narain “mixify” of 360 Interactive talks about Web 2.0 or “Live Web”.
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Arjun Ram of Taazza.com, a news aggregation service in the making, asks “Where are the machans?”. Arjun is working on developing a news aggregation site that will allow you to narrow down your news to lower levels like, “I want to know whats happening in Besant Nagar or Mylapore”. Arjun also demos Taazza. *Interestingness*. An iPod Shuffle is in the offing for the best review of Taazza. Write your reviews and post your link on Arjun’s blog
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Suman talks on NPL – a new programming language that he’s developing that will enable you to visualize code. While the discussion is a little too technical for me, I take a break and apply the Law of Two Feet to check out the session at Track 2.
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Track 2 has quite a packed audience. Amit Aggarwal of Digital Inspiration talks on how to make money from blogging. “Its all about writing with passion at the end of the day”. Amit says that there is a lot of money to be made by just blogging. But is blogging really about making money?
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Back on Track 1, Charles from AdventNet talks on the ZOHO Suite of Applications. ZOHO is attempting to replicate the Office Suite for the web. They’ve got a really nice logo. The applications look interesting but they need to work on the user experience to attract more customers onto their site. Well, thats my 2 cents!
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Muthu from Sun Microsystems, Bangalore is gung-ho about xDesign (User Experience Design). Muthu has been working on user heuristics and usability ever since I’ve known him and is really passionate about it, which, is great!

Day 1 : Its a wrap!

BarCamp Chennai – Day 2
By the time I got here, a session was already in progress. The new Microsoft Office 2007 was being demoed and I did catch a glimpse of exciting things that are expected soon.
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Atul Chitnis talks about Mobile Computing. “Sending an sms using one hand will not get you into trouble in a classroom.” Atul evangelizes the use of mobile devices for computing and believes that the desktop is gonna be replaced by smaller devices for infotainment purposes.

BarCampChennai photos are available here

More updates to follow..