Monthly Archives: January 2010

Indian Tiger RIP

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Tiger! Tiger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

As an Indian I am quick to write off a myriad different things about my country,  saying that it won’t work. Today I am writing off our national animal – The Tiger (not to be confused with a certain Tiger woods, who has been a real tiger in bed of late!).

With just 1411 of these wild beasts left alive in India (out of the only 3500 left alive around the globe), this may just be the end of the Tiger. Project Tiger was launched back in 1973 in order to conserve these animals; the numbers increased from 1827 to around 3500 in the 90s. However, the number dwindled to 1411 in the last decade.

Save Our Tigers is a campaign to raise awareness and concern about the state of the national animal. Do visit the website and make your pledge.

Honestly I don’t know whether my blogging about tigers could make a difference; for its just a form of opinionated inaction”

iPad or a bigger iPod touch

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Since half of the world and almost all of twitter was in a iPad/iSlate frenzy yesterday; I have decided to bank on the internet trend and get my blog a few hits today ;-)

To the uninitiated (really? You haven’t heard of the Apple iPad yet? Wake up!), an Apple iPad is a 9.7″x7″ touch device which is barely half-an-inch thick and allows you to play audio, watch TV, video, run applications off App Store and surf the internet on 3G, cellular networks and of course Wi Fi. It comes in capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB and runs a 1 GB processor.

It also boasts of a finger print resistant coating (oh yeah, now i could kill someone with an iPad and not worry about those nasty prints for CSI) on the screen.

Well the price is pretty high $499 to $899

Honestly, I feel that my 16GB iPod touch is just a smaller iPad!! Features aren’t too different, maybe applications later would make all the difference! Carrying the device maybe a pain, afterall it isn’t a netbook and it can’t fit in your pocket.

On the marketing front, Apple got plenty of free Internet Buzz…lucky them! But naming could have been different iPad sounds like a sanitary pad!

Even though it doesn’t have a camera, is over priced, cannot multitask, is just a bigger iPod touch…i’d still want it ‘coz its cool and its from Apple (sigh! I can already head Admiral Ackabar screaming: It’s a  ’Marketing’ trap!)

The Charge of the Life Brigade

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Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:

The lines above have been taken from Tennyson’s The charge of the Light Brigade. The very same lines are a part of my GTalk status for a few days now. They reflect very well a soldier’s duty to follow orders without questioning them even if these very same orders may lead to their doom!

Most of us admire and envy a soldier’s life filled with discipline,  honor and valor.  A soldier’s life and the life of his fellow men often depends on following orders without fail or deviation. For people like me, who love to question each decision/order in order to understand the big picture; an army career would have been a difficult choice.

But, just putting the same lines in the perspective of life and replacing the decision maker as God, i suddenly feel that unwittingly all of us just ‘do and die’. Whenever unfortunate events occur in our life, people comfort us by telling that something better is in store and that we should not question it for it is the part of God’s big plan.

But what if, Some one had blunder’d, and the big plan is but a false dream? Then of course, we are just doing and dying only to be forgotten in time…

PS-Apologies if this is a very philosophical and confusing post to read!

Mumbai Local

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Everyday, my local train leaves Dadar station at 8.41 AM to reach Thane at 9.10 AM Precisely at 9.08, we’d all get up from our seats and lineup on in such a way that the incoming rush at Thane station doesn’t kill us.

As the train draws to a halt, a swarm of screaming people glides in…hurting unsuspecting individuals standing at the door, for they thought that the crowd would allow them to get down first. Its terrifying at times, people can get seriously hurt.

Having lived most of my days in not-so-cluttered environs, I fail to understand why would people risk their lives to reach to their workplaces in time. Is work that important? Probably, India’s Got Talent could pick a few gymnasts from the mumbai local horde!

Okay, having scared the reader enough of the local train crowd, i’d bring back today evening’s incident which made me feel different about the same people who seem so mad each morning.

On my return journey tonite, the train stopped at Vikhroli…a blind man was trying to find his way on the platform…almost bumping at the pillars or the seats. Every now and then a passerby would guide him…and save him from hurting himself. Every few seconds i felt that he might hurt himself…but someone always was around to help him out…While my train started moving on, a passerby just held this man’s walking stick and guided him all the way out.

These are the same people I am afraid of each morning in the train; and now I respect them each day too.
Someone was absolutely correct when he wrote:
Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahan. Zara hat ke zara bach ke. Ye hai bombay meri jaan