Rooting for the Slum(Under)dog

Underdog : A participant in a fight, conflict, or game who is not expected to win.

Ever wonder why most of us root for the underdog, is it because those who are viewed as disadvantaged arouse our sense of fairness and justice. Its also true that we tend to believe that underdogs put forth more effort than top-dogs.We associate our selves with the underdog because of our inner urge to succeed against all odds, it's almost like rooting for ourselves.

In one study using the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the participants were given the same essay about the history of the area, but with different maps to reference — one showing Palestine as smaller than Israel (and thus, the underdog) and the other showing Israel as smaller. No matter what scenario the participants were presented with, they consistently favored the underdog to win.

US President 'elect' Barack Obama a self-professed underdog maintained that he was the underdog, throughout the Democratic Presidential primaries against Hillary Clinton, until he became the front runner for the Presidential race itself. Then it was John McCain who took over the underdog status just before the polls in November last year. McCain said in one of his rallies in October when Obama was way ahead of him in most of the opinion polls- "I love being the underdog. You know, every time that I've gotten ahead, somehow I've messed it up". Was this his last attempt to have a fighting chance in a lost battle by way of appealing to the voters reminding them that now he and not Obama was the underdog.

Many of us including me who followed the Bigg Boss show on television last year supported the winner Ashutosh Kaushik, whose only claim to fame was his surprise win in MTV. Roadies 5.0. Ashutosh a 'Dhaba' owner from Saharanpur in western Uttarpradesh became an overnight celebrity winning nearly Rs. 1 Crore (~ $250,000/-) in prize money as the winner of Bigg Boss. He played his small town underdog image to the hilt during the show appealing to the aam janta to vote for him, and they did as we all know now. His onscreen chemistry with a former miss world also would have drawn audiences towards him who saw someone who was one of them winning the heart of a celebrity.

I recently watched "Slumdog Millionaire" an amazing tale of triumph of the underdog against a society which is not able to believe that a lowly "Chaiwaala" from the gutters of Mumbai's Slums can know all the answers to 'Who wants to be a Millionaire'.The movie however is much more than just the story of an underdog and the television game show.

Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) teams up with Co-director Loveleen Tandan and Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy who wrote Slumdog Millionaire with the novel 'Q & A' by Vikas Swarup as the premise to mount a truly impressive undertaking with masterful storytelling finesse.Brutal, Dark, heartbreaking and madly romantic this movie is a celebration of the Indian spirit with some great performances from all characters especially the amateur young actors. The chase sequences in the Mumbai slums and the teenage gangsters remind you of some of the scenes in 'City of God', theres even a touch of Dickens' Oliver Twist in some of the characterisations. 

The music score by A.R Rehman is sensational to say the least. O..Saya and Jai ho are simply superb. Overall a great movie. 

This reminds me of one instance from class 12th when I was representing my class in the intra school quiz competition. I remember somehow managing to get into the team, answering some impromptu questions my class teacher threw at me and convincing him that I was good enough to be part of the quiz team. On the day of the quiz, no one from the other teams gave us a chance as we were amateurs as compared to some of the participants from other classes who had represented the school in many inter school competitions. The look on the faces of the other teams was one of surprise and disbelief when we kept hitting the buzzer and got all the questions right. It felt great winning that quiz, that too with a huge margin, its one of the most cherished memories I have from School. 

The underdog had won again !!

हिन्दी..एक प्रयास

यूरोप में काफ़ी समय बिताने पर एक बात का मुझे विशवास हो गया है के यहाँ के लोग अपनी मात्रु भाषा को काफ़ी महत्त्व देते हैं। यहाँ हर चीज़ उनकी भाषा में होती है चाहे वोह सड़क पर लगे बोर्ड हो या फ़िर उनके अखबार, अंग्रेज़ी न तो देखने मिलती हैं न सुनने। यह लोग बिना अंग्रेज़ी जाने अपना पूरा जीवन बड़े आराम से व्यतीत कर सकते हैं, इतना ही नही वह अभियांत्रिकी, विज्ञान व चित्कित्सा शात्स्त्र के शेत्रो में अनुसंधान अपनी भाषा में सफलता पूर्वक करते आए है । जर्मनी, रूस, ग्रीस, फ्रांस ऐसे उधंरण हैं जहाँ राष्ट्रीय भाषा का महत्त्व जीवन के हर पहलु में दिखाई देता है। इनका साहित्य, संगीत, सिनेमा सब कुछ उनकी भाषा में इतना लोकप्रिय अवं विकसित है के उन्हें किसी और भाषा को जाने की आवश्यकता नही पड़ती।

भारत में हम कितने हिन्दी, बंगाली, कन्नड़ इतियादी समकालीन साहित्यकारों के नाम जानते हैं । शायद बहुत कम। और कितने समकालीन अंग्रेज़ी साहित्यकारों को हम जानते हैं...उस सूची के लिए ऐसे १० ब्लॉग पोस्ट भी कम पड़ेंगे।
इस बात से किसी को इनकार नही के भारत में बीपीओ अवं आई टी शेत्रो की सफलता में अंग्रेज़ी भाषा का बहुत बड़ा हाथ है, पर इसका यह मतलब भी नही के हम अपनी भाषाओँ को महत्व न दे। हमे अंग्रेज़ी में आपस में बात करता देख हमारे उरोपीय क्लायन्ट मुझे कई बार यह सवाल पूछ चुके हैं के हम अपनी भाषा में क्यों बात नही करते।

यह मेरा हिन्दी ब्लॉग पोस्ट लिखने का पहला प्रयास था, में देखना चाहता था के क्या आज भी मै अपनी सोचने की भाषा में कुछ लिख सकता हूँ या नही। हम अंग्रेज़ी भाषा को ब्लॉग्गिंग की स्वाभाविक भाषा क्यूँ मान लेते हैं, आम तौर पर कोई भी अपने सोचने की भाषा में लिखता है क्यूँ के वह अपने आप को उस भाषा में बेहतर अभिव्यक्त कर सकता है। पर शायद में अंग्रेज़ी में ब्लॉग करते हुए अधिक सरलता के साथ अपने विचार अभिव्यक्त कर सकता हूँ..यह एक वास्तविकता है जिसका मुझे खेद है..पर शायद भविष्य में यह बदल जाए इसी उम्मीद के साथ। अगला ब्लॉग अंग्रेज़ी में :)

A minor hiccup...a lesson learnt

Small Effort High Impact items are something project managers love to implement as part of their projects as these small items give them an opportunity to earn some brownie points from the project sponsors.
IT teams in any organisation are always trying to justify the high cost of deploying new modulues to the powers that be by citing complexity of the requirement, quality assurance practices testing efforts etc..and when they come across something which can be put into production with minimal effort but addresses a critical need of the Business team they jump on it without further thought. This works in most cases, but sometimes in their enthusiasm the complete impact of the small change is not analysed thoroughly it can turn out to be a much bigger change to implement than thought earlier.
I too succummed to such a "small change high impact" situation recently. Inspired by Amitabh Bacchhan I too thought of ending my blogging hiatus and to re-start writing on my blog. The first thing that came to my mind was to change the template on my blog to give it a fresh new feel. It was just a matter of logging onto my blog admin site and selecting a new template and I would get a brand new look for my now quite old blog in a matter of minutes.
I previewed many templates but could not make up my mind on which one will best suit my blog, then finally decided to keep almost everything same and just change the base color to Blue.

Changes done I was going through some old posts, when I realised something was amiss. The regular items I used to have on my blog were not there.I quickly went back to the html code of the blog..and then it struck me. In my enthusiasm to change the layout I did not take into account the customisations I had done to the base template of the blog, all my adsense ads snippets, my sitemeter, my google search box, my links etc all were gone. Above all I had no backup of the earlier code. The blogger.com html generator is not intelligent enough to know what content is user genereted and needs to be retained and what needs to be re generated.

Then began the frantic search for things I had added on the blog over the years - Google ads, site meter etc..However this gave me a chance to clear the clutter I was begining to buildup on my page. My revenue earnings from ads since the last 4 years have not even reached double figures :( do I really need to care about ads. So I have retained only basic advertising just to give the blog a better look (btw who am I fooling)

Yes, I too once dreamt of making millions from my blog ad empire, I was young and wanted to tryout my hand at earning a fortune with the then latest buzzword - "online advertising". Now that its very clear the my millions are not going to come from this channel atleast and the only people who will make money from those ads are the google guys, I have retained some ads just for fun :)
After spending a good part of a Sunday evening fixing my blog I was able to restore and in some cases improve the additonal content on the blog. A lesson was re-learnt in the process..Now I have a backup of the code and all the posts of the blog as well.

Lets start blogging again :)

Lost/Delayed Baggage ..a Traveler's Nightmare

I used to dread this frequent travelers experience as I had heard many stories of delayed/ lost/ damaged bags from 'veteran traveler' colleagues and hoped I would not be subject to any such experience..

With the steady increase in the number of people traveling these days there is a lot of pressure on airport infrastructure across the world to make sure the baggage is managed/transferred to their respective flights. Frankfurt Airport is a major hub for transfers within Europe and to North America, it handles around 200,000 pieces of incoming and outgoing luggage in one day- each of which reaches its destination within 45 minutes - all this is possible using an automated conveyor system that reads the bar coded information on each baggage tag and directs it to its destination. During this time the ISO 9001:2000 certified system also calculates the shortest route to the destination extraction point.

And as luck would have it my first brush with delayed baggage was at Frankfurt airport, but I still believe the claims of Fraport AG which manages Frankfurt airport about their sophisticated baggage system as the issue with my luggage was caused due to a booking error.

Before I talk about my delayed baggage experience I'll narrate a few narrow escapes.

The first one was in October 2006, I was returning from Lagos (Nigeria) to Mumbai via Dubai by an Emirates flight, it seems I had stuffed the bag too much or that that bag suddenly decided to retire. The timing wasn't right for that as Lagos-Mumbai is almost an 18 hr trip including the stopover in Dubai and any bag which decides to give up in that sector is bad news.Well somehow the zipper of the bag gave way and it opened during transit with the lock in the zipper still in place it simply lifted from the sides as if wanting to take off on its own and not wait for the 8+ hours in Dubai. Thanks to the Emirates ground staff in Dubai they put the bag into a giant plastic bag.
I arrived in Mumbai unaware of the plight of my poor 3 year old bag..time ticked by as I waited for my luggage..and when the crowd started thinning around the baggage claim area and the minutes passed by, I started getting a bit anxious. I tried to think of pleasant things and made small talk with Sunil my colleague who was traveling with me.
When finally the belt stopped..I knew this was it. I went up to the lost luggage counter and was about to fill in the form when I thought of looking for the bag one last time...It was lying there in the corner in all its misery wrapped in a plastic body bag..ready for its last journey.I checked if everything was okay and somehow managed to secure the bag again with the zipper. Narrow escape I should say.

My next brush with the lost baggage situation was in Muscat in early March 2007.
I had taken a Gulf Air flight from Bangalore to Bahrain via Muscat, there were just 7-8 people who disembarked in Muscat, I was feeling happy that I'll breeze though immigration and be on my way to a quick nap before I start work. In the baggage claim area there were hardly a dozen bags doing the rounds on the belt...my new black 360d roller bag wasn't in sight.
The belt stopped, I located the lost luggage counter and informed them the details..they made a few calls and they asked me to hang on. After 15 mins, what seemed to be an hour the belt started moving again..with just my bag on it. It seems someone overlooked the Muscat tag and the bag was on its way to Bahrain, before it was retrieved in the nick of time. False alarm this time.

Then came the D day..
The 'Law of Averages' caught up with me and I finally lost my baggage(temporarily though) for the first time.
This was in late march 2007, I was on a 4 day trip to Brussels via Frankfurt on a Lufthansa flight from Bangalore.
Due to some last minute confusion on the flight timings the Lufthansa ground staff in Bangalore 'through' checked in my luggage to Brussels on the 9.40 AM flight from Frankfurt to Brussels, but somehow couldn't give my boarding pass due to some technical hitch as I was also confirmed on the 12.20 PM flight which wasn't cancelled as yet. I was told to collect the boarding pass in Frankfurt for the onward journey.
When I reached the transfer desk at Frankfurt airport they had no clue what to do with my situation. They directed me to the Ticketing counter where I paid some flight change charge and got the boarding pass for the 9.40 Am flight with less than 45 mins to go.
In this confusion my luggage was held by the system as the boarding pass issue didn't update in time. I reached Brussels around 11 AM but my baggage stayed in Frankfurt. I filled my first lost luggage application, and it seems it was quite a regular affair for those guys as they handled it quite efficiently. I was told the luggage will be delivered to my hotel by 4 PM..
With a heavy Ultra Sparc-Sun Solaris laptop server and a few documents in my hand baggage I was not carrying any personal stuff with me, I but somehow survived thanks to the Hotel. However I got my baggage only by around 8PM..paying the price of a last minute change when I could have reached Brussels with my luggage by 1.30 PM had I not decided to change to the 9.40 AM flight..

But as they say in Spanish 'Todo es para bien...siempre' - "What ever happens..happens for good..Always"

Maybe it was better to have learnt about the process...with Lufthansa than with Biman Bangladesh.

Holy Kingdom

My visit to Saudi Arabia in March this year was my first visit to the middle east, not counting Dubai and Bahrain airport transits as a visit.

The King Khaled Airport in Riyadh was once the largest airport in the world and the vast landscaped interior courtyards, the huge terminal buildings and the numerous moving walkways are the proof for it.

Tight security and the tough looking airport police greet you at the emigration counters, this in a way symbolizes life in the KSA and you encounter several such situations during your stay.
Riyadh is a modern city, an oasis in the middle of the desert but there weren't many trees around the place, you can sense the urban sprawl with its dull beige colored buildings that dot the landscape.
The Olaya district in the city centre is abuzz with commercial activity, huge malls, commercial complexes line the roads leading to the 302ft tall skyscraper the 'Kingdom Centre'. There is a high speed lift that takes you 99 floors in 1 minute and the view of the entire city from the viewing bridge is breathtakingly amazing.
There is something in this country which I feel is unique..and that is the strict separation of the two genders. They have separate multistoried 'Ladies (only) Malls' , Ladies only floors and Family hours in common entry malls. The food court outlets in the general area are also divided in gents and ladies sections.

Life in Saudi is measured mostly by Sharia, or ultra conservative Muslim law, of which the Saudi version includes women not being allowed to drive, wearing the 'abaya' (traditional floor length long sleeve garment, what we call the Burqa in the subcontinent) at all times, forbidding all alcohol and virtually all other Western “vices”. Cigarettes are about the only vice allowed in the kingdom. There are no theaters, no public bowling alleys and no bars or nightclubs. Some hotels have private bowling alleys, and some larger 'foreigner' compounds have a small theater for movie viewing.
The foreigners also have to abide by the dress code of the land, I would see a group of white women go out of the hotel with the the Abaya and head scarf (the hijaab) every morning however the viel is not required to be worn by westerners the local women were 'veiled' most of the time.

Islamic law dictates 5 prayer times a day; sunrise(around 5 am), Afternoon (around 1 pm), mid afternoon(around 4 pm), and sunset (Around 6 pm) and late evening (around 8 pm). the timings are indicative for the subcontinent, these timings differ as per the daylight timigs for the region. In most Middle Eastern countries when the prayer calls are given the faithful go to the mosque and perform their ritual prayers and then return to work or whatever they were doing at the time of prayer call. Businesses continue to operate, and life goes on as usual.
In Saudi, however, when prayer time comes, the entire economy comes to a halt! Restaurants shut their doors, the streets are deserted, shops down shutters or shopkeepers simply leave them open and go to the mosque when its time for the Salah (Arabic for Namaaz) things come to a complete stop until the prayers are over . People plan their day out in the public or downtown around the prayer schedules. I met a couple of westerners who said they carried a prayer schedule with them at all times. Here I saw more mosques in that 1 week than I had seen in my whole life put together. There were mosques in every lane, every commercial establishment including petrol stations, Banks, Hotels and even shopping malls.

The cars were big, powerful and beautiful and there was a clear sign of a throbbing oil economy everywhere. With a litre of petrol costing an equivalent of Rs. 8, you dont have to worry about the mileage of ur 4.2 Litre SUV. Boys as young as 14 could be seen zipping down the roads in their GMC V8 monsters. There was opulence everywhere..except in the middle class south asian neighborhoods, the narrow, dirty lanes in those areas were like any street in central Mumbai and I felt safer here than I did on those superhighways and upmarket districts of the city.
It was a relief when I stepped into the boarding area of the airport past the emigration counters. this was another world altogether, you could see many uncovered female faces, the expats had shed their abaya's and were back in their skirts and tops, they were ready to go back to the free world !!

UnGoogled !!

Thomas L. Friedman's book "The World is Flat" mentions In-forming as one of the Flatteners which have made the world a flat place and brought an equilibrium in the world where a University Professor in Cambridge has access to the same amount of research information as a kid in Cambodia.

With the kind of information now available on the internet it is almost impossible to go around without a search engine. If you are not using any search tool you are bound to get lost in the labyrinth that is the internet with its seemingly infinitely intricate network of the web equivalent of alleyways and streets.Its not similar to getting lost in a big city like New York where you can get around by asking locals and Indian taxi drivers for directions.

You can survive though without a search engine, memorizing or saving your most often visited sites in the favorites list of your browser. If you use a web portal you can get access to free email, news, movie clips, music, e-shopping all in one place and there wouldn't be much need of pretty much anything else.But if you want to look up some information and want instant results without having to read through hundreds of probable websites you will require a search engine.

I and hundreds of thousands of people around the world use a search engine on a regular basis looking for any and every kind of conveivable information that a human mind can think of. Yahoo, MSN and Google being the most commonly used search tools.

Google by far exceeds any other search engine in terms of popularity with its ability to bring up the most relevant sites from your search key words. Larry Page and Sergey Brin ( Google Founders) challenged the way traditional search engines worked on the internet looking for key words from your search.Google follows a Page Ranking technology (a mathematical formula ranks pages on the basis of how many other web pages are linked to it ) that combines with an analysis of page content, which determines which pages are the most relevant to the specific search being conducted. This enables Google to return the most accurate and relevant results.

I cannot imagine a world without Google nor can most of the post Year 2000 MBA passouts who have referred/copied/pasted/lifted most of their assignments/term papers/project reports from the results available from Google.

On an average I would do about 10 searches on Google and the max could be as high as 30 a day. I have searched for things and got results for most abstract things.I lookup words, phrases, history, geography, technology and even news on google.You can say I am a FAN of the whole concept that Google is all about with Gmail, Orkut, Picassa etc, all Google products adding to the whole experience.

Now imagine in the year 2006 a person working for one of the top IT companies in India in a managerial position that requires sufficient amount of Functional and Technical knowledge. What are the chances that he/she hasn't yet heard about Google. I would say almost negligible, that too if that person does not have access to the Internet, does not read any news paper and never watches the news on television.

I recently had the honor of meeting such a Google ignorant person ( who has full time internet access and is understandably quite well read too) who had not even heard about Google.
In a meeting I asked that person to look up some thing that we were discussing on Google, it came as a shock to me when i was asked to spell it for her. I had to explain what Google was and what it can be used for. Its almost as if not knowing Tarla Dalal when you are running a Cookery school.

I can only imagine what that person has missed till now, an entire phase in technological advancement has passed her by without she having the faintest idea if such a thing existed. Had she been in any other industry it would have been perfectly okay for her not to know about Google.When you work for a world class organization that is one of the flag bearers of the Indian Technological revolution the world over, this cannot be excused.

I hope with her initiation into the wonderful world of Google she has attained enlightenment from the darkness of ignorance and has taken to Googling by now and www.Google.com has replaced www.johnabraham.com as the first site on her address drop down.

PS: Images of John Abraham had started to load onto her laptop's internet explorer screen during that meeting- ofcourse by mistake - to her sheer embarrasment.

Status Update !!

December was a very eventful month...

- traveled the length and breadth of the country.
- spent most of my savings,
- met almost all my relatives, whom I hadnt met in years.
- got myself a completely new wardrobe....well not completely but almost.
- put on a made up smile for more time than i have done in my entire life put together.
- got a 3 hr movie shot with me as one of the central characters.
- was the centre of all attention in my family for more than a month.
- was stuffed with fattening food till i choked.
- felt anxious, sad, elated and happy all at the same time.
- bought my first, (can u believe it) "scooter".. a Honda activa actually.That was the official end of my biking days :(
- became a double from a single. :)

In short I got married !!!