A ride to my solitude putting my "Thinking Helmet" on

It was drizzling and I was driving... Went to Spencer Plaza, loved the place, has its charm on it's own way. Kinda cozy but very local and close to my heart. Got stuck at landmark, found my lost love to books which used to be my best friend once upon a time before these IT days :D.

I remember, it was books which was always with me in every moments of my life, when I was sad to cheer me up, when I was happy to make me happier, when I was alone to give me company, when I was with friends to provide me enough wisdom to continue random discussion. I am talking about the days when Google was not part of my life, and trust me, Google is such a spoilsport in that way! That too in smartphones. Very annoying sometimes, you are having a discussion with your friends, suddenly someone pops out a smart phone and then the Google search result - end of the discussion. Kind of looses the charm of argument over a topic where you try to support your opinion with some fact from your limited wisdom and random bluffs and everyone fights for it. Most of the time, I remember, eventually the main topic used to get away from the discussion and some other random topic took the place. The transition was so smooth, sometime you wouldn't realize. Also, eventually the people who started the actual discussion got away and their supporters continued to fight. So, it goes like this, you make statement A, your friend objects and makes statement B as the supporting clause, and then you starts arguing about the justification of statement B and someone else makes statement C to support statement A then you take the back sit and other two people continue from B to C to D and so on.... Now what you don't realize that it deviates from the actual statement A which gets lost over the time and a new set of people might continue fighting on statement Z. It's like the genetics, heredity stuff we read in biology... Children gets 50% genes of each of the parent, and then grand children will have 25% of their grand parents and so on.. It's like, you know that you are carrying the legacy but then you don't know how much of purity of the actual idea exists there. Story of killing a small insects by me has a possibility of becoming a legendary epic story of fighting till death to kill some monsters to my great great great (continues) grand children. I guess that's how we got most of the epic stories about our great great ancestors. Might or might not be true, but who cares as long it is entertaining :)

Now! did you realize the even my chain of thoughts got shifted from what I was actually talking about - books. Well it can be titled as "chain of thoughts" which has a high probability of becoming "chain of wild thought" depending on my imagination capability and that is where books were with me in those days. It taught me to think, imagine, dream and even day-dream (which I still do)... It used sooth the pain of getting punished for not doing homework due to reading some good story.It used feel so worth to let go your homework and the aftereffects for reading stories, comics or anything random which not tagged as "textbook". Remembrance of old days...

Lost my way home while coming back, went near Parry's to Perrier Bridge to some army area to Marina Beach to Beach Road and my way home - leads to a 40 km ride. Amazing road - no traffic at 11 pm AND... it was drizzling... Now that's another interesting experience. I call it as "I put my thinking helmet on". Whenever I am on the road with less or no traffic, no hassle of break-clutch-accelerator trio, as in, a smooth ride, the "chain of thought" process as mentioned earlier gets triggered. That is like my own solitude in motion, moments of look into myself inner-self, a small break or quick disconnect from normal/random activity of my own life. Quite a few times it helped me to think through stuff which otherwise was not happening. So whenever I am stuck, here I go putting my "Thinking Helmet" on a ride to my solitude through the amazing roads of lovely city called Chennai  :)

FIFA 2010 songs: So many variations...

AND THE INDIAN VERSION:

Aamir Khan's surprise visit to Sourav's house in Kolkata

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



Part 4:

Doesn't matter what you drive but how you drive

This video made me very upset this morning. I mean we know all the bad things of life but sometime just forget. When the same thing is in front of us, we get shocked. This video is so sad but still don't know how many people would learn from it. I mean rash-driving, drink&drive, drive without wearing seat belts are so common nowadays, seems like breaking the rules itself has become a rule. People don't understand that even though these are rules but still they are for our own safety. In fact I would say, these safety measures have become rules because of a huge number of irresponsible, careless and stupid people who become the cause of death to others.



And I would say the punishment should be far stricter and harder that what it is right now. Because whatever that person did is irreversible and irrecoverable. You can't bring that baby back who was an angel to her parents nor you could heal the pain of her parents. But the trick is unless you feel the same pain, you won't learn and will do the same mistakes again - rash-driving, drink&drive etc. So it should be responsibility of the authority that you feel the same pain, realize what a big blunder you have done, learn from that and ensure that it won't happen again. Because if you were driving and survived after the accident caused by you and the other person is dead - one thing you must remember, you have take a life which by no means your job. It could have been YOU but God has given you another chance. So respect that decision. Also I notice that, nowadays people are too lazy to go to give a driving exam to get a license and bribe people to get a driving license. Not sure how many of them would realize what is responsible driving. Hats off to the corruptions which puts spices on this fire. But at the end of all these shortcuts you avail to drive on the road, you miss the vital point, you yourself are putting your life into danger. So my humble request to all the drivers and aspiring drivers, PLEASE think about it twice. Because it doesn't matter what you drive but how you drive.

KGEC - The Beginning, my first iMovie project

This is something I wanted to do for a long time. But could not make it till last night. Finally I am here with my first iMovie video. But life was not that simple to get it done. I had a tough night learning and fighting with the features of iMovie to get what exactly I wanted. Could not find it helpful while editing the audio for it. Thanks to Chandan, he helped me with this by introducing me to Audacity . Also since I was trying to edit an mp3, I had to download LAME MP3 encoder along with audacity. Yah I know, I know, it is going to be little technical. But that is just to express my emotions. I am really happy that I made it finally. Still long way to go. Wait n watch, there are a lot to come yet.

500

I am not a frequent blogger. But truly speaking that is what I would like to be. So many things I want to write, I want to tell others, but somehow doesn't happen. Here is another video which made me think for a while that how we take our life, luxury and amenities for granted and just do stupidest things with the precious thing - money. Please put a little pause on your fast moving life and think through it.

Gurdas Maan-cycle new song

Dark Side of indian media

Something which made me think about the power of media and its actual (mis)use... It is an interview of P. Sainath

Reverse Bungee Jumping Accident at Banerghatta Road, Bangalore - A Lesson I Learned

I like adventure sports. Whenever I get time, I try to go out for various adventurous activities - trekking, moon light mountain biking, night trekking & rock climbing, parasailing blah blah... The latest addition to that list (which I want to be endless) is BUNGEE JUMPING. This is something I wanted to do for a long time and when I got the news that it is happening in Bangalore my adrenaline became high. I was thrilled, here comes the opportunity. I called up friends, mailed them. Finally found 6 more interested fellows and went for bungee jumping, yapeee. It was organized by HeadRush adventure sport organizers at paint ball arena, near Banerghatta Road. We reached there at around 11 a.m. The place was crowded by the participants. There was long queue for registration. We managed to get our registration done and were informed that our turn would be at around 4.30 p.m. When I looked around I was little worried about the arrangement. I was expecting proper cushions or air bags covering the ground below the place where bungee jumping was happening. This is how I saw it happening in any other places. Otherwise it generally happens on the top of a lake or swimming pool. But there was only a small net fixed by some bamboo sticks which hardly solves any purpose. They have another crane which was used for reverse bungee jumping. The difference between bungee and reverse bungee is in case of bungee you will be jumping from a crane or tower.

In case of reverse the participant will be thrown from ground and you go up and then come down.

To my surprise for reverse bungee there was no net at all. Also I did not see any sort of medical kits or ambulance or emergency vehicle. I was not comfortable at all seeing all these, was getting an weird feeling that something was not right. But still my thrill had taken over my worries and I was all set to do bungee. We had to spend the whole day before our turn, so went to a resort close by. There we had good fun, did swimming, played TT, Badminton, carom etc and had a good lunch and then we went back to the place. When we reached there we heard that the bungee jumping had been cancelled. A severe accident happened just before we reached there. One fellow was doing the reverse bungee and his strap and hooks in the jacket got broken while he was coming down and he fall fat on the ground from a height of around 80 - 100 feet. The poor fellow was from Chennai. Sadly there was no help came from the organizers as they did not even have any equipment to handle such an emergency situation. Later few participants helped him and brought him to nearby hospital. Later at night I heard the news that he was no more. May his soul rest in peace. The sad part was when we asked the organizers why it was cancelled, they told us that, it was because of some technical problem. We heard about this accident from the other people present there. I was so surprised that, even after such a bad thing happened because of the organizers' negligence, there was a considerable effort from them to hide the fact and pretending as if nothing happened. When we did the registration, we had to sign a form stating that I am doing all these on my own wish etc etc. Everybody signed that and put there life to the organizers' hand, trusted them. But it seems they were least bothered to take care to participants' lives. They were more busy to collect money and get the forms signed by people. I did not realize that they will go to such extreme by ignoring the safety concerns just to increase the profits. So here is my take on this, from now on whenever I will go for such event, first and the most important thing I would check is, how the organizers ensure the safety of the participants and what are measures they have taken to handle the emergency situation. This would lead to the next item in my checklist. Since in such activities you have to put your life in the hand of others (literally) and you have to trust them, I will ensure that whether they are really worth for that, are they really trustworthy? You have to draw line conciously between having fun and madness. Otherwise even the safest adventure like this (according to the statistics) could be fatal.

Ignite Bangalore 2

Time for me to talk. Its IGNITE BANGALORE 2. I am going to talk there about some of my usual crazy thoughts :) . I hope it would be lots of fun filled event and I cant avoid that from my life :D. So hope to see you there. Details you can get in the above link.

The previous events' videos are here:
http://igniteboulder.com/

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/09/ignite-boston-4----videos-uplo.html

http://ignite.oreilly.com/see-it.html

Presentations from Ignite Bangalore 1:
http://www.slideshare.net/psridharp/ignite-bangalore-sridhar-pabbisetty-presentation 

http://www.slideshare.net/ruongo/presentation-by-rupa-patil-at-ignite-bangalore-november-2008-presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/dineshtantri/collaborative-enterprises-enterprise-20-beyond-ignite-bangalore-presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/rohan_kini/ignite-bangalore-surviving-a-bicycle-commute-in-bangalore-presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/Anbusivam/world-may-end-tonight-ignite-bangalore-presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/sshreyas/future-of-user-interfaces-presentation-768100
 

Art of Living - quick visit

Recently I went to Art Of Living Foundation (AOLF), Bangalore. It was really a good place. Will find your peace of mind. The surroundings are pretty good. I found myself really relaxed and comfortable there. It was sunday. Every sunday they have some yoga and meditation program. That would relieve me from my tiredness of journey. It was well maintained.
After some time roaming around we went inside the main temple. It was amazing. Gave me such a soothing feeling, like I could stay there forever. It was an amazing feeling. Such a great ambience. It was like silence is everywhere. People around me are physically present there but their mind is not there. May be flying around anywhere and everywhere in the universe. It forced me to be silent for that moment, forget every other thing and made me go deeper inside me and think why I am here and who/what am I.At the same time made me confused with so many other questions like what is my purpose of life, what is my responsibility and what am I doing to fulfill that, blah blah. Decided to step back. Came out from the deep thinking.

But one thing came to my mind which surprised me a lot. I felt, that is what attracts people to this kind of organizations - Peace of Mind. People can forget all their worries here once they are in, like the Utopia - country of dreams. And that is what we seek throughout our lives. Nobody wants to be unhappy, stressed, disturbed. This is also a kind of addiction. Addiction to God. Trying to get closure to Him. And why? To get peace of mind. But that is kind of contradictory. To get what you seek you are leaving all your social belongings and responsibilities behind, getting over all your existing relationship to form a new relationship with GOD. Is that what the almighty really wanted us to do? Being selfish to get my own pleasure and let others feel the pain of separation. There is no value of the existing relationship? You are moving to this way because you found it better for you than the existing one. What is the guarantee that if you will find something better tomorrow, you will quit the almighty? I know all this religious activities are still achievable along with the normal life. Then why people want to move towards the complete devotion? leaving behind other people who care for them and want to be cared by them?

Luckiest Guy on Earth (Seems not Fake)

God, Human, Belief and Trust

Who are we? Who am I? What are we doing? Why? What do we want to do? What makes your identity? Never mind... People say God will help us. Also we say God is within us i.e. the almighty stays among his followers. Does this mean believing in God and trusting each other are same. Then why don't we help each other? And if we go to help somebody, why they look for reasons not to rely on it? Does this mean God never exists? But we do exist. And we do believe in God.


In mythology Lord Vishnu is often depicted as reclining "Sheshanaga" - the coiled, many headed snake floating on cosmic waters that represents the peaceful universe.





We human beings before birth are also in mothers womb floating, connected and surrounded by "the umbilical cord", placenta, arteries, veins etc.

That adds on to the reasons to believe that God is inside us. Then WHY???