Lost temples of south India

My wife, archana, has put together a wonderful post on the lost temples of south India and the times of Raja Raja chola. A must watch video for people with an interest in ancient Indian history!

I have been tagged

ok! I HAVE BEEN TORTURED...sorry tagged!!

..by my own wife :) ..aint that nice!

Now, what do I do ?

I pass on the legacy!



1.Grab the book nearest to you, turn on a random page and find random line.
* Holy mary! mother of God!
2.Stretch your left arm out as far as you can.
* small noise.. not a crack but felt more like a gentle tap on the table

3. What is the last thing you watched on TV?
* Out of time (2003)

4.Without looking, guess what time it is?
* 12:45 pm

5. Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?
*1:00 pm .. vohoooo i was wrong!

6. With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
* TV

7. When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
* Dang! I was out the presidio last night watching the sun set around 7:30 pm after that Al Gore's movie (An inconvenient truth). It was beautiful on that side of the Golden Gate bridge.

8. Before you started this survey, what did you look at?
* My body for scratches from last night

9. What are you wearing?
* shorts (ultra thin, light blue)

10. Did you dream last night?
* Yep!

11. When did you last laugh?
* Just before I came out of the pool and got into the shower.

12. What is on the walls of the room you are in?
* Calendar

13. Seen anything weird lately?
* Yea, a 5' 10' man almost drowning.. in a 8' pool. waz that me ?

14. What do u think of this quiz?
* I love it ! ... bada bing bada bang bada... u know what follows

15. What is the Last film u saw?
* Out of Time (2003) on TV

16. If you became a multimillionaire overnight, what would you buy?
* lunch

17. Tell me something about you that I dunno.
* I'm funny in all possible ways. I am laughed at as much as I am laughed with. I am the start to being smart. and I like my girl...sorry woman! I love to associate with and read about new ideas. I like to lick when I like something I see (usually when its edible).

18. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
* The notion that time exists just because we die.

19. Do you like to dance?
* Yep..u should check out my shower video! Dont worry..its obfuscated enough..so it is hard to know I donot have much on!

20. George Bush
* is a nice man with a good heart and a clean brain. Note 'clean'.

21. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
* AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaa. My wife wants her first kid to be a girl and that her first name should start and end with the letter 'A'.

22. Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
*mmmm...now thats tough! for now, try reading #21 carefully. If you can think of a better name, ping me when I m on my love train ride (to work I mean).

23. Would you ever consider living abroad?
* Yep. Although sometimes I think, when you call where you live 'Home', then would there ever be an 'Abroad' for too long ?

24.What do you want GOD to say to you when you reach the pearly gates?
* You have lived a meaningful life .
WARNING. The above sentence may contain a figure of speech commonly known as oxymoron.

25. People who may do this memo in their journal.
can go bite the creator of 'Yo mamma's' original series and still not get mad, angry or sad even after they just got told that their favorite movie hottie got married to a 30-something writer baldie who dumped her right after the honeymoon, ceremony and champagne.

People I wish to tag...
- My late granpa (Dont laugh.. he was a great man who he never had a blog, but was meaningful enough to write several books)
- My best, late pet Vishnu (A tibetan terrier/palmarian/spanel cross that lived a record 15 years right from my 7th grade summer holidays till a few months ago). He did not have a blog either but boy could he write !! He scratched our entire 100-yard garden with his paws twice and we could not even finish it the third time before he started writing again !! I am yet to decipher their true meaning)
- My brother who paints and animates better than what saw him write. Thankfully, he does not have a blog.
- My dearest wife who fills my life with so much love, fun and laughter ..but.hmm she tagged me already!
- My parents who love their banking that recently went onto computers. I love to listen to my mom who still argues that the last great thing to happen to computers is the floppy disk. They are yet to get a blog too..

So, who does that leave ? The blogs that I visit ..(some of them good friends too!)
- KK
- Gangadhar
- Jagz
- Gajendran
- Amit Sinha
But again, what good is tagging them when they have been tagged already!

When I feel lazy....

I did not consider how lazy I have been getting these days ! I am 26 and I feel like ...well..52 sometimes.. Feeling like 62 would have made it even worse@..!! but I am not far off :( ..am I ?

My daily routine is more laid back than it used to be a few years ago. I am trying harder (and longer) to get out bed in the mornings and even my grand mom thinks I am being lazy [about our planning for a kid.. a thing I am sooo yappie abt :)]. I mean I do love playing with kids and all but I sometimes feel his contributions to a 5 billion population could be seriously undermined by the time, money and attention that he deserves from us!

That Apart, who is working really 8 hrs @ work these days? So, I wont even talk it..
coz I thought I wz taking it a little easy at work oflate and in comes a call from my brother .. who proudly announces that his only work for the last month has been checking his email prompty :))! aha... just when U think u are on top of the charts !

I tend to be very competitive by nature and even a car speeding in the next lane used to get to me a few years ago. Now, I would not care much if I am seriously slowing down traffic on single lane freeway exits! I seriously remember a time when parminder (my colleague @ work and roomie in SFO) used to pick on me for driving like a maniac on freeways!

Now, the only speeding that I know of is +5 on a completely empty freeway and that too.. only when hot chic is driving somewhere around ...and Archana cant wait to go home !

Is that some change or what?

Has the meanie, leanie turned into a teenie, weenie who happens to be happy with himself, his glass of wine and his plate of roti with some edible sabji? grrrrrrrr...no !

I learnt something about my self today!

something good! For the first time in months, it occured to me that I am now able to live with sides of me that are un-cool! Not that I was ever cool to start with..right from my days in kindergarten, I was the nerd/geek/tech-gizmo in a cost-effective combo-pack. So, being cool was a mile away from as far as I could see! Somehow, I was unable to live with that fact and was always conscious of it. I had this innate fear of not being good enough, not going that extra mile and not being unique enough to stand apart. Even worse, I did not know it was this that kept me partly unhappy and partly hungry!

So, my desire to progress/prosper/expand came out of a sense of dislike for what/where/who I was. Interestingly though, it did not occur to me until recently.

Until recently, when I realized I could get over it! It occured to me during a brief moment in my meditation that my sense of insecurity/inability was just as ephemeral as any other emotion, unless I let it bloat into a monster that would eat into my innermost image. So, I decided to let go..forget for a while that I donot like being as good/bad as I am and try to go back in time, right to my childhood.

Slowly, I found there were so many significant events/instances in my life where I would have made a different choice knowing what I know now. The knowledge that I donot have to the best at what I am doing to like myself when I am doing it. I thought this would take away from my desires, hopes and goals and scale me down into the depths of introspection and a sense of incompetence.

Boy, was I wrong!

Strangely, I now feel rejuvenated. I feel the power to be able to syndicate and work with what is better than me. The ability to listen better, to understand better and to create goals and think of ideas that are way bigger than I could ever fathom. What energizes me is the idea that I donot have to be the best at what I do to be able to recognize/appreciate/reward/energize someone better than me to accomplish the same.

Now, I got company! This time, it is as big as the noble intent of the globe!

New Year Resolutions?

My wife has an interesting post reflecting on what happened last year and where we plan to go this time!

Read on!

Happy Holidays!

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and was recalling how incredible an year 2005 was for me. I sincerely thank God for blessing me with the opportunity to make the choices that I have made this year, most of which have turned out to be great sources for learning, creativity and action.

First of all, I left HTC and joined Houghton Mifflin as a senior performance engineer. My Job responsibilities involved load testing and hopefully tuning their edusoft 'apportal', a popular and fast growing web based assessment management system.

A few days after I joined the company, some of the founding members and employees started leaving the company as they did not like to deal with the surprises of a takeover phase. I was wondering if I walked into a shit storm and cursed my decision to move to california but those months really made me rethink my long term goals and exposed me to some new worlds.

So, Archana & I started word of the worlds, a blog to promote our domain name and it soon grew to be a collaborative effort with around 80 users in a matter of months. We wanted to leave it as an Inclusive blog that made some one feel at home, the first time they visited it.

I thought I would have to help archana with the networking part but I guess she inherited her dad's genes. In a matter of months, she built up a good network of friends using social networking websites (orkut, hi5, friendster) and the blogging community. She did the incredible! For Oct 2005, we hit the 10GB bandwidth range with around 60000 page views and around 3000 distinct visitors. I thought that was incredible for a starter on such a well established turf!

Even more so, she introduced me to a great blogging community and I started frequenting Fred Wheeler and the china stock blog.

From the Indian perspective, I had a chance to see what pros like Mahesh murthy , krishnamoorti and Youngsters like Komal were thinking about (the next generation of Indian thought train) and the lattitude was amazing.

Overall, 2005 to me taught the importance of Syndication, the need to build networks and work with great teams and what it took to do so. In fact, I was so dumb founded by some of these ideas that my first months (so far) at houghton have been more about passive listening and nothing else!

On the investment front, I wound up the year early (zeroed out in November) with a gain. I scrapped out everything I had to invest in, what I thought was, worthy land deals in India. I even got into debt doing this but I am positive that the small 34k investment we made will grow considerably in the near future.

On the community side, I was happy to be able to donate my 2 cents worth to the relief efforts of Tsunami through channels like Sulekha, Red cross and the Sri Lankan government apart from my periodic contributions to CRY. I am seriously short of my target but luckily for me, my company has a donation match program that I am planning to use.

On the technology front, I started fiddling with LAMP (linux/apache/Mysql/Apache) for our blogs and soon started liking it. Hope to be able to learn more. This interfered somewhat with my goal for this year to obtain a Java programmer certification, just for the heck of it. I later realized my programming knowledge in this language was not as bad as I thought but I seriously lacked some moves on the execution part (to just read those books and get done with the java exam), another lesson learnt this year.

Did not read much this year.. still half-way through steven covey's all too old '7 habits'. My company gave away some free books at the year end. I picked up one from jumpa lahiri (namesake, 2003) and another from Nathaniel fick (one bullet away, 2004). As you can see, I am reading stuff that is years old..some serious catching up to do!

On the whole, this year brought a lot of good change my way and I am hoping this experience will help me launch 2006 with renewed energy & commitment towards my future goals.

Sell it!! and now!

I love quick fixes! I didnt approve of them at school, at work or in my own private life but I love them! Reasons? mmm..let me think…they are quick, they get the job done and 9 cases out of 10, they are the equivalent of 10 days of WHAT-WOULD-I-DO-INSTEAD effort bundled into one hectic day!
….plus … They have this semantic & ideological correlation with ’strike the iron when its hot’, the sort that Sean Connery had with James bond! Its not the same thing, but you think of one thing, you inevitably think of the other !

Sort of makes me wonder which is probably why I see such countless (..wondering if baseless too!) claims of get-quick-rich schemes taking over the Internet after their not-so-old victory over traditional media like TV and mouth-to-mouth marketing!
The other day, I lived past my more-than-fair share of those ‘you could make-a-mill-in-a-month (and wake up to Roger riney or schwab calling/begging you to take care of your investment portfolios)’ commercials on TV !!

Typically after midnight, they strike, one after another, in methodical precision..!!
.. and mostly after all those commercials about the latest hot.flash.skin episode of ‘girls gone wild’ and more-than-you-can-handle proportions of celeb gossip. Now, not a lot of people are watching TV after all that direct pandering, and I know I want something “more” out of life in general and my TV in particular when I am done with the daily mass of kitsch kichidi!

Probably the best time to pick a middle-aged voyager (thats right! strike it when ‘hot’) like me who knows there is no point going back and no fun moving forward in life…and so ends up looking for that ultimate ‘quick fix’ to patch it all up … to become the next da-awesome who can eat like a pig and still look a deer because …….(s)he is rich !

Seriously, I am glad there is so much in my life that I can fall back onto, much in my relationships that makes me feel loved but I wonder what if I (for that matter anyone) did not!

Then, is that not a subtle line that I cross when I make that eager attempt to “Sell it!! and now!!” to someone like that..?
when I close that deal in a rush, or use that extra twist of aggression (ah! I wish I could) or those by-now-famous ‘take-back’ clauses (”may be this is not for you”, “I could show you something from the less expensive range”, “This is the high end..but who has the money to buy it..right?”) instead of doing what we know is right but probably takes longer??!!

rrrrrr…My fear of death is eating me up ..and if you will excuse me, I need to go get some breakfast..before I starve and end up there ..and I gotta do it quick :D ~!