The Utopian girl

Welcome, golden girl from Utopia; hi from earthlings.

I got the letter you sent about the angels. Nice that you are interested in geogamic study. I will be glad to be the guide on your world tour. Watch out for that flight crew, he is dashing towards you.


Prayer

In this part of the world, we start anything with a prayer to Lord Ganesha. Let us do this tour in a traditional and auspicious manner.



He is a smart guy. North Indians know that he is married, twice. However, Ganesha had hidden his martial status to South India. My guess is that he has an eye for a South Indian girl. It is a tough bet with a South Indian girl. All she cares is - the horoscope MUST match (also that 8th square should be empty). Thou the guy may have an elephant head or he is married couple of times, these do not bother her much. So, success of Ganesha depends on effective ways of manipulating his horoscope.




Jai Sri Ramji

As your research involves with monogamy among earthlings, I would take you straight to Sri Ramachandra Maharaj's palace. He is the perfect example quoted for a one-one ideology. A rare thing among gods and kings.

You are lucky to travel at this time, as Sri Ramji had just returned from Lanka. Let us meet him. His wife ... hmmm .. let us put it simple. She had gone hmm ... somewhere, to enjoy the beauty of nature.

Poor guy, after newly married, he was sent to jungle. Had it been with his friends, he would have enjoyed the trek. To intensify the punishment, he had to take his wife and brother. As any girl, she was asking for gold, that too a golden deer. As it happens, that lands into more trouble. A damn damemon picked her up to his country. Ram had to suffer a lot in the search and find (google wasn't available in those days), forming an army out of monkeys etc. Good that he had a great fighting spirit (after marriage effect?), and won against the rakshasha. Only two weeks back they all returned to Ayodhya.

Again their marriage is in a rock. I dont know the exact details, but rumours say that people (who watch many Hindi movies) dont like the rescued heroine to be accepted by the hero. On popular response of the SMS contest, Sita was sent to forest.

My granny used to bless me as, "you should be like Sri Ramachanderji!". I feel it is a curse.

I wouldnt like to visit other gods as you might start hating them.Did I mention the hobbies of the Lord of the Gods, Indra?



Theory of evolution

In Hindu mythology, the evolution of life is personified as avatars of Vishnu. Starting with watery creature, amphibians, then beasty boar, progress is made to half man - half animal, small boy, hunter, farmer, king, king maker etc. Earlier part of the evolution, they had no partners, then they were trying their luck with one - one.

In the line came Sri Rama. We saw his one to one concept and his sufferings. The avatars realized their mistake. They realized the primitive way of thinking. After broadening their views, they refined their thoughts and came up with the last known avatar; fixing all the earlier bugs, the ultra modern social personification ... here I introduce ...

KRISHNA!! man, you rock!!! We are glad that you showed us the path away from sufferings and guided us through everlasting ectasy.

I am eagerly waiting for the last avatar, Kalki. If Krishna had so many partners, let us wait to see the next one. He is supposed to be a slayer. My guess is he is going to chop off all the guys in the world. He will be a single man in all girls' land. hmm .. that is tricky; not sure if that is lucky or would that be pitiable.



History lessons

A pop quiz. Answer short.

Name a monogamous person who may be a king or an ancient time minister, olden days panjayat leader, historic priest, worker in the temple, or a farmer or an artist.

Yes, I can show one from the stone writings I had seen.

His name mentioned there is :
RajathiRaja RajaKesari RajaMarthanda RajaKulaThilaga VijayaParakrama DhushtaSankrasta VimalaAdhithya NarasimhaHamsa VenkataPurana RaghuNandaVaiRagya VaishitaKulathonga Baskaranutha VaraKaraMustika MaathuruBootho VeeraBoopathi ChandrasekaraNruthunga KangeyamKonda VeengiGiriVendra AkilaBhuvanaNayaka MagudaMaguadaAdithipathi Sri Verendra Varaguna Pandiyan, Second

(wooof, let me take a breath)

On reflecting somemore time, it occurs that the following thing might have happened. In those days the litho caligraphers would have charged carving on a per letter basis. As a cost cutting measure, this king would have mentioned the writers, "put my name and any one of my wife's name".




Mathematical proof

I know with the jet lag you have from the Utopian visit, it is difficult to follow up with mathematical equations. I will make it simple.

Is monogamous practical? Let us check with a leading mathematician.

For the sake of discussion, we will assume equal numbers here.
Male = 50%
Female = 50%

As per the monogamous theory, 50% : 50% is the right break up.
However, the data is skewed as the gay population is not taken into account in this calculation.

Let us assume 10% of guys are gays (optimistic). These 10% will lure another 10% guys into their vicious net, as the original 10% need guy partners to acheive their purpose.

=> 10% + 10% = 20%

20% guy population implies 10% of the total population. ie,

10% + 40% against 50% of female

Once you match 40% (most of the time) straight guys with 40% female, we are left over with 10% female. (ie 50% - 40% = 10%)

The government would have to come up with effective campion to convert those 10% into nuns or lesbians. I doubt if any goverment has such plans in near future.

Therefore, we need to somehow convince 10% (of the original population) out of 40% guys to come out of their "primitive" mindset of one to one. We need to provide sufficient incentive for them to consider another girl other than his wife.

Ya, it is a tough task we have ahead, that is to convince a guy to go through another trouble. But we have to do it as the world should be saved.




Modern society
Being in the isolated world of Utopia, I guess you have missed out the social norms here. For the highness purpose, I am blogging couple of cases. You may start with Romeo and Juliet, then with the court case.

btw, while talking about court, do you know that the supreme court had passed a suggestion to other courts in order to refrain from issueing divorce? The number of divorce had shooted up sharply. As a measure, court would like to delay the hearings and put their maximum effort to convince the couple to live together. For what?, to quarrel till life time?

That brings another interesting line of thoughts. If a majority of people in a society are forced to lead a life with a partner they dont like to be with, wouldn't that lead to mass adultry? Let us wait and watch.







Golden girl : " All Men are Flirts ?!"
well, depends.
On how you define flirts.


It is a very nice meeting with you, lady. It should be fascinating to be at Utopia. What a peaceful and happy life it should be with all the virtues you follow there. Once in a while, please come down to earth to realize the reality.

A visit to the court

Last week I happen to be in the vicinity of a court. I called my friend who is a lawyer. He invited me to meet him at the court.

The place is quite busy with activity. People were moving fast. Most of them carried a sad face. Lawyers were seen expressionless. Neither happy nor sad, but very busy. I wonder how they hope with the stress level. Just being there was quite an experience.

My friend's senior lawyer took up the case when it was his turn. He was arguing for the client who produced a letter and the court was not in a position to consider that as a legitimate proof. They were asking for authentic one.

Later the senior called me up, after the usual pleasantry greetings, he asked me what my problem was. I had to explain couple of times that I came just to meet the friend. Seems like lawyers don't expect someone to meet them as a casual visit!

During the coffee break, my friend narrated the case to me. It is a matrimonial issue. The couples went for honey moon. On their way, in the flight, the girl mentioned that she has an affair with a guy and she is not interested in the marriage. Good timing sense. The guy felt like jumping from the plane.

The guy filed for a divorce, the girl was willing for it. However, the girl's side expected a heavy compensation for them to sanction the divorce. The guy's side felt angry for their demand, because the cause of the separation is due to the girl's mistake. Mistake in terms of doing things at the wrong times. Thou the guy is well-to-do, they do not wish to give away money for a wrong cause. So, both the parties are meeting in courts in different cities, for the past 8 years. There are n number of alimony like dowry harassment, false notices etc.

Anyway, that is one more supporting factor to consider for self arranged marriages.

Beautiful names Part 1

I like to scrutinize words and find the root words. Take for example, Girija. A simple and usual name looks normal. When we break up the word, we get Giri + ja, or Mountain + born. The mountain-born or born-in-the-mountain is the meaning and the word could indicate many things like timber, river, pebbles, wild life etc. Usually the indicative meaning take out of Girija is the another name of Parvathi, who is born in a mountain or as the myth goes born to the mountain king, Himalayas.

Most of the ja ending names are fascinating. Vanaja, Jalaja, Ambuja, Anuja, etc. Jala and Ambu means water. Water-born could mean lotus, conch, the moon(!), Lakshmi, fish etc.Anu is after or subordinate. Anuja is born-after or younger sibling.

My all time favourite name is Vikramadhithya. Breaking up the word, we get Vi + Krama + Adhithya. Adhithya being an easy one to decipher, means the Sun god. Krama is orderliness and punctuality. Vi is a prefix used in many root words. The meaning of vi should be understood as per the context; it has sixteen different usage. Certain context negates the original meaning. Like videsi, which means non-desi; compared to swadesi - our own desi and also pradesi - other than desi. vi also used to intensify the meaning of the root word, for eg: gnanam is knowing or understanding, vignanam is knowledge, wisdom and usually used as a translation of the English word 'Science'. So, an extra large burger can be coined as viBurger :-)

Coming back to Vikrama, this composition suggests 'intensified orderliness'. Perfection in punctuality. That seems to suit the Sun as the Sun is the most punctual among known entities. The word Vikramaadhithya also makes us feel awesome towards the Sun for the meticulous shower of bliss and prosperity.Out of many other meaning, krama also means power, heroic. So, Vikrama could also refer a great hero, valor power.

Apte online dictionary is a good one to learn many such words. Here is the book at Amazon.

The farewell for SJ

SJ is leaving the company. We all went out and had a good time at Maharaja restarant.

Leason learnt today is never to have veg soup in a non-veg restarant.

Kids' choice

Wondering how the male kids are fascinated at cars and guns; whereas the girls are fond of barbie dolls and kitchen-ware. Today at the shopping mall, we were watching the kids playing at a kids' toys chamber. A cute little (Korean?) girl was playing with the kitchen model and a boy was zooming to her side in a toy car.

Angels in the building

GA saw a girl in a nice attire, shirt and skirt. He suggested to add to the angels list. Hmm, he didn't know that that girl is already in the list :-)

MsAD was surprised to see the new fan joining the busy fan club. Then the original angel (the title given to her by all judges) came in the hall. What a dressing sense! So cute and lovable!! She was in her jeans and shirt. Both dark colored and went well with her fair complexion. Madam had styled her hair at US. That is an added advantage. I gave 20 more points for today's occasion, RS increased by 25.

Wah! what a coincidence! The little angel also came in a similar dress. Good. There are divided opinion on including little angel to the list. I say why not. RS feels otherwise as she is rarely seen smiling. Since I get a good smile at all occasion, I am comfortable vetoing for the cause.

For few of the cubicle dwellers, the lunch hall provides a relief out of the otherwise dull life. The variety of color, texture (I meant the dress), lifts the soul and nourishes a happy mood. Guess many are motivated to come to office with such incentives.

Btw, when I was working in US, this is a difference I felt. At US, most of the Indian guys go alone, after few years they marry a girl at India. One would find very few unmarried Indian girls. Compared to the Indian population, this number could be negligible. In such situation, a guy might be deprived of interacting with opposite sex and may have a suppression of feelings. This may not be explicit or understood by the person, but could cause some kind of loneliness and depression. This is more at a psychological level and may vary between person to person, with their interest and mind set.

Getting experience before getting a job

Few days back there was a question raised in a forum about job experience. Most of the companies ask for experienced engineers. How does one gain experience without getting a job? This is the main concern of freshers.

Here is the reply I gave. Feel free to add more in the comment section.

• There are many forums like javaranch.com There is a section for jobs request and job oppurtunity. Also there is a column in the newsgroup where people want their projects to get done. Choose a project which is simple, close to your liking etc. Complete it and pass the same to the requestor. If you have a coordial communication between you and the other party, ask for a completion letter or a referal. That can be highlighted as your experience. You dont have to stop with one project, take more and difficult projects.
• There are sites like topcoder.com where they conduct weekly competition to test your technical skills. As you solve more problems, you will gain score in this site as well as experience. They give a beautiful logo image which may be placed in your resume. Definetly it will attract the prospective employer.
• Open source code projects like apache.org always needs technical resource.
• Free tools like eclipse.com, htmlkit.com etc has a concept of developing plugin. Anyone can develop a plugin and upload to their site. Based on the usefulness of your contribution, you will be successful among the net community and automatically pull employers interested to seek your service.

Profession

When we read morality, we see that none of the jobs have any difference in status or undue respect. We get thrilled reading poems like Chimney Sweeper

However, in reality, we are comfortable wearing some masks like software professional or doctors. (Just check the matrimonial success of different professionals). Once in a while there is a call inside me or from my wife to shed off this mask and be myself. Glad to know that my wife is supporting such noble thoughts among the materialistic goals of most of us; however at times I need to channelize her thoughts away from seeking max-income-zero-satisfaction jobs.

Many of my friends and relatives have appreciated my way of teaching students on topics I know. I am comfortable with bringing enough analogies to make the points clear. For eg, while discussing about data types in c, it was so easy for everyone to pick up the analogy of parking a car, bike or a bicycle in a parking lot vs storing an float, int or char in a memory location. Also, I liked breaking the conventional mode of teaching and enter into informal discussions. Practical approach is easy to grasp and understand than theoretical abstract concepts.

I do have interest in writing and penned few articles. Have ideas about publishing books but there is always the initial enthusiasm with no follow up.

Will these things in life give me satisfaction? Can a person pursue his/her hobbies and goals without much of income? Will there be a depression in life for moving from a luxurious lifestyle to a minimal income jobs?

On the other hand, how finite are these lucrative jobs? The layoffs are just around the corner. Instead of getting a sudden bolt in life and thrown into a deep pit, I would rather step down gracefully and take up a task of my heart. That would give me much of happiness than the sudden ups and downs of life.

Certain things are unknown in life, may be we will never know. Current questions of that nature are - when is the right time to leave this field and learn a new skill? Will there be content in life with the switch? Wont I be bored with monotonous life?

Inheritance of properties

What is the legal rights of a father over an ancestral property? Does the son has more rights? What if the son sues the father for the property; who will get what proportion (apart from what the legal system eats up)? Who is responsible to a loan taken by the father and he passes away? Will the loan offer can only contact the cosignatories or also the legal heirs? As the girls are legally entitled to inherit properties, will they take a share of debt, if asked to?

Along with discussion, I shared a 'smart' father's decision which I happened to hear else where.A father had traditional mind set and wants to beat the new law permitting women to inherit. Hence he made his two daughters sign in legal papers stating that they will not claim for the property. He threaten them not to do so after marriage. He had also prepared a will for allowing his brother's sons to enjoy the properties after his death.

Just wondering how his last days would be. High probability is that his nephews would kick him out. His daughters may not be able to support him as their husbands/in-laws will be angry at not passing the wealth to the daughters.

Casteism of our society

Recently I got a chance to look at a community's monthly magazine. There was an interesting article about dowry system. The writer elaborated the evil of dowry and how families suffer due to such practices. He/she was encouraging the next generation to throw away such injustice social norms and improve the community's harmony. So far so good. The last statement of that article was interesting. The rough translation was like, "Due the evil nature of dowry, boys and girls are not married at the right age; because of this delay, they are pushed to a shameful act of finding a spouse outside our caste".

The above article made me think. It is a good sign that many are raising their voice against dowry and we see a positive response from the younger generation. However, I am not able to conceive inter-caste marriage as something sinful. I could understand that in a community magazine, they may not encourage their community person to marry outside the community - but that is not justified to portrait a broader vision (of inter marriage) as sinful.

Reflecting back the history of the caste system practiced in India, we might find the root in Aryan civilization. May be it made sense at that time to classify people based on their occupation. One might observe that this classification was far humanity based compared to slavery practiced in the rest of the world of that age. Major disgrace is that, when the rest of the world had banned such sinful slavery, we Indians try to cling to it dearly. We are proud of this stupidity.

The recent reservation scheme raises another serious concern. The reservation system was brought in to equalize the otherwise uneven society. However, giving this kind of tool to a selfish politician would use it to cut the society treating that system as a weapon. What a harmful effect of the reservation policy causing a permanent demarcation of the society based on the caste! Unless our community feelings are triggered and a vote bank can be milked, we might have to go through this kind of sub-standard life.

It looks like a chicken-egg problem. Politician finds it easy to reach people based on community and get his needs met. Same way, people find it easy to approach political parties with the background of representing communities and hence getting benefits out of the ruling parties.

The other supporting factor of this caste system is the individual family. The irrational parents do not weigh the importance of their progeny's welfare and happiness. Their standard thinking pattern is: if I get my children married to some other community, what will those "four people" talk? Who are those four people? Nobody knows. They are nameless, jobless stupids. Parents are willing to forego the life of their children for the sake of their dignity and pride. Their cowardice nature of being afraid of facing the society is the reason for the evil of caste system. They think what will their relatives and friends circle speak. This is again an irrational thought, by not realizing that those people will talk for three or four days and beyond that they have their own headache to mind. The spineless activities of the older generation is molding the future generations also into the pit of the evil.

Is there any government policy or social organization working towards eradicating caste from the society? Eager to know.

Upon reflecting what could be done from individual, these are the things came up:

• When a man or a woman is ready for marriage, the person needs to identify the kind of spouse one is looking for, list out the characters and try to find a person outside the same caste. Intercaste marriage will be a strong bolt against the current practice.
• An interesting point at this junction. The thousands of caste system we have in India today is not solely due to the ancient practice. In olden days they had four major sects. The intercaste marriage is the culprit spawning hundreds and hundreds of subsects in due course.
• The next generation should not be exposed to the poison we have. They need to be tagged as non-casterians. We need to voice up for organizations to accept such category. Again, we need to be extra cautious in not forming new sects in mutations or making this non-casterians as a new sects.

Feel free to add your suggestions in the comment section.

I am able to express to this extend because I fortunate to be in a happy inter-caste marriage.

Romeo in India

Earlier we saw US-returned Juliet, and Romeo at Australia. Here are the updates.

Ramasamy is a first cousin of Juliet. Hence all her relatives visited her home and passed on their wisdom. Definitely it is not an easy job to face everyone and go through their 'worldly knowledge'. The statement Juliet has is in this line .. irrespective of Romeo, she had decided to move away from Ramasamy. Ramasamy is also echoing the same view. He is not interested to live with Juliet anymore as she is looking forward to lead life in different direction with different person.

Out of all the relatives, Juliet had discussed the issue in depth with one of her uncle. He looks to be stable minded and gave some solace to her. Uncle mentioned that let Romeo come down to India. If Romeo agrees to marry and lead a harmonious life, and the uncle is satisfied by his commitment, then uncle will support Juliet in marrying Romeo. In such situation, it might be feasible for uncle to convince others too.

Romeo was informed about this development. He took the next flight to India. His close friend received him at airport by 3am IST. I doubt if Romeo had come at any other time, he would have hardly expected anyone to welcome him. Looks like love brings fame and charm.

SJ questioned the credibility of the uncle. What if the uncle calls the local goons once Romeo lands in the country? Uncle might beat him to death. That is the risk one needs to take; and for love any sacrifice may be made.

Most of us felt happy for the re-union of the lovers.

Romeo discussed this movement to his parents. Father mentioned to disown Romeo, and Romeo accepted the same. Mom confined herself to a room and not interacting with anyone.

'To do or not to do' is no more the question. 'How to do' is what is interesting now. Let us wait and watch.

Reviving the language

GA and myself went to Karikudi mess for lunch. He is very much into the study of Samskrit. I asked him the current growth and prospective of the language. He mentioned there have been good progress. In the study center he attends, there are lots of young crowd. That is encouraging to hear.

We shared our ideas on complete revival of the language. GA mentioned the hindrance in gathering the required attention deserved by the language. Foremost is the result-oriented society expecting some kind of monetary benefit out of any activity. Studying or reviving the language doesn't seem to have a direct result for a commoner.

Weighing the vast knowledge one might gain out of bringing back the language, justifies the difficulty in the process.

Ancient wisdom

GA sent a link to our internal newsgroup. The link contained discussion about a book, "Pride of India". It was a well researched book about the Scientific frontiers India was leading ages ago. The author clearly illustrate the acheivement made by Indian and what we are lacking today. Gives a direction to move towards.

Worth reading.

Whose jewels are they?

Today we went to Gramin. Out of many topics, Gandhiji's autobiography came into the discussion; rather I should say I brought in. Got so much inspired by reading his book. It moves like a suspense novel, particularly for someone who had forgotten the history lessons. Couldn't resist reading six or seven chapters a day. (My usual speed is two chapters).

When we think of Gandhi, we get the image of 'mahatma', the great soul. To think about the pair Gandhi and his wife, we have an impression of an ideal couple. That is how they were portrayed to us. Reading his own words, we are pulled to a surprise.

Here is the sample from his book. Part III Chapter XII

Gandhiji was returning home from South Africa (second trip). The NRIs threw farewell parties with large gatherings and showered with costly gifts including gold and silver. Gandhiji didn't want to retain those gifts as it was not his liking to be gifted for public service. After lot of thought, he decided to leave the gifts with the trust of South African Indian community.

He had to convince his wife. Instead of daring to tell her, he talked to his sons (eldest around 12 years old), got their approval, asked them to talk to their mom.

**********************
'Certainly', said they. 'That is our business. She does not need to wear the ornaments. She would want to keep them for us, and if we don't want them, why should she not agree to part with them?'

But it was easier said than done.

'You may not need them,' said my wife. 'Your children may not need them. Cajoled, they will dance to your tune. I can understand your not permitting me to wear them. But what about my daughters-in-law? They will be sure to need them. And who knows what will happen tomorrow? I would be the last person to part with the gifts so lovingly given.'

And thus the torrent of argument went on, reinforced, in the end, by tears. But the children were adamant. And I was unmoved.

I mildly put in: 'The children have yet to get married. We do not want to see them married young. When they are grown up they can take care of themselves. And surely we shall not have, for our sons, brides who are fond of ornaments. And if, after all, we need to provide them with ornaments, I am there. You will ask me then.'

'Ask you? I know you by this time. You deprived me of my ornaments, you would not leave me in peace with them. Fancy you offering to get ornaments for the daughters-in-law! You who are trying to make sadhus of my boys from today! No, the ornaments will not be returned. And pray what right have you to my necklace?'

'But,' I rejoined, 'is the necklace given you for your service or for my service?'

'I agree. But service rendered by you is as good as rendered by me. I have toiled and moiled for you day and night. Is that no service? You forced all and sundry on me, making me weep bitter tears, and I slaved for them!'

...
I somehow succeeded in extorting a consent from her. The gifts received in 1896 and 1901 were all returned.
...
I am definitely of opinion that a public worker should accept no costly gifts.

**************************

I felt very happy to know that his wife 'talks' in a similar way like mine :-)

I didn't intent to de-mean the great soul. His frank narration increased the salutation for him. Most of the description show the pain and sufferings (not only at the family front :-) ) he went through at various stage of life. When I took the book, I expected to see a super hero who had universal solution with larger than life strength, who had never felt the pain. Indeed it was surprising to see an average Joe kind of neighbor, who goes through the joy, sorrow, desire, plans, disappointment, sufferings etc like most of us. The Himalayan difference comes out by the way he responded back to the injustice thrown at him, and at a later stage to dissolve his complete self and possession for the entire community cause.

There are interesting observations he found and the suggestions he makes. So far I had an impression that raising money for social cause and maintaining a fixed deposit is a good idea. Seems like Gandhiji faced issues with this and hence suggests against the same. Thought provoking.

We not only learn the history of our nation, but also the wisdom of an old man. Very valuable - the book and the lesson learnt.

Silapathikaram

MsAD had a view about Romeo and Juliet. She mentioned that even if Romeo and Juliet unite, Romeo needs to be extra-cautious in accomodating Juliet. One or two years down the line, he should not refer the US life of Juliet - neither in humorous context nor in a heated argument. Such words may hurt Juliet more than the pain she has now, which may lead to another drift.

MsAD is true in this aspect. This point reminded Silapathikaram literature. In this story, Kovalan is the hero. He leaves his wife, Kanaki, and leads a life with a dancer, Madhavi. Kovalan and Madhavi live together enough to have a baby girl. Thou Madhavi is from an unchaste community and leads a life of dancer, she has a loyal relationship and faithfulness towards Kovalan.

On a spring evening Kovalan and Madhavi were enjoying the breeze by the Cauvery river side in Pokar (modern name is Kaveripattinam). Kovalan sings a song refering the flirting nature of the river. In return, Madhavi sings a song hinting her affection towards someone else.

This creates a drift between them and Kovalan leaves Madhavi, reaches for Kanaki.
(Story picks up further speed from this point towards Kovalan's death and Kanaki's standpoint).


Coming back to Romeo and Juliet, let us hope Juliet will lead a happy life ever after (with whomever she chooses at this juncture).

Romeo, Juliet and Ramasamy

Are you thinking .... Ramasamy... what the hell? Read on.

For those who have not heard about our time's Romeo, here is a quick flashback. The next few paragraphs are the part one of the ongoing series.

Romeo and Juliet were in love with each other. Romeo had a nice session from his dad after expressing his interest to marry Juliet. Since he couldn't convince his parents and didn't feel like eloping, the pair decided to move in their own path. She got engaged to an US software guy, Ramasamy. Marriage was fixed, things were going smooth. Three or four days before the marriage, Romeo realized it is HIS girl who is getting married. He called the girl and suggested her to walk out of the house. She was in a confusion. She had never mentioned about him to her parents because he never took a strong decision. She couldn't refuse his approach, at the same time not interested in spoiling the marriage at the last moment. She was crying in silent mode. Romeo was talking to her over phone and no other moves from him. Nothing interesting happened except for Juliet to marry Ramasamy. She flew to the great land of Indian hopes.

Romeo was not perturbed by minor incidents like marriage and US migration. Technology aided him in keeping in touch with Juliet. They enjoyed fine moments of what a usual yahoo messenger conversation would provide. They relished on the past, recollected each other's company. Juliet expressed that she is not quite happy with Ramasamy. Romeo tried to convince her to return to India so that they could marry as per their original plan (never understood how his dad is going to approve this).

We could safely assume that Ramasamy is a typical Indian nerd calculating $n * 45 and buying moving sale stuff. It is quite obvious that such a nerd could never match to our Chennai stud Romeo.

Nothing much happened and slowly we didn't hear from Romeo or Juliet. We closed the chapter thinking that Juliet leads a real life with Ramasamy and maintains a virtual contact with Romeo.




Now comes part two of the story. Less than a year after the marriage.

Juliet is back in Chennai. She had told she is never going back to US. Looks like Ramasamy is not that a nice person to be with. He had tried some crooked means to block her from returning to India and other undisclosed deeds. Juliet's parents, as any middle-class-narrow-minded-Indian parents would do, were not happy with her decision. They tried to convince her of different approach. Juliet should have picked up presentation skills from US; she convinced her parents of her decision.

Now let us see the twist in the story line. Where is Romeo? He is in Australia!! May be he felt Chennai without Juliet is dry and flew out of the country. He had quit his job and went for studies. His dad is financing the studies and he will not be able to support himself in the foreign land.

His plan now is to find a job for Juliet at Aussie and get her to that place.

Will the lovers merge? Will there be more hurdles? Come back to know the climax.
Feel free to post your comments and suggestions for the true love. Leave out the oldies, we can discuss about the three characters, Romeo, Juliet and Ramasamy.

The cities

An interesting observation about cities and town. From any part of the country, if we travel 50km, we will have a town. If we travel 250 km, we will find a major city. Upon thinking the reason behind this, came up with a small theory. This is a hypothesis and most likely to have happened during the early civilization period. While people had to move around for trading, they would have traveled on foot or animals. 50km is a normal distance to be covered in 5 hours. As they might have halted for lunch break during the travel, requirements like motel, refreshments would have gathered and due course formed township. 250 km is the distance that can be covered in roughly 18 hours. That would have been ideal to halt after a long journey. They might have needed further sophistication like special suites to take rest, do business etc. That location would have to hold more people for a longer period of time. That is likely to have gathered mass as human power is needed to cater to the traveling folks. This would have formed into cities.

Rural development

I had registered for MA course in Rural development. Last week I got the study material and I am going through the same. Discussion started in that line.

VY: After reading the rural development policies and plans, you will be shocked to see the reality. You might wonder where all the money allotted to those plans had gone into.

KM: The government disperses a large amount for such development programs and usually the money ends up in few hands in the middle.

JB: True, the study is all about these state of affairs and more. The improper execution of these plans are sole reason why we still talk about rural development.

VY: I saw a program in tv where an IIT graduate is teaching school children. He conducts classes in different manner where the students are finding easy to understand the pictorial lessons taught. It seems the scheme is working well and he is going to many schools to propagate his findings.

JB: I guess you are mentioning the same person who came to our office for discussing such activity. He had a good idea of the social condition and ways to improve the current state.
His views about current educational system was interesting. Only 10% of the entire population really apply the lessons learnt in the curriculum. The rest do not find the school/college useful at all. Thou very less apply the studies, the entire population is forced to study something of not their interest. Such compulsory studies of complex matters (like calculus, finding atomic mass of a molecule ...) leads to 40% of students dropping at the school level. His views about teaching were more practical. He shared his experience of teaching street kids about how to divide their work load mathematically, how to calculate the principal and the interest rates etc. Seems like his approach worked well since the kids were eager to understand the subjects of their interest.

Website decisions

The discussion today was around the technicalities behind designing a website. The number of options we have, and what are the technologies involved and what kind of end user experience we provide ... it is an infinite combination.

The site I am working involves dynamic pages with data pulled from a db. Planning to provide a newsgroup facility to the users. First decision I was faced is the basic web programming environment to adapt to. Had a choice between java world and php. After working with php for two weeks, I decided to move to java. In php, I started implementing common utility modules, navigation control, generic database access etc. Slowly I realized that I am writing a framework of my own ideas. The more I was thinking .. the more I realized I was trying to simulate mvc in php and starting from scratch. That was not convincing thing to do. So, I moved to java which can give me rich frameworks and other standard tools, concepts.

Then I downloaded eclipse and playing with it. For Jsf and hibernate, I felt the myeclipse plugin might be useful. I might have to pay $30 for using this. The other alternate is using jdev and adf. After pondering on adf, I realized that I will be limited to use hibernate in jdev as jdev is friendly towards toplink. So, I switched back to eclipse wagon.

The current issue I am trying to work out is to find integration means to bring the mvnforum and new jsf apps together. I want the mvn to register user and login them; my jsf apps will use the logged in or registered users info.

Apart from these issues, the webhosting companies are a different set of discussion with wide scope of topics like technology, database, size, speed, support etc.

Will update you folks on the progress.

What is in the name?

Heard about Bengalooru? Bangalore is renamed. I feel the names are chosen based on popularity than the origin of the name. For example, shouldn't the city be renamed to Benthekalooru? That is what I heard about the original name of the city. Even other cities like Kolkatta retain a name convenient for them instead of digging the origin.

What is a city has many names in the past, like Delhi. Which name is the right one? Instead of getting into these controversies, I prefer the current name.

Even our country's name doesn't reflect the right expression of ourself.

These dual names are not unique to our country. Around the world each society and country goes with two or more names. Came to know that Germans address Germany as Dautche or something. Not sure about the spelling (if u google, pls add in the right spelling in the comments :-) )