Bloganand

Dear Sharvari, Yesterday was your first day at the Play School, really the first step out of our home. Here I am wondering how fast time flies; you were a small little angle in our life just a couple of years ago. All the small skills of life you acquired over this period brought a lot and lot of joy in our lives. I know you are getting ready to see and face this beautiful world around you. I want you to live your life to its full and go on exploring it with great courage and joy. You need to learn to live the current moment and embrace the present; the past is gone and future is yet to come. Life is only as long as the happy moments we live. You do need to cherish the past but not let it hamper your present and at the same time plan for your future and not let it overshadow your current moment. I know it’s going to be a balancing act but I am confident you will be able to strike it. You tell us your play-school name as ‘Rabbit and Tortoise’ and you also know the story

Once again Google is proving that it is on a quest of continuous innovation and working hard towards simplicity with all its applications. Happened to see this improvement in Google Search, just enter a mathematical expression and Google comes up with a scientific calculator. This is too good, once again I have to say “Google Rocks !!!”

With globalization and open trade and economic policies, there is a consistent rise in India’s per capita earning. With this, we have the biggest pool of middle and upper middle class households. As a result there is an ever increasing need for better management of individual’s funds, resulting in a need (hype?) for financial advisors. The real question is, ‘do we need a financial advisor?’. I do not think so. I happened to read an analogy for justifying the need for financial advisors. A TV manufacturer, say SONY, can manufacture a TV for a few hundred dollars whereas if we want to individually assemble a TV, we can do that with a lot of efforts but the end result far from what we can go and buy from a SONY showroom. I think this analogy is too far stretched for a extremely specialized area. When it comes to managing our own funds (and making sure they work for themselves), I do not think there is a need for a professional financial advisor. Here are the reasons –     

Over last few days, three things deeply disturbed me about India’s social and political future. 1.        Child Labor – While looking for a shoemaker for a quick shoe polish, I visited a local road side footpath stall and surprised to see the job handed over by a father to his 4 year old kid. When the child started polishing the shoe, I asked his father, “Why don’t you send him to a school instead?” the man replied, “He does not want to go to school”. This is the state of affairs in India 2012. I do not know the exact numbers but, there are millions of small kids kept away from education, and some of the basic human rights. On the other hand, there is a generation of growing middle and upper middle class kids spending more than 3 hours a day on Facebook and other non-productive activities, spending (wasting) money on luxuries and addictions. There is a widening gap between haves and have-nots which in turn disturbs balance of the society. The ever increasing cost of living make

At the moment, there are two major sport events in progress. One is IPL-5 ( Indian Premier League – Season 5 ) and another is WCC-12 ( World Chess Championship 2012 ). I am more than sure that 95% of Indian population knows about IPL for one or the other reason and only less than 5% of the Indian population is aware of WCC-12.  No doubt with a right (?) mix of Cricket and Bollywood, IPL is a grand success and it is truly enjoyable to watch the matches on ground. I experienced the IPL magic during very first match on Pune’s brand new stadium. It’s a complete package of entertainment and as IPL-5 gets into the play-off round from today, there will be even more enthusiasm on Pune’s stadium and the match between Veeru and Gambhir promises to be a terrific one. The television viewership will be at all time high and the rest of IPL-5 will receive a lot of India’s attention (media, common man, Bollywood, gamblers and all…). At the same time, Vishvanathan Anand is battling hard against Bori

bing l e On Thursday, 10 th May, Microsoft announced to introduce a set of changes to Bing that it says will improve searches with help from loads of information available with Facebook. In order for the search results to be relevant and personalized, there is no better data source than Facebook as of today. Seamless integration with Facebook will definitely an advantage to Microsoft. This new version of Bing is the biggest update to the search engine since Microsoft introduced it in 2009. Google has already integrated the data from Google+ in its search engine. At this time, Google serves two third of US web searches compared to 15% for Microsoft’s Bing. This is a wide gap and Google more than dominates the search space; to the extent that ‘Google’ is synonymous with ‘Search’. There is no doubt that majority of the internet users remember Google when it comes to searching content on internet. Microsoft is trying to bridge the gap as much as possible with collaboration w

Good News…There is a Better chance to get a Tatkal Ticket on Indian Railway Site How many times have you tried to login to the Indian Railway Official website for a Tatkal Ticket and got it successfully? I have more often than not failed to get a Tatkal ticket from IRCTC . One of the known reasons is that during peak travel times, the agents book all the tickets by logging in right at 8:00 AM. For a personal user like me, there was always disappointment in store with the Tatkal tickets. The site gets very slow at 8:00 AM and finally when you login, the tickets are over. If you have had same experience in the past, there is good news, Indian Railway website has implemented a new feature by which only two transactions are allowed per IP address between 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM. That means, people who are bulk blocking the tickets, cannot do that on the same scale anymore, giving that much more chance to personal users like us to get tickets. Well done Indian Railways, IRCTC

Experiments with Google Translator Google translator is a great tool for translating text between more than 60 languages. It can also detect the language as you type the text. Simply out of curiosity, I tried to test the translator between Hindi to English. Here are the results. Hindi to English Translator (click to enlarge) In all the sentences above, the translator is unable to convey correct meaning in English, although it comes pretty close to the context. I am very sure that Google will perfect this, just a matter of time. English to Hindi Translator (click to enlarge) English to Hindi translator works better than Hindi to English one. Here is an example. Good job Google.