Defining life with ....

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Location: Dallas, Texas, United States

Sunday, April 27, 2008

IPL controversy

What do we all fight for, live for? Let's take the case of a sportsman...well, the biggest honour for him is to wear the national crown and the happiest moment is to win a World Cup! Sportsmen are worshiped so much that they are sometimes seen as soldiers..soldiers fighting for national pride, soldiers sounding the victory horn, soldiers showing our supremacy over many other menial competitors...Sportsmen become our channel through which we see our frustration expressed..For example, I become a Sreesanth, you become Harbhajan and together we beat Pakistan in the world cup :P...we cheer our team, our team works as a unit and trounces the enemy and declares victory and then there is euphoria all around us :)...Our great team has achieved what we have been longing for and WE are just the best .. (atleast for that momemt)..

You know, all that has changed with IPL! Now, everything is ether...players are drafted from just about anywhere in the world and play for any team within India..in fact they were auctioned! Indian players don't necessarily play for the regional teams they belong to...they just play for the highest bidder...so now, everything is for money...very very clearly money. A big chunk of IPL as you would have expected are players from India...everybody in our national team is playing for one team or the other and most interestingly against each other along with members of teams they used to plot against, play against! Well, a very interesting concept, but it has even more interesting results....now our players cannot get along well with each other and are ending up fighting with each other...Where's our "team India" spirit? Gone, all gone for money? Latest on this is the Bhajji slaps Sreesanth controversy! Harbhajan couldn't take Sreesanth taunting our own players and slapped him! What comedy :)..he is the same Sreesanth we liked when he did the same to our opponents! He was a representation of "aggressive" India..so was Harbhajan....and look at this MESS now!

Now, after all this, when team India plays for national glory, do you think the camaraderie will be back?



Look at this video for a few laughs...media is taking this issue to the extreme...this particular coverage from TV-9 is in Telugu and dramatizes the whole thing, doing some background song mixing for every event that happened/is happening during this controversy...wonder how the world cup would be for India this time with all this going on...do you think all this is due to IPL or are we just seeing some innate human tendencies being exposed?

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Communication Revolution?

Really, internet has brought lives closer, but closer the way we like it or just closer? Well, for now, I think it just brought lives closer, thats all..
Mom and I were talking today and we thought...so much to do, so many people to keep in touch with...wasn't it better when we stuck to our families...deeper bonds, lasting relationships and more fun...Are we draining CPU cycles in friend based context switching? Still saying "good old days?"...maybe it's time for communication evolution and not revolution?

Harakiri in style


Craigslist is great! A free billboard for just about any place and for just about anything. My wife found a job in Columbus and we have been depending on it for quite a few needs..right from a roomate to tickets to finding a used car...Nobody can match it's openness, the fact that is free and the fact that it has such a lot of "visibility"..Ask anybody anything and the first reply you hear is, "Have you looked at Craigslist?"....Great thing, ain't it?

It surely is!! But for every system that has a lot of benefits, there are abusers. There will be! Otherwise, this world wouldn't be interesting. In our pursuit of finding a new old car, we met one such. We saw a post in Craigslist that looked very promising, so promising that the deal looked deceptive :P...a honda for $4000 less than market value! Interesting, very interesting....

So, we couldn't hold our greed and ofcourse contacted them..my wife did...we got back a reply a day later from the seller asking for more details and mentioned a company that could do our transaction "online"..somebody like an escrow agent. She said we could try the car for 7 days and return it back if we didn't find it good...sounded too good to be true :)...So, then started our investigation...

We asked her for the VIN..she gave us the VIN and also a carfax report...Well, we ran our own check and that report was wrong :P..too bad for her..

Just for the heck of it, we contacted the escrow company..with great difficulty we got their e-mail address and sent an e-mail to them. We got a response in 5 minutes! And the response said that this lady was trustworthy etc etc...Great, somebody was vouching for this lady! How very silly on their part :P...

So, we said, lets humor ourselves a little more and then we went and looked up this new third party escrow company's DNS "easyasales.com"...for our amusement and yours, that DNS was created the day before!!
So, this lady or man, whoever it was did all this and all in style! Tried to look professional...maybe somebody else would've believed them, but luckily for us, we didn't and it helped :)

We went a filed a complaint at http://www.ic3.gov/ about this scam...so, if you are buying something on Craigslist, better be sure or gEt ReAdY fOr ThE rIdE !

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Did I go to Pittsburgh?

Did I really go and meet my sister in Pittsburgh or was it just a dream? Even if it was true, it sure does seem just like a dream...nothing seems to be patient in life and neither am I :)...I just seem to be in a railway junction and trains are just whizzing past me! Wonder how I can make a few moments stick in my life! I know I will remember our trip to Columbus and especially to Pittsburgh because that was the first time I ever surprised somebody so unexpectedly :)...but, it happened so fast that it just seems like a dream.

Feel bad every day that I am paying lesser and lesser attention to friends and family who are more and more important to me...can't call this a conscious or an unconscious choice...all that I wanna say is this is something I have "fallen" into and I don't like it! Living a life and leading a life are just two different things!

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Intesting projects : Fun time :D