Arundhati-citis

This is a brilliant post by the 'comic project'. I absolutely loved it and so am adding it to my blog. All credits to the original poster, i have not done any value addition here and have posted it here simply for the love of it. You can read the original post here: http://thecomicproject.blogspot.com/2010/10/arundhati-citis.html

Drinks and Personality

I got this in an email as a forward (hope am not flouting any copyright rules) liked it so posting the same here:

Before you order a drink in public, you should read this! Seven New York City bartenders were asked if they could ‘nail’ a woman’s personality based on what she drinks. Though interviewed separately, they concurred on almost all counts. The results:

WOMEN-DRINKS, WHO THEY ARE!

Drink: Beer
Personality: Causal, low-maintenance; down to earth.
Your Approach: Challenge her to a game of pool.

Drink: Blender Drinks
Personality: Flaky, whiny, annoying; a pain in the ass.
Your Approach: Avoid her, unless you want to be her cabana boy.

Drink: Mixed Drinks
Personality: Older, more refined, high maintenance, has very picky taste; knows EXACTLY what she wants.
Your Approach: You won’t have to approach her. If she’s interested, she’ll send YOU a drink…

Drink: Wine (does not include White Zinfandel)
Personality: Conservative and classy; sophisticated yet giggles.
Your Approach: Tell her you love to travel and spend quiet evenings with my friends.

Drink: White Zinfandel
Personality: Easy; thinks she is classy and sophisticated, actually, she has NO clue.
Your Approach: Make her feel smarter than she is…this should be an easy target.

Drink: Shots
Personality: Likes to hang with pals and looking to get totally drunk… and naked.
Your Approach: Easiest hit in the joint. You have been blessed. Nothing to do but wait, however, be careful not to make her mad!

Drink: Tequila
No explanations required – everyone just KNOWS what happens there.

MAN-DRINKS & WHO THE MEN ARE!

THEN, there is the MALE addendum — The deal with guys is, as always, very simple and clear cut:

Domestic Beer: He’s poor and wants to get laid.

Imported Beer: He likes good beer and wants to get laid.

Wine: He is hoping that the wine will give him a sophisticated image to help him get laid.

Whiskey: He doesn’t give a damn about anything but getting laid.

Tequila: He is thinking he has a chance with the toothless waitress.

White Zinfandel: He’s gay

The Immortals of Meluha - A Review

Author: Amish Tripathi

Publisher: Prakash Books India Pvt Ltd

Price: INR 295

Pages: 398

This is a book that landed up with me when I read about the same on a small HT feature page way back in March or April 2010. I loved the concept and lapped it up with enthusiasm. This book was my first online buy from the website www.flipkart.com. The entire package; right from the cover page to the first chapter are very alluring and trust me you will not let go till you’ve read the last page. And once you’ve read the last page you will start looking for more. You will start asking about the release dates of the next two books of the sequel. At least, I did. J

Moving on to my views and excerpts:

‘The IMMORTALS OF MELUHA’ is the first book in a trilogy. The other two books in the series are:

Book 2: "The Secret of the Nagas"

Book 3: "The Oath of the Vayuputras"

It is the story of the simple man, whom legend turned into a God. The book is set in 1900 BC, in Meluha a near perfect empire created many centuries earlier by Lord Ram. We commonly refer to this era as the Indus Valley Civilisation.

The proud empire of Suryavanshi rulers faces severe perils as its primary river, the revered Saraswati whose water is used to make Somras or ambrosia is slowly drying to extinction. Suryavanshi’s are surrounded by enemies in the form of the evil Nagas and Chandravanshis.

The only hope for the Suryavanshis is an ancient legend which says that ‘when evil reaches epic proportions, when all seems lost, when it appears that your enemies have triumphed, a hero will emerge’. This person is called Shiva – the Neelkanth.

I will not describe more about the book here and spoil your experience of reading the same. Here is the official link to the first chapter here: http://shivatrilogy.com/books/1st_chapter.pdf and indulge yourself.

If you like then please go forward and but the book - "The Immortals of Meluha" from here: http://shivatrilogy.com/buyonline.html.

Well done Amish, I look forward to the next two books. I absolutely love the fact that people are taking the Indian folklore to fiction and the same is doing it well. As a matter of fact this book has been in the Top 10 fiction list in India right from the time of its launch to till date. Kudos to Amish and eagerly awaiting the other books.

Indian Grand Prix

October 2011, will signal the start of the first Indian Grand Prix at a state-of-the-art, brand spanking-new race track in Greater Noida near New Delhi.

TRACK FACTS

• 5.14 km track to be ready by June 2010, in time for FIA inspection
• Track designed by Herman Tilke
• Total cost of the track around USD 350 million
• Fastest speed expected from an F1car — 318 kph
• Average speed — 210 kph
• Slowest corner— 93 kph
• World-class motorcycling events to come to the track
• Four layers of ticketing for the inaugural race
• Feedback from current racing drivers used in finalising track design
• Karting circuit and racing institute planned
• Bernie Ecclestone influenced the track design
• Grandstand alone will handle 30,000 people
• 140 marshals will be trained and the rest of them chosen from abroad
• No night race to begin with — but possible in the future
• One of the top three fastest circuits in the world
• Site part of the special development zone

What remains to be seen is whether India can pull its act together unlike the Common wealth games and build a great track on time and also if the race can draw enough enthusiasts to make it a profitable model.

I for starters am going to Delhi in October 2011 for sure :) :)

Long Sales "Gestation Period"

ADRUSHY MK-II, an anti Tank mine

I just read about the ADRUSHY MK-II, an anti Tank mine. I was mightly impressed with what i read and heard, so here is a jist of the same.

It is popularly called as "The Indian Influence Mine"(The Invisible Tank Killer).

The Specialty of this mine is that it doesn't explode if Indian Vehicle unit(Like a Jeep ,truck or even a tank )passes over it, but if an enemy unit passes over it explodes.

The trick behind this mine is that the DRDO scientists have recorded seismic signatures of the vehicles which are unique as our fingerprints or DNA to be precise. If the mine detects an unknown signature it shall explode as it thinks that it is an enemy vehicle.

Features

* Armour Penetration 85 mm causing 'k' kill.

* Full width attack capablity

* Tank trawl discrimination

* Reusable with three field settable SN periods of 10, 40, 80 days.

* Immunity against CLMC blast.

* Electronic cum mechnical safety.

Dimetions:
Lenght -- 330 mm
Width -- 240 mm
Height -- 140 mm
Total weight -- 7.6 kg
Explosive -- 2.3 kg
Body -- 10% GRP Polycarbonate
Linear -- Copper
Battery cells -- LiSOCI2(lithium Thino Chloride)

Of ‘Azaadi’, ‘Kashmiri’ and other false words - The real issue in Jammu & Kashmir -by Arnab Ray - (copied verbatim, link given)

This is a brilliant post by Arnab Ray. He has put forth in clear, unambiguous way how we are at fault in Kashmir and how people of Kashmir and Media (both Indian-foreign owned and foreign) are painting a sad picture of India. SO much so that some have gone to call India a terrorist country. It amazingly well questions MF Hussain on his calling India a non-free country when at the same time the state of India allowed him to speak so. The original post is copied here, i've added the link here as well. If i'm flouting any copyright then please let me know.

The original post is below in italics:

"There has been a slew of pro-Azaadi, anti-India articles in the Indian mainstream press recently. One fine specimen of mediahood proudly recounted how he became a stone-thrower for a day, pointing out quite pointedly that the only thing that saved him was the Hindustan Times staff card, with the emphasis being on the sub-string Hindu. Of all these marvelous bits of journalism, with their objectivity and integrity misaals in their own right, my favorite piece is by one M F Husain, who tells us how he left India for its lack of freedom. Yes, and presumably found it in Qatar, an Islamic theocracy where freedom of all religions other than Islam is severely restricted and where apostasy (leaving Islam) is technically punishable by death.

To castigate India for being “not free” while being a voluntary citizen of Qatar is the height of hypocrisy.

Anyhow, this article is not about M F Husain. Nor is it about the way forward in Kashmir nor whether trying to bribe the local population with money will work. Nor about the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which I believe needs to be repealed, for the armed forces have to be made accountable in civilian contexts like everyone else. Nor indeed about the recent violence per se.

It is about the Kashmiri ‘fighting for independence against the wicked Indian state’ thing that we see repeated ad nauseum not just from Pakistan but also in the Indian mainstream media.

My first beef is with the word ‘independence’. Historically independence struggles have been fought against foreign powers, those who have taken control over a piece of territory for the purpose of economic exploitation. It has also been fought between peoples of the same nation, like the Bangladesh independence struggle where a section of the population that has attained power (Punjabi Muslims) treats another ethnic or linguistic community (in this case Bangali Muslims) as second class citizens, systematically annihilating and depriving them of their most basic rights.

In the case of India’s Jammu & Kashmir state, none of this is true. India does not economically exploit Kashmir. On the contrary it spends a massive amount on the state trying to buy the loyalty of the population. Even the New York Times, which last time I looked wasn’t a right wing newspaper, says: “The dirty little secret of Srinagar, the heart of the movement to secede from India, is that many of its residents live quite well on the Indian government’s money.”

At the very least, no one can accuse the Indian government of taking anything out of the state. It is, of course, true that a lot of the development money lands up in wrong hands (that happens everywhere in India) but there are far more deprived areas of India that have no ‘freedom struggles’. As to the rights of Kashmiri people, they have privileges over property ownership that very few Indian citizens outside Kashmir have, making them super-citizens rather than inferior ones.

So none of the traditional characteristics of freedom struggles hold here. However, it is true that Kashmiris are fighting. But for independence. They are fighting to establish a theocratic Islamic shariyat state, aligned with or as an intrinsic part of Pakistan, where “independence” is defined somewhat as it is defined in Qatar, with subjugated status for minorities, and where the establishment of liberty, equality and fraternity—the ideals of any freedom struggle—is farthest from the minds of the stone-throwers and those that support them.

Sure, one can say “So what? If they want to establish an Islamic state, that’s their decision. What right does the Indian government have to interfere?” This brings us to my second bone of contention—the word “Kashmiri”. Like “independence” this too, in this context, is a false word. A better more honest descriptor would be “Kashmiri Sunni Muslims”. There was a time when Kashmiris meant both Hindus and Muslims, but then the Kashmiri Hindus were killed and driven out of the state by ‘Kashmiris’. Since these Hindus (as well as people in Jammu and Ladakh) are not part of the ‘freedom struggle’ it is not fair to use the word Kashmiri to refer to the agitators, who, since they use Islam as their reason for wanting independence and identify themselves solely by their religious orientation, should also not object to being called what they actually are—Kashmiri Sunni Muslims.

The question should now be framed as: “So what is wrong in letting Kashmiri Sunni Muslims, after they have driven out the large section of the minorities, from establishing an “Islam is the answer”, “independent”, non-democratic state? Their free will—they shall do as they like.”

If tomorrow the majority in Jat-land start an armed struggle to establish an autonomous Khap-istan where castist lynchings, dowry and child marriage are legal, and where inter-caste marriage implies death and retributive rape , would you call that an “independence” struggle and say that India should just let them have their way and not have the army fight them? If the day after tomorrow, if Gujarat decides that it wants to throw out its Muslim minorities and establish a Hindu theocratic Dhokla-land will the same Indians who post “Stop illegal military occupation of Kashmir by terrorist-state India” on Facebook also support the rights of Gujarati Hindus to choose how they wish to be governed because that’s what the ‘Gujarati’ majority wants?

I think I know the answer.

So please sirs and madams, do protest against the Indian state and the Indian Army and sign petitions and protest outside the United Nations while drinking Starbucks and discussing EB2 Green Card priority dates. Do whatever you want to do but please, for the sake of truth of labelling, please drop the “independence struggle” from the description, and qualify the word “Kashmiri” with what should come after it.

Of course, if you do so, then the romance and the liberal “feel good” of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with an independence movement will be gone. Hurling stones at the Indian Army would be seen not as an act of supreme passion and justified frustration but as an act of war against the Indian state, something I believe which there are laws against.

Which is why you won’t do it."

Dilbert: Managers take on appraisals!

Another favorite Dilbert post on Managers and appraisals!!

Dilbert and Numbers

Another yesteryear Dilbert strip that i loved.