What's with these days??????

Yesterday happened to be my bhaiyya bhabhi’s 6th anniversary.after the regular formalities of giving the gifts and wishing them we sat for a chat. My brother started off the conversation saying that this over-hype of anniversaries and other such “special” days are something he does not understand. Be it “Father’s Day”, “Mother’s Day”, “Friendship’s Day” all are the gimmicks of gift companies and definitely does not belong to our culture. He also added that the concept of cake cutting is also alien to our culture but now has become a part and parcel of our life. I pretty much agree with his point so didn’t have much to add. But it was my sister-in-law whose words made me sit back and think. She said, many things are not part of our culture but we have adopted it. Giving an example, she referred back to our breakfast of noodles, she said that even that wasn’t a part of our culture but we do eat it happily.

She had a point and I couldn’t argue. Though I have my reservations over the celebrations of all the “days” but her opinion had a point. There are many things which was not part of our culture but slowly and steadily we started accepting them because they were convenient and made our life easier. Today in the pace we are moving, we hardly have time for family and friends or for that matter our partner. Thus we happily resort to the convenient way of making those “special” days more “special” by throwing surprises at them. So the concept of Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and all the other day’s becomes relevant to our life. And the gift companies happily cash of our sentiments.

So even though we may hate it, and there maybe extremists strongly voiving their opinions with dharnas and bandhs, the fact that we have also somehow contributed to the increasing popularity of these “special days”.

April Fool - The GMail style

"GMail is a new kind of web-mail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun”. This is one line probably most of the GMail users miss when they log in. This in brief tell us what we are using everyday, what we are experiencing and what is so useful every time we log in to check our mails. Launched on 1st April, 2004 with a storage capacity of 1 gigabyte, today GMail is one of the largest products in the market. It recently celebrated five glorious years on 1st April, 2009. To mark the fifth anniversary, GMail announced its new feature AutoPilot. With the help of an automated artificial intelligence technology called CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed- Intelligence Entity) the feature analyses ones writing skills and replies for the person.

GMail is notoriously known for the April Fools’ pranks that it have been playing on the users and the market analysts over the past five years. In 2004 when Google announced its launch everyone thought it to be a joke because no one expected a mail to have storage capacity of 1 GB. But to everyone’s surprise Google did the impossible and launched GMail with the promised storage capacity. Immediately in a few weeks time other big players like Yahoo upgraded their storage. It is still to be seen whether AutoPilot is just another prank or a real feature in GMail.

GMail since then has been re-inventing itself coming up with newer and better facilities each day. GMail comes in the Beta version meaning that all the features that they launch are on an experimental basis which actually comes out from the Google subsidiary “Google Labs”. The idea of having Beta phase is to enable the users rather than the developers or professional testers to give the feedback. GMail says that it wants the users to be the critics and respond to all the new features that they include in it.

In the last five years GMail has evolved. It was the first mailing site which intigrated chat within the mail box. It was also the first one to include video chats. As Todd Jackson, GMail Product Manager says, that these innovations and features are “really important in expanding the scope of communications that Gmail makes fun and possible and easy and fast.” Other features like less spam, easy UI (User Interface), filters and labels makes GMail a favorite with millions of people around the world. Jackson further enumerates that the steady growth of GMail has been one of the reasons the users are hooked to it. Gmail’s first aim is to make it as user-friendly as possible and then add more additional features. Jackson claims that in the next five years it will grow more and get even stronger.

As for the users, we are certainly benefiting from the increased experiments from Google Labs. Today there are millions of users logged on to GMail and it is “counting”. With GMail coming in many languages it further increases the chances of its growth. The latest edition for India is its Hindi version. Transliteration will only help GMail and obviously us, the users.

IT’S BUSINESS ALL THE WAY

Recently we have been hearing a lot about “the Indian Culture”. A lot of things for and against it have been said. And now the “moral policing” issue is quite forgotten.

The other day I was watching MTV “Roadies, Hell Down Under” with my friends. Seeing the tasks and the apparent humiliations the contestants were made to go through I was compelled to sit back and give this some serious thought. The task that I saw was where the female contestants had to fight with accomplished female boxers in Australia. Common! Now. How much is it fair? These contestants are here to play a game (though I have my reservations on that too, but later) and fighting physically with professionals is just not done. Moreover probably to raise the TRP’s of the show they showed shamelessly the uncensored version of how during the fight one of the contestant’s cleavage got exposed. It was disgusting. I wonder how is it that the so called “moral police” don’t take notice of these things. If all this was not enough, the male participants were asked to fight with two such participants. The result was that the poor had a torn ligament. Well, all in the name of a game!!!!

Now there is yet another youth programme in MTV called “Splitsvilla” and if I may add another extremely offensive and derogatory programme. How does love become a game, learn here. The way the girls and boy expose to get the popularity and win the “much coveted prize” is some sight. The games they are made to do are no way “Indian”. I mean we by our culture don’t go about seducing the opposite sex in such a pathetic manner. I just wonder again where the “moral police” are.

Moving forward, now I wonder what kind of family do these participants come from. I don’t have any right to accuse any family and my intentions are not at all doing so, but watching “Splitsvilla”, I am forced to wonder. Fortunately or unfortunately both these programmes are very popular among the youth (it wasn’t long ago that I used to religiously watch Roadies). And the youth I am talking about in this case are the teenagers and college going students. These programmes have a huge impact on their life. The way they live, behave everything. Is TRP’s all that matter in today’s world and not emotions?

Parade Attention

Location: Women’s Hostel, Varsity College
Time: 20:00 hours
Program: March Part
Event: Annual Meet

This is the schedule for every girl in the campus of the residential college. Rather, it has been the schedule for the past month. It is a big thing in the college and according to the ‘veterans’, it helps imbibe feelings of attachment, solidarity, togetherness among the boarders of a hostel. The practice simply demands all the 1st year students, some of whom have never marched in their life, to become the best in a matter of a few days.


Rigorous practice sessions, lots of instructons from seniors make up the practice sessions every evening. In this, add up the daily amount of people fainting, falling ill, limping etc. illness becomes the order of the day and the end result, less amount of concentration duringthe class hours. End result: well, your hostel becomes the best, at the expense of others health.


One may ask, what is the requirement of an even like a March Past. Unfortunately I don’t have the answer to this (I wish I had). What king of solidarity, togetherness does this event bring is another question answered to me. from my point of view, it brings bad breath, conspiracy among the hostels. One hostek’s “secret” should not be leaked to the others –an underlined rule in all the hostels.

I, as a mere spectator need to wait till theactual event to come to get a few answers. Probably, these “honourable feelings will also come in me once I watch my hostel win. Till then, I merely stand and watch the others struggle.

Introspection

As I woke up today amidst the regular hustle bustle of the other girs in my hostel corridor, I heard the chirping of the birds. Not very unusual in this part of the world. But today, I really heard them. Feeling quite nice hearing such soothing sound, I went out of my room to be welcomed by early morning sunshine warming the corridor. Well, I had to smile at this!!

Sometimes I wonder how beautiful and lovely it is to be woken up right in the lap of nature. The day definitely goes better after such a wonderful start. The way I heard the birds chirping, noticed the sunshine on the corridor made me think again if it happens everyday! And the truth is yes it does. But I never notice. I realised that even though I stay in a surrounding filled with greenery, trees, hills, I heardly notice it.

Isn’t it what has become of all of us? Havnt we stopped noticing the beautiful wold around us? Arnt we too busy making “our world” beautiful? Well a simple answer to all of them, yes we have. We all know global warning has spread its wings in our world, forests are vanishing, rivers are becoming streams, sun is scorching too hardly on us, ice is melting, glaciers are cracking, everything bad for us is happening, but we ar not doing anything.

It is true that we may not make much of a difference individually, but I am sure if we all try things will change. I guess, like I did today, we need to take notice of our surrounding first of all and then everything can happen. Observing a 5th June World Environment Day does not make much of a difference. Everyday should be Environment Day.

As I write this today, I think I should also make it a point to contribute ant little way I can to restore our environment.

You are in line!

“One person at a time”. This notice is seen outside ATM centres around the country. Though we may not be aware of this notice hanging outside the ATM centres, we do follow it sometimes. Sadly, most of the times we don’t follow this simple instruction written in three languages- English, Hindi and the local language.

In the place I am currently located Tezpur, people are probably illiterate or choose to ignore any kind of instruction. In front of an ATM centre no one follows this simple instruction of the fact that a person may be getting irritated at this breach of privacy. Moreover, there are always some smart-heads who think they know all about ATM’s and its processes and won’t stop from giving their valued opinions and suggestions when not required.

If a concerned citizen tells these people in queue to read the instruction and wait outside, smart answers like, “I want to get the cool air of the AC”, or “I won’t look at what you are doing” is alone gets. No one bottoms about it. It is really wonderful to think what do they get by entering and peeping into someone else’s transaction.


To a certain extent, if the attitude of the people cannot be changed overnight, sure the ATM centres can be changed. There is a facility in the centres where the door gets locked when a person enters and it opens only when the card is used. Sadly, in most centres this facility is dysfunctional and no one bothers to repair it.

India needs to wake to the social norms and follow certain rules which does not harm anyone but further strengthens the process. We all need to be aware of our rights and need to fight at the right time.

An emotional musing

Reading a newspaper after a long time is probably one of the worst faults of a mass communication student. Here I am supposed to be reading news everyday but I touched a newspaper after quite sometime. Not going into the reasons for it, I would rather talk about how it felt to read todays’ headlines.

“Times of India” read, “Finally, Sun Shines on Sania”. Though I had some knowledge about hers and Mahesh Bhupati’s win, it was quite something to read about on the papers. Further more, being the first Indian women to do so is quite a great achievement. But I wonder, if she will again not be taken over by endorsements and advertisements. Hope she doesn’t, we need more wins by Sania and the like to encourage other sports than cricket in India.

Anyways moving ahead, I leafed through the pages to the sports section. Here Roger Federer was shown in tears after loosing the Australian Open to Rafael Nadal. I can very well say, it was not a photo I’d like to see everyday. I mean a sportsman of his caliber in tears that too in public just doesn’t match. But again it shows some true emotions that cannot be controlled. Somehow the photograph invoked a lot of emotions in me. I would love to salute the person who tries so hard to achieve his goals.

I has always thought that reading a newspaper would only give me information but today it invoked certain feelings in me. I can say I missed reading the newspapers and would surely not stop it anymore.

You can't rely on Reliance

Reliance: Anything on which to rely; dependence; ground of trust. A meaning of the word from an online dictionary.

Dhirubhai Ambani had set up his industry in 1962 with a name that would probably make people buy the company’s products. But today Reliance Industries is a total misnomer. If Dhirubhai had meant to get trust from the name of his company, today both his sons have miserably made fun of it. Here I would specially talk about Reliance Mobile. If anyone has seen the ads of Reliance Mobile, it says, Air, Food, Water, Network.

But any Reliance Mobile user would tell you that the Network part is nowhere to be found. I myself have seen Reliance users around me searching for specific spots under the tree, under a lamp post where “network” comes. If our searching for “network” is not enough, most of the times, “all lines in this channel are busy” or simply “network busy”.

This is simple terms means trying to get through a connection in some 20-30 times, if anyone is left with the patience.

I sadly say that I have been a Reliance user for the past 3 years and even though I have many a times gone through such terrible “network”, even after changing location, I insisted on having Reliance because of their cheap rates. But today, I am so disgusted that I would harm my dear phone in my anger to get through a number and on the other hand, dear Mr. Anil Ambani would be getting richer.

One would say, what am I getting venting out my feelings through this blog. Probably NOTHING. But the fact that today atleast I am venting out my feelings gives me immense peace.

May His Soul Rest In Peace and May his Sons keep getting richer. That’s what I can ultimately say for our own GURUBHAI”