R O A R :)

Chennai-ku!

Well, we were the defending champions. We proved it once again. What a terrific game of cricket we have seen today! 72 games over a tiring long tournament, and at the end of it all, Chennai Super Kings lead by Captain Cool, the Think Tank - Mahendra Singh Dhoni's men have pulled out a blinder of a performance to stand-still the visiting Bangaloreans and clinched the Trophy for one more time!

The Champ is here

 It is very much disappointing for a team that has reached the IPL Finals TWICE in FOUR editions, but still couldn't handle the nerves and emerge on the successful end. 

Everyone has always said that Dhoni is a Lucky man. Indeed he is. Despite his efforts, his teammates come up with flying colors every game. It is also the responsibility of the captain to keep his team's morale in the right direction. It is pretty much proved that trusting one single player will only lead to jeopardy. Gayle's Duck proved exactly that.

Gayle lit up the IPL on fire as soon as he arrived, but couldn't match up with big games. Chennai was just sensational. They did not rely on any single player for success. In every game, one of them contributed greatly. Even there were 2 league games where Saha and Aniruddha contributed toward win. This side is amazingly balanced in such a way that you always have someone contributing every game.

This stat proves it all: None of CSK batsmen made it to the TOP-5 run getters in the tournament, and none of CSK bowlers made it to the TOP-5 wicket takers list. This clearly tells us how even the contribution from the players is. Another interesting fact is the middle order strength. After FIVE DOWN, you still have ALBIE MORKEL and DWAYNE BRAVO. That's a kind of line up you can never contain, in a 20 over game. Always CSK stared slowly, but improved the momentum at the end. 

Albie Morkel and Suresh Raina were amazing during the SEMI FINALS. Murali Vijay and Micheal Hussey was mind-blowing during the final, with a 159 partnership for the first wicket!

This Victory is an apt recognition to a TEAM that really proved themselves as an epitome of that word, and remained victorious in the end. Let's ROAR fans. For our great CSK. Here is me, celebrating this IPL 4 Victory with a brilliantly edited video from Vinod. Just embedded below !!!

Miss Integrity

I just wrote about an unpredictable girl in my previous post. Here is a story of another unpredictable girl, with unbelievable integrity in a country like India, where people casually give and take one common thing: BRIBE.

This intelligent girl registered for an M.B.A degree in a renowned University. 3 semesters went by, and she cleared all the subjects at her first attempt itself. This is a correspondence course in fact. A software developer by profession, she spends 9-10 hours @ work, 2-4 hours in commutation, but still manages to find time and prepare for her course.

All-is-well until she started looking out for GUIDEs for her Final yr project. It appears that no one do projects on their own in that university. "Give me 4000 Rs, I will take care of it", was the shocking blatantly statement she heard. Our Miss Integrity is not one for indulging in such cheap activities. She wanted to do it on her own. After contemplating the possible options, she went to the University, taking off a day at work. She went to the senior most professor in the department, explained him the problem and blatantly blamed the faculty's shameful attitude. She expressed her I-will-do-on-my-own intention.

"I will be your guide. Don't worry. Go ahead and start your work", the professor acknowledged encouragingly. She felt like her voice was finally heard. Filled with excitement, she completed the thesis that totaled some 40-50 pages, and met the professor after two months.

"40 pages is too less for a M.B.A thesis. Even high-school projects total more than this. You better work hard and put in more content, then bring it to me" was the response. For her, it is like someone saying this:  "Functionality doesn't matter. Write a code for 100-200 lines. Then only we can convince the clients that we have done something".

Well, to be honest, the customers care only for the quality of the software, and not about the number of lines written. Similarly, the no. of pages used to express the idea is insignificant. She felt ignored but added more pages  and took it to the pages-loving-professor, one more time. After correction, one more comment. "Everything looks good but the font size is unreadable. Increase it".

Days rolled on and on, and her final review date is just one day away. This girl, having corrected all the stupidly pointed out mistakes, took it to the guide for signature. This guide makes her wait for 4 hours outside his room, and finally lets her in, takes the bounded thesis and gives one more statement to solidify his stupidity-quotient. "This Table of Contents is not looking like a table. A table should look like a table. This must be changed. I know tomorrow is your review, but you can easily do this. Go out now, change it before evening, bind it before night, bring it tomorrow morning, I will sign it and then you move to your viva."

This really pissed her off. She had no other way then. The exam was less than 24 hrs away. She did everything she could, took it correctly the next day. This guy makes her wait, like the previous day, and she didn't know what to do. There was his assistant, whom she knows very well as she used to stand outside his room for enumerous times, gave her the answer: "Didn't you know yet, why he is delaying the signature? You did not yet give him the real-thing? That's why he is making you wait. He collects 1000 Rs for every signature. Just give it and you are good to go."

She never gave away a penny. She waited and waited, as the exam got over, and she couldn't do anything about it. There was this stern mind that firmly stood by moral principles, which did not have the courage to go inside and blast him into pieces.

That was truly terrifying for her. He who gave her the confidence & go-ahead, made her wait and wait, avail so many leaves, in which some of them, on a LOSS-OF-PAY, only for a cheap 1000 Rs. Where the hell does these professors come from? Which college do they graduate from? This event is real, and it happened in a well-known university.

While we can salute this girl, who stood by her principles even giving up on the degree, what should we do to the corrupt and cheap professor? Isn't God watching this suffering, upright girl?  She had only one arrear which prevented her from getting the degree. That arrear is no other than this project!

Dear God, where in the world are you now?

iPhone development

I love to see people start blogging. Many of my friends have asked me how to go about it. I have created one video tutorial on blogging once. Just wanted to introduce you my friend Srinivas' blog on iPhone development.

 

He writes about his learnings on a regualar basic, primarily about Objective C. It is a programming language which is prominently used in developing Apple Inc's applications.

If you are interested in learning iPhone development, this is the guy to catch. You can read Srini's blog here: http://iphoneobjectivec.blogspot.com/

Miss Unpredictable

I was driving back home on a weekday evening. The Mount Road isn't as populated as it usually used to be, around 7 PM. It might be due to the #IPL effect. I was casually breezing through the road, letting off all the honking cars and buses to go past me. In a flick of a moment,  I witnessed a Pulsar bike which crossed me in a flash. Rightly so, an youngster was driving it, and surprisingly a scary-looking girl on his pillion, eyes closed, heads down, holding something down tightly. 

I don't know why I chose to check out her face. I just wanted one stare at the reaction of that scared-out face. I anticipated it to be cute & funny. I shifted gears. He was long gone, but I accelerated through all those vehicles that went past me, and I am now in parallel to the Pulsar. 

Making sure I am not going to smash any on going vehicle, I sneaked at the side only to notice her holding on to something, tightly. Little acceleration revealed the unexpected. She wasn't scared of the speed or anything. She wasn't holding on to the bike. She was actually busy, typing an SMS!

#WTF 

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On a serious note, using mobile phones while sitting behind a two wheeler is extremely dangerous. One sudden break, and you will have nothing to hold on to, injuring yourselves, and 99% of the time, the driver too! Please don't do it. How fucked up life can get in a fraction of a second, you will only know after the happening of the unexpected!

How to save time?

Book Reading is a habit that I 've been carrying out over the past 8-9 months. I started blogging in 2007, with one single objective: Improve my knowledge on the world's most prominent language: English. And I later realized that only with good reading comes better writing skills. I decided to make it a habit to read books. I succeeded to some extent but I always found myself left with little or no time to turn pages. Read one interesting blog entry today. It goes like this.

So, How to get time for reading books?

If you’re watching TV two to three hour per day and if you reduce your TV watching time one hour per day and you’ll save your 365 hours per year. If you divide that by forty hours work week, you’ll see that you’ll have added about nine half additional week of productivity to your life. That likes getting two additional months every year! Use this additional one hour to read the books in the field of motivation, psychology, education, training and self esteem. We assure you that it will make a profound difference in your life.

If you’re not ok with one hour for daily reading, then just keep aside 15 minutes a day. In fact, you can read a book a month-that’s 12 books a year-by reading only 15 minutes every day. Here’s how:

The average high school graduate reads 250 words a minute. But we all stop to re-read a sentence from time to time…or pause to think about a new idea. So it’s fair to say that the average reading rate for the most of adults is 200 words per minute.

There are 400 or so words on an average book page, which means the average reader, can easily read this (400 word page) in two minutes. At that rate, you could read seven of such pages in a 15 –minute’s period.

Suppose there are 210 pages on an average book. So by reading 15 minutes a day-that’s seven pages every day, you could read this book in 30 days. It may take you more than a month to read some longer books, but by and large, if you’ll read 15 minutes a day, you’ll be able to finish a book a month.

By the end of the year, you’ll have read at least 12 books. By the end of 10 years, that will add up to 120 books! Just think, by setting aside just 15 minutes a day, you could easily read 120 books that could help you grow richer in all areas of your life. By doubling your daily reading time to just half an hour, you could read 25 books a year-that’s 250 books in 10 years.

That’s why one should not be sympathetic with people who say they don’t have the time to read and grow rich. That’s nonsense. They have the time. They’re just choosing to use their time doing something they value more than reading!