Saved by Aundha – part III

Posted on by
Reply

Darkness had descended by now. We decided to take a stroll around the temple complex before beginning our hunt for a local dining experience.

The weather this far into our trip had been nothing short of perfect. Early morning rides through the crisp, fresh and dry morning chill of the plateaus had been unexceptionally pleasant. Daylight would spread around us as if the heavenly blanket was being withdrawn tantalizingly slowly to reveal the beauty sprawled underneath. Daytime temperatures were tempered by the winter axis of earth. The clear day sky spilled into nighttime, painting a twinkling ceiling and making the evening ritual of exploring the town on either side of dinner that much more special. Lack of precipitation meant that the humidity levels were comfortably low. Tonight was no different.

The Aundha Naagnath temple
The Aundha Naagnath temple.

We followed the sparse crowd into the temple complex. The token presence of state security police at the gates was not as pronounced as the ones we encountered at Pandharpur two noons ago. Two police constables were sitting on an elevated platform near the gates, next to the ubiquitous walk-through frame of metal detector. The metal detectors were switched off, the constables even more so. Their monotonously dreary responsibility of safeguarding the complex and visitors without any clear intelligence directives had produced the inevitable effect. While most constables found solitary pursuits in reading news, some others found activity in helping out the temple staff in their duties. In a few cases their assistance hid ulterior motives as I was to discover later. None seemed approachable and almost all presented a courteous but curt facade. Their expressions hinted that they would welcome some human interaction but on the other hand the risk of loosing their carefully crafted pretentious respect restrained them.

Continue reading →

Rajiv Gandhi Speaks Against Nuclear Weapons – Part II

Posted on by
1

In the second part of this speech, Rajiv Gandhi Speaks Against Nuclear Weapons, Shri. Rajiv Gandhi presses home the point of the futility of nuclear arms race. He outlines a process, which if adopted by the U.N. and the masses, would bring about complete elimination of nuclear arms from the face of this earth by 2010.

Alas, it is as much a reflection of the lack of leadership as it is about the dearth of a universal platform for masses to organize, that the race has only intensified by new entrants seeking to secure this invaluable diplomatic bargaining chip. India and Pakistan having already underlined their philosophy by the tit-for-tat tests in late 90’s it’s now the turn of Iran (to be clear Iran’s claim has always been it’s pursuit of nuclear technology for power generation) and North Korea.

Rajiv Gandhi
Shri. Rajiv Gandhi

This section of the speech is dry on emotions and full in procedural outlines. The need to hold an audience’s attention during such sections is a critical challenged faced by speechwriters, especially in speeches with such an ambitious objective. Shri. Rajiv Gandhi’s effort is satisfactory in this regard.

In this part of the speech Niels Bohr, Gandhi and Nehru’s quotes make an appearance. It ends poignantly, relying on a quote from Dhammapada.

Continue reading →

Google – Little evil is healthy

Posted on by
Reply

Google’s initial spell on an uninitiated user during it’s toddler years of early 2000’s was one of freshness. Freshness in presentation, freshness in efficiency and economy, freshness even in it’s ideology. It’s efficiency in delivering super-fast results and it’s boldness in thought at organizing and prioritizing search results was an instant hit. No other search engine of the time came close to churning relevant data to the top like Google. Google’s ideology, even though not something that was stage managed by the corporate, was perhaps the most impressionable aspect. Especially to us working in IT at the time.

Google’s loyalty to it’s official motto “Organize worlds information and make it accessible” was transparent to most of it’s consumers. Without any real ideas about how to monetize this incredible platform which was attracting users by the millisecond, Google’s unofficial motto “Do no evil” was also easily accepted by the world. Even during the months on either side of it’s IPO, Google continued to maintain it’s reputation, although by then they had solved the problem of monetization. By successfully mimicking what Goto.com had figured out initially, it started selling ad-space based on words. In it’s subsequent and unrestrained thirst for profits it created other innovative avenues to sell ad space. Through an idea ingested by corporate acquisition, it launched the Adsense service which could be embedded in any site’s content where it would display a text-only advertisement that was also relevant to the content of that page. With this innovation in marketing, the landscape for digital billboards became limitless.

Continue reading →

Indian Seasons

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a slow opinion week so far so instead here’s something I learnt recently. Something that I should have probably known all along but…

In India 12 months of the year are divided in six seasons (ऋतुएं) – Greeshma, Varsha, Sharad, Hemant ,Shishir and Basant. Their timeline on English Calendar is as follows:

  • शिशिर (Winter) – 22nd December to 19th February
  • बसंत (Spring) – 20th February to 21st April
  • ग्रीष्म (Summer) – 22nd April to 21st June
  • वर्षा (Monsoon) – 22nd June to 21st August
  • शरद (Autumn) – 22nd August to 21st October
  • हेमंत (Pre-Winter) – 22nd October to 21st December

7th September, 2010. Mumbai.