This time, I took her to Janpath to do shopping. Frankly I never have liked shopping very much. And this fact was more so while shopping with Patty. Our shop keepers are shameless in quoting prices to foreigner. If Indian rate for a simple “chunni” is Rs. 100, for foreigners the bargain starts at Rs 1000 and ends at Rs 700! Total Loot!

Anyways I will write about these double standards some other times. (We had a backup with us in form of my school friend Rajeev who was a local and had good contacts. He helped us in getting some good stuff at reasonable root rates!). Having spent the whole morning roaming Janpath and CP It was finally time to return from the arduous shopping trip. It was going to be a long drive, but as it was afternoon the traffic was less.

I have always felt that traffic lights can tell you a lot about a place or city you are in. There is always so much activity around a traffic signal. There are places were traffic lights are given their due respect and people stop. and there are places were people do things otherwise! this is more visible in Delhi NCR. In Delhi, people follow traffic stops; you cross border and go to Noida or Gurgaon, people would look ferociously (swear at times) at you as they drive past you over a red light (i.e. if you are foolish enough to stop over one yourself !)

Traffic signals have also become good source of income for many. Starting with the local traffic constable who demands money from every Truck that passes his traffic junction, to hawkers  who try to push the items inside your car window given opportunity. Who can forget the poor woman with a baby latched on here breast, or one arm in plaster asking for money.

This has become so normal for us Delhites that we have stopped noticing. I am one of them.

This experience that I want to share is something that I still cannot forget. So Back to the story. We crossed Regal cinema hall in Connaught Place
and were our way towards office (Gurgaon).

Patty was concerned about we reaching office late. I felt guilty about the shopping she did. The price at which she got all the stuff! We tried consoling each other. I  comforted her by assuring 1 hour late to office was okay! (by Indian standards), she returned favors by assuring me that the cost of chunni was okay (by European standards).

We eased into one of the many red lights we were going to get on your way. We were in Central Delhi area and it being a week day, after noon traffic was light. A small boy waited patiently on the corner of the red light. This five-year old was short, tanned all over ( Delhi sun on black asphalt road can bake you like this is days ). He wore a simple brown shirt and a blue half-pant, no footwear. He wore a small brown satchel around him which looked rather over sized on him.

He came silently to window and offered a set a of fancy pencils.  Two long pencils with a fur cap and a rubber. And said ” Bhayia! Pencil lelo” , he looked at the co-occupant of the vehicle and called up in English. “Only 10 Rupees Saab, per pencil Saab! take Saab!”. I gave a soft smile! i knew the reason the conversation had changed to English and the prices shot up double!By conviction my first reaction would have been to shrug away the boy and ask him to go away. But I  continued the conversion, I took the pencil and reviewed it, asked couple of things about the pencil. Then asked him whether he goes to a school or not. The boy replied “Nahi Saab! Me Kaam Karta hu; pencil lelo Saab” (No , I work, take the pencil saab). I told him I will take a pencil only if he asks his mother to go home. “Apni Mummy ko bolna tumko school bheje” (tell your mother to send you to a school), I said, giving some unwanted advice. The answer to this made me feel so guilty. The boy replied and asked me gently “Koun Mummy Saab ? ” (Mummy Who saab ?). This innocent answer was a genuine reply, and not doctored just to earn sympathy.

I quietly took out a 20 Rupee note from the dashboard and handed it softly to the boy and kept the two pencils. light had turned green and it was time to move along.

At times, I still think about this incident. I feel sad for the poor orphan boy, some thing I could have done any thing differently that day. We make tall claims of our growth rates and hyper malls with 1km plus shopping space; then i wonder how this growth and country’s prosperity has not touched this boy’s life. This boy who lives in a capital of the country and works from the central business district of the city still can’t go to school. Probably plays real-life chor-police and hide-and-seek with Delhi Police constables every day just to make a living and survive.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.  ~Galileo Galilei

I too learn a few things from this ignorant little boy that day.

I have a collections quotes which I keep saving. These quotes are from some famous minds and best way i can think of to summarize and end this story is by  quoting them.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.  ~Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.  ~Buddha

True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander.  ~Charles Caleb Colton

My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants.  ~J. Brotherton

“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”

I remember the days when I was in school and we used to get Newspaper from school under the NIE, after getting complaints from parents about the unacceptable material getting shown in the Magazine section, our school management (a conservative lot) decided to do away with the Magazine portion and only keep the Main newspaper for circulation.

After reading (or rather looking) today’s newspaper I am convinced newspaper reporting and editorial-ship has dipped to a new low. Every body today’s knows the quality of News getting reported on so many 24 hour  NEWS channels on Indian television. Don’t even want to comment on the Indian TV NEWS channel because it has a potential to become a blog page itself! Newspaper industry has surely gone one-up on every one today, setting up a new bar of shame and crossed all boundaries of censorship.

sleaze in newspaper TOI 05/10/2009

The image that you see in the blog entry is of today’s Times of India main newspaper page 13. Reporting about the raunchy sleaze parade that is underway in Nice, France. The objective SAVE Environment for better future. I wish I could understand what the editor wanted to report by showing such revealing images and publishing them in a news daily. (The size of image is deliberately kept to  a minimum.)

Newspaper reporting was considered a noble profession, there still are many good articles that get written and many interesting stories that one can only find in a newspaper. But this type of newspaper editorial is cheap stuff and is condemnable. Hope some action is taken against the Editor of the Newspaper.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Video Credits to vilhelm999
ENJOY!

Sing Along
Big wheels keep on turning
Carry me home to see my kin
Singing songs about the Southland
I miss Alabamy once again
And I think its a sin, yes

Well I heard mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow

Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I’m coming home to you

In Birmingham they love the governor
Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth

Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I’m coming home to you
Here I come Alabama

Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers
And they’ve been known to pick a song or two
Lord they get me off so much
They pick me up when I’m feeling blue
Now how about you?

Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I’m coming home to you

Sweet home Alabama
Oh sweet home baby
Where the skies are so blue
And the governor’s true
Sweet Home Alabama
Lordy
Lord, I’m coming home to you
Yea, yea Montgomery’s got the answer

A man was polishing his new car; his 4 yr old son picked up a stone & scratched on the side of the car. In anger, the furious Man took his child’s hand & hit it many times, not realizing he was using a wrench. At the hospital, the child lost all his fingers due to multiple fractures. When the child saw his father….with painful eyes he asked ‘Dad when will my fingers grow back?’ The man was so hurt and speechless. He went back to the car and kicked it many times. Devastated by his own actions… sitting in front of the car he looked at the scratches, His son had written ‘LOVE YOU DAD’. Next day that man committed suicide…Anger and Love have no limits… Always remember…..

” Things are to be used and people are to be loved” but the problem in today’s world is People are being USED & Things are being LOVED

Lisa is currently undergoing a cancer treatment.
A special tribute to her.

About the Place

We normally do a fare bit of research of the place we go to on the internet. We found very little detailed accounts of travel, by public transportation, to this place. Barachukki and Gaganachukki Falls collectively referred to as Shivanasamundram falls are about 130 Kms. from Bangalore and are part of Karnataka’s Mandya District. River Kaveri splits a few kilometers to the south into western and eastern branches. The western branch results in the twin waterfalls of Gaganachukki, the eastern branch results in the Barachukki falls. This place has Asia’s second hydro-electric power station after shimshapura, which is located at the waterfall and is still functional. The electricity produced here was initially used in the Kolar Gold Fields making it the first place in Asia to get hydro electricity.

Going there

The preferred way to go to this place is by own vehicle, the roads are nice and drive is pleasure. It rains here daily nowadays so bike ride was not a good idea, besides we were three and did not have a car between
us. But as we found out the place is well connected by public transportation.

Bus service starts as early as 7 am in the morning from Bangalore’s Kempegowda inter-state bus stand. The last bus for Bangalore is around 8:30 in the evening (though we did not wait that long to find out, this information was told to us by the (very friendly) BMTC bus conductor (who astonishingly spoke OK Hindi) while on the way to the falls.

We took the first BMTC ( lal daba (Red Box) as we call it) bus from Bangalore bus stand platform 7. We were told to look for a bus that goes to Malavalli. The bus conductor noticing our bag packs knew exactly our destination. The nearest bus stop from the falls is called Sathyagala, Malavalli is 102KMs from Bangalore, and Sathyagala is 21 KMs further ahead from Malavalli. Fortunately for us the bus was in fact going towards Sathyagala. For (some unfortunate) travelers like us who depend purely on local transportation, travelling here not so difficult. The two falls are about 6 KMs from the bus stop and are about 5 KMs away from each other. Other places to visit include couple of beautiful tradional south Indian temples and a Dargah. We found an auto stand near the bus stop and arranged for an auto rickshaw.
Our auto rickshaw driver Mahesh spoke only in proper nouns (name of places) and numbers (money) but it was okay, in the end he turned out to be a decent chap. We arranged and settled for 200 bucks – two falls – temples – waiting – drop back to the bus stop (basically the rickshaw stand).

The Barachukki falls

Now that we have been to number of places around Bangalore I would rate Bharachukki falls 4 out of 5 points in terms of adventure, 2 out 5 in terms of accessibility. Let me clarify, by accessibility I mean the user friendliness of the location. (Pardon my IT English!!). Logically Accessibility and adventure factor of a place will always be inversely proportional . What’s the fun in going to a place your grandpa can also hop off too?!(off-course the anomaly to this theory will be a place artificially created, like a theme park)

Barachukki falls

Barachukki falls are about 8 KMs from the bus-stop. Some great photo ops when you reach there. Its 250 steps down and you reach the base of the waterfall. The falls are termed segmented because it’s a collection of waterfalls which fall from different places. The heights of these falls vary from 150 feet to 50 feet. These falls are smaller than the Gaganachukki falls and therefore more accessible (for bathing). Swimming is highly NOT recommended (especially during monsoons season) mainly due to lack of safety infrastructure (we did not notice any formal life guards, safety
equipments in place).
The coracle boats are an ideal way to experience the falls up closed and personal. People from all age groups can enjoy this boat ride, 100 bucks is what is charged per (15 minutes) trip (and we think only IT resource billing is exorbitant!!). the tiny boat looks quite unsafe/ incapable at first but the boat-men and look well trained for emergencies and the rides can be deemed relatively safe (definitely safer to the kamikaze bus trip we experienced while coming back!!).

For more adventures ones, barachukki provides a section of falls that are smaller in height and less volume of water. One can actually go, stand and bath underneath this fall section. Getting to this section is an adventure in self. One has to cross a stream (not very wide) but pretty strong water current that is waist deep. Challenge is the extremely slippery river bed rock! We noticed the very minor cuts and bruises only after coming back! (must emphasis “minor” cause this probably will be read by family later! )

Neeraj decided to stay back from the water crossing and fall bath so Rajiv and myself, who had come prepared with a spare dress ( lessons learnt from past outing to River Kaveri (Mekedatu)) took the plunge crossed the stream and were under the fall. The experience was a first and was amazing. The water force was so great; standing under the water continuously was proving a challenge. We found a section of fall were volume of water was greater therefore continuous, the water pressure was enormous. The nature’s full body massage was a refreshing experience. 20 minutes of bathing, we were
satisfied and jokingly decided It to be the LAST bath we would ever need to take for the year!!

eating mirchi Pakodas

Locals find appealing ways to make a living out of the growing tourism from these places. Bangalore’s ever growing young IT force has indirectly affected living styles of many locals around. There is a little interference from the authorities here and surely no audits. There are a few people who serve fresh fish, mirchi fry, keera, bottled water to tourist, which is nice, only they don’t seem to care about keeping the place clean. Food is served in paper plates and one can notice a dump of garbage getting developed on one side, which is a sad thing to see.

Anyways continuing over journey, scaling up the steps we bid good bye to the falls. Strategically placed coconut seller midway provided refreshing coconut water. We were off to Gaganachukki.

Saying Good bye to Barachukki

Gaganachukki falls

Gaganachukki falls are about 5KMs from Barachukki. There are two places to see this waterfall. We took the way down from the dargah. This way you see the massive water fall’s second step section from its head! To reach their, requires a bit of trekking over rather slippery rock surface, jumping over minor streams, but none too difficult for youngsters. The approach to dargah was very dirty, probably due to some mela (festival) that had recently happened. The Gaganachukki falls are much greater in high and are sectioned in two, creating an island in between.

It is said that there are ancient temple ruins on that island and probably was a human settlement many centuries ago. This piece of information we were able to only get from the internet, we tried getting information about getting on the island from locals but weren’t able too, mainly because of language problems. (Probably we were asking wrong question to wrong people in a wrong place! In a wrong language!! ).People I think weren’t too pleased with us (outsiders)
asking directions to the temples in front of a dargah, that too in Hindi!! Next time we will try going to the

Gaganachukki falls

falls from the
other side.

The place must admit is very scenic. Though after the initial day’s adventure was proving a bit dull. It had rained the whole morning (most of the time we were in the bus) but had cleared by the time we reached the falls. So the weather was perfect. It was only 2 pm and we all were feeling a bit lazy and a lot hungrier! From past experiences we had brought some nick knacks to munch on and that’s exactly what we did.

Soon were we out of the falls and heading back. Our auto rickshaw driver (Mahesh) took us to our final two destinations in a jiffy. Two temples, one was a local deity, other one was of lord Vishnu. The statute of sleeping Vishnu in bronze was beautiful so were the temple complexes. The trip back was quite uneventful and we were in Bangalore by 5 PM. The trip was thorough enjoyment and a good way to spend a week end.
Enjoy the Photographs.

At Peace with Nature

What better tool to learn about it, but google it-self. With times the world ‘google’ has become a synonym searching. It won’t be long when the Webster adds the word “googling” as a verb! Action of searching (all most any) stuff virtually on the World Wide Web (WWW). So how does it all work? How google does brings so accurate search results. Let me explain with a bit of history about Search engines.

Search engine technology had its humble begins. Things were maintained manually, due to limited number of web servers in dinosaur age of computers. As per wiki Tim Berners-Lee was the poor guys who kept updating the list on the CERN webserver.

Alan Emtage (apparently an Archie comic’s fan it seems or a bad speller) a student at McGill University in Montreal in 1990 created the very first tool used for searching on the (pre-web) Internet that was called Archie ("archive" without the "v."). The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP sites, creating a searchable database of file names. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) and Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) search tools came next which searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems.

The web’s first search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. The site basically depended on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format. Practical approach for the times, but not exactly a smart way compared when compared to current context.

As I would like to write more about google search mechanism I would skip directly few generations and talk about the origin of search concept google is based on.

The Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer developed in June 1993 by Matthew Gray (MIT) was probably the first web robot. JumpStation (December 1993) used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index. It was thus the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine crawling, indexing, and searching. Web Crawler one the first “full text” crawler-based search engines which essentially searched for any word in the web page.

Niranjan, Infoseek, Lycos, AltaVista, Open Text, Web Index, Magellan, Excite, SAPO, Dogpile, Inktomi, HotBot, Ask Jeeves, Northern Light, Yandex, AlltheWeb, GenieKnows , Naver, Teoma, Vivisimo, Baidu, Exalead, Info.com, Yahoo! Search search engines popup between 1994 and 2004, which basically still did not fully use full text searching technology, rather had the more conventional Web-directories.

Google had a rather humbler beginning. The developers Larry Page and Sergey Brin while working on their Stanford research project developed google search technology. Did some distribution partnerships with AOL and Yahoo, pitched google technology to friend and Yahoo! founder David Filo, unsuccessfully.(that what I read)

Google got a profitable business model only with their AdWords advertising program in February of 2002; soon grew to over 100 billion dollars by the end of 2005!!

So I to go to the more technical side of the discussion, how does the sucker work?!

Google uses automated programs called spiders or crawlers, just like most search engines. Google runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing. Parallel processing is a method of computation in which many calculations can be performed simultaneously, significantly speeding up data processing. What sets Google apart is how it ranks search results, which in turn determines the order Google displays results on its search engine results page (SERP). Google uses a trademarked algorithm called PageRank, which assigns each Web page a relevancy score.

Google Search has three working sections.

• A web crawler (GoogleBot) that finds and fetches web pages.
• The indexer that sorts every word on a website page that the crawler provides and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database.
• The query processor, which compares the search query to the index and pulls out the pages that it considers most relevant.

Keeping everything running quickly meant building a system to feed necessary information to the spiders. The early Google system had a server dedicated to providing URLs to the spiders. Rather than depending on an Internet service provider for the domain name server (DNS) that translates a server’s name into an address, Google had its own DNS, in order to keep delays to a minimum.

When the Google spider looked at an HTML page, it took note of two things:

• The words within the page
• Where the words were found

Words occurring in the title, subtitles, meta tags and other positions of relative importance were noted for special consideration during a subsequent user search. The Google spider was built to index every significant word on a page, leaving out the articles "a," "an" and "the." Know we know why the search results are so accurate!

Will try and append some for data in the page.

References:

1) http://computer.howstuffworks.com/search-engine1.htm

2) http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

3) http://computer.howstuffworks.com/google1.htm

4) http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/

5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine
6) http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

First paragraph of my blog and I am already having a writer’s block. I realize that starting something is the hardest. Remember the science lessons from school days,  For a body, static friction is more than its rolling friction. Same principle applies.

Reason for me in initiating this blog is combination of reasons. For starters, to become regular at something that is not life-critical and sustaining practically! Am feeling self conscious now.

So I hereby patent and name this blog “Here’s a though…”.  I pledge to keep adding interesting stuff and ideas, new sections, updates about my life.

Just to add there is a paper available online written Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page check it out at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.htmlView This Poll