Tittle-Tattle

Last Saturday, we went to the Bangalore International Airport. I have uploaded some of the photographs from that visit at my flickr site . While we were there waiting for our guest to come, we noticed a huge group of school kids visiting the airport that day. All their teachers did is to divide them in two different groups. One group stood near the departure terminal and the second group near the arrival terminal. We were sitting close to the arrival terminal.  These kids were having fun. And they have their unique ways of having fun. Whenever some foreigner (especially white skin) was coming out of the Arrival terminal, all the kids would in chorus say a Big "Hi" to them. I am sure those guests would not have expected such huge welcome when they land India. Not sure what all their teachers showed to them that day, soon our guest arrived and we left the airport. There is one good area though to watch the happenings on the runway etc next to the departure terminal.  One can cl...

A few friends and ex-colleagues of mine have come up with an interesting idea about travel search. First a little background - The Indian Railways operates around 8700 passenger train trips but still these many trips are not sufficient to give you point to point connectivity to around 6,856 railway stations. So we have this practice of connecting trains. To go from point A to B, you first go from A to C then from C to B. You can have various options depending on your fare, time and location preferences. And you may want to check about the availability on these routes, the pricing, time taken etc. To this, if you want to add the options provided by the fast growing air travel industry of India, you will have even more options to compare for. So what my friends have done is that they have come up with a website called http://www.90di.com , which lists all the connection options from point A to point B in India. One can select modes like Train, Flight and Train+Flight and it fetches inf...

This blog is for people in Bangalore , who happen to travel on Hosur Road every weekday or more to reach their offices in Electronic City . I have tried to create a tour in Google Earth of an alternate route from Wipro Office in Electronic City to Bilekahalli-Bannerughatta Road junction . The latter junction is a few hundred meters away from the Bannerughatta Road and Outer Ring Road junction. This route will be a wee bit longer than the regular BTM-Hosur road route but the time one would take on this route is always close to 30mins (in almost all weather conditions!) unlike that on regular route which varies from 20 min to 4 hours. To check this route, you will have to install Google Earth and open the .kmz file using that. The route starts from the Wipro Office gate in Electronic City and takes you thru some villages although the road thru them is mostly wide and tarred and in very new condition and rarely used. This even avoids the NICE road whose exit to Bannerughatta road is...

नमस्कार, अभिषेक को देख कर मैंने भी सोचा कि एक ब्लॉग पोस्ट हिंदी में भी करूं। यह तो काफी आसान है। गूगल नें तो ये सुविधा मार्च में ही दे दी थी पर मुझे अभी पता चला। काफी सही है ये तो! अरे सही, इसमें तो गलती करने पर सुधार के लिए उदाहरण भी देता है, वाह! किसी भी शब्द पर लेफ़्ट क्लिक कीजिये। अगर आपको भी हिंदी में ब्लॉग करना है तो Settings में जा कर Basics में देखिए वहा पर आपको Transliteration का drop down दिखाई पड़ेगा. सही है ना! पर अगर हिन्दी व अंग्रेजी मिला करके लिखनी हो तो फिर थोड़ी समस्या है। editor थोडा slow हो जाता है। मुझे लग रह है कि editor का "Write Hindi" option click ना करके सीधे शब्द पर लेफ्ट क्लिक कीजिये उस से आसान रहेगा। और समस्या तब हो रही है जब मैं कुछ गलत टाईप कर दे रह हूँ। खैर दिमाग तो काफी लगाया है गूगल नें उसमें कोई दो राय नही है। वैसे मुझे अब लग रह है कि मेरी हिंदी लिखने की आदत अब छूट चुकी है क्योंकि कोई भी वाक्य पहली बार में बिना अंग्रेजी के एक शब्द इस्तेमाल किए हुये पूरा ही नही हो पा रहा है। १ - "option" को हिंदी में क्या बोलते हैं? ...

Have you tried the Rail Enquiry using the number 139? This one is IVR and it allows you to type in the train number or speak the train name. There is an option (in Bangalore) where you can enquire for either train bound to Bangalore station or elsewhere. For elsewhere you have to speak the station name. Today when I said "Yasvantpur Jn", the IVR lady said "I **think** you said Yasvantpur". The "I think" struck me hard. Vow! To make the software sound more interactive/human they have used the word "think", cool! ~mks PS - I use the Train Enquiry website . Todays was an exception.

I met this friend of friend of mine today. He is son of Oriya Tam Bram father and Bengali Tam Bram mother. He can understand Tamil but cannot speak. His paternal ancestors settled as Raj Purohits of some Kingdom in Orisa and maternal ones settled doing same for some Bengali Raja. He himself has married a Marathi Brahmin settled in Andhra. Really interesting lineage! ~mks

Rising India India Poised Do these remind you of anything? India Shining When is the election? ;-) ~Mks

While I was raving about BSNL 's dataone broadband all around the world , BSNL was busy in its own bureaucratic innovations! I use dataone at home and I have Home Unlimited 900 plus plan. This means I get unlimited downloads and uploads and the bandwidth is 256Kbps. When I saw this news on dataone portal I was very excited and I happily blogged about that in my intranet blog also. But then Veetrag asked me to do a bandwidth test and post the image showing 2Mbps or so bandwidth. So I did a bandwidth test and saw this - Eating the humble pie! A retest within a few minutes was some solace - But I am confused! Though this is still not enough (afterall they said they will be giving 2Mbps). I checked up with the helpline, and its there at the dataone website also. BSNL is not increasing the bandwidth for Home Unlimited users so why am I getting > 256Kbps b/w. For me the higher the better, but where is 2Mbps? So now, I have asked them to migrate me to Home-1000 plan where there is ...

This valleywag entry intrigued me to do a Google blog search on Sun Microsystems sale . The search took me to this somewhat old discussion on "Is Sun priming itself for sale?" . The discussion is good but there is one point in it which made me post this blog - The buyer could be one of the new players: some undefinably large and yet unknown company from China or India. Among others (IBM, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Apple), one of the readers is expecting a company from India or China, yet "unknown" to outside world take over Sun Microsystems. Interesting! People have these views about India. China I understand, it could be Lenovo but which is this "undefinably" large and yet "unknown" company in India. ~Mks

CNN IBN news Five members of a family were trapped in an overflowing river for eight hours in Rajsthan, India. They were swept away, one by one, while an entire town and the government machinery watched. This is shocking, was there no way to save them, airlift using helicopter or something? Considering that it took eight hours for all of them to die (swept away). And considering that we could mobilize the whole nation to save prince . ~mks