Drishtikone
Effect of the elder sibling: After wearing his Kurta, my son was looking for his pyjamas. So this 3 year old went over to his Mom and asked "Mom, where are my tights?" Read more
Effect of the elder sibling: After wearing his Kurta, my son was looking for his pyjamas. So this 3 year old went over to his Mom and asked "Mom, where are my tights?" Read more
This week Aamir Hafeez was eliminated from Sa Re Ga Ma Pa. It created a very sad and avoidable situation. His brother and family went on a rage rant accusing other participants of not being good singers and also bringing in the example of Musarrat, Amanat Ali and Raja Hasan - implying that Muslims are discriminated against in reality shows. It was really a sad situation - specially with someone like Amjad Ali Khan there. I personally have been a great fan of Raja Hasan but his singing had limited dimensions. Areas that he was strong in, no body could even touch him.. Period! But, he was not the same in all the areas. Amanat, on the other hand, was good and had a very easy singing style (clean singing - as Ismail Durbar rightly said) but he was not, in my humble opinion worthy of the top spot. Between, Raja and Aneek, I really think that Aneek was certainly the most versatile. In fact, he probably happens to be the most versatile singers I have seen. Ironically, many people held his technical correctness against him as if just because he cannot get it wrong technically, he doesn't have any "feel", which was a BS. Aneek was anyday the best. And, honestly, if there was indeed anything negative against a minority singer, then Harpreet Deol was one who should have felt bad. He kept on improving and bettering himself and yet no one ever gave him good remarks. I was as much longing to hear a standing ovation for him as he was. I wonder where he went wrong? I was always a fan of his. But until the end he never got appreciated! He even started to say that but stopped short. That showed his greatness. Read more
Information is King it is said. However, rarely is information even obtained within most major corporations. Most only reach the level of having huge piles of data. Data that is not even verifiable or in a form that could be used. There are multiple sources for the same data sets thus bringing into question the integrity of any one of the datasets. When data is available as reports, those reports - which do now provide information to the employees - are so numerous and cumbersome that they are not properly used for any decision making. In one of my client companies, they had 2000 reports that were created in a month for their middle and top management. It is anybody's guess how much else those managers would be doing apart from looking at the numerous reports during a day (if at all they were being used!) - much less making decisions based on that information. Reports are created for two purposes: - Decision-Making - Postman-delivery Read more
Ae Meri Zohrajabeen from the movie "Waqt" sung by Manna Dey (Music by Ravi & lyrics by Sahir) In this series, this is the first song from Manna Dey. I think he happens to be the best classical singer in the bollywood history. He himself admits that Rafi was better than him, but there really is not much comparison. This song is an iconic song from Manna Dey. It remains the only one in its area. The initial part of the song (alaap) is sung so well .. its twists and turns.. and then to the start of the song itself is just marvelous. Even the acting by Balraj Sahni in this song was very endearing! Read more
Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes. Where do you think this scene is from? Abu Gharaib, right? The prisoner? Some Middle Eastern terrorist, right? And the guard is definitely American. Bingo. Well last one is the only fact right! The prison is in Texas. The prisoner is an American. The year is 1995 when George W Bush was the Governor of Texas. And this treatment is not one-off mistake or a contractor's misdemeanour against the Army policies. It is an endemic way of life in prisons across the US! This has been unveiled by BBC on a Channel 4 film. They have videos to confirm all that. Strangely, there is no one to talk about that. The hypocrisy of the faithfuls and those whose heart beats for democracy is breath-taking! This is the movie with the details.. Read more
All our lives we try to fight hard and study to get jobs and create a career.Save moneys - climb the ladder, kill our dreams just to feed our families. There is a certainty and a feeling of safety. Or is it? In these days? Outside of these jobs is fear of risk. To hide from that risk we keep running. Running from the joblessness and running from standing still. What if you just stand in one place and say. Enough is Enough! I will not go on with this. What would happen then? Just try to stop running from your fears and stand up to meet with your dream. Archimedes said - "Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth". I am setting the lever. Read more
This is the story of a 7 year old boy surgeon who is now in his teens. He was featured in the Extraordinary People's show. The 1st part is embedded below (links to other parts are given below that). Watch the show carefully. It is unmistakeable that this kid knew more than the medical students in the Imperial College, by their own admission. He wanted to work in the Cancer Research at Imperial College to find a cure for cancer. He may not have the maturity of a 40 year old, but his level of maturity was far above his age. The top guys there at the Imperial College talk to him and work with him and then suggest that he go back and go through the college curriculum and "take it easy" lest he burns out. It sounds like good Psychology mumbo-jumbo.. but honestly, I got off at the end of the program with a rather bad feeling. In full view, this guy beat the shit out of all these folks, and still he had to go back. Yes, he is young. Yes, he needs time to develop. But his enthusiasm does not need time. It needs facilities. When I watched the program, I saw one generation of smart but certainly not great people evaluating a great mind while using their own measurement standards! What if the time in the B. Sc. in India blunts his desire and focus? One almost feels like asking the politically incorrect but obvious question - were they terrified to be pitted against this self-taught cancer researcher with not even a fraction of facilities and opportunities that these guys had and still stumping them? Imagine if he had the entire power of machinery behind him? The attitude and the mess that the Indian education system is not even comment worthy. I think the Indian system is just retarded anyways, but the attitude of these two Imperial College researchers was almost sickening. What are your views? Read more
Getting a job when you do not have the right experience or credentials is tough. But if one is smart, he/she can easily off-set that by sheer enthusiasm. It requires focus and targeting the interviewer/company that you are interviewing for. I remember when I first came to US with an Indian company to be trained in an ERP package. The other folks in the team were all experienced in the in-house ERP package that my company sold back home. It wasn't the best ERP but it had most of the features. And out of 20 in our team, 18 had worked on it for years. So quite obviously they had stronger credentials than I had. But I was determined to grab the project. And coincidentally only one was on offer. I did not know which area it was in or which client of this Big 6 would it be for. However, this is how I went about the process: 1. I looked for the weaknesses of the home-grown ERP that my colleagues had worked on. And the strengths of the new product that we were trained on. 2. Then I looked for my strengths. It was finance and cost accounting. 3. My gap analysis in #1 suggested that the home-grown ERP did not have a cost accounting module which this new product had and was strong at. This, I knew instinctively, was my chance! 4. I sat down to tailor my resume (not fudge). I remembered and listed all the things I had done in accounting and cost accounting in particular from the fact that I was a Cost Accountant to the fact that one of my internship projects had indeed helped that organization save money (Rs I million). I mentioned all that upfront. Along with the other stuff on accounting of course. The interviews happened and I did not over promise on my understanding of technology but stuck to my process side knowledge. Ultimately, out of the 20, I was the only one to get the project, because luckily for me the project that came up was miraculously in cost accounting. Bingo! Read more
Talking of China today, it is difficult to keep that butcher and barbarian, Mao Tse Tung out of the conversation. An earlier post on Drishtikone had reviewed the book "Mao: The untold story" - which after years of painstaking research suggests that Mao was responsible for massacre of over 70 million people during his rule. More than the sheer scale of his madness, it is the non-chalance with which he goes about his work and how he disregards even the most basic of humanity that astounds you. For him, human beings - his own country men and women - were no more than pawns and pieces of flesh. They could be decimated, starved, eliminated and if nothing else worked - then simply sold off! Here is a completely sickening take of Mao on the women of his own country. In the meeting with Henry Kissinger in 1973, he proposes to ship 10 million Chinese women to US. Read more
China is a great land. Either everyone does it or no one. There is no room for differentiation. Everyone is uniquely similar. And if you want to be different, you are to be killed... like this.. detailed stories (Chinaview . boingboing . Epoch Times) These are of course that have been caught on screen. there is an estimated 430,000 who have been killed! But the Chinese Government is very disturbed because "horror movies" from other countries are harming the psychological make-up of their kids. I am not sure of which world this Chinese Government really lives in, but I am wondering if it considers the world to be stupid? The Chinese kids do not need a horror movie to have issues of psychological disorders. They just need to live in China their entire life and be subjected to that nonsense! Of course, no one can really say much because everything bought anywhere in the world seems to be coming from China! Now, China has surpassed Canada to become the largest source of products shipped into the US last year (USD 321 billion in 2007). Read more
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