An awkward set of keywords got me the one which i had lost long time back...here is it, circulated during the post iraq -michael moore driven wave across the net, now it may be a bit anachronistic and irrelevant...still...

and the heights (or chasms) of oil diplomacy in terms of a former senate member:
"if oil was found in the hell, then exxon executives wont go and complaint with the God about the injustice meted out to them, but rather invite the devil for a luncheon meeting and fix up the exploration rights"(!!)

If there is something that i use for the most of the time on my computer, it is nothing other than the good old winamp. The definitive mediaplayer for windows- the brainchild of the maverick programmer justin frankel- it continues to be the best voted player for digital audio. But being an ardent fan of winamp, i was a bit frustrated by the news that winamp is not going to have any further developments. Why because, the original winamp team has left AOL, the company that bought winamp from justin frankel. It's a long story about how justin as a university dropout started of the winamp saga at the age of 16. Winamp turned to become a stable and versatile player and even more popular than windows mediaplayer. It's estimated that justin frankel-through his winamp- has caused an annual loss of revenue to the tune of $2b to the music industry! That gives a rough idea about the mammoth user base of winamp. Then came a hefty $80m deal that saw the takeover of nullsoft (the company formed by justin and his friends for marketing winamp- he claims it to be a play on microsoft!) by AOL. Following days were evidently not so smooth for the happy-go erstwhile nullsoft team whose every activities were monitored by the eagle eyes of AOL. Justin was dragged in to a point of threatening when he released the file sharing program called gnutella (and that too hosted on AOL servers!) at the very time when AOL was partnering with Time warner inc. which turn in was waging a bitter legal battle with napster. Though he was forced to back off, the source code had already been leaked and that later did the groundwork for the file sharing clients like kazaa, morpheus, winmx etc etc.. A couple of stunts later AOL unceremonoiusly throwed out the nullsoft team one by one and before they reached justin, he voluntarily stepped out (one would do well to check out his blog at hotdog.com). As expected, winamp too suffered the repercussions. THe version 5.05 is supposed to be the final version for now. A sad demise for such a brilliant piece of work. I think winamp is destined for a fate similar to that of the media player sonique which too saw its downfall when the original team was expelled by lycos.

today's express carried a capsule review of the various free content providers on the web. wikipedia - a free source encyclopaedia that anyone can edit- triumphs the game. A much criticised venture, when it started off in april-01, has now acquired the proportions of a mammoth mediahouse. With offshoots of wikipedia running into travelogue databases, news portals, e-book collection etc, they have now stunningly proved the good old theory of 'wisdom of crowd'. three cheers to jimmywales-the man who started it all!

Kerala is getting into the swirl of election hustles. It's now a hot bed of sectarian politics and continues to be so with rising levels of sycophancy. As evident from the recent issue of DIC(K)'s decision to remian aloof from any tieups and the consequent split of DIC(K) itself and a not-so-surprising return to its original form. Although the fronts alternate between themselves in being at power through the process of rejection (rather than election) by people, we all feel the terrible change in god's own country,that of the downward spiral into which our infrastructure development and investment flows have fallen into. A much hyped global investor's meet, and a couple of other profligate conclaves, for all practical purposes, has proved themselves to be nothing more than third rate publicity stunts. We come to know about the real picture because there is always the opposition to bring them up, while themselves ignoring the fact that they too are responsible for the economic stagnation the state is facing.

ok i'll stop the dystopian gyan session. i've got a couple of days more to prepare for the iisc interviews. i may be going to b'lore soon for the same. These days it's becoming increasingly difficult to stay off from the tv. star and sony are apparently on a race to grab the telecast rights for all blockbusters. This sunday they had a nice package of 'no entry', 'hulchul', '1857 the rising'. Without saying it goes that i had a taste of all the three. So that explains why i find it that difficult.

I think it has been a long time since i penned something on my blog...not that i was preoccupied with some other job, in fact i was not having any job at all, but rather couldnt frequent to a cafe as i was away from my home and ironically that was in b'lore.!
instead of a rather cliched retrospective narration, here it goes...








<ACTION>
june 1 - 2005
"my successful first day at degussa..met my colleagues, a treat at PARK, all went so smooth and cool."

july 23rd - 05
" a fateful twist to wind up the job because of some unexpected troubles.."
<CUT>

<ACTION>
august 28th :
"registered for TIME course and started to attend their classes from mid september.."
"Nov, 20 CAT, Nov 27 IIFT, Dec 11 JMET."
last week of December:
"Results are out-- instead of a belled CAT i saw a belled myself...97.15 CAT, 94.4 JMET,only calls are from iitkgp,
iitd, iitm..the final verdict is to give GATE a good shot."
<CUT>

<ACTION>
Feb 12 GATE and March 15 results are out:
"man..! in think i'v struck gold ..an unexpected 99.53"
<PACK UP!..THE TAKE IS OK>

As expected an anticlimax has set in...which however was disgustingly predictable. Thank God i got a headstart for GATE as i started it off a bit earlier. And added to that the near virtual zero competition ..but still there is no room for complacency.

home sweet home! back to earth's finest abode.....it's nearing the results. so what next?.. i feel that i shouldn't take any chances. A one and a half month's preparation would do well for a decent GATE score. someone asked me, why this 180 deg turn? the answer is to keep all options open. you never know what's in store for u. whether it is cat gate or whatever.
it was a bit difficult to start with - obviously- but it has started working and i can feel myself under a different threshold rather than what it used to be for a typical cat preparation.

I was checking out the cutoffs required for iim calls as calculated by various coaching centers.
The one given by TIME is 44 +/-1 fora single call. and 44 is where exactly my calculated score lies based on the key provided by them. But here comes another catch - the key given by ims is having a couple of questions with different answers..and my attempts are not spared.God! these speculations and discussions are killing me. But why should I worry about the stuff, coz i gave it the best shot i could ever deliver. now to wait with fingers crossed....

next week , after a long time i would be going home this week.

expecting the unexpected, the CAT philosophy..

True to the legacy of CAT, it threw up a couple of surprises. With practically no easytakes the exam proved to be a tough nut to crack. and to my horror and later to a few others too, the verbal section - the everyones's cup of tea - turned out be a real bloodshed with passsages about articles ranging from the mystical pablo derrida's deconstruction theory to a technically oriented game theory. Heard that the passage called edwardian summer is an editorial by Guardian editor Larry elliot...hats off to those who could make out the questions itself. A rough estimate of the paper's difficulty level can be estimated from the fact that almost none of the coaching centers could come with a complete answer key on the day of the exam although many of them had claimed to put them up on the website right after 3 hrs of the exam...quite strange that we are trying to crack a verbal section in 30min which the whole of the iim/xlri passouts running the premier coaching institutes couldn't do in even 12 hrs. still, since the stakes are high for CAT that doesnt deter anyone from trying a second shot next year..But i'm dead sure that if i end up not getting a call, then the next thing is to give the GATE ,the last in the stack.

Saw the much talked-about film anniyan today. I had read a couple of reviews about the movies some days back. Bare a few, almost all of them acclaimed vikram's performance that steals the show, and none of them had the scathing tone which was ubiquitous in their reviews about shankar'searlier venture 'boys'. Truely anniyan must be another feather in the crown for vikram. He continues to be a director's delight. A stunning performance as three different characters supported by whiz kid shankar's direction, the film is bound to draw a formidable audience among all classes.

The film is about ambi ramanujam (vikram), a middle class lawyer who lives in an utopian world, stricly law abiding in all its sense. He gets frustrated by the way the world around him behaves with him. In addition his childhood sweet heart nandini(sada) ditches him because of his seemingly hyperbolic ways of strictness. Out of these reasons he develops a Multiple personality disorder by which he changes into the vicious character anniyan, killing the antagonists of the society as per punishments given in the hell for sinners. A character called remo, a flamboyant model, comes to the scene. He is none other than ambi himself. As expected nandini falls for him. The rest of the film is about how ambi comes to know about his alter presonalities and ultimately winding up with a terrific climax scene. - i think thats an allround review without much spoilers.

plus points are obviously vikram's performance - the scenes where he switches between the characters are simply brilliant. Then comes the camerawork. Ravivarman's camera lavishes on the beautiful tulip gardens of amsterdam. Sabu Cyril's artwork is evidently superb especially that of the sets of thyagarajar music fest and that of the song "iyengare veetu..". Harris Jayaraj has , to an extend, filled the ar rahman vacuum in the shankar film. But he couldn't deliver a effective BGM for the movie.(compared with the one he did for kaakha kaakha).

Peter heyne's stunt sequences are breathtaking but at points they seem to be blowing out of proportion - man! people flying on a single blow is increasingly indigestible.
Flipsides - the concept of MPD has been already overused, first we had manichitrathazhu, then aptamitra and the latest with chandramukhi. One who is used to shankar's earlier movies can spot a familiar and repetitive anticorruption, antibureacracy thread that manifests itself in the form of punching dialogues which as intended by the director somehow strikes the emotional buttons of the people. But then for all its cliched nature it shows the society as it is without any pretense. That should be definitely appreciated.

At last the time has come to move out.....We left the college today morning at 6.00 am (28/04/03). Thus freezes those great moments, the 4 wonder years. Lets make it a point to remain in touch, forever.

I would love to remain there once more.....(oops! the good old tearjerkers)
In the first place it does seem awkward to think like that...coz someday i should face the real life..To carve out our own niche..

Thats it folks, all the best .....We shall meet again, to relive those great memories...

Its nearing..hope the change is smooth, anyway i have to face it......

Four years and still counting....its only two weeks to go.

Still dont know what it was all about...a breakthrough engineer or a four year farce..
Gone are those days, only thing that remains is the memories..

The Nazi Genocide...The crime against humanity
http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/people/aspel.htm

http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/gallery2/83014.HTM

It has been more than half a century since the jewish holocausts took place in the europe by the savage-blooded monsters of the nazi sect..but now the repurcussions has begun against the trials that were given to the nazi criminals.. the new opponents in the stage are the neo-nazis or the so called revolutionaries of the present germany.
right from the beginning of the mankind, history had never witnessed anything more cold-blooded than the shivering deeds of the nazi SS soldiers that were mercilessly unleashed to the unfortunate jewish and other minority communities.
But still the world tends to evade away from the past...if hitler could do away with a mass genocide that gets even justified some time later, then there is surely a chance of another new-age dictator to try a holocaust which may be even more meaner and gruesome than those the history had witnessed.