Elections 2009 !!

The dream of being a prime minister has brought some of the big wigs
of Indian politics together (the Third Front). Everybody remembers how I K Gujral and Deve Gowda had their short but memorable stint at the helm and supposedly that's what is making everybody try their hands. But historically such third front alliances have not been
a success in Indian politics. Before the elections they might show extreme unity but once
the government is formed then there is a tussle at every step, be it the decision on
cabinet ministers or important policy decisions.
Specially in these testing times where on one hand we have disturbed neighbourhood and
on the other we have financial turmoil, I would have loved to see a government which could
be ready to take some decisions on its own rather than doing something which will
be in line with the pol manifesto of all the alliance parties. :-(

Bloggers can be nailed for their views

Today a news item featured in the TOI which mentioned about the case of a 19 year old blogger against whom a case was filed by a political party. His mistake: he started a group against that party and lots of people posted their hatred filled thoughts under that group. Though this guy had moved the supreme court to quash the criminal proceedings against him, but it didn't work in his favor as the honourable court upheld the proceedings against him.
I am sure this is going to be an debatable event in the blogging community, more so because we Indian's believe it to be our fundamental right to express our thoughts freely and blogging being one of the mediums to do so. Already i could see many sympathizers posting their comments on the TOI website. Whatever be the ulitmate ruling in this case it would be a path breaking one and would surely impact the blogging community in a considerable way.

Polarization Of News

Its quite surprising to see the extent to which news channels polarize the news depending on the region where this news is read. One of the best examples of this being " Slum dog Millionaire" the most talked about movie in the recent times. Today when Slum dog bagged 8 Oscars out of the 10 nominations it had received, i decided to check on two news websites just to see how they put across this news.

BBC news: Stated the headlines as "British Movie Slum dog Millionaire" sweeps the
Oscars.

On the Other hand IBN Live puts it across as " India based movie " slum dog bags 8 Oscars. Though neither of the news items are wrong as slum dog is an India based movie directed and produced by British citizens, but then the impact that the two news items leaves on the mind of the readers are quite different.

Say for e.g.: an Indian would be more happy to read the IBN live version of the story and for a British BBC's news might sound music to his ears.

Traveogue: Elliot's Beach

After spending my last weekend in Kerala, this time I decided to explore chennai. Subsequent to a awesome chicken curry that we (me and my room mate) prepared we went to the Beasant Nagar Beach also called as the Elliot's Beach. This is supposed to be among the more cleaner beaches of chennai. 

From Porur we got an A/C bus ( one of the few in chennai) quite a comfortable journey to Saidapet with just two stops in between. I wish there were more such buses in chennai. From Saidapet it took us another 20 odd mins to reach Beasant Nagar beach. To my surprise as my friends had told me it was quiet a clean beach. Since we were not carrying any spare clothes we didn't actually venture into the sea, rather enjoyed the cool breeze from the shore. Considering that it was a weekend the place was quite crowded.  

To my surprise lots of well known brand’s retail outlets are there  around Elliot’s beach. Infact I managed to have my first vada pav in 4 months from a small shop out here, though it didn’t match the taste of a typical Mumbaiya vada pav, but then considering the fact that I was having this vada pav in one of the most conservative cities of southern India gave me immense pleasure. 

Out an out it was a nice weekend cooked a delicious meal and visited a nice place, hopefully the subsequent weekends would as well be equally good. By the way the next weekend we are supposed to go to ECR road, for a Go-karting competition .. J

Life @chennai

Its been precisely a month since I ventured out of my home once again to a new place altogether to start things from scratch. Further retrospection tells me that in the last 10 years I have been to quite a few places like Jabalpur, Kottayam, Palakkad, Mumbai, Pune, Dubai, Singapore and now in Chennai and have stayed at these places for a period varying from 6 months to 4 years. Guess that’s some achievement of sorts ;-) .

Anyways this wasn’t supposed to be a self boosting blog. So coming to the point now I am put up at one of the oldest metro’s of southern India. The last time I came to Chennai was about 14 years back and that was just for couple of days. Since then I have never had any ecstatic feelings about this place, unfortunately then the memories that I took back home was that of long queues of vessels in front of the pump waiting for water to come, petty fights over water and the extremely crowded buses. Infact I used to feel pity for people who used to work in Chennai. Well what can I say what goes around comes around. So here I am in a altogether new place where everything we eat starts with some form of rice and coconut. People speak different languages like Tamil, Tamil and Tamil ;-). The best part are the autowalla’s, their’s nothing called a meter that the auto guys out here make use of. But I must say the auto drivers out here enjoy tremendous unity they are all united as far as stating a fare is concerned, you ask for a 2 km distance and they would add two zeros to that and state a bill of Rs.200 ( a bit exaggerated u see). But believe me this month I have dared to take an auto ( not the share auto) only once and that was the first trip that I took out here.

Having said all these not so good things I would say that my preconceived notions made me expect more bad things in Chennai than I actually did. Things in Chennai are certainly changing but there is a lot too be done on the infrastructure side. Though they have developed an IT park but this place is an panchayat which means although the government gains in terms of taxes and employment but then there is much that they can do, but since supposedly the budget of panchayats are not good enough to undertake major infrastructure projects. So many places along the way I see water clogging which seems to be a very big problem in this vicinity. Public transport is pretty decent infact its much much better than a city like Bangalore, but mostly its crowded.

So out and out I have got very mixed feelings for this city with a bit of an inclination towards the negative side. I believe there are some basic things which the government can do in here which would improve the life of the local people immensely. Well the worst test for me would be during the summers and the rainy season, so keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best

Data Centres - Server Farm

The importance of datacentres can be understood from the gowing size and number of data centres across the globe.Companies go in for various approaches when they decide to go for a DC. Say for an banking application or applications which need real time information it is very necessary that data should be as close as possible, to make sure of the speed and also to make
it possible for the support staff to rectify the errors if any.This is the reason the computers in corporate data centres were often housed in the firm's basement and dedicated “server farms”.
On the other hand for companies like Microsoft & Yahoo datacentres are mostly used as data storage areas/systems hence for them the prioriy is safety and security rather than the speed as real time use of that data might be less. Hence such companies go in for some really secluded place say for eg: Quincy in the centre of state Washington, about three hours drive from the nearest city.
One of the major reasons for going for such far off locations is the geographical advantage that they possess. Some of these locations close to dams and rivers, there by making sure that ample cheap power is available, as power is required in lumpsome for Datacentres.To have a feel of the quantity of power required by these datacentres, i quote: Microsoft's $500mn facility in Chicago will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts.
Prempted with above concerns and data centre regulations, companies are now trying to consolidate and simplify their computing infrastructure. Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest computer-maker, for instance, is replacing its 85 data centres across the world with just six in America.