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Nithya Sivan, such stunningly beautiful photographs of you. Now my boys want to know about bharatnatyam and arangetrams. I had no idea that Bhakti and Bindhumalini designed this brochure.

My kids passed the twitter spelling test. Should I let them be on twitter now?

Because of the odd even rule, I was carless in Delhi today. So I got to hear this:

देखो, शराब पीने वाले हो, तो उसके बाद मेट्रो मत चलाना

ज़िदगी एक सफ़र है सुहाना

Someone has to tell these children that there is far more to life than your test scores. Life is beautiful. How others judge you is not who you are, or will be.

कह रहा है शोर-ए-दरिया से समुंदर का सुकूत
जिस का जितना ज़र्फ़ है उतना ही वो ख़ामोश है

सुकूत - शांती
ज़र्फ़ - क्षमता

(will find the shayar's name and update soon)

Facepalm will soon be a part of Unicode.

http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-candidates.html

Much rejoicing!

I'm going to assume this was a card of appreciation. Not hate mail.

Rahul Pal, this belongs to you. Would you like me to send it over. It would only be eighteen years late.

Tarun Jayaram, found this in my treasure box today.

ए भइया @[601093713:2048:Mayank Rungta], @[644286457:2048:Goli Golani], @[1350622552:2048:Meera Rajesh], @[668315149:2048:Anupreet Dhody], ई देखो क्या आया हमरे पास:

http://www.cgnfindia.com/aboutUs.html

आप लोग मिले हो इनसे? इंट्रोडक्सन चाहिए हो तो हम करवा दें।

तुम लोगों के काम में ही लगा हूँ। अब एक पैकिट चावल ज़्यादा भिजवा देना, ठीक है।

@[644286457:2048:Goli Golani], @[100001239173925:2048:Saurabh Jain], @[100000506450390:2048:Ankur Jain], something interesting for you guys to munch on.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/millennial-farmers-challenges_us_5717d498e4b0479c59d6d23c?section=india

I have people in my life who call me to know how I'm doing.

I have folks who wanna meet me at the slightest hint I might be sad.

People treasure the time they've spent with me.

Life Is Good. I must be doing something right.

PS: once an year I'm allowed to make a soggy post. Even if it makes me look like all my self worth comes from external validation.

Home is where the heart is...

@[610909224:2048:Rashmi Singhal] आपकी याद आ गई। @[681991399:2048:Meenakshi Krishnan] you too.

If only prayers worked... The stark reality is that the food I waste everyday most likely comes from a hungry farming family.

This is one of those things where I don't have an opinion yet. Others are helping me form an opinion through their posts...

Guy sends me email: 'This coming Friday & Saturday (i.e. 15th & 16th April) I am conducting a workshop on the "Art of Effective Email Marketing" at GK-2'.

Email ends up in spam.

Classic.

Every now and then, I see people complain about consumerism, about the lack of direction of human society, about how we are all making the wrong choices all the time.

As people, we love shiny things. I would love to subscribe to a sock club. I love the warmth of a new pair of socks while in bed.

But I would much rather subscribe to Nana Patekar's Save Our Farmer's club. I would sleep sounder at night knowing that someone else isn't going to bed hungry.

But @[104005856303981:274:Nana Patekar] won't market in oh-so-shiny ways on Facebook. He will tell you the facts, as they are. And leave you to your karma. He won't form a club that you can subscribe to from the comfort of your computer.

Damn you Nana Patekar. Damn you LBB. And double damn you, Moja Club. For keeping the things one should be doing, hard to do, yet making the things one doesn't need, easy to get.

Unfortunately, this is not a joke.

Did the SIT visit Pathankot or Satyabhama?

If someone wants to save a life, an economic incentive is not required. Creating an incentive might lead to problems, such as autos picking up victims who are in no shape to be shipped in an auto. But I suppose there is some research backing this action.

Removing legal hassles is far more important. I have helped accident victims often, and have never faced hassles from the police. Auto drivers would be more susceptible to harassment by the cops. If an auto driver knows he will not be harassed, he is a lot more likely to help. Expediting the legal framework around that is most important.

Is there something weird about people wishing their spouse, children, parents, grandchildren, grandparents and siblings on Facebook? Or am I just old fashioned? To me it feels less like a 'hey, happy birthday' and more a 'hey look, I wished her a happy birthday'.

I am not a birthday wishing, gift giving person myself. I don't remember any birth dates, other than those that I'm forced to fill repeatedly into forms (even there I screw up). If I'm wishing you on Facebook, honestly that means I need Facebook to remind me of your birthday, and you're not one of the top five people in my life.

What do you think? When immediate family wish each other on Facebook, is that creepy or cute?

(Monday morning hasn't kicked in yet. Soon I'll have something better to do with my time.)

We have been to two places in recent times in Gurgaon, that treat poor children with love and respect. Tikli Bottom and Decathlon. At both establishments, poor/street/village/underprivileged (choose your euphemism) children were permitted a run of the place.

At Tikli Bottom, the children of the workers at the place had a habit of popping up just about everywhere. While I did not appreciate that some of them wanted to shake my hands with their snot filled hands, my children didn't care as much. Those children showed my children around the place as if it were their own (which it undoubtedly was). If there is any better way of promoting goodwill towards your outfit, I am not aware of that way.

At Decathlon Sohna Road, Gurgaon, patrons are allowed to try out various equipment before purchasing. Children from the nearby village/slum can be seen using the equipment at most times of the day. Being haryanvi kids, usually that equipment is being used to its fullest potential. Here, it goes beyond goodwill. You essentially have an always running demo of your finest equipment, by a capable, delighted and free team. The children are unkempt, and they usually won't speak to you, even when spoken to. How they convinced their security staff to not be mean to others of their kind, is beyond me.

The world is becoming a better place. I would strongly recommend that you patronise both places, because they are also wonderful establishments in themselves. Tikli Bottom must be reserved in advance. The British gentleman who runs the place is, well, British, so if you simply show up then any amount of cajoling isn't going to help.

Incidentally, both places have a trampoline. Full of children, always. Good fun.

I shall now proceed on a rant on how religion is stealing childhood. But ... awww he's so cute.

Holy shit!

Morning beauty. Right outside my home.

Freshly shorn

I got featured in a blog :). Participating in AID's Metric Melas in Chennai fifteen years ago gave me lifelong skills ;)

https://juniorprogrammeheritage.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/kahani-aur-ganit-mela/

https://juniorprogrammeheritage.wordpress.com/2015/12/22/story-telling-a-resource-room-endeavour/

Photo 1: I am not distracted... I am using a smartphone to control a robot.

Photo 2: You think I look grumpy? Try repeating the same story eight times over, to a group of eager young kids. A story about a grumpy witch :p

This is the height of bad reporting, or perhaps false marketing by Microsoft. Linux is not coming to Windows. The Linux kernel cannot come to Windows without being encapsulated by a hypervisor. Also, a computer running two kernels simultaneously would actually be worse than a computer running Windows.

GNU is coming to Windows. The Bash shell, and various open source tool chains will natively run on Windows. What does that mean? I can't be sure, because the current set of communication on the matter is so poor. I'd assume that these libraries would be interacting with the OS without a translation layer like cygwin/mingw.

Which could only mean that full POSIX compatibility is coming to Windows. Which is a big deal because Windows is the only major POSIX incompatible OS out there. But Linux is not UNIX, and POSIX compatibility is not the same thing as running Linux.

Also, GPL. How Microsoft could graft the kernel into their OS without the whole thing being a steaming GPL mess is beyond me.

1. This is one of those occasional posts that remind people that I'm a Linux nerd and an engineer. So don't act all surprised.

2. Correct me if I'm wrong. Even Slashdot doesn't have a proper discussion on the topic. I don't have Windows in my life any more, but people in my life have Windows in their lives. Bash on their computers might encourage me to help them with their computer problems occasionally.

SF people, an apartment is available for sharing in April for a month, with one if the nicest people I know.

मैं दो दिन छुट्टी क्या गया, मोदी ने ISI को बुला लिया, केजरीवाल ने बजट निकाल दिया, इरानी ने एक और विश्वविद्यालय पर हमला बोल दिया। अगर मैं सारा दिन social media पर post न करता रहूँ तो जाने यह मूए politician और क्या क्या कर जाएँ 😅

And this is how the boys rolled today. Thanks for a wonderful, memorable day, @[648017223:2048:Monika], @[100000013058335:2048:Ashish] and @[100063776928841:2048:Himalayan Drifters]. If it weren't for that fortuitous phone call yesterday, we'd have been in Manali and not having half as much fun.

So this should actually be quite accurate for the day. In that case I should also trust the 475 flights of stairs I'm reported to have climbed today. Didn't realise our climb was so high.

And then it rains. And words fail me.

My FitBit's going berserk today. But I doubt if its measurements are accurate.

तीन कि.मि. की खड़ी चढ़ाई का मीठा फल - यह नज़ारा और माँ के हाथ कि गुझिया।

यार वह Airtel वाली लड़की ठीक ही कहा रही थी। 3G मिल तो रहा है पहाड़ों में।

Snow fight. Check.

Riding on the bed of a 4x4. Check.

Getting to use all our hiking gear. Check.

Sardar boys. Slim. Tall turban. Goggle. Bullet. That characteristic way they keep their foot on the brake pedal, the toe pointing downwards.

Matlab, duniya ka saara tashan yehi kar lenge ya kisi aur ke liye bhi kuch bachega?

Me: Nilay, look, bombs mounted on a vehicle.

Him: Suicide bombs?

Me: (ranting about what a useless world we are building for our children where they think all people with bombs are terrorists).

Him: (words to the effect of) The only purpose of a bomb is to kill, ok. How does it matter if a soldier carries it or a terrorist?

Me: (Wanted to talk about the 1929 assembly bombing and how Bhagat-Rajguru-Sukhdev woke up an entire nation with a bomb without killing anyone. But I realised he had already made a stronger point.)

बदमाशियाँ

I'm just trying to make you guys jealous now.

500km from home. Never going back.

I've ranted about the "verification process" of large employers earlier. I've also posted one rant already today. But there isn't any rationing going on, is there?

Dear Ms. so-and-so

Please stop sending us passive aggressive messages such as:

"Please co-operate as your delayed response would impede the verification process and eventually the career of the candidate."

If anyone is going to be responsible for creating any impediments to the career prospects of the candidate, it will be your organisation, the organisation that has contracted your organisation to verify the candidate, and you yourself. We never elected to be part of your verification process. You never even bothered to seek our permission before sending us this request. You just assume that we have nothing better to do than to respond to your request. You believe that by hounding us over email, sending us threats that the career of our ex-employee will be destroyed by our inaction, and terrorising the poor fellow into calling us multiple times a day, you will force us into stop doing the real work we do and start participating in this meaningless verification process.

Seriously, who do you people think you are? And what gives you this misplaced sense of entitlement? Merely because your corporation has put you in a position of power does not mean you abuse that power into harassing candidates and their former employers. If you really are a "forensics analyst", as you so pompously claim in your email signature, then, well, indulge in some forensics madam. Or has KPMG redefined harassment to be called forensics?

And don't you begin to tell me that the career of the candidate will be impeded. At Thinvent, we do not destroy careers, we build careers. Over the last eight years of our existence, more than fifty fresh graduates of this country have been given an opportunity at our company. And none of them were unpaid interns. They were all fully paid, full time employees that large organisations would not look at for want of experience. And we gave them that experience. And training. And salary. And real work to do. And a sense of identity. Your meaningless verification process will not take that away from the candidate, whether you pass or fail him.

And why will I not participate in this charade of yours? Well, firstly, because you did not have the courtesy of actually asking beforehand if we would be willing to participate. You could have called and asked, or emailed. But no, you just thrust this responsibility upon us. And secondly, because people in our company have a lot of real work to do. We do not have a dedicated HR department that is jobless enough to play verification-verification with other HR departments. With more than 50 employees having "graduated" from Thinvent, we get a lot of verifications requests. Especially because after leaving us, these guys can't seem to work at one place for more than an year before changing again (which, given the attitude of their employers, is hardly surprising). And everytime they change, fellows like you come "investigating" their history since the time of their college graduation.

No, our company will not be a joining you as a cog in your mindless corporate process. I would appreciate very much if you put us on a do not call list, or a black list of some sort. It will save your colleagues the trouble that you are going through right now.

Regards,
Saurabh Jain

PS: I took the liberty of looking you up on Facebook and LinkedIn. You look like a very nice person. Yes, my anger and dissatisfaction above is directed at you, personally, because you emailed us persistently. However, it is more a grouse with your entire industry which invariably behaves with the same sense of superiority and impunity. What can you do about it? Change yourself. If you hadn't sent me the kind of email you sent, I would not have responded the way I did. We can all be nice and polite with each other even while we are busy meeting our targets. Also, in your next meeting, you can bring up a process change request where you actually ask companies for permission before seeking verification. And if they deny the request, perhaps because they are a small company like us, then create options for that within your process.

Practo and UrbanClap have a sense of entitlement that is appalling. Merely because I use their service does not mean I agree to receive dozens of SMS and email messages. The messages, websites and apps offer no way of unsubscribing from these messages. What is worse, once you install the app, there is no way to turn off promotional notifications while still keeping service notifications enabled. In this last bit of smugness, they are joined of course by the stalwarts of the startup boom - Flipkart, Grofers, etc.

No one cares about your business model, startups. No one wants to be forced to give feedback on your doctors or carpenters so you can build awesome content for your site. Irritate the customer, and they will move on, no matter how good your offerings. It is a week and I have already dumped both these services, having to filter out their messages using Truecaller.

Learn from folks like Amazon and Uber, who offer convenient options to turn off promotional messaging of this sort.

This is so much fun. Thanks for sharing @[633385995:2048:Prateek]. I can say from personal experience that using the MakeMyTrip apps gets me better discounts than negotiating at the front desk. All that charm, cultivated over the years to wow front desk staff - all laid to waste.

This solves everything.

We put up maths games for kids. There was a robot, a mathematics maze and some fun with Lego blocks and additions. If you wanna try the maze, drop by at home some time.

So I look very serious. So what. It was really hot, OK.

Me wants!

If you have children, and you post about them on Facebook, please read this: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/dont-post-about-me-on-social-media-children-say/

I've occasionally pointed out to parents when they've posted embarrassing things about their kids online - your kids are not gonna like that when they grow up.

Growing up, we all met parents who would force their kids to recite poems or sing when guests came home. I was never put through that horror. But our family album did have a couple of embarrassing photos of me. At least, they were embarrassing to me growing up; now I see what my parents saw in it - art. One of them was of me playing naked with some other naked boys, in the sea at Puri.

Both my kids are well aware that anything you put on Facebook is (potentially) visible to everyone in the world. And they care about the public's perception of them. Just because they said something to me and I found it cute or perceptive, I can't share it online without their explicit permission. They even get into the family photo album and delete photos they don't like. Sometimes I've posted about them when they are asleep or away, and on later review, I've had to take it down even if it was garnering a lot of likes.

Because how your children feel is more important than "likes"!

I am sharing this because many of you have kids younger than mine, who may not understand social media or be able to express themselves at this point. But this how they'll feel once grown up.

Always worked for me. Ah, Madras.

Urbanclap wants me to offer astrology services on their platform. बस यही दिन देखना बाकी था।

Gun violence and Donald Trump. Making America look more stupid and inept with each passing day.

If this continues unabated, everyone America has fought in the name of freedom will start looking better than them. The communists, the drug lords, the Islamic terrorists.

Meanwhile in India, we are killing over a 100,000 of our own just in road accidents every year. No one has a high moral ground any more. We are all mired in our own inabilities to make simple, small changes for the greater good of all.

Today, India is ready for global business. Let the corporations of the world come, invest, create jobs. But let them not pollute and kill without consequence.

Now to make HUL cleanup the mess they created.

Does this rekindle any hope for the Bhopali victims of Union Carbide?

India. Where American euphemisms come to die.

Sporting team colours

The revolution will be posted live on Facebook. At least if I'm in charge.

Nirvana: When your children attend a birthday party at McDonald's, thoroughly enjoy themselves, but do not eat the food.

It was "unhealthy" and "not even tasty".

They did eat some fries, though.