Corruption

We have been hearing this word "Corruption" since ages now, and in last 1 yr we have heard it so many times that even my 3 yr old son Ishaan says we should not do corruption and can recognize Anna Hazaare. But most important question is do we understand what is actually meant by the word corruption, its a term which covers a very broad meaning and I think it was never clearly defined by anyone.

Lets take an example, think at the end of every scenario which one is a bribe.

1. A 5 yr old kid gets 2 chocolates everyday for going to school and finishing his homework on time.

2. One day the family has to go out for dinner, so the father asked his kid to finish his homework 1 hr before the usual time, to motivate him he promised the kid for an extra chocolate if he is successful.

3. Another day this kid got a lot of homework, it was unusual but he still had to complete all so father offered an additional chocolate to motivate him to complete everything on time.

4. Soon getting more than usual homework became a daily routine and father had to give an additional chocolate to finish the work everyday.

5. One day when kid got usual homework but he was feeling very lazy to complete it on time, father decide to offer him an additional chocolate to motivate him to finish it on time.

6. One day when kid got usual homework but did not complete it on time, still father gave him his regular 2 chocolates.

7. One day when kid got usual homework, he did all his work on time but most of his answers were incorrect, still he got 2 chocolates from his father.

8. One day when kid got usual homework, he asked one of his friend to complete his work and offered him 1 chocolate out of the 2 that he will receive from his father to complete it on time.

9. One day the kid did not go to school, did not complete homework still got 2 chocolates from his father.

10. One day his father asked him to do an additional work that was not a part of his homework and not to worry about the homework and still get an additional chocolate.

We might have faced each of this situation or could think about a real life example for each of these. Few of these scenarios dont fall into the category of corruption, they are similar to salaries or rewards that a person gets for doing his job on time, few others are legally correct but ethically/morally wrong, whereas other few scenarios are both unethical and illegal. But every person will have a different opinion and everyone would draw this line at a different place. Few of us would feel comfortble doing unethical things which are at least legally correct whereas others would even consider doing illegal things for personal benefits if the law is not too strict. But the most important thing is to know and think what exactly we are doing and to keep ourselves aware. Think about these points and the category they fall into, next time when you come accross a real life scenario where you dont know if whatever you are doing is corruption or not.

Camping

June 20, 2011

Camping is always one of my favorite activity, and everyone in our group is always ready and excited about it. There is so much enthusiasm that we literally have to limit the number of people we can take for camping, still the number goes up every year. The best part is every year we get to meet few new people and make new friends.

This year the number of campers was 16 + kids, and it was much more fun because everyone in group was experienced and brought in new ideas based on their previous experience. As usual when we started planning, it looked like we would surely run short of time and there would be so much to do and eat during the camping and that is what exactly happened. 2 days was not enough, and this being a new campground, it had strict rules about the quiet hours after 10pm which was very disappointing for everyone in the group. Overall we were able to do what we planned for like hiking, cricket (although we missed our bating and Neha got injured too), sand volleyball, cooking dal bati, grill chicken, paneer, mushroom, play games, dance etc etc in these 2 days and had a lot of fun.

Photography Lessons !!

Its been about 3 yrs since am planning to buy SLR camera and every time I think about it, I think about all the hassles that go with SLR camera. One needs to be really into photography to make optimal use of a good machine. With these thoughts I gave up on SLR and bought Sony H50 2 yrs back, which was an excellent camera and I was proud of my decision of not buying a bulky camera and still getting the zoom and quality I was looking for.

But last year I had an issue with my Sony H50 and slowly it started giving problems and finally few months back the lens on the Camera was totally stuck, which could not be repaired. Now I was back with same old question, what should I buy SLR or Point and Shoot Phew ... It took me more than 3 mnths to research and come up with final decision of buying D3100 from Nikon with 18-55m and 55-300mm lens and I think I would still need one more lens in future.

When I started reading about how to take good pictures and use your SLR for best shots, I found there is whole new area to explore, I never thought about so many things before taking a picture, and am not talking about the technical details of the camera, but about our psychology on what to capture . A picture that you take should speak a lot, it should tell you the whole story about the place where it was taken, in fact you can hide or reveal as much as you want on a picture. It requires a totally different set of eyes and thinking to take a good picture, you need to think like a viewer of the picture and understand what he needs to see and what you need to show him. I thought pictures are 2 dimensional but now I know they are 4 dimensional, you can capture, X and Y axis but could also capture the depth and cover Z axis. But above all that the 4th dimension is the time, you should focus the right dimensions at the right time to have a perfect image.

I think learning photography would require a lot of patience and hard work, you might end up spending 15 mins to take a picture that a viewer would view only for 5 secs. So there is no ROI, its only the satisfaction that you would get after taking a good picture, and believe me not everyone would be able to appreciate the efforts involved. Now when I started reading about taking a better picture, I try to see the pictures with those set of details and its really interesting to notice the minute details that most of us always miss.

Fortunately I have 2-3 of my friends who are guru in this skills and are helping me to understand it better. So let me try few shots and I will keep uploading my best pictures online for comments.

Happy Journey Chachu !!

3 weeks back Dinu came to our place, he took a long vacation to stay with us before he goes back to India. Ishaan was very excited about his visit and was eagerly waiting to see him. During his stay Ishaan was happy because he got a person who can spend a lot of time with him, listen to his stories, answer his questions, do whatever he said and was not strict about eating, sleeping and silly things like discipline and manners. He tried and got almost everything that he planned for his Chachu like carnival, chucky cheese, Museum etc and got to play on Chachu's laptop, iPhone for as long as he wished, without worrying about what will daddy say.

When Dinu left for Airport today, Ishaan was all set to go with him to India leaving me and Neha. On our way to airport Ishaan kept asking and confirming if he is going to India or not, whenever I told him "Ishaan Chachu is going to India" his immidiate question was "How abt me ? I want to go with Chachu". We kept explaining him that he needs to stay back with Mumma and Daddy as they love him and can take care of him, but he hardly payed any attention to such logical explanations. He didn't even care about his favorite toys and his best friends which we told him wont be there in India. At last we reached airport and when Dinu got off the car and was taking his luggage, Ishaan asked him "Chachu, go get the tickets for me too"

We were laughing every time he said "I want to go with Chachu to India, he will take care of me" and if we tell him "Chachu is going to India to get married", his answer would be "I want to get married too", he was very serious about what he was saying and it was so innocent. Although we were a bit surprised by his act but were also happy that he developed such a bonding with Dinu that he has no problem going to India with his Chachu leaving his mumma and daddy. Being in US, we are always concerned about the bonding that Ishaan will develop with other family members and relatives. We keep reminding him of all our family members and keep talking about them, showing him pictures, even if he hasn't ever seen them. His memories with Chachu will always remain in several videos and pictures that Dinu took during his stay and in the end Ishaan did promise Dinu that he will come to India for his marriage and will dance with mumma on "Zubbi Zubbi" song. Finally Ishaan gave 3 rounds of hugs and kisses to Dinu before he boarded for the flight and said "Happy Journey Chachu"

Social Networking

Created on: December 9th, 2010
Posted on: December 9th, 2010

Time is running fast, I still remember about 15 yrs back when I traveled 25 Kms. just to see a computer bought by my friend, who got it from Russia, that was my first personal computer.

One of the most important thing that has changed in these years and specifically in last 5 years is how we interact and network socially. We were always taught how to meet and greet friends and relatives, how to interact with strangers, how to behave in a group, in a class, in a team, but we were never taught how to behave in a virtual environment. When you don't actually see and cannot read his facial expressions and voice modulations, its very tough to interpret and get the actual meaning from just words and also understand the hidden emotions and intentions in those words. With all these limitations of communication, tools like Facebook, linkedin and Orkut for social networking add additional complexity to effective communication. I think social networking, dos and don'ts is a very important topic to be taught at school for kids and teenagers. In this writeup, am trying to list Top 5 dos and donts for social networking websites like Facebook, if everyone of us can be slightly careful about these points we could surely use these tools for our best and prevent the cons attached with them.

1. Profile : All the fields on Facebook profile are not mandatory, try sharing minimum information, specially information like Date of Birth, address and phone number should be shared very carefully. For eg. you can avoid displaying year of birth by changing settings. You could also modify settings to hide specific information from strangers and share it only with your connections. Each word that you enter on your profile carries a meaning and talks about your character, your views and what kind of person you are, for a stranger that is the only source to understand you and make an opinion about you.

2. Photos: Facebook has made sharing pictures very simple and it helps in sharing your special moments with your friends and family, but hold on .. are you sure only your friends and family are the ones looking at those pictures. Change your profile settings to make sure that only your connections view them and not the strangers.
Picture speaks a thousand words, each picture you upload speak a lot about you, your life and what kind of person you are. Every picture you take is not meant to be shared on Facebook to everyone who is on your network. Few pictures are personal and are only for close friends and family members, those could be shared by other means like web albums (for eg picasa), emails etc.
Mobile uploads with distorted and blurred images makes your album less interesting for your connections, try avoiding them.
A comment on a picture is always useful for the viewer, not everyone in your connection could correctly identify Statue of Liberty, if you got a picture under it, comments would help them.

3. Status update: Its a very important piece, do you understand every update that you make on your account like uploading pictures, setting a status, updating profiles goes as a notification to all your connection. Each message you type in your status update would help others to make an opinion about you. Imagine you making fun of your boss/employer and your boss is on your connections. You need to be very careful using the status update if you feel uncomfortable sharing your opinion about a topic with each member of the group use private message instead.

I think a person always behaves differently in different groups, and there are very few topics which are generic that he could share with all groups, he should be careful in selecting those topics.
Also its very dangerous to show your negative emotions on status update, everyone under your connections might not understand them and might create an opinion about you or make fun of your updates. eg. Status update should not talk about your breakup with your girlfriend unless its meant to show your availability to other girls in your connections.

4. Wall post: When you post on a friend's wall, it could be seen by all his connections. Never post a humiliating statements that could make him uncomfortable within his group.
You might be very good friends but wall post is not the right place to make fun of him or share his personal information or details.
Wall post is also not a right place to share contact information, address, account numbers and discuss important information. You can use private messages instead.

5. Photo tagging: Its used to tag your friends in the pictures you have. If you tag a friend in a picture under your account, it would be visible to all his connections. Do not tag a personal picture of your friend which could make him uncomfortable within his group. Try taking his permission if you want to tag him or leave him an email or message when you tag him so that if he is not comfortable he could un-tag himself from the picture.

Back with updates

Its been about 4 months since I wrote on the blog, and so many things happened in this duration.

In December we made a short trip to India, idea was to save my leaves which were expiring at the end of December and to meet everyone in the family. When we were making the plan we kept our schedule very tight and planned to visit Indore, Mumbai, Pune, Jodhpur and Goa in this short duration. But because mumma was not doing well we had to drop Jodhpur on the last minute. The best part was the Goa trip it was fun and we all enjoyed a lot.

When we came back, it was snowing badly in US. Mid Atlantic region broke all records with 3 major snowstorms and much more snowfall than even Boston or NY. At one point we were so tired of snow storm we were praying to see clean sunny sky. Am wondering what would have happened with people who own their houses and have a long driveway they would have spent their winters cleaning their driveway.

My racquetball is going good, we stopped going to Radisson hotel to play and started playing at Bally's fitness center so that we can play with more and more different people. They have challenger's court on Wednesday evenings where you can walk into the court and challenge the winner of previous game. Initially when I use to enter the court I was sure to loose the game but question was by how much, I have lost games on 3-4 points as well, those guys were amazing and you could learn so much from them. But now looks like am coming somewhat closer, am atleast able to win one game every Wednesday and if I loose its not as bad as it use to be.

I also joined back King of Prussia volleyball league at Aspiring Champions with NetIP team, and next week we have playoffs hopefully we would do well and would be among top 2 teams.

We also started the spring soccer and this year everyone is acting like a pro, off-course they would as we are planning to enter a soccer league this year starting in May. I know we are too bad at soccer, we never run, everyone is short of stamina and its going to be a disaster. But still we all want to play in a league .... thats the spirit.

On 24th May we are planning for a trip to Hawaii Islands, we are a group of 3 families and are expecting this to be the best trip of our life. We initially planned and made reservations for a weeks trip but now we are feeling a week is nothing for Hawaii. It has 6 islands and every island has something different to offer. After a lot of discussions and planning we finally decided to cover 3 islands in 7 days and do a bunch of activities at each island. The schedule is so tight that if we miss an activity due to weather or some reason we wont be able to catch it up on a different day. Our planning excel has every minute level of details starting from Flights to the restaurants for lunch and dinner. I am sure we wont be able to do 100% of what we have planned but even if we do 80% it would be the best trip so far. Some of the important activities that we are planning are Skydiving, Scuba diving, Snorkeling, Jet ski/Para sail/Banana Boat, Shark Cage, Helicopter ride, Dinner cruise.

And the biggest thing going on is Ishaan, he is growing and learning very fast. I sometimes feel the time is running and am going to miss this time. Everyday he has something new to surprise us with his intelligence. Sometimes he would fight to go out and play in winters when it snowing and sometimes to play his favorite cartoon which is has already watched umpteen times and at this age you cant explain him. The best thing I like is as soon as he is in the car on his car seat he will start his demand to play the songs he like ... he will say "Daddy Daddy ... I want Jai ho" and later would sing along on Jee Karda .....Ek Baari ho Ek baari ...We recently changed his day care and fortunately he is comfortable at the new place and talks about his new friends.

2012 Why do we believe ?

Create on : Nov 4th, 2009
Published on : Nov 4th 2009

Interesting ...a great eye catcher caught my eye balls few weeks back and then it took a lot of reading to understand what is going on. Most of you have by now read or seen some videos about the theory of end of the world on Dec 21, 2012. If not watch the new movie "2012" (releasing on Nov 13th 2009). Let me first write about what exactly the theory says:

1. According the Mayan Calendar, which is 100% accurate so far for each and every event, it has predicted earthquakes, Tsunamis, Hurricanes accurately. This calendar predicts the world will end on 21st Dec 2012.

2. Nostradamus has a prophecy for end of world on Dec 21, 2012

3. Scientific community claims there would be big celestial event on this day. Earth, Sun and center of Milky Way galaxy will be aligned in a single line. Which might result in a magnetic shift and the North Pole would move by 1 degree. This might destabilize earth's magnetic field and would result in catastrophes like earth quakes and, Tsunami.

4. Another scientific theory claim that a comet or Asteroid will hit the earth on that day or there might be a solar storm that would hit the earth.

Most of the documents/website will speak about one or all of these theories to prove Dec 21, 2012 is correct date for the end of the world.

This write-up is not to prove if these theories are correct or are just a Hoax, am under qualified to talk about that. All I want to say is why would someone think about this and why would someone believe it. I will list some points to which would help us to understand human thinking better.

1. Fear of unknown: We have a very limited knowledge about the universe, living things, Expansion/Growth and we have tried to bind these topics under the rules of Physics. We believe everything in universe would work based on the rule of physics that we have derived, due to which we can never think out of box and consider ourselves lucky to be the only planet with life. We have defined what is life and we are trying to search for similar thing on other planets/stars so chances are we wont ever get it. When we have 99% of unknown in universe, we always have a fear of unknown like something might come from other part of universe and destroy us. We want someone to be held responsible for this unknown stuff and so we discovered God, who can be held responsible for the unknown which is a result of our lack/limitation of knowledge.

2. Desire to know the future: Its almost similar to point 1, if we don’t know about universe we also don’t know what will happen with us on earth tomorrow. That is how our brain is made, but we refuse to accept it and try to make so many unsuccessful attempts to find what is going to happen in future. And I really don't know what makes us believe that someone in this world knows about future. So we try to search for that someone and believe them, few of those are Mayans, Nostradamus etc.

3. World will surely end: In our lifespan we have seen nothing is immortal, everything that has a start will surely have an end, our life, plants, animals, non living things, stars etc all get created and destroyed. So we are forced to believe, even the universe or earth will get destroyed one day and so will the human race. The best example we have is dinosaurs, we know that race came to an end thousands of years back, the most accepted theory behind destruction of dinosaurs was earth was hit by an asteroid during that time which caused the extinction; hence we would always be afraid of asteroid hitting earth because we know that can destroy the complete race. Most interesting point is all the theories for 2012 are predicting destruction of earth by known reasons like Tsunami, Earthquake, and Asteroid there could be unknown reasons as well like virus outbreak.
Again if we think out of box, being immortal is a very relative term, for a parasite living in human body having a life span of 3 mins, human body is immortal. Similarly for human beings or other animals all celestial bodies are immortal. I would rather support a theory that says nothing is constant, human race will transform to some X race in future as they did from Apes or Neanderthals earlier, or few of dinosaurs were transformed to Birds and Amphibians or a star is transformed to a black hole and similarly earth, sun, or universe will transform into something different where X race would be able to survive.

These are the reasons why most of people around us might believe the theories, few of us might not care, another few will oppose these theories based on their scientific knowledge, and another few will be surprised/scared and will try to find ways to avoid it somehow.
But am sure each one of us on Dec 22nd 2012 will say we were already aware that all this was Hoax.

Racquetball

Well summers are now over and the temperature is reducing everyday, still we can have few outdoor activities until october end. But most of my evening activities like Sand volleyball, Tennis and Soccer are coming to an end for this year. We still play soccer on Tuesday but we can see lack of interest due to changing weather.
So I need to plan for winters, last winters I spent a lot of time in understanding the stock market and analysing whats good and whats bad and making some investments but this time I would prefer to do something more physical then mental. So I chose Racquetball, after having a good hold over volleyball, I think its now time to learn one more new game. For those who dont know what racquetball is, its something similar to squash thats played in a closed room and you can have 2 or 4 players playing the game. Its a high energy game requires a lot of thinking and you need to be very quick. I have a friend of mine who plays national level championships in US and he helped me with information to understand the game. I use to think its similar to tennis but its way different, in tennis you get a lot of time to think, move and plan your game but in racquetball you need to be quick both physically and mentally, you would run a lot and would sweat even if you play for 30 mins (unlike tennis). In that small room you have so little to do to beat your opponent and you still have so much to do to save yourself from a dropped ball. I am learning, with everygame I try some new shots, some new serves am trying to do some multitasking by moving with ball and still planning the next shot so that opponent cannot pick the ball.
I have 2-3 friends who play racquetball and am planning to play with them regularly atleast 3 days a week, play volleyball on wednesday and spend rest of the time with Ishaan.

Communication Technology

Communication ... hmm its way different now, it has changed a lot in last 10 yrs. I remember when I was a kid we use to book a trunk call to speak to my nani once in a month or so and I think it was expensive to do that. I use to think why cant I have this facility on my phone why should I call someone and wait for him to connect me. So here was the answer STD facility which we took on our landline phone and use to lock it, I remember I was the one to dig out the process to place a STD lock on phone.
But still sometimes we missed calls, or were not able to call our relatives or friends because we were not at home. To resolve this problem there came the Cellphone revolution. When I was doing my MBA, only one of my classmate had a mobile phone and most of the communication was through missed calls because an incoming call was like Rs 5/min and an outgoing call was Rs 12/min. We use to laugh at him why he is carrying the mobile phone if he does not wants to pick our calls. We never thought at that time that mobilephones will be so much part of our life, like TV, electricity and cooking gas are. I always thought mobilephones are evil because that will make you available for 24 Hrs which is not good so I wont ever buy something like that.

After I worked for about 2 yrs, in yr 2002 everyone around me had a mobile phone, moreover it was easy for my family to contact me if I had a mobile and also the call price had gone down still incoming calls were charged by the service providers .. So I bought my first handset motorola (dont remember the model number) which looked like a cordless phone and was very heavy it had no other feature but to get incoming calls and outgoing calls (see the picture).

At every stage when I changed my mobile phone between Motorola and now, I was reluctant to club any other functionality with mobile phone. I always thought mobile phone should always be used for calls and nothing else. If we want to take pictures we should use camera and not mobile phone, if you want to surf internet we should use laptop and not mobile phone. But now last week when I bought iPhone, things are totally different it has everything that you can think of for communication, it has high resolution camera, it has video camera, internet surfing, games plus thousands of application which you can have to think how can you use them. It has totally changed the way to communicate, and it has the quality assurance from the best company Apple.
Now because I have started using all in one instrument, after doing some brainstorming I found iPhones dont really have everything that they could have, they are missing few very basic features.

1. Multitasking - You cannot have one application open on iPhone and use the second application as well, like using facebook application while the radio application is on ... thats not possible. I am wondering didn't apple think of this basic feature which is present in all laptops and computers.
2. Video calling - How good it would be to have a webcam in the iPhone where you can call your friend who has other iPhone and do video conferencing or call you family on Skype and show them fall colors while you are at New Hampshire in the month of October. I dont think it was a difficult thing to do for iPhone if Nokia N97 and a dozen of other phones in market can do that iPhone can do it easily.
3. Interface with TV- A good to have interface where we can connect iPhone to TV to watch a you tube video.
Similar to my previous requirements of STD or Cellphones even these requirements will be catered and am sure Steve Jobs would be aware of these limitations with iPhone, either its too tough to do and maintain the quality or Apple wants to limit the features in each release so that they can keep selling iPhone for long time with some upgrades in every release.
I am still rethinking if I should keep this iPhone or wait for the next release which might have all these features and so many others which might give me a true all in one instrument.