Perpetually Perplexed

Pi Patel is religious. Multireligious to be precise. He visits temples and mosques and churches. The priest, pandit and maulvi fight with each other saying he is theirs. He also asks his parents to perform baptism for him and buy a prayer rug for him to pray to Allah 5 times a day. His parents who are non-practising Hindus like all of us, reluctantly agree. ( If you disagree with me, consider this. We have a puja room or mantap in our houses. Our Devar puja done once in a day by one member of the family is chore which everyone tries to avoid. Our festivals are more for preparing and eating sweets and savories than for praying devoutly. We know that we are supposed to be having some religious texts in some unfamiliar languge. But we never bother to read them. So we practice hinduism but barely so. ) But then when his ship wrecks and his family members disappear along with all the animals, he is saved. My doubt is who saved Pi - Ishwar, Allah or Jesus? But jokes aside, I am rea

Now a days drama companies (natak company ) of our childhood have all vanished. So if we want to see a drama, we should see the same old boring mother-in-law/ daughter in law serials of Hindi or kannada channels or same friends and similar serials in English. But not to worry. Our leaders are coming to our rescue. And they are providing drama free of cost. Or is it? You can watch didi drama where the mighty lady makes king dance to her tunes. You can switch channel and watch our own home grown "who wants to be the see emm" drama where two grown up people are trying to play musical chairs sans music. Or if you are inclined towards sob stories, you can watch the helpless leader drama where the hero cries saying nobody listens to him anymore. Well the title is part of famous kannada film song "Jagadeeshanaaduva jagave nataka ranga" This entire world is a stage directed by God!!!

Many a times we try to find reasons behind things ignoring the obvious. And more often the problem would some kind of miscommunication or misunderstanding. I was not able to use share dialog in my android app. This dialog must let the user send text or image using gmail, bluetooth and in some cases facebook, twitter etc. I searched for many code pieces , most of them were similar, and put them in my program. But my program would say, no program suitable. I tried to hunt for similar problems and their solutions in google, but to no avail. I started thinking that I should re install my IDE, my android sdk etc, etc. Then I installed the same program in the phone. I was testing all this while on the emulator. And lo, my share dialog appeared with gmail and bluetooth option. So the only problem was the emulator. Leave alone this coding. Let us look at some real life situation. A week back, I got a phone call. A man started shouting that he is calling from such a long time and why am

When I look at the beautiful user interface of other applications for android and iphone/ipad, specifically ipad, I am filled with envy, fear and some tiny bit of inspiration. My designs are so dull in comparison. Let me ctrl c ctrl v the designs. Anyway I got something accomplished today. My inspiration app for android is responding to fling event. That is I can swipe from left to right or right to left to move to next or previous quotes. What is so great about it? It is great because I spent almost a day to implement somebody else's code. And the funny part is, the quotes to be shown in this app are funny. No, the inspiration quotes are not funny, they are humorous quotes. I thought, funny quotes might be more popular. And where am I writing all this? Is it not oh life mail. oh life mail is something I have subscribed to and get a mail every day. Which asks me how was my day. And I pour out everything. Helps me in emptying the heavy heart.

We Indians, specifically Hindus are well known for our broadmindedness and religious tolerance. Have you heard otherwise? Well, the intolerant ones are misguided people. Ignore them. Let us see the reason behind this. We are polytheistic. Every morning, we pray to many gods, by showing arathi to many idols. I have 5 of them in our puja room. And I sing (I think I am singing, but neighbors don't ) hymns (of course in Sanskrit) of at least 10 gods every morning. Why not two more? Along with Shree Ganeshaya namaha, Shree Vishnuve namaha etc, I can easily add Shree Kristuve namaha and Shree mahammadaya namaha. Not so difficult, see. And not only that. Each of us will our own mane devaru (house god??) and grama devatha (village god??) etc. And we accept another person whose mane devaru is not Ganapathi but Venkatramana. So we can accept people whose God is Jesus or some other. We should and we had been, all these years. Until recently, when Ram, the new form of intolerant Ram came

What would you do if your name is Piscine and everyone in your school calls you Pissing? Pi has a similar problem. He develops a new strategy. When the teachers ask the students to introduce themselves, he walks to the black board and writes My name is Piscine Patel. Everyone calls me Pi pi=3.14 So instead of getting ridiculed for his name, he gets new cool nickname Pi. Innovative kid. This is how, the book "Life of Pi" proceeds. I am liking the book.

Our leaders are fighting a ferocious battle. Not against the merciless murderers who killed the IPS officer Narendra Kumar. Not against the goons who are punishing the people who have not voted for them. Not against the lawyers who have hurled stones and bricks to media men and police and injured 87 people. Not against illiteracy, poverty, malnutrition. But against other leaders who are trying to snatch their gaddi. Again a curious fact here, if a Narendra Kumar is crushed by tractor, how or why could not he escape from it as it moves really slow?

The poll results in 5 states have proved that Indian people are not gullible as we and politicians do believe. And also that, for people good governance is more important than caste or community. And they can see the actual motive behind poll time announcements for placating people. Mera Bharat Mahan!!

I am back to coding - which translates to writing - or rather debugging 3 lines of android code - or sometimes ctrl c ctrl v ing some lines of code - and then waiting for 3 hours or some times 3 days for that code to execute. You see, eclipse is slow, emulator is slow, but power cuts and distractions are fast. I have been Kk for a almost ten days ( he was testing engineer). Now let me be Si for some time (She was Tech. manager) and find out where are the loop holes which drain precious battery and memory and find out why can't I use more meaningful variable names instead of temp, temp1 and temp2. Role playing !!!

One way to realize that you are getting old is that you tend to look back, always. I was drinking half a glass of some beverage from the fridge. I remembered the good old days. Me and Veena - my cousin just one year younger than me, would take some poppins - sweet lemony toffies in orange color, soak them in water, add some sugar to the mix and drink it with straws, which were newspaper pages rolled as a thin tube. How we loved them! How I love to go back to that time when the world was filled with games, friends and laughter. We would wait for the summer holidays for this opportunity when we can come to our ancestral village. One and half months of pure (at least for us) bliss. We were totally eight girls in the family - 3 of us, 4 daughters of my uncle and 1 daughter of our grand father. Almost all in the same age. During day time, we would roam around in the forest, eating some or the other berries, plucking cashew nuts and eating their fruits. Climbing short

I am currently reading this book by  Albert Camus. It is an autobiographical novel published after the author's  death by his daughter. The narrator, 40 year old Jacques visits the tomb of his father whom he has never seen and never really felt any feelings for. But when looks at the date, he is shocked. His father had died at the age of 29 much younger than he is now. He suddenly starts feeling filial devotion for this person. Jacques had a very tough childhood. His strict grandmother who is ready  to discipline the children rather than loving them, his  widowed deaf mother who will be in her own world, half mute uncle who is working as a laborer in a cooperage and hand to mouth existence. One of the best books I have ever read. Jacques is the teacher's pet. Because he is the orphan child of a war soldier. But when a classmate teases him saying that, Jacques has to fight him. There must be a duel - there own mode of duel. In which Jacques gives Munaz, his opponent