BangNoos !!

If there is one thing that unites all Bangaloreans it is the nostalgia and longing for the old Bangalore, with its wide roads and great weather.Indeed, that Bangalore is a thing of the past, and the Bengaluru of today is a monster devouring into our resources every day, growing at such a rapid pace that all our resources: roads, basic civic amenities like water, electricity, drainage, housing and pavements are all waiting to burst under the tremendous pressure.
With the political climate looking extremely favourable and a new Government ready to turn the tide around for this city, everythings being turned upside down to get things in order. Large infrastructure projects, each with their own bunch of litigations, integrated plans to improve the city by BBMP, roadworks, drainage works, Parks, Lakes, Power, Water everythings under the scanner.
Bangalore is making its last ditch effort to salvage its image as the Garden City with great weather and great infrastructure.
It occured to me that it would be great to track these changes to Bangalore, as it tries to pull itself out of the muck its stuck in.
It is with this intention that the blog BangNooS!, short for Bangalore Noos(News), was brought to life.
I hope it will meet its objective of tracking the Civic Life in Bangalore and reach out to all those Bangaloreans across the world, attract comments and be a source of active participation from all those who love this Green City.
All your suggestions and comments are most welcome!.

Now, thread ceremony via Internet

CHENNAI: Overseas Indians who wish to go through the annual ritual of changing the sacred thread (poonool) on August 5 (for Yajur Veda adherents), need not worry about finding a guru to perform the Upakarma rituals.

All they need to do now is to log on to www.traditionalwisdom.in, and they can find a guru to chant the right mantras.

Designed by two Chennai-based persons, S K Sundararajan, who is concerned about preserving the country’s traditions and heritage, and Ramkumar Ramamurthy, an IT professional, the web initiative will help Brahmins living in four time zones — Australia, Middle-East, the USA and Europe — to go through the Anushthanam with ease at home in front of their PCs.

All one has to do to avail of the services of a guru back home is to register with the website (there is no charge) and keep ready the items required for the ceremony, including the sacred thread, at the time specified on theonline portal.

Although there is a school of thought that anyone going out of this Karma Bhoomi (India) loses the eligibility to perform such rituals, this initiative provides an opportunity for all Brahmins to perform Upakarma all over the world even if finding a guru to chant the mantras in their area is a stupendous task.

Details about the day’s events are available on the website, which also seeks a purely voluntary donation as vadhiyar dakshinai ( a token for the services performed by the guru) and for continuing its research and service in preserving the Indian heritage.

Three weeks of solitude

The last few weeks in Brussels have been amazing. I have had nothing to do on the weekends. No work!!! no social engagements and no phone calls. Phew!!! Dont i sound like a busy man???
.. well i've been really busy doing nothing much in particular.
So i've been sleeping, watching TV and browsing the net in peace. The only work!!! i have to do is the laundry. But over the last 3 weeks, even this process has been audited and tuned, to maximize efficiency and minimise time and effort. Phew!! i can justify that management degree now..

So i've also had the time to catch up with whats been happening around me. There's plenty as usual. Almost overwhelming infact to digest all at once. But the good thing is i have started digging in.

Just noticed a few weeks back, that google has added their services to the top of your gmail account. Its a pretty kewl idea especially if they can integrate all their services and provide access to all of these through one's mail account. But they have indeed taken the right step forward yet again.

Hope to see u guys here more often now.

Cheerio..

B2B

Yes, Back 2 Bangalore. Got here a few weeks back and waiting to catch up with life et al. Something that i havent done in the last few months.

Just want to thank all u guys(yes,even the fellows who come here and post ad's), for visiting whats been a dead blog over the last few months.

Googly's from google

Figure this one out... a lil late sending this, still... :))

http://www.google.com/googlegulp/index.html

And this one is interesting...

http://yagoohoogle.com/

Mel 'Bourne Voyage'

And then one day I was on a flight to Melbourne. The events of the previous weeks had run through so fast that the mind had not had the time to process them.

Sitting in the Malaysian airlines flight, helping an old Indian couple and myself get some vegetarian food, it hit me like a bag of ice falling from a 1000 ft above me. Well, couldn’t think of anything worse to compare. I survived though.

I spent the rest of the time trying to answer questions that I was throwing at myself. Am not sure if some of those will ever find themselves an answer.

The ABCD(American Born Confused Desi) sitting next to me, on his way to LA, wasn’t helping my cause. Thankfully, after a change of flights at KL, I found some decent company and successfully kept myself away from helping some of those questions find answers.

Like someone once said, and I hope he was right, ‘Everything happens for good’. Duh!!

tracert

For those of you who could not make any sense about the subject, its just a command in linux/unix that lets you trace the route to any machine on the internet from your machine.

Well frankly I had no idea what i was trying to name when i was asked for a name for my blog while registering. In fact it left me wondering as to how i got myself into this at all. This in short is the story behind the subject of this mail and the name of my blog.

Now that i seem to have figured out what it is that i have named, i suppose it is only my duty to enlighten anybody else who may wonder what all this is about anyways.

Boarding the same train of thought, it would not be pertinent to keep myself in the shadows, especially when i am throwing so much light around. I am a computer science engineer from the Cochin University of Science and technology. Following a short stint at Tata Consultancy Services and two years at a b-school(SCMHRD, Pune), I now find myself idling away my time at Infosys in a sleepy little port town in Karnataka.

Frankly, I am not much of a writer and this and the days to come would be my maiden attempts at it. As you probably have guessed already, its only after exhausting all other options of keeping myself busy in office that i am venturing into these realms.

It is only with the intention of making this introduction of mine technically "Complete", that I am about to take this post of mine perilously close to the lines of a hindi film script. I am not technology averse. I am totally new to blogging. I enjoy all kinds of music and movies. I read anything that is hot and in the news. Have just read Da Vinci Code. And I am trained in carnatic classical vocal and violin. And love indian food. Thats about it I guess.

I suppose you guessed most of that already, but the Hero has to sing a song and express his love for his heroine to make it a hit Bollywood fillum.

Please do mail me your comments, suggestions et al.
Hoping to churn out as many posts as the box office does films.

Abe oye, khatam nahi hua #$@# ...

to be continued...

Vinod