Archive for December 2008
Just What The Dentist Ordered!
I am not sure what came upon me when I visited a dentist recently for a check-up. It was meant to be preventive but it has ended up causing me exactly what it was meant to prevent: loads of pain, incessantly. I remember as a boy, we read a poem by Ogden Nash called ‘This is going to hurt just a little bit’ where the poet hilariously describes the experience of visiting a dentist. I remember this poem because it was the first time I learnt the expression ‘vicious cycle’. But today, while reading it again, I identified with each and every line.
Blackberry Storm Causes Outage in the US!!
Browsing through top stories, as reported by Google News, is a daily habit with me. I was in for some bewilderment this afternoon when I spotted the following the headline under Sci/Tech category: “Blackberry Storm Causes Major AT&T Outages”. There was an unmistakable image of an iPhone next to it. Underneath, it said that as Walmart began to sell the iPhone 3G in thousands of its stores, a storm caused major AT&T voice and data outages across the US Midwest and along the Eastern Seaboard. Here is the screenshot of Google News I took at 2:16 PM today:
Mercifully, the Information Week article that it linked to did not exercise such a leap of thought and described what had really happened – a natural storm.
I have been trying to imagine a conspiracy theory behind why this occurred. Did Google (whose Android is competition to both, iPhone and Blackberry) tried to kill two birds with one stone? Or was it an editorial oversight?
Or, more believably, was it a software glitch?
For once, Google’s mighty crawlers picked up a bad donut.
Being Rod Blagojevich
I am trying to imagine what being Rod Blagojevich is like. Unfortunately, I don’t live on some floor 7.5 from where I could enter his consciousness, so I am going to speculate. Before the morning he got arrested, I would have guessed he feels ‘fortunate’ (as I am sure he’d have said in several speeches) but afterward, I would have hurried to exit his mind, even if that meant being thrown into a ditch by NJ Turnpike.
Your Passports Will Be Mailed To You!
Those are the magic words that my parents and didi (’sister’) recently heard at the US Embassy in Delhi after their successful visa interviews that marked the culmination of months of careful planning. For Nidhi and me, getting a visitor’s visa for my folks has been like the all-important science project in school which has to be done with utmost care as it carries a double-digit weightage for the final exams. It all started with a simple notion i.e. how about getting my parents to travel to the US next year?
The Unbearable Lightness of Diversity
I remember, as a child, one of the favorite lessons in the classroom was about how India is a great country because we represent unity in diversity. Take our national anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana’ that elegantly evokes different regions of India, combine that with Iqbal’s assertion ‘Sare Jahan Se Achcha’ and we have a very powerful cause-and-effect relationship. In India, we have come to idolize our diversity, holding it dear to our hearts and yet inexplicably, we claim to have a common destiny.
