the world of orkut

orkut!! in some minds, this word conjures up hours spent on the web just chatting with friends or looking up various profiles. network administrators must be one of the most hated individuals in organizations where this site is blocked. not to be left behind, people keep on finding proxy sites that enable them to chat. there is a friend of mine who was able to use gmail after a long time because of such a proxy server provided by a colleague. her words were somewhere along these lines, "bless him!"

it is kind of funny, all the stuff that keeps getting discussed here. politics, culture, porn, what not!! and that too in a variety of languages. transliteration refers to spelling the exact words of a language in another (for e.g., main hoon na is transliteration). this is different from translation where the meaning of the words is converted into the other language (for e.g., ain't i there for main hoon na)

now why did i mention this? orkut is a hotbed of transliteration activity. i am sure the britishers who introduced english to india never dreamt of the day when the indians would write their own language(s) in the queen's!! so there is a very good chance that you will see "kya be, kya kar raha hain" more than "what's up, dude, what are you doing?", and the stuff i myself have seen here!! i have discussed office work with my colleagues on orkut. obviously the normal chit-chat keeps taking place all the time. and i trust quite a large number of people will testify about meeting a lot of old friends.

i do not want to discuss the pros and cons of orkut, this has been done ad nauseam on various forums (fora for the purists). this article was just a general reflection on the site.

moving on, let us talk about corporate targets. why on god's green earth are organizations so fanatic about numbers and targets? gone are the days when people used to be happy with the basic necessities of life. today the guy who gets in the maximum 'dhanda' is the hero. the justifiation as far as i understand is that any business is here to do well, business. and growth should be a continuous process for the organization to sustain itself.

this is similar to what is called the red queen phenomenon in evolution (read about this in jurassic park or the lost world). in alice in wonderland, the red queen tells alice that she should run as fast as possible in order to remain where she is. similarly, in nature animals must evolve rapidly so as to just survive. the same logic must be extended to today's businesses. 'perform or perish' seems to be the oft-repeated quote. and in a world where there are a lot of others trying to do the same things that you are doing, well, what you have is tension, tension, tension!!


those of you who are studying, do enjoy your time now. once you start working...

rantings of a traffic victim

hmm, another effort at letting the world know what goes on inside the brain of the organism called chaitanya takes off. bless the guys (and girls, to be politically correct) who have made blogging what it is today, enabling anybody with access to the internet to put out all sorts of stuff, useful and otherwise!!

i was going to the howrah station by taxi to catch a train to ranchi yesterday. it was then that a few thoughts occurred to me. traffic in metros (generalizing, possibly in any decently-sized town, with adequately insufficient infrastructure) seems to be very intelligent. it has a mind of its own. it regulates its speed such that it achieves its ultimate aim, i.e. to not go anywhere. unfortunately its human components live under the mistaken impression that they are traveling from one place to another (and have to do this asap) which results in not-so-desirable temper swings.

aiding our hero, the traffic in its quest are the traffic signals, designed by somebody who thinks a vehicle should wait at a signal for it to change for at least the time taken for a single cell to evolve into a complete human being. the hapless humans can but pray for the day when their movements are not restricted to the ground (for illustration, refer to a good science fiction movie).

moving on, i used to pride myself on the fact that i read quite a decent amount. a conversation i had yesterday with a friend of mine and a list sent by another of TIME's compilation of the 100 greatest books were humbling experiences. it reminds me of a story i read once.

one day indra was thinking to himself how learned he was and how much he had read. along came narada ( i think) and showed him a huge pile of books. when asked what it was narada told indra that those were all the books that indra had read. this gave indra's already inflated ego a great surge. then quickly narada pointed to an even larger mound in front of which the first pile was infinitesimal. that, he told indra was a collection of books indra had not yet read. no prizes for guessing what the outcome of this was.

watch this space for occasional stories from indian mythology too. for now, adios!!