Author: Rahul Razdan

Top ten posts on Swadeshe

Humour, Zeitgeist

I have a confession to make, and I am going to make it publicly. I have been wrong in judging Sachin Tendulkar. I always had an issue with the country’s (and most certainly his own) obsession with the centuries he scored. His centuries were an end in themselves, and not necessarily a means to an end — the larger cause of the team winning matches.

So what has caused this change of heart? No, this has nothing to do with Sanjay Manjrekar’s recent comments on Tendulkar’s dubious injury-itinerary in the last few years.

It is about the psychological impact of crossing a 100!

Well, the Prince of Kurukshetra post was picked up and linked by Mumbai Mirror in their ‘Views’ section and it sent the per day views to Swadeshe soaring past the 100 mark! In early Dravidian style (Rahul Dravid-ian, just in case, you smelt a Chennai slant here) — the previous highest was 93 views.

Same day another milestone was reached, when my Internet, Shahid Afridi & integrity post also crossed 50 views!

As of today, here are the top ten viewed posts on Swadeshe:

Title Views
Internet, Shahid Afridi & integrity
 50
Krrishi Darshan 44
Krrish Case Study @ IIM Indore? 43
Prince of Kurukshetra
 37
I saw Philip Kotler in Chennai! 31
Sons and Loafers: A case of bad sons-kaar 28
Jaswant Singh revisits Kandahar… 27
This Guy’s Goma make it big! 24
Mumbai Blasts: Enough is enough 20
Chucking: Acute angle, obtuse logic 17

And even though the above sample size is small, this could also provide me with an instance of the ‘Leader-feeder Effect‘ that I had propounded earlier.

Prince of Kurukshetra

Media & Entertainment

Move over Budhiya Singh, Prince of Kurukshetra is here.

If you are living outside of India, maybe it’s an event that will entirely pass you by. But if you have watched any of the Indian TV news channels this Sunday, the story of the 6-year old boy, Prince, who fell down into a 60-feet deep bore well couldn’t have escaped you, no matter what.

The sequence of events is like this: Friday evening, some children are playing, when one of them falls into the well. In other times this would have been a tragedy that we hear/read about, feel momentarily sorry for, and carry on with our lives. But here along with help, arrives a CCTV camera, which is lowered into the deep pit. And a miracle occurs — the child is alive!

While his well-wishers see a ray of hope — the media sees a story. If you are a student of journalism and are looking for a perfect example of a ‘public interest story’ — this is it!

It has everything that makes for a sensational story. A tale of survival, the challenge of rescue efforts — a parallel tunnel being dug; oxygen and food being released; doctors and ambulances on standby; people offering prayers for the boy in mosques, gurudwaras, temples; Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi sending their best-wishes for the boy; Chief Minister of Haryana Bhupinder Singh Hooda arriving just as the boy was about to be rescued. And not to forget the CCTV camera that was giving minute by minute images of the boy in distress. A day-long gripping drama, that generates spontaneous interest in viewers. And you won’t believe it — no advertisements!

And then the overwhelming moment when the boy finally resurfaces — the TV anchors go berserk with hyperbole:

“…dharti maa ki goud mein pachaas ghante bitaane ke baad, ab apni maa ki goud mein hai Prince…”

“…apne janamdin pe hua Prince ka punar janam…”

Now that congratulatory messages are pouring in and crackers are being burst far and wide, time for a pun intended closing line…

All’s well that ends well!

A short love story

Claymation, Humour

I had gathered a lot of video shots during my initial experiments with claymation. While the magnum opus is still at a story-board stage, I decided to put to use some of the ‘spare shots’. A lot like mothers (or like that guy on MAD TV on Pogo) who conjur up by-products out of waste pieces of cloth and other material.

Here I tried a hopelessly dummy-stamped rendition of a popular modern-day camera technique. I would be flattered if anyone figures out what technique is being talked about.

And of course this is not pureplay claymation either. That’s reserved for the magnum opus, remember!

Jaswant Singh revisits Kandahar…

Open-letter, Politics

…in his book, A Call to Honour to be released shortly.

He refers to the notes that he made during the journey from Delhi to Lahore and what went through his mind. ‘It is impossible not to jot down impressions on board this special flight. I do not really know what to term my mission — a rescue mission; an appeasement exercise; a flight to compromise or a flight to the future,’ he writes.

http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/jul/21onkar1.htm

 

Dear Mr. Jaswant Singh,

Congratulations on your book, and thank you for giving me perhaps the worst New Year of my life in December 1999. (Even the Tsunami ravaged December 2004 was bad — but that was a natural disaster that left us humble, unlike Kandahar 1999, where a bunch of rowdies had us humbled).

But going by your quote above, I wonder who/what were you jotting your impressions for? Isn’t it obvious you were penning down notes for your book? And on the quote itself: Mr. Singh, you rescued the three terrorists; appeased a generation of them; compromised the honour of India; and of course it was a flight to the future for those terrorists, who otherwise would have deservedly rotted in prison. So, you shouldn’t have worried about what to term your mission. I’ll give you two words that sum it up aptly: national shame.

Till that incident, I had been a BJP supporter. For at some point of time, the party displayed a certain common-sense perspective, and talked a lot of right (right as in correct, not right, the politically polarized position) things. But this surely was a turning point in my understanding of the party. And please, don’t you raise the bogey of ‘coalition compulsions’ for this one too.

You Mr. Singh, of the famous accent and articulation, showed an embarrassing deficiency of tact and bankruptcy of tactics in handling this. It is one thing to be striking compromises with various groups — perhaps that’s a part of governance, and I believe all governments do it — and an entirely different thing to be seen as capitulating completely.

Imagine this, a Union minister as the flight care-taker. Tell us, did they serve liquor in-flight. After all, this was an international flight! Right?

First, the whole idea of releasing terrorists was wrong. But even then, tact could have dictated two airplanes. One carrying the minister and his team. And the criminals with the security officials in another. Otherwise the whole idea is repulsive — a Union minister of the Indian state, spending a couple of hours in the same plane as some of the most wanted global criminals. Headed towards the same destination, but to a different end. A beheaded Daniel Pearl some time later. (One of the terrorists Jaswant Singh escorted, Omar Ahmed Sheikh, was involved in the killing of Daniel Pearl) (Update: Read here an account of an HBO documentary on the issue by GreatBong)

Second, you could have bloody paid them money! As it is, all terrorists have been paid for by different governments. Well, there are suggestions that you did hand over some bags to them, which contained either money or explosives. But releasing criminals who have already undermined your authority once lets them undermine it to perpetuity. We are still paying the price for that.

‘Before writing about this event, I reflected long on how I was to do it; how would I convey the enormity of the challenge that was we faced, as a nation and not simply as a government,’ he writes in the chapter titled ‘Troubled Neighbour, Turbulent Times: 1999’.

Mr. Singh, the nation died that day. Your government survived. (Thankfully, not for long, though!)

I had to write this to exorcise from my psyche that one image from December 1999 that still haunts me — that of the grinning Taliban terrorists disappearing into the sunset. The pride and self-esteem of a billion people ground to dust. And that dust being blown around by the station wagon they drove away in.

Regards,

Rahul Razdan

User delights with FireFox

Media & Entertainment, Zeitgeist

I know this is coming a little late in the day especially when FireFox 2.0 Beta has already made an appearance. Actually I had written this long ago, and wanted to make an academic research out of browser comparisons. But since that isn’t anywhere close to happening, here goes.

Top 10 user delights of Mozilla Firefox web browser (in my order of experiencing them):

1. Freedom from virus and spy-ware attacks

This is perhaps the single biggest reason for people wanting to shift from the hitherto ubiquitous Internet Explorer. And it is not only novice users who unwittingly get infested with these viruses and malicious spy programmes, even seasoned net users have become hapless victims and their browsers hijacked.

2. Installation relief – Download size, import bookmarks etc.

Having made up your mind to try out Firefox, you double-check with incredulity that the download size is a mere 4-6 Megabytes. Compare this with your status quo browsers at around 25-50 bloated Megabytes! Moreover one of the bigger inertia factors against changing browsers — existing bookmarks — can be imported very easily.

3. Tabbed browsing

Once you start using Firefox the first feature that catches your eye is tabbed browsing, which allows users to simultaneously open multiple sites within a single application window. Many people feel this is a new feature — which is not true. Tabbed browsing had been introduced by Neoplanet as far back as 1999-2000. However, given 5-6 more years of user-evolution tabbed browsing has become one of the most popular features of Firefox.

4. Open in new window/tab

This is a direct fall-out of the tabbed browsing feature. A very common online trait of information seekers (mostly when you want to check out multiple Google results) is the tendency to right-click and open link in a new window. And without fail the new browser window opens, but on top of the existing window you are working in – disrupting your flow of activities at the page you are on. You necessarily need to click back on the original window to resume and continue. With Firefox, you right-click and open link in a new tab. The new tab opens in the background while you continue your search through other links on the page.

5. Search engines

Over the last few years add-on toolbars from Yahoo, Google and MSN have become popular with users as it saves them the additional step of opening the parent sites in their browsers and then using the search feature. However if your activities involve an equal usage of these three popular searches you end up installing all three in your browser. Not only does that tend to mess with your default settings for home pages and search pages, it also drastically reduces the available screen area. Firefox on the other hand has very smartly used the real estate for menus and carved out a space for the search field along with the address input field. However, what follows next is a much bigger value-add. You can add a number of popular and specialized search engines to this field. For example, I have added Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Answers, Creative Commons, eBay, IMDB, Flickr Tags, Dictionary, Wikipedia. It takes not more than a few seconds to add a new search engine – no restart required!

6. Extensions/plug-ins

Firefox allows you to add on a series of extensions that have been written by the Firefox community. Typically these add-ons are not more than a few to several Kilobytes in size. I have yet to come across an extension that’s in the region of Megabytes in size. Two of my favourite extensions are ‘image zoom’ and ‘blog this’. Whenever Firefox comes across a page where you are missing a plug-in, it effortlessly helps you with downloading and auto-installing the missing plug-in.

7. Download manager

How do downloads work in I.E? You click on the file to be downloaded; a new dialog window opens asking you the location where you would want the file to be downloaded; and then a separate panel opens showing you the status of your download. For multiple files being downloaded simultaneously, multiple download status panels are there, adding to the clutter on your open windows bar. Once the file downloads fully a new dialog box appears letting you open the downloaded file. Sometimes you are not sure where the file has been downloaded, or what all files have you downloaded in the past. In Firefox, all such downloads are streamlined through the download manager, which does all the above activities in a single window, but also shows you the files you have downloaded previously. Additionally it lets you suspend/pause/resume specific downloads.

8. Clearing history selectively

Have you ever been faced with a situation where you have wanted to remove from the address bar history, a few of the recent URLs you have visited? Perhaps the only way available was clearing out the browser history. But with that all the other addresses would also be cleared out. Here again Firefox adds value by removing from the address bar as well, web addresses of the sites you remove from the browser history.

9. Closing window

Another fall out of the tabbed browsing feature is the safety of not closing browser windows accidentally. If you have multiple tabs opened within Firefox and you click the close window icon, Firefox prompts you that this would close all the tabs within the browser and not only the tabs currently being used.

10. It’s free

Free of cost, and free of obligations.

Also-rans:

Pop-up blocker

(This post would have served its purpose if even one person switches to FireFox)