A to Z of world

This is a Complete List of the 79th Oscar Winners for the year 2007. I saw just "The Departed" among all the films listed. I liked it when I saw it but never thought that it will walk away with Best Picture Oscar Award. Anyways, here is the list for you.

BEST PICTURE - "The Departed," Graham King, producer
BEST DIRECTOR - Martin Scorsese, "The Departed"
BEST ACTOR - Forest Whitaker, "The Last King of Scotland"
BEST ACTRESS - Helen Mirren, "The Queen"
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - Alan Arkin, "Little Miss Sunshine"
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Jennifer Hudson, "Dreamgirls"
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY - "Little Miss Sunshine," Michael Arndt
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY - "The Departed", William Monahan
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM - "An Inconvenient Truth", Davis Guggenheim, director; Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, producers
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM - "The Lives of Others", Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE - "Happy Feet", George Miller, director BEST ORIGINAL SCORE - "Babel," Gustavo Santaolalla
BEST ORIGINAL SONG - "I Need to Wake Up" Melissa Etheridge (from "An Inconvenient Truth")
BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM - "The Danish Poet", Torill Kove, director
BEST ART DIRECTION - "Pan's Labyrinth" Eugenio Caballero, art direction; Pilar Revuelta, set decoration
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY - "Pan's Labyrinth", Guillermo Navarro
BEST COSTUME DESIGN - "Marie Antoinette," Milena Canonero
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM - "The Blood of Yingzhou District", Ruby Yang, Thomas Lennon
BEST FILM EDITING - "The Departed", Thelma Schoonmaker
BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM - "West Bank Story," Ari Sandel, director
BEST MAKEUP - "Pan's Labyrinth", David Marti, Montse Ribe
BEST SOUND EDITING - "Letters From Iwo Jima", Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman
BEST SOUND MIXING - "Dreamgirls," Michael Minkler, Bob Beemer, Willie Burton
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS - "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson, Allen Hall

Tag: Oscars

Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life, officials said. "We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden," Swedish Institute (SI) director Olle Waestberg has told AFP. The embassy would not provide passports or visas but would instruct visitors how to obtain such documents in the real world and act as a link to web-based information about the Scandinavian country. "Second Life allows us to inform people about Sweden and broaden the opportunity for contact with Sweden easily and cheaply," Waestberg said. The Swedish Institute is an agency of the Swedish foreign ministry tasked with informing the world about Sweden. The ministry fully backed the initiative, he added.

Second Life - a fantasy world inhabited by computer-generated residents (called avatars) created by San Francisco technology company Linden Lab - has attracted several real-world companies, including car manufacturers and sports clothing makers, which created 3-D stores. While there were individuals in Second Life calling themselves the "Canadian Ambassador" and "The United States Embassy to Second Life", the Swedish initiative would however be the first officially sanctioned embassy in Second Life. Waestberg hoped the embassy would open soon. In the longer term the Swedish Institute envisaged buying an island in the virtual world to create a home for Swedish companies.

Source: SMH.com
Tag: Second Life

Britney Spears seen in tattoo parlor with her head shaved bald. Police arrive to control crowd of fans and photographers. Appearance came same day as reports Spears tried rehab. Spears' manager could not be reached for comment.

A salon owner tried to talk Britney Spears out of shaving her head, but the singer insisted and actually used a buzzer to do the job herself. Salon owner Esther Tognozzi said Spears appeared at her shop late last week and announced she wanted all of her hair cut off. Tognozzi said she refused to do it and tried to reason with the singer. "Are you sure you're not having a bad day?" Tognozzi recalled asking Spears. "And tomorrow you'll feel differently about it? Why don't we wait a little bit?"

At that point, Tognozzi said, the singer grabbed some electric clippers and went to the back of the shop and began cutting her hair off. All Tognozzi did was "even it out," the salon owner said.

Later, Spears was at a San Fernando Valley tattoo parlor, sporting her newly bald head. Video on KABC-TV showed the newly shorn Spears with tiny tattoos on the back of her neck as she sat Friday night for a new tattoo -- a pair of red and pink lips.

"She just wanted something real small on her wrist, something dainty," Max Gott, the tattoo artist at Body and Soul in Sherman Oaks, told the TV station. "She got some cute little lips on her wrist."

Derrik Snell, who works at the tattoo parlor, said Spears showed up without notice and stayed for about 90 minutes as about 60 fans, photographers and gawkers gathered outside. "She seemed fine," Snell said. "I didn't really notice [the hairdo] at first, she had a hood on when she showed up."

The appearance came the same day as reports on TV and Web sites that Spears, who has drawn criticism for her recent partying and sloppy behavior, had briefly checked into rehab. Larry Rudolph, Spears' manager, couldn't be reached for comment.

Syndicated entertainment TV show "Extra" first reported that Spears had entered a treatment facility. Celebrity Web site TMZ.com then said the singer had entered a treatment center but had checked out one day later. Neither revealed their sources.

People magazine's Web site, citing "a source," said Spears had gone in and out of rehab, and identified the facility as Eric Clapton's Crossroads center in Antigua, in the Caribbean. "Access Hollywood" then said the reports weren't true, but didn't cite a source. A woman who answered the phone at Crossroads told The Associated Press that she couldn't confirm or deny anyone's presence at the facility. Angelique Uram, a Spears fan who stood on the tattoo parlor's sidewalk for Friday night's spectacle, was aghast at the singer's new look. "We could see her in the mirror, and her head is completely shaved," she told KABC. "It looks terrible."

Police arrived to control the crowd and helped Spears' bodyguards guide her into a waiting SUV, her head covered by a hooded sweatshirt.

Source: CNN
Tag: Britney Spears

An autopsy will be conducted on Friday to help determine the cause of Anna Nicole Smith's death, according to the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office. Smith died Thursday at a South Florida hospital after being discovered unconscious in her hotel room. The reality TV star, Playboy Playmate and former Guess model was 39. Her death came less than five months after the birth of her daughter and the death of her 20-year-old son. One of two men involved in a paternity dispute over Smith's daughter is seeking a DNA sample, and a hearing is set for Friday morning.

Smith checked into the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, on Monday with her lawyer and boyfriend, Howard K. Stern. Smith's private nurse called hotel workers at 1:38 p.m. and security officials went to the room, Seminole Police Chief Charlie Tiger said. Before rescue workers arrived, Smith's bodyguard performed CPR on her, Tiger said. She was taken to Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, where she was pronounced dead at 2:49 p.m.

Late Thursday, police told CNN the hotel room where Smith was found had been cleared. Police carried bags of evidence out of the building. Smith's attorney, Ron Rale, told reporters Smith had been suffering from flu-like symptoms for the last couple of days. "We are saddened and heartbroken by my sister's death. No matter what our differences have been over the years, Anna was still our blood and she will be missed terribly," Smith's sister, Donna Hogan, said in a statement Thursday. "She was a woman who was determined to get out of her small town in Texas and make a name for herself."

Hogan went on to say that the death of Smith's son last year "left her deeply saddened, a sadness she hid from everyone." Dannielynn Hope "is now without a mother," Hogan wrote. Last September, Smith gave birth to Dannielynn Hope in the Bahamas. Her son, Daniel, was found dead in his mother's hospital room days later.

Source: CNN
Tag: Nicole Smith

People using Yahoo Pipes will be able to mix and mashup data sources from all kinds of places on the Internet into combined feeds they can share with others. The latest service from Yahoo makes mashing up RSS feeds from lots of sources into single powerful feeds much easier thanks to its drag and drop interface. It's a tool that hardcore information junkies will love. I do have a Pipe for this blog.

As a new effort, Yahoo Pipes will appeal to the more technologically comfortable people at first. The ability to combine information in a relatively easy fashion should quickly broaden the appeal of Pipes. Response to the recently launched Pipes from some of the most enthusiastic techie types probably was summed up best by publisher Tim O'Reilly, who lauded Pipes on the O'Reilly Radar blog:

Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.

While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.


Yahoo calls Pipes "a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment." Fans of Unix and Linux who understand just how useful the pipe function can be in those operating systems will understand why Yahoo chose the name.

Even a Yahoo competitor found himself impressed by Pipes. Google's Matt Cutts, a fan of pipes at the command line, also became a fan of Yahoo Pipes despite hitting an issue with the new service:

I took it for a test drive right after Jeremy (Zawodny) posted about it and hit an error message partway through, but I’m sure they’ll get it smoothed over pretty quickly. I was able to save a “module” (which appears to be a little chunk of pipe processing which is connected to an RSS output).

Then you can click publish and you get an obfuscated url back. I tested the obfuscated url and it generates RSS just fine; the test module I made is safely tucked into Google Reader now.

Zawodny had posted about Pipes, and commented on the error Cutts found. As expected it was fixed quickly.

At its core, Pipes allows for mashups of RSS feeds. Those feeds can come from blogs and websites, along with plenty of other resources that allow people to create a feed based on a query, like a search at eBay that returns a list of auctions for Chicago Bears apparel. The real utility for Pipes will come when someone creates a Pipe of such usefulness that others will pick up on it and tweak it for their use. Pipes can be cloned and shared, and we expect those features will bring in more users as really great Pipes are created. We'll be interested in seeing how our readers in the search and e-business communities put Pipes to use.

Tag: Yahoo Pipes

In the world of romance, one single rule applies to men: Make the woman happy. Do something she likes, and you get points and you improve your grade. Do something she dislikes and points are subtracted and you loose your grade. You don't get any points for doing something she expects. Sorry, that's the way the game is played. Here is that amazing guide to the Grading System and unfortunately it applies only for men.

SIMPLE DUTIES

You make the bed (+1)
You make the bed, but forget the decorative pillow (0)
You throw the bedspread over rumpled sheets (-1)
You go out to buy her what she wants (+5) In the rain (+8) But return with Beer (-5)
You check out a suspicious noise at night (0)
You check out a suspicious noise, and it is nothing (0)
You check out a suspicious noise and it is something (+5)
You pummel it with iron rod (+10)
It's her pet (-10)

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENTS

You stay by her side the entire party (0)
You stay by her side for a while, then leave to chat with a college buddy (-2)
Named Rita (-4)
Rita is a dancer (-6)
Rita is single and is really beautiful (-80)

HER BIRTHDAY

You forget her birthday (-50000)
You take her out to dinner (0)
You take her out to dinner and it's not a sports bar (+1)
Okay, it's a sports bar (-2)
And it's all-you-can-eat night (-3)
It's a sports bar, it's all-you-can-eat night, and your face is painted the colours of your favourite team (-10)

A NIGHT OUT

You take her to a movie (+2)
You take her to a movie she likes (+4)
You take her to a movie you hate (+6)
You take her to a movie you like (-2)
It's called 'DeathCop' (-3)
You lied and said it was a foreign film about orphans (-15)

ENJOY THE 'BIG' QUESTION

She asks, "Do I look fat?" (-5) [Yes, you LOSE points no matter WHAT]
You hesitate in responding (-10)
You reply, "Where?" (-35)
Any other response (-20)

COMMUNICATION

When she wants to talk about a problem , you listen, displaying what looks like a concerned expression (0)
You listen, for over 30 minutes (+50)
You listen for more than 30 minutes without looking at the TV (+500)
She realizes this is because you have fallen asleep (-10000)

Now what chance do you have to get a A Grade?

Source: My Brother-In-Law Movva Hemanth's Mail
Tag: Men Women Relationships

The sixth edition of Aero India 2007 took off on a spectacular note Wednesday at the Yelahanka air base in Bangalore, with breathtaking manoeuvres and daredevil aerobatics at the flying display. The supersonic fighter Sukhoi-MKI30, three Advanced Light Helicopters (ALH) of the Sarang aerobatic team and nine sub-sonic trainer aircraft Surya Kirans of the Indian Air Force (IAF) stole the thunder at the hour-long flying display, leaving about 5,000 spectators spellbound.

Other aircraft and helicopters that took part in the flying display were the two prototype Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), Intermediate Jet Trainer (IJT), the five deep-penetration fighter Jaguars, transport planes Tuplov 142N, IL-78 with air-to-air fuelling by two Mirage 2000 jets, AN-32 and the prototype of the 14-seater Sarang aircraft of the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL).

Inaugurated by Defence Minister A.K. Antony in the presence of his two deputies - Inderjit Singh and Pallam Raju, Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumarawamy and a host of top dignitaries, the five-day international defence exposition-cum-seminar received an overwhelming response from global aerospace majors and the aviation industry, including the large Indian industry this time. Held biannually about 20 km away from India's silicon hub, the mega event is being attended by delegations from 15 countries, with air chiefs of 28 nations participating in such large numbers for the first time in an Indian air show.

Welcoming hundreds of delegates, participants, exhibitors and other stakeholders, defence production secretary K.P. Singh told the gathering that the air show had attracted over 500 companies, including 280 global firms from major aerospace countries such as the Britain, Germany, France, Israel, Russia, Sweden and the US. Among the Indian participants are a dozen public sector units, including HAL, BEL, NAL, DRDO, ADA, GTRE and BEML and about 200 firms from the private sector.

"Aero India provides an ideal platform to the Indian aerospace industry to showcase its capabilities to the global audience. It is also an excellent forum to explore business opportunities and facilitate joint ventures and collaborations for mutual benefit," Antony said in his inaugural address.

Source: MSN.co.in
Tags: Aero India Indian Air Force

Inkscape 0.45 is now officially released and available for download. Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats. Inkscape's main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

This release brings the exciting new features developed by the Google Summer of Code 2006 participants, as well as tons of other improvements across the board. Most notably is the new Gaussian Blur feature, which allow softly and naturally blurring Inkscape objects like path, shapes, groups, text, and images. Gaussian blur enables a wide range of photorealistic effects: arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows, glows, etc. Also, blurred objects can be used as masks for other objects to achieve the "feathered mask" effect. For more information, see the Inkscape 0.45 Release Notes.

Source: Inkscape.org
Tag: Inkscape

Paris is bracing for a transport revolution later this year with the arrival of more than 20,000 self-service bicycles thanks to a deal between city hall and one of the world's leading suppliers of urban advertising. A contract signed Monday with JCDecaux gives the French firm access to more than 1,600 hoardings and other publicity sites, but also requires it to provide a mass system of cheap cycles-for-hire.

By the end of the year JCDecaux has undertaken to set up 1,451 stations, where customers can use swipe-cards to rent some 20,600 cycles for journeys around the capital. The bikes can be deposited at any station, and then picked up by new users.

A similar system has been run by JCDecaux since 2005 in the southeastern city of Lyon, where city authorities have hailed it as a major success in the campaign to reduce motor transport. France's second largest city Lyon adopted the system in May 2005. It has been a huge success, with people combining cycles and other modes of transport to reach work or leisure destinations.

Source: StreerBlog.org jcdecaux.co.uk
Tags: Cycle Transport Paris

The Intel® Web 2.0 Technology Development Kit (TDK) allows developers to learn about the platform's configuration, e.g. display, storage, processor, and the platform's context, e.g. bandwidth, connectivity, power and location, etc. within a browser using JavaScript.

Create Web 2.0 application with the platform and the environment in mind. Leverage information about the platform's configuration and context to provide more expressive interactions and better user experience for your Web 2.0 applications, especially on mobile platforms where intermittent connectivity and limited power are common issues.

Imagine if your Web 2.0 application could be aware of the platform it is running on and its environment. It could, for example, leverage multi-core power to provide more immersive user interfaces, postpone certain tasks during low power situations, avoid network traffic over low bandwidth/high latency connections, etc.

The Intel® Web 2.0 TDK contains documentation and full source code (C++ and JavaScript) for IE 6/7 and Firefox. The code can be incorporated directly in your extensions or JavaScript libraries, and be redistributed royalty free.

Intel provides support through the online mobile software forums staffed by Intel software engineers to provide information on using the TDK for within Web 2.0 applications.

Tags: Intel Web 2.0

Random fire tornadoes, walls melting in brilliant colors, people desperately drinking black rain drops, a boy who crawled home to his mother because the soles of his feet were the only part burnt, the rapid appearance of maggots in wounds – it sounds like some twisted acid trip; much more chaotic then it appears from a distance.

These "Voice of Hibakusha" eyewitness accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima are from the program HIROSHIMA WITNESS produced by the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK, the public broadcasting company of Japan. The individual accounts were input and translated into english by college students.

Every company faces the problem of people leaving the company for better pay or profile. Early this year, Arun, a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its India operations developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer. He had heard a lot about the CEO. The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office, and the very best technology, even a canteen that served superb food.

Twice Arun was sent abroad for t raining. "My learning curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined. Last week, less than eight months after he joined, Arun walked out of the job.

Why did this talented employee leave?

Arun quit for the same reason that drives many good people away. The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The st udy surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called "First Break All The Rules". It came up with this surprising finding: If you're losing good people, look to their immediate boss. Immediate boss is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he's the reason why people leave. When people leave they take knowledge, experience and contacts with them, straight to the competition. "People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. Read How to Handle a Tyrant Boss.
Mostly manager drives people away?

HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave,but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he looks for another job.

When people cannot retort openly in an ger, they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information. Dev says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him into trouble. You don 't have your heart and soul in the job." Different managers can stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious,too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over a trivial issue. "Jack Welch of GE once said. A company's value lies "between the ears of its employees"

Tags: Human Resources

Choosing the right CPU for your needs isn't always an easy task. If we all had bottomless wallets, it would be easy just to pick the ultra-high end CPUs and be done with it. But most of us have to budget our purchases, and it's always a delicate dance to figure out what's the best fit for what you do. Also, the CPU isn't the only piece of the puzzle. Rather, it's a shifting matrix of choices we make. If I'm a gamer, do I step down one notch in CPU power and pick up a slightly faster graphics card? If I'm a video editor, will running a faster CPU make up for somewhat smaller storage? If I'm an average PC user, would more memory be more useful than a faster CPU?

This balancing act is difficult to perform in the absence of data. Today, we're taking a look at the CPU side of the equation. We vary the processor, but keep everything else in the system as constant as possible. The key difference is core logic and processor, which are inseparable.

We took a look at the performance of the high-end processors in our initial review of Intel's Core 2 Duo back in July. Later, Jason Cross went in-depth on the gaming side, pitting the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ against Intel's Core 2 Duo E6600 in our Real Gaming Challenge. Now we dive back into our comprehensive benchmark suite, running a wide array of performance tests across the entire range of Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 X2 AM2 processors. AMD has the price edge, but is that enough to overcome Intel's performance lead? How well do the various CPUs scale across the product line? We try to address those questions.

Continue Reading Here...

Tags: Intel AMD Processors

ajaxSketch is a web-based drawing tool that provides a familiar environment for diagramming, creating flow charts, free hand drawing and more. You can perform functions such as resize, rotate, change background or pen colors, and alter opacity...all from a Firefox browser! Once finished with your images, you can easily save your work right to your hard drive. This keeps you organized and works in the same way that you're already accustomed to.

ajaxSketch has been designed to look just like Illustrator or Inkscape, and uses the SVG format natively. This makes it easy for anyone familiar with the drawing tools to start using ajaxSketch without needing to learn a new program. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is an illustration format that's both powerful and open — complex gradients, compound shapes, and dynamic content are all managed easily in ajaxSketch. Since SVG is an open standard, any files made with ajaxSketch can be brought directly into Microsoft Visio, Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Macromedia Freehand, and other illustration programs.

Anytime you need to open, create, edit, or print an SVG document, simply point your Firefox browser to www.ajaxsketch.com and in seconds a full-featured program will be available ready for you to use. Because the application itself lives on the web, we handle the updates automatically, this means you don't have to deal with costly upgrades or getting stuck with old versions.

Tags: ajax Web2.0

This is the Welcome Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting to the Class of 2006 on July 2, 2004 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India on defining success.

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government - he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it".

That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.
Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper.

Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.
Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes.

That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.
He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the mimetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.

Tags: Subroto Bagchi Mind Tree Consulting

Authorities have arrested two men in connection with electronic light boards depicting a middle-finger-waving moon man (popularly called Boston Mooninites) that triggered repeated bomb scares around Boston on Wednesday and prompted the closure of bridges and a stretch of the Charles River. Meanwhile, police and prosecutors vented their anger at Turner Broadcasting System Inc., the parent company of CNN, which said the battery-operated light boards were aimed at promoting the late-night Adult Swim cartoon "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." Boston officials condemned Turner for not taking proper steps to end the bomb scares earlier and for not issuing an adequate apology to the city.

Turner Broadcasting said in written statements the devices had been placed around Boston and nine other cities in recent weeks as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to promote the show.
"We apologize to the citizens of Boston that part of a marketing campaign was mistaken for a public danger," Phil Kent, CEO and chairman of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., said in one of two statements issued by the company. "As soon as we realized that an element of the campaign was being mistaken for something potentially dangerous, appropriate law enforcement officials were notified and through federal law enforcement channels, we identified the specific locations of the advertisements in all 10 cities in which they are posted. We also directed the third-party marketing firm who posted the advertisements to take them down immediately."

Peter Berdovsky, 27, a freelance video artist from Arlington, Massachusetts, and Sean Stevens, 28, were facing charges of placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic, as well as one count of disorderly conduct, said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. The hoax charge is a felony, she said. Both men were arrested Wednesday evening. According to his Web site, Berdovsky is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and a founding member of a video artists group called Glitch who goes by the nickname "Zebbler" and sings in a band called "Superfiction."

Authorities believe Berdovsky was "in the employ of other individuals" as part of the marketing campaign, Coakley said. "How exactly this was executed, we are still investigating." Berdovsky is scheduled for arraignment at 9 a.m. Thursday in Charlestown District Court.

Adult Swim shares channel space with Cartoon Network, another Turner enterprise, but the adult-themed network is a separate entity. Wednesday evening, Cartoon Network was running a statement during commercial breaks, expressing deep regret for "the hardships experienced as a result of this incident." The devices displayed a "Mooninite" -- an outer-space delinquent who makes frequent appearances on the cartoon -- greeting passersby with an upraised middle finger. But the discovery of nine of the light boards around Boston and its suburbs sent bomb squads scrambling throughout the day, snarling traffic and mass transit in one of the largest U.S. cities.

"It had a very sinister appearance," Coakley told reporters. "It had a battery behind it, and wires." The statement from Kent said Turner Broadcasting deeply regrets "the hardships experienced as a result of this incident."

Source: CNN
Tags: Boston Mooninites