The story of Hosur Road.

When i was in Bangalore, i used to stay in a place called BTM Layout. Its a pretty popular residential place for IT guys as it is near to Electronic City. You can actually count non-IT guys in that place. From BTM layout to Electronic city we had to go through a junction called Silk Board which was a couple of kilometers from my home. From that junction there is a 8 to 9 km straight road (four lanes) to Electronic City.

When i joined Wipro in 2004, we used to use this road to go to the office. It used to take 15-20 mins everyday. The road was good and had way more capacity than the the existing traffic. I remember one of my colleague telling me that why do we need such a big road when there is no traffic. But within 6 months everything changed. There was more traffic than the road could handle thanks to the amazing growth in IT in Bangalore. Now the travel time changed from 20 mins to one hour and even more in the evening time. And looking at the amount of new campuses being developed in Electronic city area, it was hard to imagine what it was going to be in next five years. People preferred working in Whitefield or other business locations and a lot of people quit their jobs as it was one big ordeal to reach office daily.

I changed my job and my new office was at MG road. It was not a big relief in terms of the traffic for me as Bangalore traffic was getting bad to worse and the work on infrastructure was hardly making progress thanks to Dharam singhs and Kumaraswamys. In few months i saw an announcement that they were building a flyover from silkboard to E-city to ease the traffic and it was supposed to open in start of 2008 or something. It was a great news but the work never started on time. When it started it added to the commuters woes. Offices changed their transport timing to control the traffic. The work on flyover was going on at snails pace.

In Jan 2010, i heard that the flyover is finally open. I hope it is good enough for the existing traffic. Still wonder why our city planners cannot think ahead of time. Even if they plan it takes ages to execute the projects. Dont know how many years will be needed to complete Metro rail construction.

Publicity or TRP

Once upon a time there was a bollywood star named SRK. He was on USA tour. On his way to Chicago he had to undergo secondary check at the Airport security cos he was a Muslim. He was angry and humiliated as he thought he was a big star and how can they do the check. Media comes to know about it. Media flashes breaking news saying SRK detained in Newark Airport. All jobless people start following the news and start blogging. Media asks everybody on the street what they feel about it. Ambika Soni is pissed off says tit for tat. Salman says whats the big deal. Harbajan says it happens all the time. Kabhi khan says his moves says it all. SRK watches this and sees this as a super opportunity to publicize his film My name is Khan. Media channels contact him ask questions. He gives a nice sentimental reply. Media makes it a headline. Media will setup debates on whats happenning. It will ask if SRK is doing that for publicity. They will discuss about state of Muslims after 9/11. They will say it happens in India. They will pick up incidents that happened before like Dr Abdul Kalam incident. Seeing all the things hyped up. Chidambaram makes a statement saying US overdid investigation. US sources say it was regular procedure and officials were professional. SRK reacts to that. Govt says it will take up the matter with US. Bollywood celebrities will express their views on twitter. Media reacts to the bollywood response. Fans express their feelings through blogs and start blasting everyone who is saying a word against SRK. Aamir khan fans would write in every possible way saying SRK has done this for publicity. People read these blogs and google makes money using adsense. In the heat of the events movie channels will air SRK movies on TV which will attact a lot of ads on TV. If the parliament sessions were taking place, some mp who usually sleeps when budget is announced will all of a sudden stand and talk tough asking govt for some action. Media will say mps dont have any other topic to discuss and blasts mps. Bloggers start talking about it again. Sagarika would write a blog blasting SRK . After few days people will forget what happened. Minister who said they will take the matter with US will take up another issue. Next day couple of guys die due to swine flue. Media changes it attention towards that. After a week people wont remember anything. In the process Media will have attained high TRP rating and made loads of money through ads. Google would have made a lot of money through adsense. SRK would be smiling and thanking the American security for giving him free publicity for his next film which will make him a lot richer. People watching the news would have wasted a lot of their useful time.

Moral of the story is : I wasted a lot of my time writing this blog.

Bihar girl molested

Today i was watching news on cnnibn. They were showing some woman being molested in front of a huge crowd in Bihar (link). The channel was saying that the law and order situation in Bihar is out of control. As usual the opposition who are actually not bothered had same thing to say, the CM should resign. I saw that there were around 4 guys who were molesting a girl in front of a huge crowd and the crowd is watching the tamasha. To me most shocking was to see Media covering it as a new item instead of helping the girl out. I was also surprised to see all the people watching and doing nothing to stop them. If something of that sort happened in hyderabad people would have belted all those guys. (People wait for this kind of incident).

Baarish!!

For last couple of weeks i feel i am in Bangalore. Pleasant weather, soothing breeze...these are not typical characteristics of Hyderabad. Well people are actually not happy like me seeing this weather. They say this time of the year it should have been raining daily as its monsoon season. I knew rains are important for us but now i realized how much its important for India. Almost everybody here depends on rains. People in my village are getting restless as by this time they would have been sowing, but cos of scanty rains the dams are not full and hence the govt is delaying releasing water for irrigation. No rains means less agricultural land under cultivation. Hence lesser production which will lead to higher cost which will in turn affect their lives. If you are a businessmen in village then your business is affected as most of it is related to agriculture like pesticides, fertilizers etc. No rains means lesser electricity production and the power cuts are maximum in the rural areas. Some villages see 50% cut in power supply. And we cannot take a couple of hours of power cut in cities.

Even if it rains in the village they are not exactly concerned about them as all they want is it should rain in the areas which will feed the dams. Well not everybody is worried about scanty rains. Almost every year we hear the same story about Mumbai flooding.

It has been a huge problem for people in Mumbai. Everybody blames BMC for not building good drainage systems etc. Not sure how much BMC is doing to fix it. I am sure govt might be allocating a lot of money to get this problem solved. But the extreme level of corruption at muncipalities is well known fact. So i wouldnt trust them to get this issue to be fixed in near future. If the same amount of rain falls in any city in India as in Mumbai , i am sure that city would be in similar situation. Lets just hope it rains in other parts of the country.

Take a bow ROGER

I still don't know why i am not a fan of Roger Federer. By far he is the best player of tennis i have ever seen. When i watch him play in any tournament, i feel that he is playing with some kids in the court. Winning 15 grand slams and over-taking Sampras in 6 years and that too when Sampras took 12 years to achieve his 14 wins says it all. I always wanted someone to beat him. Only recently Nadal was able to beat him and take the number one spot. I am a big Nadal fan, and even though Nadal has beaten Federer 13 out of 20 times, i know that Federer is far far better player than him.

Want to see people in Stone age? Meet them in state run organizations

There is nothing new that i am going to write in this post. All the people who have interacted with government employees ( Some are good though) would have had similar experience.

Couple of days back i had been to State bank of Hyderabad. I had opened and account there 3 months back and had not received ATM card till now. When i asked one of the employee he took the pass book, did some thing on computer and then said the concerned person is on leave and asked me to come next day. I was not happy but i agrees and went home. Today i go there and saw that the concerned person is available and he said that they have sent it and it seems some one has already accepted the delivery. I said its not my problem its your responsibility to make sure it reaches me. Then he thought for some time and told me OK go and ask the lady who sits there and pointed out a desk. I went there and saw that nobody was there. Apparently she had gone for lunch. I waited for half and hour and then the lady came. When i told her about my problem, she said go and meet a person and pointed out to somebody else. And that person had just gone to lunch. I got furious. I shouted at top of my voice. Suddenly she said she will look into it. Then for an hour they made me sit and i really didnt know what they were doing. Ultimately they said the same thing that they said initially. I didnt know what to do. They were so unprofessional and were behaving rudely. I took my passbook and rushed to the Chief manager and started shouting at him. He seemed to be nice person, talked to me properly and solved my problem. He said that this is a remote branch and only useless people come here to work. He explained that 90% of the work is done by 20% of the people here.

May be these employees are not motivated enough to work efficiently. Or they are not at all bothered as nobody is going to remove them from the job. And these banks doesn't care about the customers at all. Given a choice i would never go to these banks.

Serial Killers

I tried, i really tried watching all these soap operas coming on television. I thought may be after watching them for 2-3 weeks i might find them interesting. But I cannot take it anymore. I realized that these serials are so pathetic that it actually makes me angry seeing all those stupid scenes. 90% of the time some one is crying. The remaining 10% even if people are laughing, its unbearable.

These days they seem to go back to old themes. Looks like they are totally out of ideas . One of the seriels have child marriage as their theme. Oh come on. I hear its one of the most popular serials these days. Some find it cute. I am sorry but i cannot digest that shit. First there is child marriage and then there is girl child issue. Even though the topic might be relevent but they make is unnecessarily complicated and dramatic that i feel like taking my eye balls off.

Most of the serials have one lady in the house who will be trying to create cracks in a happy family. And there will be another lady(heroine) whowill either be very weak or very smart. If she was weak in the initial episode, you can be sure that she will turn of super smart in the later episodes. People watching the serial would be waiting when her pathetic state changes. One more embarassing thing is that the guys are shown to be dumb asses.

Different themes have come up ( mostly pathetic). Some rajasthani culture ones, some jaadu mantar ones, one of them copies movie masoom etc etc. Worst part is most of them are sick to watch. Every serial has a huge family living is some huge bunglow. (thoda tho realistic banao yaar). And the pace of the scenes are like ooh my god... can you show whats going to happen. i cant see all that dragging of scenes with those irritating focuses on those pathetic characters.

Watching other language serials are no better. South indian ones are the worst. The women cry so much that i wonder if their life is pathetic or mine who is trying to watch them. I am wondering how any person can like those serials. But the reality is people love them. They watch them like anything. Looking at how much they are into the scene makes me even sick.

You might be wondering why do i even watch them when i dont like them. I dont have a choice these serials come at the time of lunch or dinner. Watching aajtak news would be less painful than these serials. Even mythological ones are similar to regular ones. Luckily i have broadband connection.