A new life

I want my blog to be active again, yes I know I have to start blogging for that. May be it is time to start everything afresh, time to get back to life. Wana rewind and playback what happened in past few weeks

1. Place : Moved to San Francisco, so will be living in Northern California for a while and will move back before it makes me soft. (P.S : Wear Sunscreen)
2. People : Got two new friends in the recent past,  we never know where do friends come from. Re-connecting with people(chooooosy) thru FB
3. Lessons learnt: Life is a circle
4. Movies : A lot of them, nothing really impressed except Avtar
5. Books : Again a lot and everything was impressive – Toyota way, Logicomix etc
6. Travel : Went round the world once . . LOL
7. Blogging : Totally inactive, almost extinct, thou so many uncooked drafts.
8. Technology : next point please
9. Poems : Wrote one after a long time, but too delicate to post
10. Sleep : Got very lucky with it

Just an icebreaker, will be off the Web for a week(not to mails) as I am going to be without internet for a week starting this Monday. Let see how easy it is.

For every lie

Lie is becoming an integral part of our life, my friend use to say that, in their religion there is a belief that for every lie you tell a mark will be made on your left arm and for every truth the same is done on your right, if that is true, then can we count the marks on our left arm? During olden days, people use to fear God/Parents, but that is not the case now, we fear neither.

Psychologists say that people lie for pleasure, if we contemplate, it will sound true, some believe that people get immense pleasure when their lie is believed undoubtedly. Most of us lie without even realizing that we are actually lying, one such is exaggeration.

Exaggeration is one form of lie,

• We exaggerate day to day events,  just to make it sound more interesting and spicy
• While teasing people  we exaggerate a lot.
• Sarcasm often comes bundled with exaggeration. Buy one get one.

Lie is one of the bad outcome of human evolution, it takes us away from nature. Nature never lies, but we do.  Lie can  be categorized into many types and for every type we have our own justification.  We never realize how much we are bonded to lies, in fact we have tuned our ears to lies than to truth. We cannot stop it all of a sudden, but we should keep a count and a simple way would be,

For every lie you utter, drop one rupee in a box and at the end of the month open it in front of your friends and then donate it to a charity.

Drizzle after a drought

Two months since I blogged and its one of the longest period of hibernation.  I thought, it would be nice if it drizzles a bit after a long drought.

Life hasnt changed much in the past two months, but yeah, it did in the past one week, I never knew that I would blogging from SFO some 10 days back.  New country, New place, New people, hope that feeds me with lot of items to fill here.

‘United States of America’ – people here are very sweet, kind and gentle, but nothing is like being at home.  It feels like watching a movie, everything around is very new.  And yes, I am no exception to feel the cultural shock, just getting myself tuned.

San Francisco(SFO) is a very busy city, people are always running and it is a great experience to be here and one thing is that there are many Indians around esp in the bay area.  So lets see howz life at SFO and I believe it makes my blogging more active.

The reason behind India’s T20 loss

Thousands of articles and news coverages are on after India’s loss against England in a crucial Super 8 match, which knocked India out of the T20 world cup. People/Media are coming up with FMEAs for the loss, No use crying over spilt oil. Lets have a commercial break.

Sources say that they would have featured this add in the English’s  Strategy building meeting to KP and PC . Guess what, KP ordered a big box of Maha Choco from India and that is it.

Maha choco ki Diwaane nahi, MAHA DIWAANE hote hein,kyunki ye sirf chocolatee nahi, maha chocolatee hein.

P.S : Purely fictional!. Not intended to hurt anyone. Appologies, if it. Being a die hard fan, I was totally against doing this, but some one gave me Maha choco and I did this. ‘you will do anything to get the candy with the irresistible taste‘.

Colorism: Are we Color Blind?

Color Blindness:

Color - Plus?

John Dalton, if alive can be proven wrong for his theory of Color blindness. I would say “Hey, John! you are wrong, people are still looking at colors”. For those who understood, yes I am talking about the skin color discrimination, people are yet to over come that and people are no longer color blind, they do see colors and they live with it. Dark skinned people are still considered to be treated second. Well this is not the case with everyone, but the theory of First impression is the best impression holds very true for Dark skinned people, they are not considered THE BEST unless people recognize the talent in them. Before getting further into the post, I would like to pre-state and make clear that “THIS IS NOT A GENERALIZATION, BUT THIS IS COMMONLY FOUND EVERYWHERE.”

One brilliant move:
I aint a great fan of Aishwarya Rai, but I got impressed when I read that Ash denied a fairness cream ad, stating that it would keep the discrimination fed. That was a very sensible statement and hats off.

The Affected:
Girls are the major victims of this color discrimination, be it be in movies, career or marriage, they are the first affected. Take any fairness cream ad, they definitely revolve around one of these concepts. Any ad will fit into this frame.

A fair girl(with dark look make up) would have missed a chance fetching a career or would have lost a marriage proposal or would have been teased for her color, returns home disappointed and the goody goody friends/parents will suggest a fairness cream and after that all the lost chances will fall under feet.

It reinforces a false belief in people, right from 3 yr old to 80 yr old, no one can claim that they are 100% free from this false belief, somewhere a small fraction of this still exists in each and everyone of our minds.
And I still feel that we are not so far from the day Gandhiji was thrown out of the train compartment.

Where is the Root?
There is no point in analyzing the source or where  it came from, there are so many factors that contribute to skin color racism – skin color stereotypes and prejudice. And all fingers point to THE SOCIETY which is no one else but US, we cant keep blaming our fore-fathers for setting up this trend, I agree they did it, they did it without knowing that it was a sin and we are doing it even after knowing it. So who is better? It is being popularized by many social outlets from the media to magazines.

How it branches?
White Skinned people are always given a first preference, this starts right from the school. Only a fair girl is preferred, be it giving a bouquet to the chief guest or receiving them from the dais.  Beauty when it comes to Girls and Brain when it comes to boys, only fair boys are considered to brilliant (‘padipps’) on first sight.

From root to branches

I would like to include something which I read in ABCnews

Colorism is especially prevalent in music videos. Kids we talked to on the street noticed that. And said they liked it.
“They all light skinned and they all look good,” one boy said.

“There’s a lot of dark-skinned girls that are pretty, with long hair, bad, but they’re not in the videos though, it’s just the light-skinned ones that’s in the videos,” another added.

“The darker the woman takes on what I refer to as a “Ho” complex. She is the prostitute,” said Karen a University of Maryland student. “The lighter a woman is, well, she’s the goddess. She’s the untouchable. She is the woman that all the men in the video aspire to have,” she said.

Very true isn’t? Take our cinema heroines for that matter, how many are dark skinned? leave heroines, even the dark skinned hero who claim that their color is their plus, are not ready to appear before cameras without color touch-ups. (Rajnikanth, Vijaykanth looks as lighter as their heroines in duets).

The myth then travels to college and then to workplace. Let me not get into the controversy, Survey results will stand for my point. I don’t want to discuss that here. Then comes marriage, most of the ads posted contains this word “Fair Looking or light skinned”. It holds good for both guys and girls, for girls it is a mandatory requirement, for guys at least if they are well settled, color takes the back seat. And it goes on, one simple example which we can see in day-to-day life, which even I faced being a dark-skinned vegetarian

Discrimination 2.0

Discrimination 2.0:
Of course now-a-days people don’t resist dark skinned people sitting next to them in bus, but discrimination is little aesthetic in this internet era, thou black is not discriminated, White is still kept above. Thou they don’t discriminate black obviously, they appreciate White. Even in a matured/educated crowd, it has just come down to teasing level, but no one can claim that it is completely eradicated. We cannot blame because we are soaked in it and it will take a very long time to get away, unless we take conscious effort it is not gonna die.

Obama’s Victory and American History:
Obama has won the election, that is just a news. A black has re-created history in America, it is a sensational news and who is creating this? MEDIA.  What made them emphasize more on Obama’s color than his caliber? Isn’t time to shed those old theories and start working on new things? Should we still pursue the black dream?

Color Vs Caliber:
Color vs Caliber debate is still one and to my knowledge I feel that color is taking the driver seat and if at all caliber does, even that is proclaimed as a milestone. Obama’s victory as an eligible candidate is not as much celebrated as Obama’s victory as a black eligible candidate.

Lighter skin “began to be associated with privilege and it became associated with beauty,” said Marita Golden, author of “Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey Through the  Color Complex”

This section would be incomplete if I don’t mention Micael Jackson, one question remains unanswered, if MJ wasn’t under knife, will he be MJ now? Be it a super-developed country like America or developing country like India or under-developed country like Nigeria one thing is common – it is the Colorism. No matter how much people grow, the venom of discrimination still runs in their blood and it keeps affecting others.

Color-plus?

Is being light colored a real plus? The society thinks so, we are still living with the white Supremacy. It is still imperative, it is not even high time, it is already late, if we don’t realize now then it is never gonna happen.

No one knows, the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice!  Sue the White Supremacy.

Vennila Kabadi kulu

“Venilla Kabadi kulu” – I saw this movie over a period of two days, first half on Friday and second half on Saturday and now when I recollect, it looks as if i watched two different movies with same cast. Till interval the movie revolves around hero-heroine-kabadi and after that it revolves around hero-friends-kabadi. These days tamil movies have started following the trend of blunt/makeover  endings, AFAIK it started from Chennai – 600028, then Auto(Oram po) etc, the movie will be on its pace and suddenly a turn around will happen and that ends the show, audience are notified the end of show with a thank note or with the director signature. Initially it was quite different, but now it has become very usual phenomenon. You might have noticed one of the following things in climax

1. Hero will die – the director would have ended hero’s life just for the sake of publicity
2. Everyone will die in the movie – all lead characters and that too for no logical reason
3. The movie will end without any conclusion – they claim that it is left to interpretations
4. The movie will end abruptly before even going to a pre-final state.

We can keep growing this list, well venilla kabadi kulu definitely falls under one of these.

One thing which I loved about this movie is the romance, it was portrayed beautifully and we can feel the real village culture, how a girl approaches a guy and how a guy approaches a girl, no over-exaggeration as in movies which portrays city love and its 100% real – Seetha baat, no Bhakwas. Take for example Minnale, the so called all time favourite romance movie, which is a total non-sense.

Vennila kabadi kulu – Be it the first meet of hero and heroine or their last meet, its very plain, neat, elegant and simply amazing which makes it everygreen and as they say truth doesnt need any makeover.

Facebook Garage Chennai Chapter is on

Just realized that I cant Live tweet Facebook Garage Event coz my twitter account is not public timelined. So I will be blogging it live.
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Met Thomas Jestin, interesting guy – Pro facebook developer.
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Thomas Jestin(French Entrepreneur) is gona present his Facebook App which won the best app award in an event @ France
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Intro session is on – I just completed mine people are on the go – Its always nice to know about people around you.  People are having brilliant ideas for Facebook apps,  lets wait for them to come up with their ideas.Intro round is done. Waiting for the first session to begin.
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Quick Poll by Kiruba: How many of you think Poke me, poll me, movie contest kind of apps as Spam?
Guess What: Everyone was in for it. Gosh!
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“Enterprises are looking on leveraging Social Media’s power”  – Everyone’s quote
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Thomas Jestin – Live:
Developed his Social Business app for a French Company, Social business goes like this Invest – Profit – Invest. An app to make people invest on a Social Business(Grameen Danone)
They planned to use Facebook as Viral Marketting host and they created a presentation followed by a questionable and at the end they had a competition for Users about Captilaism and the winner was made to visit Md. Younis . And that how it works – They got 50,000 Users and Thomas feels its just aimed to target  small audience. He says Orkut will overcome in Facebook in India soon.
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Kiruba raised a question about Monetizing Apps on Facebook, thats a thing which i was wondering for a long term(ofcourse outside Ads).
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Will advertisements yield enuf? wont users get clever in future and ignore them just as email spams, may be a ad-filter like the current spam one in my inbox.  Start a facebook app instead o f Website, its already rich in user base – Thomas
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Facebook is for Intellects and Orkut is for the Mass – In India
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Twitter will over take Facebook, even i feel the same – but kiruba denies, lets see. Facebook has a very big flaw which will affect Viral Marketing – “I can connect only to my friends” , its not the case with Twitter.
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How does Facebook privacy policy affects bringing in certain Apps? Say for example Life science projects – Mukund talks
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Myspace was started for Musicians whereas FB was started for College group. Varun is giving a quick talk on Facebook + Mobile trend
Facebook has released API for iphone based development yesterday and it is expected to hit other phone’s market share badly.
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Phillip from Swis, he is with UN as an intern – He is live now.
He has developed an app which calls Students for a Nuclear weapon free world.  The app revolves around a competition which involves student participation and this app levarages FB’s momentum.

Mani and Vasanth just completed their DEMO on Facebook connect and i bet its really great to see FB in your site/app. Grab the power now FacebookConnect.
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Mukund is  Live: on Photon’s Facebook Applications
About Trackle.com FB app , Facebook has a new event(Web) model similar to Desktop based/Web based app. Ram adding his two cents on Facebook API call interval(3 sec).
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“Throwing sheep into the boardroom” – book find of the day.
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The chennai chapter closes. Had a very great one!