Hindu temples should be for all Hindus

No Hindu temple should be out of bounds for any Hindu man or woman irrespective of his or her caste. Yesterday dalits entered Jagannath temple in Orissa. This is good news. The fact that they faced no resistence is also heartening. The Jagannath temple of Puri is an important temple in our country and every Hindu should be allowed to pray at the temple.

I am reminded of the "Patit-Pawan Mandir" in Ratnagiri. Built by Veer Savarkar, it was the first Hindu temple for harijans. Savarkar appointed a harijan as its priest, who probably was first harijan priest in the country.

Recently there has been a controversy over allowing women into Sabarimala temple in Kerala. I perfectly agree with the RSS's view that women should allowed to enter the temple. Hindu temples should be for all Hindus.

Reporting corruption made easier

Anti-Corruption Bureau’s mobile van will be stationed in neighbourhood to register complaints. Read.

Trip to Scotland

13th November was first wedding anniversary for Poornima & I, and there was no better place for us to be than Scotland! The beauty of Scotland was so overwhelming that I consider it as one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. I do not remember any previous trip in last few years to any part of the world (and I have travelled a lot in last few years!) when I was so swept away by the natural beauty of a place. Not even in Mauritius. Scotland was absolutely amazing!! It was inconceivably beautiful.

We left for Scotland knowing that it's a good place to visit. But little did we know that it was going to blow our minds off! The first hint of what really lay ahead for us came during the train journey to Edinburgh. Just as the train crossed Berwick-upon-Tweed, the last town in England on the route, the railway track ran parallel to the sea, less than 100 meters from the shore. Every other moment we could see beautiful blue sea in front of us with flocks of seagulls hovering over it. The wonderful views of sea would only be interrupted by equally thrilling vistas of green trees that were changing colour in anticipation of the advancing winter. Since then it was a journey to the heaven for the next three days.

In Marathi there's a phrase, "DoLyAnche pAraNe fiTaNe". That's what you experience in Scotland ... wherever you go.

Pathetic Governance

The current central government has absolutely nothing to boast off. It's long list of transgressions run from Oil for Food scam to attempting Mandal II, from toppling state governments illegaly to neglecting work on the Golden Quadrilateral. However it is not often that the Congress' stooges in our media like to admit this. There are a few exceptions like Tavleen Singh, who writes audiciously. Here's an recent article by her in Indian Express (of course, it can't be from The Tabloid of India).

Second Trip to London

On Saturday, we went for our second trip to London. We walked across the London Tower Bridge and then spent hours at London Tower. We saw the Kohinoor diamond. I was more interested in Shivaji Maharaj's Bhavani Talvaar (sword), but it has been shifted to another place and is no longer available for display. In the evening we sat along the banks of Thames and ate puri bhaaji which we had packed for the trip. We went to Nilesh Gujare's place for dinner and ate paav bhaaji for the first time after coming to UK. On the whole it was a great trip to a great city, London.

More on password change

But alas! I can no longer escape from the grave danger. I have to change the password. I muster up courage and read the email carefully:

---------------------
From: System Administrator
Sent: Fri 20/10/2006 06:04
To: Jayprakash Keshav Acharya
Subject: Password expiry notification ... Open this mail for details !!!

Dear Jayprakash Keshav Acharya,

Your E-mail ID password is going to expire in next 7 days on 10/27/2006 9:04:27 AM at Indian Standard Time. Change your password NOW!!! It is recommended that you do not wait till the last day of password expiry!!!
Refer FAQ on Password Policy for the procedure to change the password and the precautions to be taken while changing password to avoid account lockouts. Extranet users can refer to FAQ by accessing Main Page -> Mail -> FAQ on Password Policy.

Please note that your password must be a combination of uppercase, lowercase, numeral and non-alphanumeric (special) characters. For example, it may be like "$M1cH37Bo".

Upon changing your password, you need to WAIT at least for 15 minutes, before you can use the NEW password. We recommend you to change the password while you are connected to LAN and just before you logout for the day.

Contact your local CCD for any further help.

Thanks for your co-operation,

System Administrator
Computers & Communication Division

Note: This is an automatically generated message. DO NOT "Reply" back to this ID. Please contact your local CCD for any assistance.
---------------------

Some of sentences in the mail, such as "Change your password NOW!!!" are in bold red, just to make it more frieghtening!! I take a deep breath and click on "FAQ on Password Policy". I am going to do this. I am going to understand this and do it correctly. So I click on FAQ on Password Policy. It opens up. And it is six pages long!! I need to study a six page document just to change my password!!! That's ridiculous. How can anybody be expected to read a six page document to change his password?! Why can't simple things be kept simple? Why are things made so complex? That's the reason I hate it.

I suffer from technophobia

Everytime I have to do something new with technology, I am in fear. Most often it is routine task like changing a password. For last several days, I have been getting mail suggesting that my password is about to expire and I should change it. I am panic striken! Everything is working fine on my computer and so I don't want to change my password.

I am afraid that if I change my password, some software will fail. If I change my password, I may not be able to login to corporate network when I get internet connection at home. Or because I am changing my password from my office computer, my laptop at home won't be able to connect to my corporate network. Or I will not be able to login to network because I am changing my email password and since we have common password for email and network login, I will not know whether I should use the old or the new password for logging into the network. If the network password is changed automatically on changing the email password, then the network password cached on my laptop at home will be different from my most recent network password. So I may face problems when I try to connect to corporate network from home. Or the worst of all, I may not be able to login to my laptop at all! :-O I hate password expiry policies!!

I remember my dialogue with Ramna few years back. The company had shifted to newer version of VPN software and had asked all users to upgrade to the latest version. Ramna asked me whether I had upgraded. I said that I didn't upgrade because the older version is working fine for me. He said, "Let me do it for you", and despite my protests he began uninstalling the older version from my laptop. I sat there in mortal fear!! "I NEVER uninstall a software that is working fine", I said. The new version worked fine. But my fear with technical tasks like software installations and password changes remains.

On my desk, I have a phone with 41 buttons!! I don't know why we need more than ten or twelve buttons. Three times in last two days my phone dialed a number that I did not ask it to dial. Today I was toying with some of the buttons when suddenly the speaker phone got switched on and someone screamed "hello!". I hastily scrambled and pressed a few more buttons at random, and thankfully that shut it off! Oh God! What a narrow escape!! I hate this hi-tech phone. :-(

Sometimes some of my friends ask me why I am still using the cell phone that old and outdated. They show me their hi-tech phones that can do magic. Well, they will not understand. All I need is a phone that has ten digits and a button to dial numbers and receive calls. That's almost all that I do with my cell phone. May be once in a while I send and receive an sms or save a number
in my address book. But anything beyond that is rocket science.

Weather not so nice anymore

Carrying on from where I left last time - We have moved to a rented house and it's quite pleasant at home. However the weather is no longer so pleasant. It's getting cold and it has been raining since yesterday, and we haven't seen the sun.

Destination Ipswich

70 miles NE of London - that's where Ipswich is situated. And me and Poornima are here. We reached here a week back. Still haven't settled in. We are put up in a sub-standard B&B (Bed & Breakfast ... search for Bed & Breakfast on Wikipedia, if you want to know more of what it is. That's what I did when I first heard the term. I like Wikipedia. It's almost as good as google). Life would be as pleasant as the weather here once we get our own home.

Alt-R for reading

Reading Microsoft Word documents is always awkward. It is more convenient to take a print out and read the document. For some reason reading .pdf files isn't so irritating. .pdf documents are "cleaner" and resemble paper documents more closely. Now MS has added a feature to Word in Word 2003 that makes it easier to read Word documents on screen. This feature appears in the toolbar as a pushbutton labeled "Read" (keyboard short-cut "Alt-R") . On clicking "Read" Word reformats the document so that it is easier to read it on the screen. The reformated document is
"cleaner" like a .pdf file. I liked this feature and use it almost every day.

Nice Time

Yesterday was a nice evening. Although I reached home later from work, at 9 p.m., I did a lot things that I don't usually get time to do. I had my dinner, lot of talk with Poornima, chatted on phone with family, went for a evening walk, read both the newspapers (Indian Express and Business Standard), taught Poornima how to do meditation, and shaved for today. I finally went to bed at 12:30 a.m. Today I was up in the morning on time at 6 a.m. That gave me time to do some jogging, few suryanamaskars and some time for meditation. I reached office at 8:30 a.m., swiched on the lights on the floor and got down to work.

About my new car

I got delivery of my car on Friday night. I have already driven more than two hundred kilometers in the first four days. It is running good and I am enjoying driving it. I have taken some snaps of the car, which I can upload here, but I haven't yet copied them on to my laptop.

On the very first day I brought the car to office, some scratched the car. A more than five feet long scratch running from the front of the front wheel to the rear wheel is faintly visible on the right side. :-(

Waiting for new car

I am eagerly awaiting possession of my new car. I hope I get it tomorrow.

Back

Well, well, well ... I am back after a long long time. It's almost six months since I blogged! So much has changed in this time. I changed my job for the first time in my life! I moved out of Bangalore and into Pune. Me and Poornima are staying together alone. So many things have changed in this time. Changing job was a period of confusion. Even now I sometimes dream (in sleep, not day-dream) that I am repenting quit a good company. I think, but I am not sure, that I did the right thing in quiting my previous job. The question is whether it is right place that I have landed into. Let's see how things turn out. As of now things are okay. They would get even better tomorrow when I book Getz!

Most people are too busy living life to ever put life in their living.
-- Doug Firebaugh

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
-- Abraham Lincoln


The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
Dorothy Day (1897-1980)
Writer and reformer

People who live well are experts at giving. They give their money; they give their time. They share their wisdom and their skills. They quickly say yes when asked to help. For them...to give is to love and to love is to live. It's a formula for a successful life.
Steve Goodier
Writer

A quote

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Liberalisation & Globalisation

Vir Sanghvi's article titled Liberalisation Vs Globalisation.

Results of a personality test

Global Personality Test Results

Stability (56%) moderately high which suggests you are relaxed, calm, secure, and optimistic. Orderliness (70%) high which suggests you are overly organized, reliable, neat, and hard working at the expense too often of flexibility, efficiency, spontaneity, and fun. Extraversion (43%) moderately low which suggests you are reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and secretive.

trait snapshot

clean, organized, dislikes chaos, semi neat freak, perfectionist, traditional, realist, fits in most places, enjoys managing others, risk averse, good at saving money, prudent, respects authority, high self control, hard working, does not like to stand out, follows the rules, finisher, resilient, takes precautions, cautious, honest, unfamiliar with the dark side of life, practical, dutiful

Take Free Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

A poem

I am not a big fan of poems. I can read one if it has good rhyming in it. I had posted one stanza of a peom in my cubicle when I was in MBT. It's only now that I searched on the Internet and got the entire poem. Here's how it goes.

The Sin of Omission
by Margaret E. Sangster

It isn't the thing you do;
It's the thing you leave undone,
Which gives you a bit of heartache
At the setting of the sun.

The tender word forgotten,
The letter you did not write,
The flower you might have sent,
Are your haunting ghosts tonight.

The stone you might have lifted
Out of a brother's way,
The bit of heartsome counsel
You were hurried too much to say.

The loving touch of the hand,
The gentle and winsome tone,
That you had no time or thought for
With troubles enough of your own.

The little acts of kindness,
So easily out of mind;
Those chances to be helpful
Which everyone may find—

No it's not the thing you do,
It's the thing you leave undone,
Which gives you the bit of heartache
At the setting of the sun.

Standing up to one's beliefs

Some years ago a friend of mine returned from an offical trip to US. He wanted to settle accounts of the trip with the company. The lady handling bills made him an offer. "Submit false inflated bills, and we'll split the extra amount". She made this offer to every employee and most of them probably accepted it, some with hesitation and some with glee. A person like me would politely declined it. But Amit Patil doesn't belong to any of these categories. He reported the matter to the company. Not that the company wasn't aware of what was going on. But everyone turned a blind eye to it. She was an influencial person and had good relationship with the CEO of the company. Nobody wanted to offend her. There was lot of pressure on Amit to back off. But he didn't. He pursued the matter and kept escalated the matter up to highest authorities in the company. It bore fruit. Because of his persistence, the company had to take action against the corrupt lady.

Later Amit explained to me, "I had to do it. I believed it was wrong. If I had not pursued the matter I would have fallen in my own eyes. I had to do it for my own sake if not for the company (or society or country)". How to say No, when you don't want to say Yes professes the same philosophy. Every time you don't stand up to what you believe in, you lower your self-esteem. I did exactly that today. I had to do something that was not pleasant, but I believed it was the right thing to do. And I failed to do it.

These days I frequently get BEST's a/c bus between Kanjur Marg and SEEPZ. Except at peak hours the bus is almost empty. At 3 p.m. today there were few people in the bus. There were two teenagers, taking cover on the last seat of the bus and kissing. This was the second time I had spotted them. I wanted to walk up to them and tell them politely, in a soft tone, that what they were doing wasn't good for them. I kept debating in my mind whether or not I should do that. My consciense told me that I should offer this elder brotherly advice, irrespective of how they react. But like the rest of crowd, I just ignored them and got down when the bus reached my stop. It was laziness or lack of courage or lack of sincerity. Or may be a combination of the three and something more. I don't know exactly why I didn't do it.

I felt bad. I know they will never cross my path again, because I am going to Bangalore tonight and won't be coming back soon. My good words may have made some better change in the lives to two young individuals. But I didn't have the courage to stand up to my beliefs. I ignored the dictates of my conscience. I was weak. My temerity has harmed me as much as my society. I want to become stronger than this.

Today is National Youth Day

12th January happens to be Swami Vivekanand jayanti, and is celebrated in our country as National Youth Day. You can't open a newspaper on 14th Feb and not know that it's Valentine's Day. However you won't find a sentence in today's paper that says it's a National Youth Day, because it's Vivekanand jayanti. Such is the media. So be it! We know better than having expectations from the media. Enough of complaining. Instead, here's a good quote from the Swami Vivekanand:

"The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves! Our first duty is not to hate ourselves, because to advance we must have faith in ourselves first and then in God. He who has no faith in himself can never have faith in God."

Where is the News?

A lot is said about the prolifiration of news channels in our country in the last decade. However I know very few tv channels that broadcast news. Most of the so-called "news channels" broadcast propoganda. Propoganda with an shockingly unabashed political bias. Free media in our country means freedom to the media to spread misinformation and lies.

What is true about tv channels is also true about the print medium. The media seem to have sold themselves to a particular political ideology, party or family. The worst thing about it is the absolute lack of introspection, and the hypocracy about the nobility of the profession. Rarely does one read an article questioning the media's role in the current state of affairs of the country.

Need IGNOU contact info

I have been trying to connect with IGNOU (Indira Gandhi National Open University) representatives in Mumbai for the last few days with futility. If you know have any contact information please let me know asap. Of coruse, I have browsed IGNOU web site.

Time for new year resolutions

It's the time of the year when you make new year resolutions. I don't make resolutions every year. Many a year it's just, "I will strive to do my best with renewed enthusiam". But this year, I have three specific resolutions to make:

1. Wake up early every morning
This is one thing that I have found impossible to put in practise. In no other activity has my failure been so thorough. Yet I have keep trying. I can't give up. I think this time I will succeed. Because now things have changed. I am now not just responsible for myself. So I feel a greater sense of responsibility. I am hoping for the best.

2. Plan my days well and follow the plan earnestly
Twenty four hours is too less time for a day. There are just too many things to do and too little time. The biggest reason for not getting things done on time lack of planning. I need to plan things well and execute to plan. I have been trying to do this for past 2-3 weeks, with varying degree of success. I think I know enough now to make progress on this point.

3. Concentrate better, think clearly, understand myself better, have healthy self-dialogue and maintain equanimity every moment
That's a tall order. But no one said that life is easy. Good progress needs monumental efforts. I need to make these habits my character. These things should come naturally to me, without any need to make efforts. I hope I will spend a lot efforts to make progress here. But I am not expecting miracles.

[Speaking of miracles, miracles never occur by chance. They are created one day at a time for decades before their effect is visible.]

Let me see how much progress I make and whether I am successful in fulfilling these resolutions.