Sahasra-namam

Recently, attended a discource titled "Lalitha Sahasranamam - A vendantic perspective" by Shri. Swami Tattvavidananda, a desciple of Pujya Shri. Dayananda Saraswathi Swami.
The interesting thing in all these Sahasranamams (1000 names or lord / Godess) is that these names belong to the three categories. 1. Mythology (has a story behind), 2. Rituals , 3. Philosophical.
Some names are given to the lord as he took those mythological forms, some for the rituals being performed to make him / her happy and the last is the vedantic or philosophical manifestation of the lord. I recite vishnu sahasranamam, but never thought in terms of these.

Naming Roads after Actors

Read a recent news item that the TN govt. is planning to name roads after the leading actors Kamal & Rajini. Kamal is a great actor and Rajini is a great human being. However, looking back, doesn't TN have any other person to name the road after? Its not be-littling them, but what examples are we setting to the next generation? Can you name ONE person in the recent past that the govt. named the streets after? Don't we have Dr. M.S Swaminathan? Don't we have Dr.Abdul Kalam? Don't we have Mr. Sujatha - the writer & Scientist? The pathetic state of TN is if you want to be great, then you have to become an actor. Is this what we want our kids to become? The cine industry is having an exorbitant say in the govt. in TN while no other industry / section of the society has such an influence.

Some recent events and my thoughts

This time, I want to write what my mind went through when I read recent events...
First is the outpour in BJP regarding the book written by Mr. Jaswanth Singh. Whatever he wrote, may be correct or may be wrong but there are certain thing that is better remain unsaid. We all know that RSS and their idelogues (folks in BJP) are so pained by the partition of India and till today they don't agree to it. This was quite evident when a reporter in Pakistan shouted"Pakistan is not complete without Kashmir", Vajpayee retorted saying "India is not complete without Pakistan" during the now infamous Lahore Bus trip. Whether one agrees or not, it is a fact and you need to base your policies on the reality and not on what you would like the situation to be. How long one can mourn the dead. BJP and the leadership rather than beat Jaswanth Singh, should have taken this approach saying "India is not complete without Pakistan" and may be whatever Jaswant says is correct and these are all hypothetical situations. I would say the BJP leadership didn't react in the correct way.
Having said that, there are two reasons for the downward trend facing BJP.
1. Vajpayee did NOT unequivocally come in support of Advani. He should have and in my opinion he has did great injustice to the party. He should openly campaigned for Advani during last election.
2. There are no more second rung leaders to Advani in the same way how Advani served Vajpayee. This is a reality and Advani should have realized this and run the party based on this fact.

The second aspect, that troubled me was the current management of Subiksha losing control of the organization. This was serving as a classical example for a home grown business from an IIT / IIM person. It is sad to see this blowing a death knell to it.

The third is the wonderful game of tennis in the finals of US open. Wow! Del Potro showed off all the qualities of a naive but a hard charging new bee. Federer was showed off that how a champion would play. However, I could see that his game was not the same as he was missing his serves and making unforced errors. We have to wait and see whether Del Potro is a raising star or a one-time anomaly. Good Luck to both as I love tennis.

Achamundu Achamundu

After a long time, I saw a Tamil movie. It was very good, all the actors involved didn't overact or screw up, a solid story line and no unneccesary jokers, songs, fight etc. Above all, everyone in this generation IT field could easily relate to the family in the story. I felt like seeing another "Kuruthip punal". Folks like Kamal, KB, Cheran, Manirathnam should pay attention and give this team a good support in the future.

Cash for Clunkers - Useless for consumers

The recent US govt. policy on offering upto 4500 for old cars to induce consumers to buy new fuel efficient cars, is infact useless to the consumers. Couple of months ago, whatever cars that were being sold for 27K are now being sold for 32k. In reality, its the dealers who get this money. Consumers, in fact should have just stayed away from the dealers . They didn't and the dealers took advantage of it. It has definitely increased the economic activity and again the consumers are the losers!

An interesting perspective

My 2 -1/2 year old son is momy's pet. We can say n-number of reasons why he is mom's boy (she spends more time with him, does whatever his needs are etc.). However, in general son's turn out to be Mom's pet and girls turn out to be Dady's pet. The main reason behind this is, one doesn't call it a bluff on the human being of opposite sex. Dad knows the ins & outs of a boy and he can easily visualize himself as that kid, so he doesn't really buy into the sons' tantrums. Whilst the mom though she understands this, she can't call it a bluff and plays into him. The son thinks, Mom doesn't know and happy that he tricked her into believing him. The fact is she knows whats' happening but somehow is unwilling to play it straight while she has no qualms playing it straight to her daughter. To hide this fact the Mom would come up with umpteen reasons saying its a girl and she would be marrying into another family etc. But all these explanations are vail over the fact that she knows the bluff and calls it a bluff when it comes to girls. This vice versa between Daddys and girls.

Sunglasses

What a useful piece of equipment it is. I can't believe how this same one caused so much trouble?

I wear glasses all the time and I also carry a prescription sunglass. On the penultimate day, we were outside the whole day and I was driving back with the family after a trip. Around 6:00 PM in Eastern time here in US, while driving on GSP, a heavy thunderstorm started and visibility was pretty much zero. I was literally sitting on the hood and driving the van. I could hardly see the blinkers of the car before me. It became slightly clear whenever we go under a bridge. Thats when I realized, I'm still driving the van with my sunglasses on! I asked my brother to pass on my regular glass. What a difference?

Bing

I had been trying Bing (Microsoft's new search engine) for the last couple of weeks. I must say that Microsoft finally got it right. First of all, the search returns result that are meaningful to the search term, secondly I like the fact that they store the search history on the left, thridly a preview of the link on the right.

Earlier, everytime I like to search even the microsoft site, I would have to use google to find it, now I can do that from within microsoft! On oneside it was frustrating that you have to go outside of the site you are to find what is inside and on the otherside, I was really worried about Google becoming a monopoly.

Now, we can get ready for a good fight. Hopefully, consumers win this time around.