Lots of new stuff coming up:

The all new start-page is online @: http://varna.sr.googlepages.com/

A new tumblrlog for random stuff on the web is online @: http://varna.tumblr.com

The delicious bookmarks page (cleaned up) is online @: http://del.icio.us/varna

A new photojournal is online here @: http://varnavisuals.wordpress.com

I shall start publishing on these pretty soon.

Fourteenth is my day of liberation…well at least partially. Its a deadline, once gone there’s nothing I can do to bring it back. I shall be on a brief hiatus till then. In the meantime check out George Bush as a Jedi here, and on a more sombre note the new post on blogging manners at Marketing Slave.

The web has had a lot of interesting stuff floating around this week- or maybe its just that I have had more time to sit up and take notice lately.

Web Worker daily has a fascinating post about a positive web presence and getting a good job. Green technology just got a thumbs up with Tesla Roadster, a 100-percent electric car inspired by PC technology that is clean, green and the ultra-cool machine.

More exciting stuff on the PC front- Yahoo is doling out unlimited e-mail storage to its mail users– one could now consider forgiving them for the awful YahooMail Beta interface. PC Mag has a nice article on Web 3.0 and an even nicer one on customizing Vista if you’ve made the Vista transition.

CSE (although I disagree with most of what it says most times) has some interesting analysis of social sector spending in the union budget. It is also offering an opportunity to work with NREGA evaluation, if anyone is looking for voluntary work in the summer. The CSE controversy on pesticides has also reached a resolution of sorts- read about it here.

Happy reading!

New widget, from RockYou…pretty cool. Pretty and Cool.

| View Show | Create Your Own

Most of those pictures are pre-loaded from an Olympus FE-16, in case anyone was wondering. The other widget is support for platial maps, that one is definitively a winner too!

Twitter is one way to feel less lonely. Take a look at twittervision and you’ll figure how popular Twitter really is. After you’re done looking at that take a look at Skype’s newest feature called Skype Prime– you get to charge for calls if you want. The potentials of both Twitter and Skype Prime are enormous, and people say technology ain’t everything?!

Sometime ago, I wrote a post entitled ‘Praying to Trees‘, the point I was trying to make then was about turning environmental protection into a religion. Environmental fanaticism is neither new nor pretty, in fact sometimes its clearly off-putting, even for those who are inherently sympathetic to the green cause. Take a look at PC Format’s report on Antony Lewis.

For those of you, who don’t know Antony Lewis is the architect of the rather brilliant and extraordinarily useful freeware utility- WordWeb.  I’ve used WordWeb for a long time and quite happily. Perhaps that is why the attempt to sing the green tune by its maker is painful.

Lewis in an interview says, “Climate change is an international crisis. By linking prices to customers’ carbon footprint we can provide an incentive for people to cut down. WordWeb is used worldwide, including in many countries such as India with rapidly expanding economies where awareness of climate change is growing only slowly. Software developers and Internet companies can reach an international audience consisting precisely of those people who are most likely to have unsustainable lifestyles. We hope the new licensing model will increase awareness of the high environmental cost of air travel and encourage people to fly less.”

Sigh. I have several questions, of which the pertinent ones are these: How on Earth are frequent fliers going to be told apart from other users? Unless of course you intend to illegally monitor surfing habits and draw correlation, in which case I would rather unhappily call WordWeb Spyware now. 

I’m all for green incentives, but this really is not one of them! Now if Microsoft were to do something about dirty manufacturing I would understand–but targeting Indian’s who have just about started off with low-cost airlines is a bit much! Here’s the problem, the idea of free software is a commitment to free as in freedom and not a space to push ideology that not all people necessarily buy!

More importantly, daft things like this takes away from the seriousness of environmental movements, that have in the third world much more to do with marginalised communities and subsistence livelihoods as opposed to over-consumption. Skewed incentives, is what it is. Sigh.

Read Chris Wondra’s explanation of Peter, the wonder prompt who knows every secret plausible, ahem….only as long as you do too! Have fun!

PS: I wish someone had tried this out on me, its fiendishly clever. I swear!  

Yup! I shall continue to remain silent for a while longer on the blogging front. See you in August then.

Au Revoir!

Blog Mad is the newest on blogging traffic exchange. What do I like about it? The fact that it has a whole host of really fun games and that not you don’t have to have obligatory buttons on your website to surf random blogs…. Its good stuff so far. Blog Mad is in invite mode only right now, so if anyone wants to join leave me a comment and head to pages>referrals>vote for Me! and I’ll invite you.

I haven’t written for a while. Primarily because I’m preoccupied. That’s not such a bad thing, except that it squeezes you out of space for yourself at times. This blog is my own space and so I’ve neglected it without as much of a second thought. Just like I neglect other vital things sometimes: like food, sleep and happiness. I don’t regret not having happiness sometimes as much I do food and sleep. A hog’s mind space for example, could be flooded with butter chicken, white sauce and pasta or chocolate and the line between happiness and food would blur into inch thick aromas that waft across the room teasing the olfactory senses.

This place has its own peculiar style… NDTV has started a massive campaign in support of Jessica Lal, while Rajdeep tantalisingly holds the ‘Amar Singh Story’ CD out to CNN-IBN audiences. Then there’s the railway budget and the ironically snide comments about the lowered AC fares being a ‘people popular budget’, as though being ‘people-friendly’ was a crime. The only hint at something equally strange though remarkably positive are the convictions in the Best Bakery case. It is sad though how all the manufactured anger and analysis managed by news channels these days steers clear of the fact that Gujarat 2002 was a pogrom and no less. Contradictions.

Its hot too. Very hot. I know I claim to like sultry climes. I do actually. Sultry– not hot! My favourite vegetable (the ladyfinger) will soon disappear off stands and I will in a couple of months start further academic pursuits at another trouble ridden Indian institution. I ought to be concentrating my efforts on applications to study abroad, but somehow I don’t quite have the heart to any more. Its almost like they speak a different language, a language that I will never learn. I have trouble recognizing their criteria for ‘academic excellence’. I have trouble understanding their warped sense of priority that seems to define the education system to their minds. The trouble, which really is most of my problem– is how a system that churns out the ‘greats’ is incapable of looking unto itself.

What can I say to a scholarship committee that tells me that they don’t think that the “climate for my ‘thesis’ question and research interests is quite right, yet” ? How does one react to “you are only a graduate… we rank people with multiple degrees higher, it really has nothing to do with intelligence” ? At one point I used to feel the burning desire to burn these people up, I saw a point in fighting the system. All that has now been replaced by a cold, watchful understanding. An acceptance perhaps of a divine will, that I am destined in some sense to study, live and die here. That my knowledge of other lands shall remain limited to books and the movies.

This cross posting business, on my WordPress blog and this one is a strange parallel to my life. Almost like another universe. One world is slow and crowded like this blog, popular and nasty at the same time. The other is virgin, fresh and new, yet, inexorably heading to the same future that was once this blog’s past. And I am like the tale, the tale that binds the two. The one who has to keep up all the writing despite the lack of spirit or will, because I do. Why? No answer. I just have to.

There is beauty too. Black skies with millions of stars like the gleaming pin points on the party goer’s complicated hairstyle. The soft wind that whips across the silent gleaming waters grayish, green and now brilliantly blue. Some part of me feels sick and lonesome, like the half finished scroll from the poet’s heart. The first few lines were beautiful, then somewhere half-way the lines became meaningless strings of words, and still they went on because the slender fingers liked the way the quill felt. There was a quiet power to it, raw, un-fashioned and it was the poet’s to shape or to throw away. It was the inspiration that was dwindling. And then it died.

Yes I have a memory. It churns and it worries. It smells faintly of turpentine, of leaves, of a shaken Black Russian followed by Vodka- lime and ice, of the charred end of a Navy Cut and of freshly brewed coffee. It rings of laughter, the singing of a lark, the groaning of a courageous old man, the love of a beautiful woman and the ambition of all that she wanted to be. It speaks of the becoming of a lost little boy, the blood thirsty anger of the band of the red , the spirit of the same little boy who grew up and earns on the street and studies by twilight in the hope of a better tomorrow, and the light of a million dazzling candles that slowly melt their way down to oblivion.

Mine is the night of stories, the quiet rising of that wave of diffidence that finds its way through the mists of time, the vein that carries the imprints of many a day and many a lives. I am alone in this battle. Alone in this joy. Alone. It is a powerful word that– because behind that loneliness is the strength of all those people that I am, have been and will at one time become.