Personal Weblog of Deepak Vasudevan

Sunanda Parthasarathy Discourse in Chennai The Thursday when I had the weekly routine trip to Triplicane and was returning back a bit late, I got to see the advertisement of Vedanta Institute near Chennai Music Academy, wherein they have advertised about Bhagavad Gita discourse by Sunanda Parthasarathy, daughter-disciple of Shri A. Parthasarathy. The following are the details of the discourse which I would like to share with the readers' benefit: Venue: Kamaraj Memorial Hall, Chennai Dates: July 6 to July 10, 2007 Timings: 1800 hours to 2000 hours Let us try to mark the slots in our calendars to attend the discourse.

The 8'O Clock Humor Come 8'O Clock in the morning and Chennai city demonstrates exemplary attitude of remarkable comedy. The 8 to 9 in the morning is also known as Peak Hour .  Today, I started a bit early since I had some one to meet in the forenoon.  We have been discussing a Sneak Preview of this in our Monday Blues discussion. Today it was real fun ferrying out of the crowd at Vijayanagar terminus in Velacherry and I had to just catch up a share auto to manage through the crowd. In the rear view mirror of the bus towards Vijayanagar, when I was observing, I could see one guy constantly showing various gymnastic tricks inspite of the driver repeatedly asking him to come inside the bus. I wonder, when these Chennai City Police would wake up from thier slumber to contain this footboard travel and pocket-pickers menace?

The CNG Spirit Today while I was travelling from Velacherry - Vijayanagar terminus till Guindy, I was observing the new fleet series of Metropolitan Transport Corporation as CNG. The fleet nomenclature like CN etc. actually denotes for the bus depot to which the bus has been attached with and being serviced by. The word 'CNG' was actually taking my memory back by four years when I got a freelance onsite position at GECIS, Gurgaon , thanks to Sakshi Automation in Nungambakkam. In New Delhi, you can see the buses and vehicles being powered by CNG ( C ompressed N atural G as) instead of the normal petrol. This way, the atmospheric pollution is brought down to a significantly low level besides the cost of procuring petrol for the city. I think, MTC should take the cue of naming the fleet by CNG and try to extend the same for fuelling the transport too with CNG fuel. Thereby the required fuel consumption would be greatly reduced besides the atmospheric pollution and also extendin...

Setback Pushed Off I have been discussing Velacherry M. K. Raghavan ("Jai Shri Yatra Travels") regarding the various Sri Vaishnava pilgrimages that he had planned out for this quarter. He was also pleased to help me out with the brochures for sharing across with the readers for thier benefit so that interested pilgrims can participate in the pilgrimages. While the brochures have been lying around with me for a while, either it is inertia (laziness or lethargy) or Bad Eye effect that we have been discussing around ' Winning Beyond the Bad Eyes ' seemed to be a hurdle for a while. And again as a testimony to the post ' Winning Beyond the Bad Eyes ', the backlog posts have been cleared and the publications have been released a few minutes ago. Simply put the setbacks have been pushed off and cleared off to eradicate and empty the disgusting and piling backlogs. For those interested about the pilgrimages, you can check out my other weblog 'Sri Vaishnava Netwo...

Winning Beyond The Bad Eyes A few days back we have been discussing about a little to more in-depth philolophical thought " Those who envy show themselves with a negative face ". I have been recieving quite a number of email comments on the depth of the topic involved. I was particularly impressed by one particular reader who had expressed her personal experiences regarding bad eyes which cast an evil effect. We call this in Tamil has கண் திருஷ்டி. Inspite of the scientific ways that we can adopt as outlined in the then post, a few religious observations like this are also considered in reality. You would have seen even in temples after the God is taken out for procession and returns back to the temple, the priests make small colored rice bundles and throw it on all the sides to ward off any evil eye effects. For this matter, in Sri Vaishnavite temples, it is a custom that before the Lord goes on a procession, Sri Sudharshana is taken out first. It is believed that Sri Sudha...

Pleasant Ringtones to imply more productivity Fancy ringtones have become so common nowadays with mushrooming of mobile phones. Along with ringtones, the other musical offering is HelloTunes where when you call a person, a musical note is offered instead of the traditional Tring Tring. We have been discussing whether this is a boon or bane sometime back over here . Sometime back I preferred having Pattern.mid in my Nokia 6030. But I feel that most of these music make you only unduly tense. They offer momentary fun or joy but on the longrun peace of mind, I think these fail in thier task. Only a pleasant musical note can accomplish that effect. For that matter, when I referred Sathya to Umesh for getting the latter's academic project done, I was feeling that latter's mobile phone for unnecessarily giving a negative vibration. A kind of jolt and vibrating Tamil song used to play with the lyrics like ship is getting wrecked. I really wonder how come people become fond of such n...

Shouldn't there be an 'Undo' Feature in Elevators? Today while using the elevator to reach my floor by mistake by pressed the floor number which is next to me. Oops! Ouch! And I had to give all expressions for the mistake, as we normally do. But being a machine following our orders systematically, the Johnson's product religiously took my order, went step-by-step and stopped in the floor next and then again went to my floor. I was feeling bad that the little elevator's effort and time was unnecessarily wasted in stopping at a floor which was not necessary. I do understand that for operator-powered elevators, the operator has full control on where the elevators should stop and also to ensure that the lift goes to a designated floors non-stop. However, similar to our software applications, can the elevator companies too make this 'Undo Floor Selection' a standard option. However, I admit that they should ensure that frequent press of this key should somehow be...

An Interim Status Update After a two-month long hibernation thanks to Curving/Handicapping of Community-Credit , now comes the victory march again. You can find me listed on top of 'This month top honors' in Community-Credit.com . A screenshot taken at June 14 2007 2345 hours has also been attached inline for readers quick reference over here. There is another interesting update for today. Today, Superstar Rajinikanthi's Sivaji film is scheduled for release. It was slated to be released on June 15, 2007 but they are advancing the releases by a few hours and releasing the midnight of June 14, 2007 itself. I actually saw the various newspapers that have been hung around in the various stalls during my visit to the temple in the evening. I hope and pray to Lord Almighty for the March to Victory to keep continuing and in His humble service. When I said March to Victory, it also implies about the Grand Prize winner of Community-Credit in March 2007. The month of March also wit...

Google's User Experience Research Google brings out a very unique User Experience Research and they are offering to reward the researches in a good big way too. Check out Google User Experience Research signup page here . The page also has a comprehensive FAQ which attempts to address the various queries that might be haunting your mind.

Thursday Temple Schedule Restored After a brief schedule alotments, the Thursday temple has been restored back. There were quite a few significant reasons for this reallocation too: Saturdays are getting excessively crowdy in the temples both forenoons and afternoons. This compounded with the excessive and mismanaged traffic conditions in Chennai makes things worse impairing the free and quick mobility across the places with ease and relatively greater degree of flexibility. Thursdays had been good and inspired by many of guides. A few of them, I would like cherish and quote are: Varadarajan -- who was my technical lead cum mentor and currently works as a project manager in Infosys in Columbus More updates shortly. Stay Tuned!

The Missed Call Alert Technology With every other provider in India now ushering to provide Missed Call Alert service for its subscribers, I just did a quick and basic research on the real technology behind this service. For that matter, we have also covered about this as a quick informative post sometime before, which you can read it here . The inspiration for this research comes from my colleague (Ramanathan R). While discussing something, he wanted to have information about the Missed Call Alert facility for his Excel Prepaid service. A quick research on Missed Call Alert revealed about the following vendors who actually service the network operators. Hyderabad-based Tanla Solutions Missed Call Alert server from OpenCode Systems Missed Call Alert Server from MobileArts I really feel that Tanla solutions has given a very beautiful and excellent explanation on the technology behind the missed call alerts that even for the layman it makes real interesting read to understand the same.

Yahoo -- Lucrative webmail and organizing service Yahoo is always a good role model for others to emulate in more ways than one. The most recent trend of developments I like with Yahoo is making the email storage virtually unlimited. If you had recently logged on to Yahoo mail services, you can find the storage meter would have disappeared totally. I still find some reviews stating that Yahoo should lift out the attachment caps like 10 MB too. But I feel that attachment should still be having a this limitation for the simple reason that email servers in all enterprises are not capable of handling huge size mammoth attachments. Also, an email is designed for a casual 'hi' or a professional 'hello' and a formal handshake thereon. If at all, a heavy-duty file exchange is required, there are dedicated file storage services available over the corner. The most significant ones are AOL XDrive , RapidShare etc. Your favorite search engine would be suggesting you more links on ...

Delicious Kerala Cuisine Restaurant in Velachery Day before yesterday while travelling to home in the evening, I got a tourist cab who was going to Medawalkam. He offered ride till Medawalkam on a shared-passenger basic for an amount of INR 10 (USD 0.25 ). While the cab was nearing Vijayanagar terminus, I found a new Kerala cuisine restaurant there called " A Kalavara Kerala Restaurant ". I am not sure whether it ' A Kalavara ' or just ' Kalavara ', since I found both the texts in the advertisement and nameplate there. Just thought of sharing this finding with other readers so that interested Keralite friends in Chennai can now get some good homely dishes right from near Velachery itself. At this juncture, I would like to fondly recall our earlier post regarding 'Aappak Kadai' in Vijayanagar (Velachery), which brings to our neighborhood good Chettinad cuisines. Check out our earlier discussion here . The other interesting good restaurants in this Ve...

Stop, Watch and Go (at Rajakilpakkam) Today while commuting to workplace in the morning while reaching Rajakilpakkam bus stand, I struck upon this unique innovative concept of ' Stop, Watch and Go '. For some reason, while most of the commuters from the area do practise it for ages, I was thinking of sharing this interesting practice with others too. The Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) of Chennai which seems to be innovative in introducing deluxe and high protective comfort bus services seems to be doing another shadow activity in the background. Basically all the white board (ordinary) bus services are slowly withdrawn as yellow board (limited stop services). That way, if you are one of those unlucky in depending on the white-board bus stop, then you are forced to walk off a distance to the nearby LSS stop or pay-out-of-your-nose to an autorickshaw. We have been having an interesting conversation on this topic in Consumer_Voice_India too. Well! But I feel that th...

Evergreen Memories (Album Collection) :: Thamizh's Wedding Lunch After a while, it was a team lunch or a wedding treat, however you define it. We had it scheduled at Hotel Rivera, Adyar. This hotel had an unique pride that it was the same place that we had a lunch treat by Ramesh Kumar Nagarajan also, when he was joining Cognizant . This time, it was Thamil (aka) Thamilenthi's turn to host the party towards his post-wedding celebrations. You can check out the snaps of the Thursday lunch here and share your comments either here or in the Album guestbook.

Big FM reminded of Dallas - Chennai return trip While driving home late night yesterday and turning on the FM Stereo, it was really nice songs on Big 92.7 FM in Chennai. Right from the launch, Big FM is performing majestic march in the city both from the programme delivery perspective and promotional offers. I would like to recall the Free Ride offering from Big FM sometime in January 2007. Well! The song that was playing in Big FM was 'Adhikalai Sevalai Ezhuppi...' from a film starring Ajith and Devayani. I am not sure of the film name though. But the song content goes like the hero is trying to wake up the hen which normally wakes up people early in the Indian villages. Going one step forward, the next lyric of the song is like the hero tries to speed up his watch so that the dawn comes fast so that he can get the glimpse of his beloved who would come out of her house to put the Kolam (Rangoli).  For interesting reasons, the memory jumped back to May 9 for me towards the ...

Corporation Bank contributes to the Under Privileged It is again a good news from one of our nationalized banks, Corporation Bank , the premiere public sector bank innovating in its banking facilities in India. I have been observing big hoardings and cloth banners being hung in almost all Corporation Bank branches across the Chennai city that any savings account that is opened between June 1 2007 to July 31 2007 would mean that Corporation Bank would donate ten rupees for the cause of underprivileged children towards their upliftment and education. So I think instead of lamenting and wasting our time with useless private banks, who only bank for the booty , I think you can walk in to a nearest Corporation Bank and get a savings account opened. Personally, I think there are lot of good points with Corporation Bank: Innovative Electronic and Internet Banking services first of its kind from the Nationalized Bank sector. International Debit Cards F ull C ore Banking S ystem (CBS). ...

Citizen Traffic Cop Initiative Following from the Chennai MVP Meet , and after browsing through the TrafficViolators.com, I felt from the heart that this is one website which is a dire need of Indian society at the moment. With booming number of vehicles ravaging through the Indian roads with a plain majority of them throwing rules to the air, putting safety of citizens at stake and the situation itself being fuelled by nonchalant traffic cops all over, here is one good opportunity for you, to be represent as a responsible, vibrant, dynamic and energetic traffic cop. Check out TrafficViolators.com . It is a pretty straight and simple website to bring and highlight traffic violators and thier violations known to a wider base of audience. The most lovely features of the website are below: Pretty fast website Quick Registration Features an impressive statistics on Traffic Incidents as an Article. A lucid report on 'Top Traffic Violators'. The website is currently in its i...

Cool Weather after really long hot summer Today it was really a very cool weather with complete absence of sun over Chennai sky. The weather seemed to be really cool. Though initially at seven to eight in the morning, we could feel that the weather was bit sultry, at least till now the sky is cloudy. I checked with Inbox.com weather aggregation reports and it indicates 84 degree Fahrenheit (that comes to about 29 degree celsius). South West Monsoons has become active over Western Ghats and it might be one of the influencing factors for the cool weather over Chennai sky now. Anyway let us thank the Sun God for His mercy from the pricky showers after His long-length fire showers.

Reading Time from the Environment for a Month Today my calendar was reminding of servicing my HMT Watch . I fondly recalled about the purchase of the gold watch during the Akshaya Tritiya, which I was in Irving, TX . From the time, I landed in US for about a couple of weeks, the original HMT watch was showing haphazard time and then coming down to a grind halt. I know you would be suggesting that I ought to adjust the TimeZone from India to Central DayLight Time but I don't TimeZone has anything to do with the dial not rotating properly right. First I could not locate a good watch service center till I found one near Rochelle, Irving. But then a simple servicing was suggested at 29 USD. Holy Crap! The original watch itself was less than 25 USDs (however in Indian Rupees and about five years ago). So I just fondly dipped it deep into the suitcase and just thought we would see it later after return to India. It was just with learning from the Nature that even the Seattle trip went...