Saturday, February 27, 2010

Aiswarya pooja and Mahaganapathy Homam Dates-2010 @Anupuram Sri Ayyappan Temple (Narasangkuppam)

Aiswarya pooja and Mahaganapathy Homam Dates-2010 @Anupuram Sri Ayyappan Temple (Narasangkuppam)

ASHTA AISWARYA POOJA(05.00 PM.)

MAHA GANAPATHY HOMAM(06.00AM)

Date

Day

Date

Day

28, February

Sunday

13, February. Kumbham-1

Saturday

29, March

Monday

15, March Meenam-1

Monday

28, April

Wednesday

15, April. Metam-1

Thursday

27, May

Thursday

15, May. Idavam-1

Saturday

26, June

Saturday

15, June. Midhunam-1

Tuesday.

25, July

Sunday

17, July. Karkitakam-1

Saturday

24, August

Tuesday

17, August. Chingam-1

Tuesday.

Malayalam

New year

23, September

Thursday

17, September. Kanni-1

Friday.

22, October

Friday

18,October. Thulam-1

Monday.

21, November

Sunday

17, November. Vrichikam-1

Wednesday

21, December

Tuesday

16, December. Dhanu-1

Thursday.

[Source Courtesy: An announcement/message sharing by Sreekumar, Member of Anupuram Sri Ayyappan temple yahoogroups]

Sunday, February 21, 2010

TukTastic -- A cute little amazing website of an autodriver in Chennai

TukTastic -- A cute little amazing website of an autodriver in Chennai
I have been following a few news articles regarding Samson who is an auto-driver opposite Taj Coromandel hotels in Chennai. He has a website designed by one of the UK tourist who was amazed by the driver's honesty and friendliness to tourists. Samson is very much tech-savvy autodriver. He can check out his website 'TukTasktic' over here.
Let us wish him all success and let us hope that other auto drivers too emulate him in being honest and tourist-friendly.

Interesting website URL of Subway, Chennai

Interesting website URL of Subway, Chennai
I was searching out for Subway, Chennai locations near Guindy and landed upon an interesting URL of them:
They have another domain name (as deduced from the email addresses in the contact page as http://www.pinkpapayafoods.com/ [named after their business] but currently it is serving 404. I have written them so that they can correct the same too. You know why I wrote them to correct it? It is in accordance with our 'Share and Grow Together' policy that we discussed sometime back.
I have another interesting observation too with respect to this domain. In US and other countries, mobile numbers are considered personal assets and little confidential to disclose. In India we have a little relaxed mindset with respect to the same. However, having a mobile number itself as a domain name is kind of very radical thought that this business is proposing to the world!

The devilish Saturday and Sunday syndrome for the past few months ...

The devilish Saturday and Sunday syndrome for the past few months ...

I believe sometime back we have been discussing about the malefic ways in which our society is being pulled towards particularly on Saturdays and Sundays. I recall my school correspondent's inspiring quotes that we should treat holidays as 'holy-days' rather than wasting them over mundane pleasures. But I believe with the increasing perils of bad media and intensifying kali effects, people are more attracted towards mundane pleasures rather than eternal bliss and/or self-realisation.

I typically observe that because of vicious circle of people who involve in all sorts of crappy activities involving arranging to schedule a demo for thier insurance product on saturday, scheduling your time for a business activity which they ought to perform (and thus they escape for a nourishing date with their partner) misusing their authority our general productivity suffers significantly.

I just thought of sharing this view that we ought to accomodate such effects whilst planning our chores in our day-to-day life to minimize (if not able to alleviate it) the ill-effects on our productivity.

The bane of second saturdays, forced shutdown hours on the current trend of business ...

The bane of second saturdays, forced shutdown hours on the current trend of business ...

These days when every business is ushering to service the customer 24x7 and set up virtual offices by leveraging the benefits of Internet as their extended office, I observe that our government organizations and offices of the state-central administrations still cling to the age-old practice of second saturday holidays and forced shutdown hours during lunch break. Typically I would like to draw the attention towards the following observations:

  1. Take any private bank for example like ICICI or HDFC. You can see the branch services from dawn to dusk without any break. The staff does take tea/lunch breaks but in turns so that the business as usual does not stop for the customer. The customers who walkin anytime during the period the bank is open can avail the same service at the same time period without any typical effect of 'particular hour of the day' (like lunch hour). Whereas in the case of a nationalized bank when you walkin between 12.30 PM and 2 PM, you can see most of the chairs empty and someone sitting in a remote chair would tell that you ought to wait for an hour when the staff resume their duty after thier lunch. I would appreciate them if they say they are trying to promote 'team spirit' by having a group lunch but I would not say it should be at the cost of the business and unhappy customer who might turn towards the competitor witnessing their misdemeanour. The private organizations too encourage their employees to go on 'Team Building Trips'.
  2. I had an opportunity to check with ICICI Bank once that they have services of a few branches open during New Year too. But state owned organizations like BSNL still cling to the practice of 'Second Saturday Holidays'. I still can not figure out from where on earth did these guys pickup this innovative culture of taking off on a second saturday. The most closest result of research on this second saturday can be found here.

I believe business establishments clinging to such practices should also bring some renaissance into their practices so that it is apt for the current day business trends and benefits the business the most.

Why does people particularly in Chennai have a craze for telephonic conversation more than to email?

Why does people particularly in Chennai have a craze for telephonic conversation more than to email?

Most of the service providers and business establishments particularly in Chennai are so crazy about signing anything verbally rather than through email also. Even a simple business query that you write to a business establishment would take months to draw their attention and comprehensively get addressed in all aspects whereas they would be glad to spend with you hours together on the phone call.

What is the reason for their phone-mania or email-phobia?
  1. Over the phone everything goes vocal. There isn't a kind of evidence of conversation. People though in authorititive cadre really lack a sheen lustre of holding responsibility of their job and feeling proud for it. They want to 'escape' their responsibilities and 'shriek' their moral obligations at any cost. This can be clearly visible when a telemarketer calls regarding insurance based on your credit card that they would offer it 'phone-on-phone' but would retract when you demand them to send a mail or an email to that effect.
  2. Taking within any one business establishment too people are glad to keep procrastinating things by talking over the phone rather than demonstrating their time-commitment over the letter (in black and white).
  3. Once I had a talk with a bank manager and when I was telling that a 'phone call' is a blocking call which pulls up productive time unlike email which is asynchronous and can be answered within reasonable time when the work load is free. He was replying with a lame excuse that he feels it otherwise.

I believe the society should do something to correct this bad habit prevailing in this part of the country.

Distressful effects of stress

Distressful effects of stress

This week headlines of every leading newspaper had been seeing three to four top news about people taking extreme steps just because of stress created either by their immediate family or because of societal impacts. This can be considered as a part II read of our earlier post "Uncontrolled Anger -- Salient Example in Mumbai". Some of the recent incidents are:

  1. When tax rage goes over the edge ...[The Austin Tragedy]
  2. Depressed youth fires for about 36 hours in Lucknow.
  3. Senior leader of TN CPM (W R Varadarajan) goes missing.
  4. Former Defence Minister (George Fernandez) goes missing.

I just thought of sharing a few recent incidents of the previous week which demonstrated the malefic effects of stress, created either from their personal or professional quarters. The need of the hour for everyone is to identify the mischief-mongers in their own society and to keep them aloof.

"Experience 3000"

"Experience 3000"

A number of people would have experienced the start of Saade Saathi in the most recent Saturn transit that happened in September 2009. The total period should be about 2555 days (spanning seven and a half years). Since the effects of any planetary transits are visible even a little before and little after, I just thought of having the caption of this post as 'Experience 3000'.

The objective of this post is that the period of seven and half years is not just bolt out of the blue. If Lord Sun is revered as a king of all planets, Lord Saturn is considered as a hard task master and judgement giver. The turbulences during this period is to be taken in the positive aspect to realise and repent one's own folly and thus incorporate suitable corrections in our day-to-day lives towards the service of the Lord. A while back I believe we did discuss about Rahu and Ketu along with the fact that planetary debilitations are an indicator that we would need to correct the path of our lives towards the noble objective of serving the Lord.

Let us share our views about your experience in the Saade Saathi period which can be helpful for others too towards reorienting our lives towards the service of the Lord.

Om Sham Shaneshray Namah-Laghu Shani Mantra

"Sani Bhagavan Magimai" -- A devotional serial in Polimer TV every sunday

"Sani Bhagavan Magimai" -- A devotional serial in Polimer TV every sunday

Whilst posting about 'Vada' shrines in Tamil Nadu, I just recalled about the television programme that Polimer TV is airing every Sunday at 9 AM. It is called 'Sani Bhagavan Magimai'. You can see a flyout about this programme in the picture below:

Interestingly I have not got the opportunity to see this programme and kept missing it till last week and with the grace of the Lord could catch up a few minutes only today afternoon. It is again the grace of the Lord to share the same with other readers for everyone's benefit.

'Vada' shrines near Chennai

'Vada' shrines near Chennai

In Indian languages like Tamil or Sanskrit, 'Vada' (வட) stands for 'North' and is normally a shorthand for 'Vadakku' (வடக்கு). Over the course of time, I have been observing a number of shrines which were prefixed with 'Vada' and found in various places surrounding the immediate 'Greater Chennai'. I just thought I would share a few of them for the benefit of readers:

  1. Vadapalani: This place has the famous temple of Lord Murugan and also the southern place where the temple of Lord Murugan can be found in Tamil Nadu is called 'Palani' (near Madurai).
  2. Vada-Thirunageswaram: This temple can be found near Kundrathur Murugan temple and the temple board says that temple deities can be worshipped and pariharams-poojas be offered akin to Thirunageswaram temple (for Rahu and Ketu).
  3. Vada-Thirunallar: Thirunallar is the famous temple town near Karaikal for Lord Saturn ("Darbaranya Kshetram"). I have observed a temple near Madurantakam whilst commuting that way with the board like 'Vada Thirunallar'. Whilst I was searching about this temple, I came across a few other temples for Lord Saturn near Chennai itself also being categorized as 'Vada Thirunallar'. They are the following:
    1. Sri Agastheeswar Temple for Lord Siva near Pozhichalur.
    2. Vada Thirunallar Sri Saneeswaran Koil in Venkatachalam Street, West Mambalam
I just thought I would share out these observations for the benefit of other readers. If you do have information about similar temples, please share them as comments for the benefit of everyone.

"Share your shortcoming with us. Spread the good word with your group and neighbors"

"Share your shortcoming with us. Spread the good word with your group and neighbors"

You can see the following quotation spread across a lot of business establishments in this part of India (Tamil Nadu) in Tamil:

'நிà®±ைகளை நண்பர்களிடம் சொல்லுà®™்கள், குà®±ைகளை எங்களிடம் சொல்லுà®™்கள்'. The exact verbatim English translation has already been done as the caption of this post. This effectively achieves the following:

  1. Avoids the unwanted back-talking against the business or service which shoos-shoos the potential customers of them and discourages them from thinking positively and progressively.
  2. When you talk face-to-face their negatives, an honest person takes it in the right direction and makes a good humble endeavor to improve their workings. I don't care about the coward who wants to 'escape' from health comments/criticisms and I don't think we have any space to talk about them or time to think about such skunks.
  3. There is also a related benefit or saying in Tamil that 'ஊராà®°் பிள்ளையை ஊட்டி வளர்த்தால் தன் பிள்ளை தானே வளருà®®்'. It means that when you help others to grow in a positive way overcoming their shortcomings it would indirectly benefit our posterity and everyone would try to help our lineage too.
Let us try to cultivate this noble culture by helping others to improve and pointing out their mistakes so that they get an earliest opportunity to correct. At least from my side, the following token services as a pilot projects have demonstrated amongst the legal experts that it is good way to go.

  1. A lot of business establishments outsource their office work to low profile direct sales agencies who involve in unethical telemarketing even to the extent of violating the telemarketing norms of the country. We can make a humble endeavor to point them and bring this to book thus de-weeding such organizations from the parasites.
  2. We do surf a lot of websites and when we think such websites/web applications can be improved, it does not harm to share out the views so that the webmasters/design/development team would also do some brainstorming on the thought and if found feasible they would try to incorporate them into future releases of the website.

An interesting prankster that attempted to demoralize but eventually contributed thoughtful ideas ...

An interesting prankster that attempted to demoralize but eventually contributed thoughtful ideas ...

There was one interesting spam comment in my post "Blood Donation -- Do's and Don'ts" which I have shared below as a picture.

No doubt that this spammer should should be suffering from sort of psychic trouble and hence trying to discourage others from helping the community. Nevertheless, I just thought I would siphon out a few good thoughts lying latent inside his own gibberish crap:

"deepak don't post any unwanted information. the information which you are posting is very old and not informational. so dont waste others time and make others to read your blog. if you don't have work keep quiet."

  1. The spammer lost his sense in sharing out the comment in the right place. He should have used the the contact information from the profile section of my weblog to intimate me this more general thought or at least he if feels that what he posts was in the same context of the post on which he scribbled, he should have been more succinctly clear and justified what is not befitting the context.
  2. By hiding himself as 'Anonymous' whilst sharing the view, he demonstrates a lack of courage and his timidity (or shows up his temerity :)) in scribbling such a crap.
  3. There is nothing called 'unwanted information'. In computing terminology, there are two things:
    1. Data -- Unprocessed Raw Inputs
    2. Information -- Processed Data (after applying proper business logics)
  4. The spammer brands the posting as very old whereas he seems to have forgotten that there is a proven saying 'Old is Gold'. He adds that the message was not informational whereas every NGO across each and every city are striving their level best putting in their heart and soul to bring out the importance of blood donation and citing these dos and donts to the people to bring up more awareness. What we need now is an increased awareness of blood donation amongst our masses.
  5. The fifth and concluding point of his view makes me ROTFL. It just demonstrates that the spammer has gone to the extreme of his hysteria and burst out with this view.
  6. Precisely, even this spam comment has justified another tamil saying that ' சிà®±ு துà®°ுà®®்புà®®் பல் குத்த உதவுà®®்' (even a small stick can be used to clean up the dentures after a sumptuous non-veg meal) and even this disgusting skunky spammer has proved that he has been instrumental in a more indepth analysis of various thoughts through his scribble.

Desperation would make things look and feel dearer ...

Desperation would make things look and feel dearer ...

A couple of weeks back I had an opportunity to accompany a friend of mine from Thailand and he had been to India on a shorter trip before he returned back to Thailand last Friday night. Whilst chatting about something I had an interesting saying from his mouth which is a kind of variant of a known proverb 'Haste makes waste'. He was telling about the Chennai's autorickshaws. He was telling that whatever be the situation if you even give an iota of 'benefit-of-doubt' to the autorickshaw driver that you are currently in the sense of urgency, the fares would quadruple and you would end up paying through your nose for a distance which should just cost you peanuts otherwise.

We were discussing about the applicability of this autorickshaw observation to other context as well. Take any other occasion for example. When you show the desperation for a certain thing to the service provider/other party, they would, for sure, try to take advantage of the same to advance their materialistic gains. All it needs is a little patience and careful, systematic execution of tasks which would lead to perfection in a cost and time effective manner. We also did discuss this in little brief about our recent post on 'Time slow or fast?'

Time slow or fast?

Time slow or fast?

The time is one entity in the universe which keeps moving at its own pace without stopping for anything. Isn't this the best reason we also have an age-old time-proven saying 'Time and tide wait for none'. Nevertheless we keep hearing people that 'I don't have time. I am totally busy', 'I am killing time. I totally free now and bored. How to pass time now?'

I don't think both these perceptions are correct in anyway. Planning out the task systematically, assessing its progress and correcting maladies/anomalies on the progress-track of the project and incorporating suitable corrections/improvements can achieve a near-perfection (not-to-quote perfection as the ideal utopian state as every thing in the universe has always a scope-for-improvement).

So when some one tells something about time, ask him to retire from his current task and introspect for himself with a psychiatrist to clean up his mind.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Another feature in its cap for VIT...

Another feature in its cap for VIT...

My alma mater VIT has another great news to share. Its Founder-Chancellor (G. Viswanathan (aka) GV) has been nominated as member of Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Information Technology (Design and Manufacturing), Kancheepuram.

Check out for more details from 'The Hindu' page over here.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Blood Donation -- Do's and Don'ts

Blood Donation -- Do's and Don'ts

Blood donation is a very noble deed as it saves some one's life. I recieved one email article containing various do's and donts on Blood Donation which I just thought I would share it out with others here:

Dos:

  1. You are between age group of 18-60 years.
  2. Your weight is 45 kilograms or more.
  3. Your hemoglobin is 12.5 gm% minimum.
  4. Your last blood donation was 3 months earlier.
  5. You are healthy and have not suffered from malaria, typhoid or other transmissible disease in the recent past.
  6. You have eaten a low fat healthy diet few hours before donating blood
Donts:

  1. You have suffered from cold / fever in the past 1 week.
  2. You are under treatment with antibiotics or any other medication.
  3. You had undergone a major surgery in the last 6 months.
  4. You had taken any vaccination in the last 24 hours.
  5. You had a miscarriage in the last 6 months or have been pregnant / lactating in the last one year.
  6. You had fainting attacks during last donation.
  7. You have regularly received treatment with blood products.
  8. You shared a needle to inject drugs/ have history of drug addiction.
  9. You consumed alcohol in the last 24 hours.
  10. You suffered dengue, chicken pox or typhoid in the last 2 years

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Let us extend support to our little tigers ...

Let us extend support to our little tigers ...
 
The rapid and reckless industrialization and rampant disturbance to the ecosystem is depriving tigers of their ecological home and denying them the right to live on this earth. As a result, the tiger population is fast depleting. WWFIndia and Aircel have started a mission to protect the tiger homes and save its population.
 
You can check out more about this movement from 'Save Our Tigers' website. Speak up, share your voice and if you can send in a few bucks as a donation it would be a great effort forward to save the tiger population.

Mission SafeSocialNetworking_EcoSystem

Mission SafeSocialNetworking_EcoSystem

These days every Tom, Dick and Harry enters a social networking system and sends out invitations to expand their community. Sometimes hysteric people use this to vent out their emotions too. Check out our earlier narration of an incident here. I was just thinking we can make a constructive use of these crappy persons too. The product of this research is Mission SafeSocialNetworking_EcoSystem.

I am currently using a simple Windows forms desktop application made in C# that processes such emails, generates a customized application form for each spammer. If the spammer is really pursuing further, it also allows to track payments and responses through NETWORKING_PERMISSION_GRANT or NETWORKING_PERMISSION_DENY.

The following response generated by the application itself would explain the modus-operandi of the application and our noble mission to safeguard our social networking communities. We support Google Orkut's goal outlined here to protect our social networking communities and keeping them clean and beautiful.

******************************
**********

Hello <PRIMARY ADDRESS OF SPAMMER>,

We appreciate your intent of inviting us to you [].

Your application-invitation has been assigned a unique number as . This application would expire within one year. Please quote this number in all future correspondences.

To process your invitation towards acceptance, please reply back with the answers for the questionairre (inline below) along with a processing fee of $2500 payable through Paypal.

Please note the following:

  1. The processing fee is non-refundable or non-transferrable under all circumstances. Also it can not be adjusted for future applications.
  2. The questionairre needs to be responded within one year else the application or this RESPOND TO QUESTIONAIRRE would expire and you would need to start all over again.
  3. Once you remit the invitation-application fee through Paypal, please send in a confirmation note with subject as INVITATION-APPLICATION-PROCESSING-FEE and in the body mention the transaction number.
  4. Please note that all correspondences are through the same email address. Requests to change the correspondence email address in the middle would not be entertained. Should you wish to communicate through a newer email address, please start over with a fresh invitation-application and await for this response letter.
  5. is in no rush to complete the invitation processing and/or update interim statuses on invitation processing whatsoever.
  6. Should you wish to withdraw your application, no action is required. The application would automatically expire after one year from the date of enrollment/assignment of unique number. However, please note that we would not be able to refund the processing fee if any paid.
Questionairre:

  1. Your Full Name (as in your state administration records)
  2. How do you know this person? [Type of relationship, History and Length required]
  3. What would benefit this recipient by networking with you through this platform?
  4. How would you stand to benefit by this networking?
  5. Gender
  6. Religion/Caste/Community/Subsect/Tribe/Race
  7. Scholastic Records (Academic Qualifications)
  8. Current Professional Resume
Paypal Link:



Mission SafeSocialNetworking_EcoSystem

We appreciate your endeavor to expand your networking through an internet-based social networking community. With the increasing perils looming with Social networking websites involving productivity time, we would need to adhere to the above said protocol to successfully network with members.
****************************************

The desktop application would send this note to the spammer and also his immediate supervisors (as deduced from his email address) including domain administrators and ISP Abuse Team.

The objectives of this noble application are as follows:

  1. 'Contain spammers efforts and help keep social networking communities clean and beautiful'.
  2. Notify the abuse team in a hilarious way to make their day-to-day chores of 'closing abusive accounts' lively and interesting.
I welcome your suggestions in improving this software. Please share your thoughts as suggestions to this post.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Time-limited free plastic surgery at Pasam Hospital, Kodaikkanal

Time-limited free plastic surgery at Pasam Hospital, Kodaikkanal
I came to know about a news of free plastic surgery that is being organized by german doctors at Pasam Hospital in Kodaikkanal. Anyone who is affected by burn injuries can register for a treatment at the camp. Besides this, those with ailments in eyes, ears, nose and lips can also register for a treatment at the camp.
To register, please contact the following address:
  1. Pasam Hospital,
    MM Street,
    Kodaikkanal
  2. Telephone: +91-4542-240778/+91-4542-240668
  3. Email: pasam.vision (at) gmail.com