Tuesday 29 July 2008

Trinity Term Results

Results came out about 5 mins ago. Being in school was able to collect it very fast. Well, passed in all subjects with between 60-65 in all. Which means I have passed three terms of MBA in plain Vanilla manner without flying colors or falling down....Boring ride.....but glad that it didn't turn in wrong direction either....

Monday 28 July 2008

Windsor Castle

After a long time! I was planning to update on Friday. But the keyboard of my laptop, that had troubled me multiple times before, had officially gave up after a small accident. So....

Nonetheless, after gruelling boredom of week end aggravated by visa problems for scp work and hence due lack of any activity, I didn't expected the week end to be any better. So out of sheer lack of anything happening, I decided to go to Windsor Castle, a weekend of of Queen. Old pal from John Deere, Hari, benignantly agreed to accompany me. So spent quarter of Sunday waiting for Hari on different train stations (don't ask), quarter in the castle watching King's and Queen's rooms (they have seperate bedrooms - I thought that was my original idea :-( ) quarter watching the movie 'The Dark Night' in Slough (which by the way is a decent movie worth watching) and rest quarter travelling. At least I got a required break, had nice time catching up again with Hari and got couple of snaps to upload here. The next episode of the 'series of unfortunate events' was the camera going all crazy. So half of the snaps have gone bad. Here is what I have got...




Saturday 19 July 2008

Blessings of Ra

Those who don't know ancient history (or those who don't play Age of Mythology, for that matter) Ra is Egyptian Sun God. Now why not Hindu Sun God Surya-Dev or Greek Sun God Apollo? Well, Surya is limited to India as mythology says, he travels in his chariot everyday and I guess doesn't work extended hours as in UK. And Apollo is not really-completely-dedicated Sun God as he shares the place with Titan Helios. I don't know other Sun Gods. So only Ra seems to be free.

Free for what? Well, to bless a sunny day in England. Actually today wasn't exactly the bright shiny day, but I got couple of warm hours and enjoyed them in SBS garden. Nice day to do nothing but relax and watch movies. The relaxing was concluded by nice and heavy dinner at Utkarsh's place, cooked by his wife Swati. May Ra bless them :)




Thursday 17 July 2008

SCP

Going fairly nice with the SCP. Right now the work load is not too much. Still in order to get things accomplished, three of us, Me, Pranjal and Huan-Yi, who are in Oxford meet (or rather sit) in library everyday from 1000-1600. While the fourth Member Nilanjana joins virtually from Reading. Right now we are in process to make the future plan. So no firm plan of action right now. Just making peace with peaceful life.

Preparing mind to start working


Preparing body in the pose of working

Hard working :)


Saturday 12 July 2008

Gayatri Mantra and Giorgio Armani

The new spring/summer 2009 collection for Giorgio Armani is displayed on their website in a video of a fashion show. The interesting thing is, for the background music they are using Gayatri Mantra...
http://www.giorgioarmani.com/ga_menu/EN/home.html

Just don't ask me what I was doing on that site :)

Coincidence is that today I found my fav add on youtube. That add uses couplets written by Saint Kabir as a lyrics of its Jingle. Interesting to have the spiritual and commercial world interlinked like this...



Wednesday 9 July 2008

Singapura, second part

Some more site seeing and travelling including good time with friends. Here are some more snaps:

Singapore Downtown, Raffle's town. Very much like any British city!

Well after hours of blabbering about the Merlion, finally when we reached there, it was under maintenance and no water coming out of it's mouth. Made me so pissed of...


...So pissed of that I needed to kick some serious arse.


And taunt Vishal until he can't take it any more.....


Don't I look content now with previous achievements :)


Parliament. Met Singapore president as well on the Orchard Street.

Old buddy from Kanbay, Sanjeev. Too bad couldn't spend much time together.

Anyways. Back to Oxford Now. From tomorrow, work on SCP starts.

Saturday 5 July 2008

Singapore - Sentosa

The last blog entry was as well written from Singapore. However it was very late in the night, I was jet lagged and haven't had any snaps to show and was irritated by that article. So didn't mention Singapore. Nonetheless. Reached here after couple of hassles to continue the trend of bad things happening to me. Some of them were visa getting rejected for not booking the hotel and the screen in flight not working and hence 13 hours of journey without entertainment etc.

Anyways. Reached here yesterday. Meet Piyusha and Vishal after long time and having great time since then. Had already three fantastic meals. Visited Sentosa Island today. The place is good. However most of the tourist attractions were for families and older people. The beach is very big and pretty good and beautiful. However it was really hot and sunny. So I didn't find it particularly interesting to lie on beach or swim. Overall, the city is as humid as Mumbai. So didn't like the weather much. I guess the city is beautiful and well maintained, but not my type and I won't like to stay here for long.

Here are some snaps:


The hosts: Piyusha and Vishal. I have many connections with them. Piyusha is one of my best buddies from undergrad. Vishal is my distant cousin and all three of us had our undergrad from the same college and they are married to each other for three years now.

And the guest, yours truely. Bdw Piyusha says this is a famous bridge from movie Krrish

And the place.

A huge resort with recreational facilities is being built in Sentosa, supposed to be completed by 2010.



And the snaps of the fantastic lazer show, The 'Songs of the Sea.' I really liked this show. The story was a simple fairytale. However the use of laser lights on water drops to create celestial atmostphere and unbelievable experiences was really amazing. Hats off to this show. It made my day.

This is just a setting of lifesize village, before the show.

Guys trying to wake up the enchanted princes. The image of princess is projected on waterdrops.

Cool fire effects


Finally gets the priness. Happy Ending! :)

Overall, a Great day!!!

Friday 4 July 2008

New TOI Article

There is one saying in my mother tongue Marathi, "Sutavarun Swargala Jaane" which literally means thinking of climbing up to heaven from the clue of single thread falling from above (or something like that). It actually means that concluding from very small clue.
I am talking about this because read the article in Times of India titled 'Now, brain drain from UK to India'. click the "link here" to read the article.

Well, of course the Indian economy is growing at least three times more than UK economy and there are multiple attractive options available. I would myself won't mind working in India for a decent job. However this article considers a single event from a 0.1% students of just one university and tries to draw a conclusion about the two countries. This is immaturity of media. It is the example of confirmation bias where you just seek for the evidence of what you already have in mind and ignore the clues directing at a rather opposite direction. The Indian media just seek a confirmation to show off the so called buoyant economy and thinks that the problems like brain drain will be solved magically by sheer growth of the economy. To stop the brain drain, we have to improve upon many things like infrastructure, corruption, red-tape and many more.

On the other hand, unlike mentioned in the comments of this article, many people including Deepti are genuinely interested in working in India. So they will go back there anyway. No need to publish such flashy articles to conclude that brain drain is stopping now...

Don't want to make more bitter comments. But pity on this.

Tuesday 1 July 2008

Food and Travel

The blog title sounds like a name of lifestyle magazine :).

So the travel update is: as I said before, I published a paper in IEEE heathcom conference in Singapore which was accepted. Then the nice Jesus college graciously gave me grant to travel there. So.... Going to Singapore from this Thursday till next Wednesday. Well the conference is just for the day but the main aim of this visit is to meet Piyusha and Vishal there. Haven't meet Piyusha since two years or more I guess. So this one week is like summer vacation for me. Which really is true as haven't have much work as of now. Will start working on SCP once back. I have got some tentative details about SCP and it looks very interesting. Looks like will get to travel as well. More details later.

And food update is: looks like I am going to have good food for a long time. It started yesterday with my home cooked food. Then had lunch today at Jesus. They are interviewing candidates for the post of Senior Research Fellow and director of Corporate Reputation at Said Business School. This post is shared by SBS and Jesus, so am I. So I was invited for this nice lunch by college Senior Tutor. Evening dinner was at April's place. Well, the dinner wasn't really ambrosian as I cooked it. But had a greaaat time. The next three meals till I fly are already booked and I am expecting them to be good. And finally Piyusha's home made food at Singapore... So this really is travel and food time.

Nice to have a good time after long :)