Oh my god! I lost my gmail password!

I had a few hair raising moments when It appeared that I had lost my gmail password. I panicked because it refused to log me in how much ever times i tried! For some reason it kept asking me to fill in the captcha and the password!
I was terrified to think that my password has been compromised! I had only one email account and thats pretty much is my registered email for most of my critical internet systems. I shudder to think of being locked out of my gmail account!
It has enough emails in it that someone could have me all figured out and wipe my existence from the net altogether! All sorts of such crazy thoughts were creeping me out!
Finally I realized after five minutes that gmail never said that my password was wrong! It just kept prompting me to enter the captcha! I realized this and then it was straight to my inbox!
Phew! What a scary thought! I realized today that I must get myself a secondary account! Perhaps make my wife's main email account my secondary account!

Instant Karma

There are times when I believe that gods have done an exemplary job creating this universe full of wonderful things that are overwhelmingly beautiful! and then there are many times, I think god got it completely screwed up when he failed to introduce 'Instant karma' along with the other laws of nature.
When we read about gross atrocities being committed by individuals, governments and dictators against innocent, my blood boils. Why does not god strike the perpetrators down with a bolt from the sky?
Alright, at least make them fall into a pit and bury themselves alive!
Time and again we watch in stupefied silence as pedophiles and mass murderers go about their crimes with gay abandon for years and years undetected until when someone uncovers them.
Why cannot these guys find their crime hitting them right back? One does not expect miracles, it can be a natural phenomenon. You commit a murder and walk out only to be hit by a bus and drop dead! Ta da, that's a natural way of bumping off a murderer!
The bus driver is not to be mistaken here. Let the law enforcement agencies spend their energies in ensuring that the bus driver did not commit any crime. Ironically, law enforcement agencies then would not have any murder to solve! For world will be on 'Autopunish' mode! They just have to log the facts and close the case!
Thievery shall be 'auto-punished' with temporary amnesia or even better, they trip, fall and break their leg on their getaway!
Law enforcement can be restricted to traffic policing , crowd control and other regulatory jobs! God can perhaps leave alone civil cases to humans? Its up to you god to decide! Like suing your neighbor because their dog pooped on your un-mowed lawn!
Imagine the amount of money the world will be saved! All those high security prisons that can be converted to schools!
Viva Instant Karma!
God, pls consider this as a change request if you have not earmarked this for your next edition of the world! Pls try to do better than a new sticker job.

Will History repeat itself?

It was year 1952 when one gentlemen and an eccentric Gandhian by name Potti Sriramulu started a fast unto death whipping up mass frenzy towards a demand for a separate 'Andhra' . Madras Presidency and the Central government procrastinated way too long and finally the whole issue erupted into a mass movement. Chaos and bedlam ensued. Still the centre paid no heed to the protesters. Finally, it directly affected the election results and Congress lost considerable ground in the general elections .
Now the Congress took notice and by the time Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru decided to act on the problem, Potti Sriramulu was dead and the region was in the grips of violence.
After Andhra Pradesh was created, the other regions soon followed suite demanding their own states carved on the basis of linguistic organizations.
The flood gates had been opened and Pandit had no choice but to initiate a committee to analyze these demands resulting in reorganization of regions and redrawing of Indian map as we now know it.
fifty years on, Andhra Pradesh is now witnessing a similar demand now based on no logic other than economics that is at best a theory! We are once again witnessing the central government ignoring the issue and muddling up decisions. Once again politicians are whipping up mass frenzy costing the exchequer and private establishments crores of rupees.
Where will this lead to? Even if the centre finally gives into the demand and creates a Telengana and the 'Rest of AP' as two states, it would set a precedent for other such demands. The politicans with no issue to cook up are only waiting in the wings for an excuse such as this.
After all what better way to win an election than by whipping up mass movements for a 'cause'.

A marriage proposal

This landed in my mailbox last night
" Sir, this is with reference to your advertisement in ... I'm seeking an alliance to my daughter. Sm.t... I have attached a photography of my daughter and her bio data along with the horoscope. Kindly check if you find the horoscopes matching and if we can proceed further.
Signed.
xxxxx"
Attachments: Pic of a young lady and other documents!
Initially, I was taken aback and verified the email addresses. Obviously they had gotten the mail id wrong! Soon, I was laughing at the context of someone trying to match 'me' with their daughter.
Soon, I realized the enormity of this mistake and its consequences if it were to land with some mischief monger. They would have access to the complete bio data of a young woman !
Imagine the kind of harassment one could be subjected to.

The more I thought of it, it dawned on me that it is a kind of mistakes most Indian fathers of earlier generation are very likely to commit. They are not internet savvy, at least a vast majority Indian fathers today's adult children are not!

I shudder to think the kind of risks they are taking on the internet without realizing the consequences of such errors!
On the other hand, the era of internet has made this marriage making process too disconnected. I have seen many of my associates do their own match making by creating accounts in the name of their parents!
Gullible fathers of daughters who seem to forever get into a mindset where they would do anything and even bend backwards to 'service' the prospective grooms, sending full details of their daughters with photographs and salary details without first ensuring whether the party they are addressing are genuine!
In an age even personal information is wealth, there are professionals who harvest personal details for money, I shiver at the thought of my personal detail being gleefully harvested by a fat and bald man with a stubble and a torn banian!
I can only think, 'God! protect the good souls'

Apathy towards human life

Is it a problem of plenty? I really do not know, but, that's the only answer am able to come up with regarding the Indian government's attitude towards public safety!

Just this morning, I saw a news item that wrung my heart in despair. A grand father died of massive heart attack on hearing that his grandson had fallen into an open man hole! The child is yet to be spotted in the drain even after twenty four hours! It will be a miracle if the child is still alive! God willing he will be!

What a needless loss of life! An average Indian immediately will pounce with a thousand questions.

Why should there be an open man hole in the first place?

Why did the corporation leave it open?

Why did the public (not including the questioner) not inform the corporation?

Why did the child's parents let the child play 'near' the manhole?

and so on and so forth.

None of the questions matter, a life has been lost and another one is hanging in balance of hope and faith!

It has become a general Indian attitude at all levels to think that a problem is never our problem unless it directly affects us!

I'm sure the average citizen would have seen the manhole open and probably it was open for even days on end. "Corporation would close it!" we would have told ourselves! or we would have even ranted it out at corrupt and inefficient corporation officials for their sloppy attitude towards work!

But its rare when an average citizen endeavors to close the manhole! Yuck! who would touch it! Even the supreme court has declared that human beings cannot be used to get into man holes! we would say pulling a ruling out of context to our defence.

The moment we are affected, the government is to blame!

Even enterprising individuals are cut down by the average Indian! The other day a truck was parked in the main road obstructing the view of the main road in such a way that the smaller street joining the main road would not have a clear view of the on coming traffic before it joined the main road. When I walked by and told the truck driver to move his truck he says

"How does it affect you? move on.. "!

When I was riding a bus one day, a pick pocket was picking the pocket of a foreigner who was on the same bus and I happened to see it. I tried warning the foreigner to move away , which he did. But the pick pocket showed a big knife and threatened to attack me should I raise alarm and I did not and he got away!

Women are being socially abused, molested in public transport and other such places and yet we do not have an uprising amongst women that says 'enough is enough'! They put up a stoic silence and delegate the problem to be foreign to their nuclear world until the day dawns when their own wards face a similar problem!

Even at work, when a worker sees a problem in the system, he does not act on it. When a water pipe is leaking in the faucet, it is the plumbers problem, its not my job to close the water supply to the faucet and inform the administration, let some one else do it.

There is a section of society that is constantly drawing attention to such problems who are being given a deaf year on most accounts. Let us take the simple case of making our country disabled friendly.

Very few places in the public infrastructure are disabled and elderly friendly! The central government has taken note of this and has slowly started incorporating this at basic level in their establishments. For instance the entrance to the chennai railway station has a ramp for wheel chair access or for the elderly to use! But beyond this, the trains and platforms themselves are not all that accessible for disabled!

If the government is taking small steps, the private establishments are nowhere in this. In a country that's bustling with development and a booming economy, hardly any private establishment today takes effort to make their place disabled friendly. Even the larger amongst these such as big malls or multiplexes have taken little effort to make their services disabled friendly. We can perhaps count with one hand such facilities in this part of the country!

There are many such places in Indian society that we seem to have this proverbial 'chalta hai' attitude or 'care a damn what happens to others' attitude that must change!

It is when this attitude of the public changes , it is when we look upon social problems as our own problems will this country improve.

Mahatma Gandhi said that "Be the change you wish to see in others.". I'm going to try sincerely. You should too!

A Gratifying experience

Shopping for books are not usually a gratifying experience unless you walk in without knowing what to buy and end up buying a treasure trove.

Mine was slightly different. I wanted to buy Srimad Bhagavatam by Kamala Subramaniam and found out that a copy was available in Pushtak Bharati (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chennai) at Mylapore.

I rang up the book store and a gentleman answered the call. He was courteous and said that a copy was indeed available. My lazy self was wishing for a way to get a copy without having to go to the store (I work about say 2kms from the store) and asked him if the only way to get a copy was to visit the store.

To this he answered back saying that he can courier it or he could even have it dropped off. He then proceeded to ask me where I live to assess which option would suit me. I replied and he said he would personally drop it off on the way home.

The unassuming way he put this across some how made me feel ashamed of myself. I could make out from his language and voice that he was an elderly gentleman and here he was offering to come to my residence that in all probability is not exactly on his way and yet here he was offering to do a task I was too lazy to do myself.

I was so ashamed of myself and I told him not to bother himself to that extent and I would visit him.

I was in his store the twentieth minute! (so much for my laziness!) and I found him to be a very soft spoken and smiling gent who heartily congratulated me on my choice of book and said it was perhaps the best condensed book of the huge epic!

He then very courteously introduced himself as V.V.S.Manian and he told us that he and his wife ran the shop purely out for the pleasure it gives them to be among books!

The lady, a typical tam -brahm lady was the authority who was helping us with the books with her insight. She asked of us the reader's age and appropriately selected different copies of the epics that would suit them and even in different languages.

While she was helping out my friend find his books, I was browsing casually and chanced across this wonderful manuscript that read roughly 'All the four Vedas and the Upanishads" in tamil. It spoke in simple Tamil the meanings of various mantras that are a part of a Brahm's life. I found it very attractive and approached the lady to check whether the book would suit half baked Brahm's like me.

She heartily recommended the book and was happy that we were even endeavoring to read such books.

Then I told Mr.Manian that it was his offer on the phone to bring the book over prompted me to kick myself out my seat and come over to the store. I told him that I was glad I came over and learnt about the treasure trove he had.

He then told us that he has many customers who are aged and do not have the resources to come down to their shops and they usually courier it at no extra cost or they deliver it themselves in person if the location is en route. What is another 10 minutes of commute time if it brings pleasure to a customer Mr.Manian said.

I was moved by their warmth and genuineness.At the end of the trip, It was gratifying to have met two humble and genuine human beings.May their breed grow.

Are these guys brave or are they...?

There is a bunch of folks who believe that medication of any sort is an abuse of nature's purity that is human body.

Here is a mild example. A guy I know has the flu.. no not the swine one, the common variety, yes, the common /mild flu or whatever one calls it.

He had been suffering and coughing like a dying man for the last several months. One day I took pity on him and asked why his medications are not working. To this he responds with this proud look on his face as though he had just climbed Mt.Everest without even as much a rope in his hands..

"I don't take medications.."

I don't know If he expected me to look at him in awe, but my reaction was

"wonderful.. folks, lets give this guy an award for not taking medications.. " I was furious

Not only was this guy torturing himself, well am not furious about that, but I was furious because he had been coughing his life out in office spitting out god knows what germs into the air for months putting everyone around at risk.

Well, you might ask, what big of a risk, flu is.

But, my question is, however mild an infection or disease might be, why risk someone with it? Why?