My hand got sprained. Had severe pain. Applied balm but wasnt cured. Then i knew the reason. I forgot to add a try catch block at the part where i had pain. i corrected this and recompiled. It was cured. But then i woke up and i still have pain

Copy Cats

Yesterday Priyadarshans Bhool Bhulaiya was released and as usual its again a copy. This time its Manichithrathazhu , one of the best movies to come out of Malayalam film industry. Was just going thru all the pre release reports in websites and i felt dissapointed that the movie's suspense was destryoyed by them.

Talking of copied versions, I was surprised to see this ad in todays paper


























It was very much similar to something i had seen before and I was right. Naveen's Ad mad had this ad of Australia Post.

Australia Post says "If you really want to touch someone, send them a letter"

iball says "Touching lives is personal... express in your own handwriting"

Kummatty(1979)

Director - G.Aravindan

*Contains Spoilers*
Saw this movie last Sunday..

IMHO this could have been a 30-45 minute film. The first half is really boring. we cant figure out whats happening. Only thing that's shown is children playing, attending class and all with lots of songs in background. All these are really dragging and makes us wonder where the story is. I was wondering whether there is one. Well there was one and a very good ending.

Set in a village, the film revolves around Kummatty(played by Ramunni) , Chindan and his friends- all around 7-10 years old. The children who are scared of kummaty in the first half of the film later befriends him. He even joins them in their plays .Then one day kummatty decides to leave the place and plays with the children for one last time.Kummatty, who is also a magician converts each of them into an animal for some time.Chindan gets converted into a dog and he runs away while the rest of them stays back. kummatty transforms each of them back to their original form except Chindan who had fled.Chindan has a long journey and reaches a house in nearby town where a girl likes him and keeps him as her pet. Now Chindan is caged and is always troubled by the other dogs in the house. he falls ill and her father offers a Pomeranian instead of Chindan.the girl lets Chindan go who runs back to his home.His mother recognizes him and he is treated the same was as he was a human.His parents try some rituals to transform him back to his old form but in vain. An year passes and Kummatty comes back and immediately transforms Chindan back to human.In the next scene Chindan frees his pet bird from the cage.

Read Aravindan's interview about the movie

Trivia -
According to this link Jacqueline Kennedy happened to see this movie and was impressed by the scenic beauty of Kerala. She soon visited the state

Shaji N Karun was the Cinematographer

Landmarked

It was around 7am on a fine Sunday morning some 7-8 months back when my sleep was interrupted by a phone call. It was my colleague Rajesh and the first thing that came to my mind was "Oh no something seems to be not working". But what he said really irritated me. He was attending something in landmark at forum mall and wanted me to join him at Tuesday evening when it was getting over.

Me: "What is this?"
Rajesh: "Its really amazing. Its going to change your life"
I wanted to say "Why? it seems perfect for me. I don't want a change". but i asked him "how?"
He again said that its something really amazing and you should attend to experience it.
I asked him the timings and he told me its from 7.30 to 10.45 pm
"10.45!!? i don't have a vehicle to come back. will you drop me back?"
"no i have someone else with me"
"oh..let me see..but i don't think i can"
by this time i was almost convinced that he lost his money attending this seminar and wanted to register me so that he can get something back.
he continued persuading me and i cooked up some lie the next day to evade him

Meanwhile i came to realize that this had nothing to do with forum mall or landmark book shop and he is not going to get any money by making me join. it was a programme called Forum conducted by Landmark education

He continued asking me to attend this ever since from then on. almost every two days he used to remind me what opportunity i was missing.This coupled with frequent phone calls from him to all people he knew asking them to do the same made me think that there was something in it. Finally I asked him whether i can attend one on morning? At that time they started having this session on Sunday mornings also and i happened to attend it with my wife.This was in last November

What i saw there was really amazing.We were told what the forum is all about and it really sounded interesting. After that some people started sharing their experience after attending the forum.There was one man who wasn't having good relationship with his brothers for years. After attending Forum he not only had a very good relation but even went on to save one of his brothers marriage which was on the verge of collapse. There was a woman who said that after attending this she started loving her job which she was hating earlier. Then there was a doctor who really didn't want to attend but upon attending this he completed further courses and started a project to treat people in old age home. And a biz man who happened to make amazing profit after attending forum. Naturally we were moved by these experiences and we decided to register for it.

Now after attending the forum , I have only one thing to say "IT'S AMAZING!!". we were quite skeptical before attending this. One main concern was the timings. i really couldn't figure out how to sit from 9am to midnight for 3 days (for us it concluded by 10.30pm on all days) .We were doubtful whether we would be able to sit for such a long time listening to a single person, that too for 3 whole days(they give breaks in between). Our forum was led by Praveen Puri who promised us that by the time forum is over we will be in love with him. Infact we found it difficult to say goodbye when it all ended. as he said all were in love with him.We had 3 days of fun and some real serious thinking.

I would recommend this for all. you will really love this.

Who was that terrorist?

Who was Deano refering to as terrorist?
It was widely reported that it was Amla. Then Deano himself said that it was Boje. But based on scoreboard it has to be Pollock.

Rahul Battacharya has come up with an excellent write up on this.

Legal proceedings initiated by every South African cricketer is now on the cards as reports from within the team suggest that the players feel that if Jones was not sure which of Amla or Boje or Pollock he was calling a terrorist, it is just as likely that he could have been calling any of the other team members a terrorist. The Player's Association is also expected to bring legal action against the Sydney Morning Herald, "which endorsed Jones's lethal manipulation of previous insults to heap scorn on the mental injury suffered by Mr Amla, tarnish the reputation of Mr Boje, diminish the achievements and damage the confidence of Mr Pollock, and to cast in a suspicious light the entire republic of South Africa."

Read it here

Lagey Raho...

I wonder whether any other movie in recent times has made such an impact as lagey raho munna bhai has done.

"Munnabhai would have been proud. The Hindi film that demonstrates the validity of Gandhian principles in today’s world, found a practical outlet in Lucknow on Wednesday where a group of people demonstrated to remove a liquor shop that runs 15 metres from a temple in the city’s Rana Pratap Marg."
read more here

Wiki's description of the term

And here is a forum that discusses more about Gandhigiri
here is one entry from this forum

there is a residence colony near my office called indira nagar , they had a big headache of regular eveteasers , finally a group called young mens forum & the girls who were subject to eave teasing together started visiting the houses of evetasers and distributing sweets & garlanding mothers & sisters of the eveteasers , there were intial problems including a scuffle among them & the group , but they were persistent & kept doing this everyday ...finally after a week the eveteasers stopped completely and are not to be seen...

And for all those in orkut here is the community

The war of the search engines

I have been getting some free time recently which was mainly spent orkuting and reading wikipedia articles. Also some googling as usual and then I tried to figure out which was the best search engine available.There has been claims by both Yahoo and Google about the efficiency of their search engines and it was high time to figure out which one is really the best. Now I didn't do any rigorous experiments to figure that out but just searched with this key word - "search engine".

First I went to Yahoo(which I have used rarely) and the results were quite obvious. Yahoo Search was ranked first with rivals Google, Altavista , Dogpile and Hot Bot taking the next places. No surprises here.

Well many of us believe Google is the best available in the net and if they are to be believed the Dogpile should be number one as the search returned it in the first place which was followed by Altavista , Metacrawler, Google UK and finally Google itself taking the 5th spot

Also tried a search with this - "best search engine"

This time yahoo agree that it is Google , Yes Google is placed first, followed by www.Search.com and Dogpile. I searched the rank for yahoo but failed to see it in the first 50 results

The same search in Google once again returned Dogpile as No 1. These came 2nd and 3rd and http://www.infopeople.org/search/chart.html followed by Google

PS: One interesting observation made during the publishing of this post - The spell checker provided by blogger doesnt recognize the word google

World cup prophecies

"Forecasts from football specialists and sports analysts are not enough for many die-hard fans of the most popular game in the world. Many of them go to fortune-tellers and astrologers. Spanish journalists managed to find a prediction about the outcome of the World Cup 2006 made by world-known foreteller Nostradamus in 1555. They believe that the Spanish team will be the winner of the championship this year."

says Pravda . Read the report on this prophecy here.