I’m at a loss of words, there is nothing I know of that’s quite comparable to these things. These are very advanced noise cancellation head phones. Sounds as good as the best speakers in the world. And noise cancellation is so good that you can listen to an audio book in low volume while walking in Chennai roads.
Pallavi took me to an Odissi/Bharatanatyam show at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan at Mylapore, last Saturday. The performance was called Krishna leela and it was a depiction of specific incidents taken from lord Krishna’s life, starting from the celebrations upon the birth of lord Krishna, the slaying of Poothana, his playful childhood, his love for stolen butter, the taming of Kaliya, lifting of Govardhana giri, his mischiefs with the Gopis and ending with the divine love of Radha-Krishna.
It was the first classical dance performance that I’ve seen live, and it was done in such a grand scale by extremely powerful dancers, that I was totally moved. All dancers were female (even Krishna was played by 3 female artists, one young, and two older) artists except one male, who played the roles of Poothana/Kaliya.
Music was played live, the song was in Hindi, but I was able to pick up random words from here and there. I was anyways aware of the stories so didn’t have much trouble following it.
What better story can you get to watch than that of Krishna? These are stories that we’ve heard/read hundreds of times and they still bring infinite joy when we see it retold. The show inspired me to buy a copy of Srimad Bhagavatam today. Would start reading after finishing around 5 other books that are already in the queue. Had a great weekend all together.
I’m saying this way too late – by more than 2 months, but better now than never: For all those who had wished me on Orkut on my birthday, I’m very sorry for not responding on time. My laptop died around my birthday and I didn’t even have a way to update my wishlist with on time for the b’day. So for everyone who had wished me:
Hello after yet another nice long gap. Enough time for me to forget I even had a blog. Eight months of bad maintainace has left it in a very bad shape. Around 27000 spam comments in all posts together. I’m not going to delete them, I don’t have the patience to dig into the db structure of wordpress. Akismet says it has also blocked around 90000 comments.
I’m amused to see Google reader telling me that even now, there are around 5 people subscribing to my rss feeds. I’ll bet none of them use Google reader anymore, and if they still do, they must be extremely lazy people or must like me very very much!
There has been more activity in my life in this gap – I joined Citicorp around 2 months back, and got my first fully Linux job, which makes me a happy man. After working for a startup company for an year, it feels very different to be for a large organization where there are seperate departments for everything. It might make you think life is very comfortable for me. Yes it is. Problem is the pace at which things progress.
Next sad thing is that internet is highly restricted. Web mail sites are blocked and our in-boxes are monitored 
Community sites, streaming media sites are all blocked. But life is still good (i.e., I still don’t get the time to think if its good.) and I’m learning more and more and more new things here including a lot of productivity tools (which I had denied myself so foolishly until recently)
I’ve read 3 Salman Rushdie novels and almost done with the fourth, but as this post makes evident, it has not had any effect on my vocabulary [yet].
I’ll try my best to write random things just to keep the blog alive. I realise I’ve missed around 1 year worth of posts just for me to look back at, if for nothing else.
I’ve got a new blog.
http://sahas.ra.naman.ms
This is where I intend to blog about all tech stuff that I’d want to write about. I’m not sure when even the first post will come, but I have the place ready. From now, this blog will purely be for my activities.
After another long break. This is what has been happening: I resigned from Accel Animation Studios around 5 months back, and joined Uniphore Software Systems on the 22nd of September, 2008, which incidentally happens to be my birth day too. Uniphore was incubated out of RTBI, which is a part of IIT Madras.
Uniphore builds voice based IVR systems in Indian languages using Automated Speech Recogniton. Uniphore has also developed a patent pending technology which helps improve speech regocnition accuracy to very high levels.
Out of all the researches and experiments happening at Uniphore, one of the very interesting products that has come out is Noddler. Noddler is a platform for developers and businesses to create IVR applications easily. All you have to do is come to the Noddler SANDBOX site, create a call flow and then, you have your very own menu driven IVR application ready. You can also get it to interact with your APIs, both get data for the IVR application to speak or recognize, and to send the caller’s responses to your server. The GUI for building the applications is slightly slow and ugly, but we’re working on it too.
Once you create an application, it goes into the sandbox where you can test it. Once we’re happy with the application too, we can proceed towards making the application live.
There are a lot of more things happening, but this is all I can say for the time being. Expect to see more exciting things, and register at Noddler and try the services to get a feel of what your final applications would be like. If you are a developer, do try out the Noddler SANDBOX.
“You think you know that it does that, because the things that go wrong in life doesn't mean you can go on and do things that aren't too bad, because you say things that don't matter and belong to you. You think everything is okay, but no it isn't and I don't appreciate everyone and everything to say things that do that, because you go on and you are distant and that's making me feel as if I was far away and you left. I don't understand what it takes in your mind to think you know everything, because I know that, but you know i'm here and you know that everything is okay, but you need to learn how to learn to talk and communicate because I don't understand these lies. They hurt me and all you do is say things and no, it's not polite. It goes and makes me feel sad. I know you go on and say "no no no" and I go do the angie jane and you know that I do it so I can feel like I know the things I need to know, so you can underestimate everything, because of the things I do for love. ”
~ Evanescence fan on life This is the first time I’m staying away from home for Diwali. There were lots of awesome fireworks in the sky and I loved watching them. I went for a short walk in the evening to T-Nagar to get dinner. Although the smoke and pollution from the fire works almost knocked me out, I was happy to see that people were compensating for the pollution they were causing by not going any where. The roads were absolutely free, so less pollution from traffic.
I don’t understand how poor people without ACs could have slept that night, but to hell with them. We can’t compromise on the fun!! It was good entertainment to watch the cool fireworks on the sky – people were kinda competing with eachother – showing off.
They’re all liars who say the end of the world is near. We’ve been celebrating Diwali for thousands of years, after all. Nothing has happened yet. And even if the world is going to end, it isn’t going to end in the next 60 years, and that is long enough for me.
My parents and grand parents have taught me why we celebrate diwali, but I honestly don’t remember.But that’s ok, because I still remember the basics (lol), and I still remember that people do fireworks on Diwali. I love the idea of religious faith and I respect my religion, but just like every other good thing about religions that these foolish non-religious bastards have ruined, Diwali too, will just be a sad and depressing day for me. Yea, and noisy too.