Staring at a Blank Screen

Now this is kinda funny. I have been staring at the blank post screen for last 40 minutes or so trying to think of the next post but my fingers were just not ready to budge.
It so often happens with so many of us that if it's been a while since we have written then it becomes difficult to write again.
At such times either your mind has so many thoughts running or it goes completely blank, either ways you can't write.
In my case, it had been the former, have so many thoughts running in my mind. So many topics, so many things to say that it was becoming difficult to start anywhere on the blog post.
People call it writer's block but its a condition that every person who is into writing anything (not necessarily books and novels) faces every now and then.
I also have a similar problem with reading, if I don't read for a long time then it becomes pretty difficult for me to get back to reading and at such time my medicine is a murder mystery by Agatha Christie :)
Thankfully since I last year my book reading is going well as part off  "the book this week" program of my own, where I read and review a book every week.

But back to the "writer's block", what do you do when you are faced with such a condition? I know there is no cure as such for this condition but I am sure different people practice different things to come out of it. The easiest (and the most difficult) solution is to start writing.

And after more than half and hour that's what I am doing as part of this post. So this post might not make much sense (or may be it does) but bear with me as I try to come out of this block and start posting on this blog more frequently.

Procrastination is a devil. So if you have been waiting to write a post, an article, a book, a novel anything just start typing something and I am sure it will turn out into something good.

तुमको ना भूल पायेंगे

तुम से ही शुरू और तुम पे ख़त्म ये जिंदगी 
ख़ुदा से बढ़ कर करते थे तुम्हारी बंदगी ।
तुम न आये थे तो ज़िन्दगी वीराना थी 
युहीं दिन काटते ज़िन्दगी बिताना थी ।
तुम जो आये तो बहार आई थी 
जितनी ख़ुशी दुनिया में कभी सोची भी न थी उससे ज्यादा पाई थी ।
फिर ग़म की वो सुबह भी आई जब चारो तरफ सन्नाटा था 
मौत ने तुमको मेरे और अपने बीच में बांटा था ।
मौत से क्या गिला करता तुम इस जहाँ की सबसे खुबसूरत थी 
अकेला में न संभाल सकता इसलिए शायद मौत की ज़रुरत थी ।

तुम्हारे जाने के बाद दिल बड़ा उदास रहता है
ऐ मौत उसके साथ मुझे क्यूँ न ले गयी ये कहता है ।
इस जन्म क्या सारे जन्म चाहेंगे तुम्हे
इस ज़िन्दगी में न सही अगली ज़िन्दगी में ज़रूर पाएंगे तुम्हे ।

Who are the Real Terrorists?

The recent Oak Creek Gurudwara shooting once again proves how vulnerable we all are in this world. Be it the tribal of Assam or migrants residing in so called safe America.
In today's world it has become very difficult to identify who is the real terrorist and terrorism today unlike the earlier times has become a global problem and each and every country is facing terrorism in some or the other form.
There is terrorism in Gaza, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Spain, Italy, Denmark, UK, US, India,etc. almost all the countries of the world.
Every other day there is a news of a bomb attack, suicide attack, trains blown up in some part of the world.

The big question that begs the answer is who are these terrorists? This question has been asked a hundred million times by two hundred million people I am sure but the problem is, it has never been answered.
No country in the world is ready to answer it, be it Israel, Pakistan, USA, India or any other nation.
Should it be surmised then that the reason nations try to avoid this question is because they already know the answer to this question? Or simply put they exactly know who are the real terrorist.
Or in even more simpler terms the Nations themselves create these terrorists so they know who they actually are.
Doesn't USA knows if it hadn't been for its policies and its gun culture, there would have been much lesser deaths every year (15000 per year less deaths by an estimate)?
Doesn't Pakistan knows that Taliban is the one of the main source of terrorism but as the dependence of the people in Lahore is on Taliban, it continues to flourish and in the end it bites the same hand that feeds it?
Doesn't India know that Naxalites are none other than the natives of the land who had to let go of their lands, their resources for some stupid government policies or for some greedy corporate honchos and to get back what was their own they had to resort to the path of violence?

In some or the other way we all know who the real terrorists are and who creates them, our systems and values have become so hollow that all they churn out today are dissatisfied individuals who have been brought up in such an environment, where the only path they know to get what they want is of violence, of gun.

When a British teenager murders an Indian immigrant for no good reason, when a mad Joker kills tens of movie goers, when Naxalites kills hundreds of CRPF Jawans, should these Nations go out in search of terrorist or should they identify and root out the evils of the society within which is creating these internal terrorist?

What goes wrong every Olympics?

Another edition of Olympics is coming to an end and India has performed even worse than the last Olympics till now. 4 Medals in all, out of them 3 Bronze.
In a country of 1 billion plus where we insist we are an important nation in the world and we mean so much to the rest of the world, we have never been able to demonstrate it in Sports.
Being in top 10 in Olympics is a dream that probably another 100 generations won't be able to see.

The big question that never gets answered is, What goes wrong in every Olympics?

The ads of Hockey players before Olympics look so ridiculous now after they lost every single game they played in London. And we were thinking of bringing back the lost glory of Hockey.
Just look at the way Germans, Dutch, Argentine, Australian play the Hockey and you will loose all the hopes (if you mistakenly had any) from our Hockey team.
Look at that jumper who did 3 false start and was disqualified, even look at the likes of Abhinav Bindra and Gagan Narang who didn't even qualify in many events or stopped at a measly 20th spot or much worse.
Look at our world record holder Deepika Kumari in archery, she couldn't even reach to Bronze. The men's archery team was placed 9th in the 9 teams.

Doesn't these types of results ever get questioned? Every sportsman cribs about not getting enough support from government, not getting enough money and what not. But nobody is responsible or nobody takes accountability after the debacle. No sportsman is Man enough, it seems.
It seems we have become a country of cribbers and unless we change that attitude nothing will change at the Olympics front at least.
At least today there is enough money flowing in every sports, you have media, you have people with you. If one performs then it gets noticed. Even people who won medals in Commonwealth games got enough money, fame, television ads and what not.
But then it seems the fame and money gets to the head of these sportsman and nobody after that wants a career in sports but in everything else, be it dance shows, reality television, comedy shows, etc.

Why don't we as a country ever think about implementing a sports system like China or even like the smaller countries who concentrate on a few sports but at least comes back with medals? Countries smaller than a state of ours go back with a bunch of medals, a single athlete wins more Olympics medals in 3 Olympics than we as a country have won in total in all the editions of Olympics and we as a country are never ashamed so much so that we think about changing things.
And if we don't want to change things then let us just accept that we Indians do not have the capability to becoming world champions (except for may be in cricket which hardly 10 countries play) and that we do not have that caliber. At least after that we can stop funding these under-performing sports institutes and sportsman and utilize that money in some other needed areas.
Alas while even writing this article I m too confident that nothing drastically will change ever so its immaterial to even say that "its high time things change and people are held accountable", because till the time we have sportsman who continue to be involved in infighting, describing themselves as 'bait' and fighting to just hold the flag then nothing will change.
These sportsman don't believe in getting things by merit but by doing politics like us other Indians.

Should Anna Form a Political Party?

Seriously who cares now what Anna does now? This was the last nail in the coffin. 
Why this enlightenment today to Anna and his Team that they should have a referendum and ask the people of the country that should they float a political party?
Wasn't this the exact same thing all the Political Parties has been saying all this while? But then Anna and his team countered why every person should float a political party to remove corruption.
It clearly appears that this movement has gone directionless now, no one knows which direction to pull it in, so they are basically doing whatever they can.
By first refusing Ramdev and then inviting him, then first accusing few ministers, then all the ministers, then PM, then President, then Anna saying Congratulate the President and doing several back and forth Anna and his team has mislead the same janta, they vowed to lead in the movement for "Corruption Free India".


This could serve as a good case study as to how to self-destroy a good movement.

Technology at the London Olympics 2012

Technology is prevalent in all the walks of life and any event small or big is touched by it at many facets. Technology has completely changed the way events are being held today.

The biggest event of this year the London Olympics 2012 have recently started. This is as big as an event can get. And once again use of technology can be seen in each and every aspect of the Olympics, from recording the personal best of athletes to resolving the conflicts by capturing micro second details to testing the athletes for banded substances.

Olympics have come back to United Kingdom after 1948 and back then there was hardly any technology, the face of the Olympics has completely changed now.

Look at the below astonishing facts of the usage of technology in the ongoing London Olympics 2012:

1. The mammoth scale of the technological challenge is put into perspective when you consider that across the Olympic Park and another 94 venues, 3417 miles of networking cabling has been laid as well as 621 miles of broadcast cables. These cables will, among other things, power and connect 16,400 Acer PCs, 10,000 Panasonic televisions, 390 scoreboards from Omega, 16,500 fixed line telephones, 900 servers and a whopping 110,000 individual pieces of technology equipment.

2. Acer has the 1,200 square meter Acer Park Pavilion, a three-storey structure located close to the athletes' village in the Olympic Park.

3. According to London 2012 bosses, a whopping 466 million photos and 334 years worth of video will be captured during the event with multimedia data generated at a rate of six gigabytes every single second.

4. All the action from every venue will be captured by the Olympic Broadcasting Services using 1223 cameras and more more than 621 miles of broadcast cable. Their pictures will then be distributed around the world with the BBC responsible for showing them in the UK.

5. The BBC itself will provide 2500 hours of live coverage on TV and online with 24 new high-definition channels created purely for the Games, four times more than used in Beijing in 2008.

6. Japan's public broadcaster NHK along with the OBS are also helping to show the games in Super Hi-Vision, a successor to HD known as Ultra High Definition. It delivers picture quality 16 times sharper than HD with three special cinemas in Bradford, Glasgow and London set up to showcase this technology using Olympic broadcasts.

7. Robotic remote cameras are used by photo journalists to get shots from positions normally unattainable.

8. Over at the Olympic Park, Panasonic has provided three 152inch plasma screens - referred to as the world's largest - along with 42 of the 103inch version. These will be mounted at venues for spectators to see instant replays and action as it happens while Panasonic are also helping produce 200 hours of 3D Games coverage with their own 3D broadcast cameras.

9. A unique web portal was setup to help London 2012 recruits more than 70,000 volunteers for Games.

10. Underwater cameras for better shots at the swimming and diving events.

11. Sports doctors have access to high-tech equipment to diagnose musculoskeletal injuries at the London Olympic Village, home to up to 16,000 athletes during the Olympics

12. Athletes can use computers and laptops provided by sponsors at the London Olympic Village.

13. Working with Adobe, they are also providing live video-on-demand giving surfers one-click access to catch-up on key moments from each sport whether on PCs, smartphones or tablets.

14. Visa has also installed contactless payment technology at every venue making London 2012 the first Olympics where contactless cards and NFC-enabled mobile phones can be used to pay with.

15. Around London, O2 has just launched free Wi-Fi throughout the games in partnership with Westminster Council. It means anyone will be able log online across the West End of the capital near landmarks such as Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square and Parliament Square.

16. And as the athletes from more than 200 countries compete, timekeepers Omega will be on hand with 420 tons of equipment to ensure every last millionth of a second counts. There will be 450 Omega professionals operating 70 public scoreboards and 320 sport-specific scoreboards managed by 111 miles of cable and speedy optical fiber connections.

17. A number of individual athletes and teams have been using Apple iOS apps as part of their preparations. They include camera and movie software to capture training sessions to watch back and analyze; the likes of Runkeeper to monitor training times; Stroke-Coach, used by Team GB's rowers to show average rowing rates and speeds; and Gymaware, which helps weightlifters achieve better acceleration during their sets.

18. With so much technology behind-the-scenes, it's no wonder organizers have already carried out 200,000 hours of software testing in a bid to ensure a smooth fortnight without crashes, slowdowns or technical hitches.

The competition keeps on getting fiercer Olympics after Olympics and technological advancements grows by leaps and bounds now we can only imagine what technology, gadgets, gizmos we would see at the Olympics 20 years from now.

Surface: Consumption vs. Creation - Does it really matter?

With Microsoft coming out with its tablet Surface last month (in the process getting a pat on the back for coming out with an un-Microsoft like device) the debate of Consumption vs. Creation has gathered momentum.

People have often questioned the tablets (and probably some have deferred their decisions to buy a tablet) for their capability of creating content. Often the market leader of tablet,  IPad has also heard similar criticism, i.e. you can watch videos, read a e-books and other PDF documents, play some games, etc. but there is less on the creation front that one can do on a tablet.

Now to give a competition to Apple, Microsoft has come out with 2 versions of Surface, one built on top of Windows RT (Which is a scaled down version of Windows 8 OS) due for  a release in 3 months and one built on top of Windows 8 Pro (which will be sort of an ultrabook with a digital ink stylus) which will be released even later.

In short, following are the main features of Surface:

1. Built on Windows RT Operating System
2. Has a removable rubberized keyboard and a Kickstand
3. 9.3 mm thick and weighs 1.5 pounds
4. Comes with Microsoft Office 2013
5. The other advanced version would be 14 mm thick and will weigh under 2 pounds and will run Windows 8 Pro operating system

1

All these features are considered to be excellent features when it comes to a tablet. For the people who have been working with keyboard and mouse since ages find tablet cumbersome to operate and not useful to create content. The other argument is, on a tablet (including IPad) the maximum you can type (easily) is 140 characters.

For such people Surface brings a relief and will give them back their known domain of Keyboard and MS Office through which they are for sure going to create on a tablet as well.

But the question that begs the answer is does it really matter that we get the ability to create on a tablet in addition to consume the content?

In today’s world of ever changing technologies we have devices for all of our needs and we do not carry only one that caters to all the needs. We have Smartphone, desktops, laptops, tablets, MP3 Players, e-book readers, etc.

And we use each of these devices as per our requirement and convenience, although we can make calls through Skype with a headphone & mic but we would prefer to do it over a phone (as long as the charges are same). One can read an e-book on Smartphone or a laptop as well but prefers to do it on a e-book reader. Similarly when we want to do some fast typing or create contents than we would like to do that on a laptop or desktop where there are no keyboard space constraints and we get enough display space too.

On the launch of Surface Steve Ballmer said "Much like Windows 1.0 needed the mouse to complete the experience, we wanted to give Windows 8 its own companion hardware innovation". Which probably from MS point of view could be right but it certainly does not extends to the conclusion that a keyboard is essential for creation on a tablet.

If creation was so essential for a tablet and was not supported through a tablet, wouldn’t Apple have thought about adding a keyboard as well in the already existing 3 versions of IPad (and you definitely can do that through an Apple supported keyboard, it’s just not part of the tablet) and even better would Apple have been able to sell close to 100 million IPad and another 100 million planned in next year, without such a feature.

These numbers flies in the face of the argument that Creation is important on a tablet.

The young breed who wakes up to an IPad or other tablets in the name of technology and gadgets might not even feel the need of a traditional keyboard (certainly the mouse is obsolete) and they will still be creating exciting and excellent content.

Recently I saw a video on TEDEX where a children book author has created an excellent application on IPad for children. It was an interactive application where children can use gestures, hand movements, shaking the IPad and other features to get the experience of visiting a fairy land. Such creativity and interactivity is definitely possible on a tablet.

The one word that describes today’s tablets and SmartPhones are Apps. The applications are giving way to app. The app is the highly specific task – for both consumption and creativity – that our tablets are optimized for.

And lastly who said that the only methods of input are mouse and keyboard? This is a old world thinking on which MS has based Surface. It’s a new world today, there are new ways to interact with device today and apps are definitely one way to go. You think about it and you will find other means of input to the device. Isn’t the IPod shuffle feature one way of interacting with your IPod?

Consumption vs. Creation debate is overhyped and although Microsoft may score a few points with the additional Keyboard on Surface, it has a long way to go to capture the tablet market, several measures need to be taken and one of them would be releasing the products on time.