Glass half empty

Whenever I read an article by Somini Sengupta, I feel it to be leaning more towards showing the negative side of things. Just consider the heading of her last few articles in NYTimes.

• Even Amid Its Wealth, India Finds, Half Its Small Children Are Malnourished


• Indian Army and Police Implicated in Kashmir Killings


• Former Cabinet Officials Arrested In Bangladesh Corruption Sweep


• Ethnic Unrest in Southern Plains Undermines Peace Pact in Nepal


• Debate in India: Is Rule on Yoga Constitutional?


• Putin in India: Visit Is Sign Of Durability Of Old Ties


• MEMO FROM LONDON; Some TV Contestants Feel More Equal Than Others


• In Bangladesh, State of Emergency and Election Delay


• India Prosperity Creates Paradox; Many Children Are Fat, Even More Are Famished

How about something positive Somini? Get some zoloft and lift your spirits to see that the glass could be half full too and not just half empty. Are you paid to write a "balanced" report so you have to fill your articles with qualms in the body as well as the title? It is hard to believe that even after the whole world has noticed India's progress, you refuse to see anything positive without any reservations. May be someone else is making that decision for you.

Pray for normalcy when dealing with big banks

Seems like my friend, Cedric, had a bad time dealing with Wells Fargo support. I completely empathize with him and can only hope that these big banks become a little more nimble about changing their stupid rules. Even though there is no monopoly in banking, why are these banks like this? Don't they want more customers and don't they want to grow their base or are they so overwhelmed with their existing customer base that they are happy increasing their bottom line by introducing other products and slapping hidden fees to unsuspecting customers?

I have been with Bank of America for over 7 years and fortunately have never been troubled so much with such an event. Sure there are times when I go "Doh! How can you have such a policy" but then, the person I am talking to is usually not someone who can do anything about it. I have had major issues with ICICI bank while sending money to India but then there are no better choices. So, my mantra in dealing with banks is, just pray that you only have to deal with the banks under "normal" circumstances. If you find yourself in any abnormal situation, don't boil your blood over their stupidity. Just remember to say, "God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to see the difference".

पुष्प की अभिलाषा

This was one of my favorite poems in school.

चाह नहीं मैं सुरबाला के
गहनों में गूँथा जाऊँ

चाह नहीं प्रेमी माला में
बिंध प्यारी को ललचाऊँ

चाह नहीं सम्राटों के शव पर,
हे हरि डाला जाऊँ

चाह नहीं देवों के सर पर चढूँ,
भाग्य पर इठलाऊँ

मुझे तोड़ लेना बन-माली,
उस पथ पर देना तुम फेंक

मात्रभूमि पर शीश चढ़ाने
जिस पथ जायें वीर अनेक!

- माखन लाल चतुर्वेदी

Beckham Retires

David Beckham signs a $250 million, 5 year contract with a struggling MLS team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, and will leave the spotlight of European Soccer in style. Read the NYTimes Report.

Open your eyes and save your heart

LittleIndia, a small magazine available freely in Indian grocery stores and restaurants and targeted towards Indians immigrants in America, ran a cover story on Killer Belly. It mostly talks about how recent research throughout the world has show how Indians, even seemingly healthy looking ones, are more inclined to having a heart disease and dying young. Dr. Enas A. Enas, Director of the Coronary Artery Disease among Asian Indians (CADI) Research Foundation and Advanced Heart Lipid Clinic in Downers Grove, Ill, and a clinical associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been doing this pioneering research since last 15 years. The article contains good anecdotal accounts of people getting heart diseases at a young age and lot of statistical data. This acted as a shock therapy for most of them as they got a bad wake up call when they were tested after their heart pain episodes. I know couple of my friends, who at a young age of 30, have to worry about decreasing their cholesterol. While you can read the article for more details, I will try and highlight some important points for my friends.

If you're an Indian woman and measure more than 32 inches or an Indian man over 35 inches, brace yourself.

U.S. studies have found that Indians in the United States have three to four times the heart disease rate of the mainstream U.S. population.

Indian men, no matter where they live, have one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world, even if they have low levels of traditional risk factors such as cholesterol. In fact, even non-smoking vegetarians under 40 who exercise regularly may be at high risk.

Under mainstream standards, a BMI of 25 is considered normal, 25-30 is considered overweight and more than 30 is considered obese.

Dr. Enas says:

A BMI of 23-25, which is normal for Americans, is considered overweight for Indians and 25 becomes obese

Indians have a genetic predisposition and if you have a family history you know you have a higher risk of heart disease

We quickly develop abdominal obesity and that leads to the condition known as metabolic syndrome, whereby your triglycerides and small, dense LDL, the worst part of bad cholesterol, goes up, while HDL2B, the best part of your good cholesterol, goes down.

Sure genetics is one of the main reason why we get heart diseases, but environmental factors, namely food, smoking/alcohol habits and physical activity, contributes in a big way. The key is to do the right exercise. One has to do an exercise which not only increases the heart rate but also maintains it at that level for at least 45 mins to an hour. Most of the people know that they are not doing enough cardio but they keep procrastinating as they think that if nothing is broke, why fix it. This is the prime reason why it has become a silent killer. Atherosclerosis, or accumulation of plaque in arteries, can happen so silently that in lot of cases, its not even visible through a regular ECG exam. Usually, when you actually get some kind of chest pain thats when you find out and by that time lot of damage has already been done.

Dr. Enas says:

Early testing, aggressive treatment, and diligent management of risk factors through lifestyle alterations is imperative among Indians to reduce the devastating economic, emotional, and social consequences to the individual and society that premature, severe, malignant heart disease currently poses to Indians everywhere.

Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger. So if you get heart disease, don't blame your parents and grandparents. Do something.

You can find the introduction about Dr. Enas here and read the first chapter of his new book "How to beat the heart disease epidemic among south asians - A prevention and management guide for Asian Indians and their Doctors".

Bloglines Rules

I know some of you already use bloglines.com but I started using it just a few weeks ago. I feel so much connected now. Bloglines makes it so easy to keep track of all the blogs you read on a regular basis. It shows you all the blogs as unread mail folders and whenever you access any of the folders (blogs) it shows you the summary of all the new blog posts. It also has AJAX enabled updates so your blogline window gets updated without you having to manually refresh the window.

Rock on Bloglines.

Inspired

I was looking at various projects listed on this Indicorps website when I came across this list of fellows. To my surprise, these are all the kids raised in the US or other countries, going and living in rural/urban India to give back to the country. This way, they get a good international experience and get to learn a lot about India by living and traveling. Hats off to the kids who have done this or are doing this right now and hats off to their parents for providing their kids with good guidance and financial security.

Suddenly the stereotypical image of an Indian-American kid crumbles. I do not know a single 'desi' guy/girl who have done this. Perhaps because they are still in the process of setting up their own financial foundation and security. Perhaps...

Create your own Jackson Pollock

NYTimes reports that David Martinez, a Mexican financier, just bought a Jackson Pollock's drip painting, "No. 5, 1948", for $140 Mil. from a Hollywood entertainment magnate, David Geffen.

Well, what do I know about art, but you can create your own drip painting at this website.

Image Courtesy: NY Times

Surati Ghazal

Gujarati reading skills: Required

Read it in a surati/parsi style

It took me a while to get this but once you get it, its pretty funny. I couldn't stop laughing for a while. Hats off to whoever wrote this.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

You must have heard the news last year about how the creationists on the Kansas School Board advocated that the Intelligent Design Theory be taught in the classroom along with the Scientific Darwinian theory of Evolution. This year voters voted noncreationists in majority (6 to 4). Well, someone here has written this open letter to Kansas School Board. Its simply brilliant.

I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

San Jose Rock 'n Roll Half Marathon

Most of you know I ran the San Jose Rock 'n Roll Half Marathon last Sunday. I have been telling the same thing to lots of people so I will just create a post to share this with everyone. The first marathon I ran was San Francisco, US Half. SJ RnR was certainly easier as the course is almost flat with no big hills like SF US-half. There were lots of rock bands on the way. Water stations were arranged at good distance and they had gel shots at mile 9. Perfect!

My performance:

• ChipTime: 2:27:25
  
• ClockTime: 2:28:55
  
• Overall: 5376
  
• Pace: 11:15
  
• Total_in_race: 8291
  
• Total_in_division (30-34): 552
  
• Total_in_sex (M): 3487
  
• 5k: 35:16
  
• 10k: 1:09:12
  
• 10mi: 1:52:55
  
• Age grade: 39%
  

After the finish line, they had wet towels, sprinklers to get yourself wet, finisher's medal, spanego sponsored sandals to get out of those sweaty shoes, bagels, muffins, energy bars and water bottles.

The course was such that the 6th and 13th mile were overlapping. So, when I was about to reach the 6 mile marker, I could see the Kenyans zipping past me to finish their race. The first ranker, Duncan Kibet ran the 13.2 miles distance in 1:00:22 at sub 5 min/mile pace. Simply amazing. First woman to finish was a Russian Silvia Skvortsova who completed the race in 1:09:17.

Overall experience was very positive. I will definitely recommend this run if you want to improve your timing.

Brainy Bay Area

Three Nobel Prizes in three days. With Stanford, UCB and UCSF in 50 mile radius and an environment of innovation, anything is possible in the Bay Area.

Planet or not, fun facts about Pluto

1 Astronomical Unit (AU)	= 93 000 000 miles
1 light year	= 63 000 AU
	= 58 00 000 000 000 miles (5.8 trillion miles)
Speed of light	= 186 000 miles / second

Pluto, is about the farthest planet (now dwarf-planet) located in the Kuiper belt, about 31-51 AU far from earth. That means light will take between 4-8 hours to reach pluto from earth.

To calculate - ( (31 or 51) * 93000000) / (186 000 * 3600) = 4.3 or 7.08 hours

I think its a great thing that we are looking at and questioning the definition of a planet as and when we discover new objects in the Kuiper belt. It shows whether we are ready to learn and question our own beliefs and assumptions. I don't think it matters to Pluto or for that matter any other object whether we call it a planet or a dwarf-planet. It will exist in the shape and form its supposed to and will move in the same fashion it is supposed it. Its more for us, whether we want to include more objects in our planet system or not based on our old definitions and new discoveries.

Refer to UCAR website for more details - http://www.windows.ucar.edu/

Read about Pluto, Kuiper belt objects (KBOs), 2003 UB₃₁₃

Some other interesting facts

• Our milky way galaxy has about 200 billion more stars like Sun
• The width of our galaxy is about 90 000 light years
• The Sun (and our solar system) is revolving around the center of the Galaxy at a speed of 0.5 million miles an hour, but it still takes 200 million years for it to go around once.

Yeh Hai Meri Kahani - Zinda

Its been a while since a good hindi song touched my heart. I love oldies because of the melody and more importantly the lyrics. Newer songs are sometimes melodious but still don't cut it to be called poems..However, this song from Zinda really touched my heart so wanted to share it with you all. It is sung by a pakistani group - Strings.

यह है मेरी कहानी – ज़िन्दा
Singers – Strings, John Abraham
Lyrics – अनवर मक्सूद

यह है मेरी कहानी
ख़ामोश ज़िन्दगानी
सन्नाटा कह रहा है
क्यूँ ज़ुल्म सह रहा है

एक दासतां पुरानी
तनहाई की ज़ुबानी
हर ज़ख्म खिल रहा है
कुछ मुझ से कह रहा है

चुभते काँटे यादों के दामन से चुनता हूँ
गिरती दीवारों के आँचल में ज़िन्दा हूँ

बस यह मेरी कहानी
बेनिशां निशानी
एक डर बह रहा है
कुछ मुझसे कह रहा है

चुभते काँटे यादों के दामन से चुनता हूँ
गिरती दीवारों के आँचल में ज़िन्दा हूँ

बजाए प्यार की शबनम मेरे गुलिस्तां में
बरसते रहते हैं हर सिम्ट मौत के साए
स्याहियों से उलझ पडती है मेरी आँखें
कोई नहीं .... कोई भी नहीं जो बतलाए
मैं कितनी देर उजालों की राह देखूँगा
कोई नहीं ... है कोई भी नहीं
न पास न दूर
एक प्यार है
दिल की धड़कन
अपनी चाहत का जो एलान किए जाती है
ज़िन्दगी है जो जिए जाती है
खून के धूँट पिए जाती है
ख्वाब आँखों से सिए जाती है

अब न कोई पास है
फि़र भी एहसास है
स्याहियों में उलझी पडी
जीने की एक आस है
यादों का जंगल यह दिल
काँटों से जलथल यह दिल

चुभते काँटे यादों के दामन से चुनता हूँ
गिरती दीवारों के आँचल में ज़िन्दा हूँ

Aggressive teams in WC 2006

World Cup 2006 is turning out to be a very entertaining world cup to watch. I remember watching the games in the previous world cups with only a handful of attacks, but in this WC, the teams are playing very aggresively. The african teams from Ivory Coast and Trinidad and Tobago gave awesome fight to heavy weight European teams before going down. Ecuador is sitting on top of the group with Germany. The classic heavyweights are looking very sharp this year. Brazil, Argentina, England, Germany are putting up quite a show out there. The fans are amazing and the atmosphere in the stadiums is almost always "electric".

Czech - 3 USA - 0

In the first opening match of Group E against Czech republic, USA succumbed to a 3-0 loss. The Czech team was assumed to be a slower and older team but people forgot that experience is something that is only beatable by superior skills, which the US showed very little of in today's game. The towering czech forward Jon Koller at 6' 7" scored a dream goal in the fifth minute. From this early setback, it felt like the USA never recovered. They were very defensive and scared to tackle one-on-one. After the second goal, they should have been more agressive and should have been trying to make a goal with urgency, but instead of trailing 2-0 to the Czechs, the US team played a slow safe game. They weren't be able to go past the midfield and were taking the ball back all the way to their goalkeeper. This gave them less time to engineer a goal.

At the end of the day, I believe the better team won. If the US wants to survive the first round, they will have to bring a better game against Italy on the 17th.

Testing Hindi

चलती चक्की देख कर, दीया कबीरा रोय
दुइ पाटन के बीच में, साबुत बचा न कोय
- संत कबीर

Blogger messed up!

Aargh!! I have been trying to write something in Hindi here for sometime. Finally I created a post and posted here but it wouldn't show the characters properly, only ????. So, I published the post, quit the browser, logged back in to blogger and edited the post. The content was gone. All I could see now was ???? instead of hindi characters. So frustrating that blogger didn't save my content as is.

Has anyone figured out how to post in hindi/gujarati? I can type in the text box but when I post/publish, I don't see the proper font even if I wrap the text in <font face="Mangal"></font>

Bravo Stephen Colbert!!

I have been busy preparing for our Europe trip so haven't been able to write anything, but when I saw this video I couldn't stop. I had to share it with everyone.

This video of comedy central's Stephen Colbert delivering a speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner in his own style is out of this world. Its a must see. You can see it at google video.

A Beautiful Gem

Mind Without Fear
- Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

I was reminded of this gem by a rediff post. Thanks Arun Krishnan.