Compassion for humanity is the need of the hour.

These days, every time I open facebook I see a lot of hatred towards Israel most of it is from my Muslim brethren on facebook. I can certainly understand their feeling if it is about the loss of innocent lives, but it more about loss of innocent lives of Muslims. I dont see them condemning the acts of violence of the Boko haram terrorists or the Jihadis in Iraq. Innocents are innocents everywhere, be it the people in Gaza or in Israel or the Nigerian girls who got kidnapped by Boko haram or the Yazidi religious minority who are being forced out of their homelands and mascaraed by the Jihadis or the poor Muslim and Hindu brothers and sisters who lost their lives or those of loved ones in the  Moradabad, Muzaffarnagar and Vadodara riots... or the Tamils and Sinhalese who lost their lives in the three decade long civil war in Sri Lanka. Compassion should  not be based on religious affiliation but based on Humanity. My great granddad, a high school English teacher, was one of the survivors of the bloody Mapla lahala in Angadipuram. During the Mapala lahala hundreds of Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam or killed and or looted. My great granddad fled to Kozhikode from Angadipuram overnight, thanks to the tip off and assistance from a kindhearted and truly courageous Muslim student of his. Taking sides is easy, each side has justice to ask for and justifications to offer... It is compassion to Humanity that matters ultimately. This is why we respect people like Oskar Schindler and Nelson Mandela... they cared for humanity more than they did for any particular side of humanity.

War on terror and the decoupling of USD and gold prices

A friend of mine shared the historical prices (in INR) of gold in the last 50 years. It got me thinking what caused the steep rise in Gold prices in the last decade. This is in no way meant to be a well thought of analysis... I am just bored this weekend and I took it upon me to see if there is some useful trend.

I noticed that for the most part since Indian independence 10USD worth of rupees invariably fetched 1gram of gold in India. But since 2002, the price of gold seems to have been decoupled from that of USD.  The good news is since 2013 there seems to be a reversal of this trend... Between late 2001 and early 2002 the US begins its war on terror and by late 2013 US has withdrawn its troop significantly from Afghanistan and Iraq. Could this be the factor that drove the decoupling? I have prepared this chart to illustrate this trend. Check it out.

Gold is part and parcel of Indian culture... People have lamented about the price of gold over the years. Due to the heavy demand for gold and heavy import duties, smuggling was rampant in the 70s and 80s. When import duties were relaxed it sure did reduce smuggling, but the price of gold in India was still very closely linked to the price of dollar... import duties didn't seem to have much of an impact. So I think the RBI's recent restriction on duty free gold imports will hardly have an effect... Lets just hope that the US doesn't go into another war :)

Sania Nehwal's Heroics at the Australian Open 2014

In a country where Men's cricket is the only sport that gains the attention of the masses for international accolades, unfortunately, the amazing feats of Indian sportspersons in other highly competitive sports sinks into oblivion...
As the elegy written in a country church yard goes...
"Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

but then there are a few like Dhyan Chand, Prakash Padukone, Pullela Gopichand, Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi and Vishwanathan Anand who make it so big that they stick to our memory and keep reminding us why Indian sports is not only about cricket... I am sure Sania Nehwal is now in that list of greats. Thank you!

NDTV: Saina Nehwal Wins Australian Super Series 

22 sachets of sugar in your standard cup of coke... that is outrageous!

Here is a video that you must watch. It is an interview with Coke UK's president. Interviewer Paxman brings some dirty information about Coca Cola to light and this is how the Coke UK president reacted.

Paxman interview's Coke's UK President 

Having a calorie count on coke cups (jugs to be more accurate) is the extent to which Coke is responsible to the consumer... If Coke actually tells you that there is an equivalent of 22 sachets of sugar in your one standard cup of coke, will you still buy it? calorie counts are like useless disclaimers, they are not designed to genuinely inform the consumer, they only pass on the blame to the consumer... the "you saw it, yet you drank it, so don't blame us" approach. What a shame!

Matured Girls

When I started watching Judd Apatow's Girls I was really disappointed... It wasn't a comedy that it claimed to be. It was more drama than comedy. In fact it was no where close to being funny... So I stopped watching it... But I happened to watch it once again this week and I was pleasantly surprised. It was good. Girls seems to have matured as a comedy - rich back stories have been established for all main characters and in the past few episodes of this season it has emerged as genuine comedy with lot of subtle humor. Way to go!

Vube: From an annoying pop up website to good quality video sharing website...

First off, a confession: I am a sitcom junkie... Although I have subscription to cable, I cant schedule my day around the sitcoms, so putlocker, gorillavid and the likes come to the rescue. The best part about it is the convenience and the shorter ad-free duration... well, not exactly... whenever I click on a putlocker or gorillavid video link it takes me to one of their annoying sponsors' webpages... some of these are legitimate companies like Gillette, others not so much... or not at all, if you know what I mean. Of late one such annoying sponsor link has been that of a video sharing website called vube... I normally close it right away, but sometimes when the video that I want to watch takes time to load I get to listen to the vube video that starts playing in a pop-up window. Surprisingly, almost all the music that I have heard in it are really really good. Like this one, by a bunch of amateurs. http://vube.com/Fresh+Ré/hdBzCkHuZx/L/vote?t=s
We have heard of viral videos, but this website is becoming viral... I was ignoring it when it opened up in pop-ups now I go to it to listen to new and cool stuff. Check it out. 
Here is another cool animation video from vube: http://vube.com/DreamVision/dHeY7iPO3X?t=s

Towards Anarchy - An Utopian Order

My initial reaction to AAP's dharna in Delhi was one of ridicule... I felt that AAP should realize that it is no longer a political outsider who is free to engage in ad hoc protests against political insiders but they are now an incumbent insider and they should act more responsibly towards their constituents... But after taking a closer look at the recent events in Delhi I now get the feeling that AAP is aiming to march towards a notion of democratic governance (you may call it Kantian Anarchy, if you will) that the great EMS once envisioned... But Kantian Anarchy is utopia and it certainly can not be achieved over night.

IMDB: Status order stability despite rigged quality ratings

I checked the IMDB top 250 list after about 5 years... I am not a risk taker when going to the movies and IMDB served the purpose of informing me about the quality of a movie... The IMDB top 250, I felt, was a very reliable list of best movies the world has seen. But several movies made in India never made the list even when their individual rating was above 8.5 and some times above 9. For example, Nayagan, Roja and The Apu Trilogy were rated by the Time magazine as some of the best movies every made based on careful evaluation by two seasoned movie critics, but these movies were not in the IMDB's all time top 250 list. It perhaps had to do with the number of people rating it and many Indians were not even aware of IMDB back then and the predominantly US users of IMDB were ignorant of Indian movies. So, I made peace with that. But I lost all faith about the list when (that was also the last time, before now, I remember checking) Dark Knight Rising topped the chart... Not that it isnt a good movie or a bad movie (it certainly wasnt my kind of movie), but the movie was only a few days old... how come so many people rated it as a perfect 10? Then I realized the power of numbers... it might simply be that Batman fans would have gone out of the way to rig the ratings to pay tribute to Heath Ledger. Anyway, the IMDB top 250 list lost its credibility.

Today after about 5 years I checked the IMDB top 250 again... and I found, as usual, the status order at the very top has been restored... Shawshank Redepmtion was at the top, Godfather I and II were at second and third spots respectively, and Pulp fiction was at number 4... of course, Dark Knight was still undeservingly sitting in the top 5, perhaps the impact of 2008 rating riot by Batman fan's was still having an impact. But that was not the surprise... As I scrolled through the list, I saw three Indian movies in the top 150 and 1 more in the top 200... These do not include Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire, both of which are films made about India but arent Indian films. So, Indian audience have started attacking IMDB. The funniest thing was, all of these four movies are by Aamir Khan. Not one from actors like Kamal Hassan or Mohanlal or directors like Maniratnam and Sathyajit Ray. So the message is clear, Aamir Khan fans are very very active in IMDB. I would not be surprised if we have populist melodramatic movies by Sharukh Khan, Salman Khan and perhaps even Rajnikanth in that list

http://www.imdb.com/chart/top