call, shoot and play.

After a serious post about EQs IQs and Qs, lets come back to things more mundane, more selfish and more earthly.

Presenting to the world, my latest possession, my new mobile the Nokia N72.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. Isn't it?

Heiligenschein

We shall come back to the title later.

A small story follows -

Place : XYZ school, First standard classroom.

Teacher to Ram - "Ram, how do you spell Bee?"

Ram - "B".

Teacher - "No, I am not asking about the alphabet B, I am asking about the insect?"

Ram - "It is B, teacher".

Teacher - "That’s wrong. Shyam, can you give me the correct spelling?"

Shyam - "It is B-E-E teacher."

Teacher - "Ram, see that’s the correct spelling. B-E-E. Not just B".

And 5 years later, Shyam won the National Spelling Bee[1] contest and 20 years later, Ram became the creator of the ultra cool "Internet Chat Slang version 2.0", which was a huge hit. People were using it more than the usual English words. SMSes, IMs, Mails they all used the ICSv2.0.

Well, this is the story that happens in every classroom. Poor students like Ram don't really understand why the spellings of words had to be so complex, without much relation between the arrangement of the alphabets and the way they sound :(. Why do we need the extra two 'e's when a single B would do. And his teacher had no answer either.

Neither do I.

It seems so weird to me, leave the formation/creation of spellings, but contests like the National Spelling Bees. Kids of the age 8 start participating in the contest and continue participating for a good five years, before they win. And at the age of eight, the kid is supposed to know the spellings of the zillions of words present in the English dictionaries, their meanings, their language of origin etc, etc. How can it be? What do these guys do? Start memorizing the dictionary at the age of five? What would YOU prefer doing at the age of five, running your toy-train and making faces at the neighbor kid whose train runs faster or try by-hearting the spellings of words similar to the title - yeah, I know you read the word twice to actually pronounce it. ( If you didn't, you should have participated in the Spelling Bee ;) ).

And I thought the winners of these competitions will eventually idolize Shakespeare and be some kind of a linguist or writer or a judge at the Spelling Bee competition :). But this dude, who was into the final rounds of the contest I have seen, wanted to become a physician. Imagine a physician taking time to spell each medicine in the prescription correctly. Did you ever see that? We all know how well a prescription is written, only to be understood by the pharmacist. :)

The point is, what is the point in Spelling Bees, or what is the point in spelling 'scissors' that way? Wouldn't sizars be easier?

Then, I came across this article. See, I am not alone in thinking so. :)

For the readers who have waited so long to know what the title actually meant, it means 'holy light' . :) This was one of the words asked in the final rounds of this year's Spelling Bee competition in the United States.

National Spelling Bee : It is a contest where contestants, usually children, are asked to spell English words after listening to the pronunciation of the word.

one and one make two..

Look at the sunrise, look at the sunset, listen to the chirping of birds early in the morning, they are all beautiful. Periodicity, the feature that is common to them all, is the reason for that beauty. And periodicity it is, that should make this post beautiful. Its been one year since I have written a similar post, marking my first year at the firm and with this post, I enter into the third year, completing two years at my work place. Yay!

I was going over that post and I found interesting things - changes in perception in this past one year.

Well, for a starter, I am no more flattered to be a tax-payer. At least, after seeing how well my tax amount is spent in putting up huge hoardings of the so called "politicians". No. Not anymore flattered.

And I have lost track of stocks, sensex and other such stuff. They are no more beautiful, I mean no more "periodic". The sensex touches the peak one day and falls into an abyss the next day. Unreliable, aperiodic and so not-so-beautiful :)

One thing though remains same. I still miss the golden college days of care-free attitude and aimless life, though a bit less than what I did the last time. Past is past.

Coming to the changes,

As anyone would expect, I have grown. While the growth is in my weight which is an altogether different story, but the important point is I've Grown.
By the way, would growth in weight mean growth of the brain i.e., more brain cells, more thinking capability, more intelligence? I guess this is not one of the Questions without answers thing, because if that were true, sumo wrestlers would be scientists, right? So leaving it there.

I have read enough books(titles at the very least) and known enough authors the past year that I can successfully pass off as a "well-read" guy. Sidney Sheldon is a man, Ayn Rand is a woman, Monks sell Ferraris, Kaavya Vishwanathan copied stuff over, Harry Potter is a magic-kid. See, I have proved it.

Sadly, my wisdom hasn't yet taken me to a point where I have opinions about everything. If only that was there, I would have written hundreds of posts this year.
To name a few -
"What do you think about the reservation issue?" - I don't know.
"Is Sania Mirza the Indian youth Icon?" - Can't say.
"Do you agree with the ban on Da Vinci Code?" - Should I?
"Was Zidane's farewell pathetic?" - Not sure.

Looking forward to more changes and more challenges in the coming year.

And why did I cross the line of "posting ONLY about Questions, answers and such stuff"? Simple. The url of my blog was complaining that I was making justice to the title of the blog but not to the URL, so I had to write something about 'gklelsani', which is me, to be unbiased, balanced, thus periodic and again....yeah...beautiful :).

the double r.

Krrish, the movie with an extra r. And this extra r, rooted from the numerology factor(or whatever factor), must have been one of the reasons for the movie's success.Released as a sequel to the movie Koi Mil Gaya, which itself was a big mix of all the E.T. related movies, this one has gone to the next level. The protagonist is a gifted dude having all the powers of Batman, Superman, Spiderman and our very own Shaktimaan too ;), not to forget the Indian dance factor, he excels at this too. But the picturesque landscapes and the action sequences are no less than the best. The movie gets a big thumbs-up for these. And Hrithik is, without any doubt, the unanimous pick for the role.

I am no big movie reviewer and I am not suggesting you guys to go and watch this one. The point is something else. This movie was the first movie to be screened directly from a satellite, getting away with the reels and boxes, which have shown us movies since ages. Well the satellite thing may not be new to many of you, but it was, for me.And the place where I saw the movie was no big technology hub of South India. It was just an average town where people have hard time trying to figure out what a call center is. That's the reason for my surprise.

I was just astonished with the ease with which these boxes, from which the term 'box office' was derived (I guess), were so easily given up for good and replaced with a signal receiver uprooting the livelihood of so many "behind-the-projector" employees. I believe this is a straight hit on their pockets, for soon, more theatres will adopt to this new technology and more of these people will be jobless. Finding a replacement job would be tougher, since their skill-set is now totally a waste. The arms behind the rotating projector will be denied the work they are best at doing.

Its not just this one case, the rise of technology has resulted in the regression of so many such jobs. And this is the 'double r' I started off with. "Rise and Regression". Rise of technology and regression of unsophisticated manual jobs. And the world needs skilled labour able to operate this new technological innovations and not the plain old manual operators. What about them? Does this mean that a person who knows nothing but digging wells with a crowbar for his living, will now have to learn operating a bull-dozer?

Is this possible?