All major searching engines have released their respective Zeitgeists, but what are readers here thinking about ? I came across a few search terms leading readers to this blog that were just too hard to ignore. So I present to you the blog zeitgeist :

• how will shahid kapoor reply to my tweet : I have no idea, but I know which reader is most likely to have punched this in. Yes, you.

• ugly waists : First, what ? Second, why ?

• abhishek bachchan cant act for nuts : I’ll save you some trouble; the answer is yes.

• how did zardari made all that money : Since Google lead this person here, are you suggesting the secret to making $10 billion is hidden somewhere at this blog ?

• sunny deol emoticon : Umm .. what ??

• groping at festivals : What kind of perverts visit this blog ?

• naked girls imagesize:1680×1050 : Once more, what kind of perverts are here ? P.S. : If you got what you were looking for, please let me know where it was.

• amruta rao : This one’s easy. It is a Maharashtrian looking for Amrita Rao.

I reserve the best for the last :

• iyer having sex with 8 girls

I can’t say anything after that.

We all know the story of Google Maps appeasing to local sensibilities vis-à-vis the Arunachal Pradesh issue : if a user is in India, Arunachal is shown as a part of India; in China, it is shown as a part of China; in the rest of the world, it is shown as disputed territory. Fine, since there isn’t much of a debate there : Google isn’t expected to resolve international disputes and is perfectly justified in what it did.

This story was recently reported at Rediff. A barrage of comments ensued — after all, the story tickled nationalist sentiments — but I’ll post what in my opinion was the best exchange :

User 1 : Does it show Telangana as a separate state?

User 2 : No it shows you are in pakistan.

User 3 : And it shows u r in Delhi sitting on Sonia aunty’s lap.

Can you better that ?

I know of friends who prowl at Rediff for sensitive topics to make offensive comments. I won’t lie to you — I would love to be a troll on the Rediff Discussion Board someday, but I am clearly nowhere as good as these pros. Perhaps I need to start picking up fights with readers here to train myself. Then again, I’ve tried offending the Bachchans, Aamir Khan, SRK, Congress, BJP, MNS, Shiv Sena. VHP, RSS .. the list is endless. I still haven’t attracted comments of this stature.

Any suggestion is welcome. It is a hopeless situation.

Sonu Nigam features prominently in a music album (3 Idiots) after many years. He has been in hibernation for the last 3 years — even announcing his retirement from singing due to lack of quality work. Perhaps that announcement was directed at music directors so they would stop seeking him for uninspired numbers. I’m sure he wanted to maintain a high level of quality but looking at his recent works – Yuvvraaj, Blue and especially, 3 Idiots — I am in favour of Sonu Nigam retiring from Hindi film music.

Until he gets a challenge.

I know my bit about music, and I have no doubt that Sonu Nigam is the most talented singer Hindi cinema has at this moment. There are more skilled, more accomplished singers, but Sonu is far superior as a playback singer (strictly).

His formative years were spent mimicking Rafi saab, the next few in tearful songs for Gulshan Kumar movies and a few more getting a foothold in the industry. Since then, he was quick to rise up and gave some wonderful songs, a lot of them for A.R. Rahman. His acting remains pedestrian, but the stint helped his mimicry skills. Not many know, but he is a superbly talented mimicry artist — often mimicking singers from Adnan Sami and Kailash Kher to Lata Mangeshkar and Usha Uthup.

He has some superb songs in Meenaxi, Bose – The forgotten hero and his recent album, Classically Mild. Besides these sporadic gems, he has been largely disappointing.

This is where regional cinema steps in. Few Hindi music directors could give him a challenge, and singing in an alien language is in itself some effort. I’m not surprised that he has done well there, while not butchering the language, as other ‘outsiders‘ often do.

I’m posting some songs of his non-Hindi songs — judge for yourself.

First, HirwA Nisarga from NavrA MAzA NavsAchA. Note how he sings the ‘cha‘ (as in ‘chamcha‘ — the Marathi word, not Hindi). The language isn’t seamless, but I am not sure if someone who doesn’t speak Marathi often can do any better.

This also reminds me of an anecdote related to the song Ashwini Ye Na (the video is hilarious — mostly unintentional), Kishore Kumar’s only (?) Marathi song. Kishore Kumar was terrified of singing in Marathi (not because of the MNS — they were infants then), because he could never get the pronunciation of ‘cha‘ right. He agreed only after Sachin, the director, and the lyricist assured him that his lines wouldn’t use the syllable ‘cha‘. I went through it fleetingly, and it seems true.

Back to Sonu Nigam, he has been active on the Kannada circuit lately, starting with the 2006 blockbuster Mungaru Male. He also released a Kannada album this year. From the few Kannada songs I heard, this one I liked best : Ninnindale from Milana.

The south-Indian singing style is unmistakable. I asked about the pronunciation to a Kannada-speaking friend : he agreed Sonu Nigam was miles ahead of other non-Kannadiga singers. It wasn’t perfect — which I believe is very hard to achieve — but Sonu Nigam was close.

I still wish his best songs were in Hindi, but I don’t mind following non-Hindi songs in the hope that he might reinvent himself and show his potential — as he did in Classically Mild.

Thanks to Raghu, Srikanth for inputs.

Update : Gradwolf, in the comments below, points me to Varayoo Thozhi from Jeans. The song is decent, but once more — pronunciation.

Feel free to write in with other non-Hindi songs of Sonu Nigam.

The last adventure activity related post was a good 2 months ago. I have been lazying around since, and forgiving myself for it, ‘because I had one of the most exhausting summers‘. After a while, I got tired of the excuse too, but I was waiting for the skiing season to begin, so I was hibernating until then.

The only accessible skiing locations near the Bay Area are at Lake Tahoe, a good 4 hour drive away. Last year, I skied at Heavenly Ski Resort, and this year, I have a season pass for Squaw (this year, it is celebrating the 60th anniversary of hosting the Winter Olympics). The season opening was on the 21st November weekend, and for the second season in a row, I was there on opening day. Both, my skiing partner and I, had rustic feet after the 7-month long break, and the trail deteriorated within a day of opening due to lack of snowfall. So we didn’t get much skiing that weekend. It was followed by no snowfall for almost 10 days. That changed this week — snowstorms are predicted from Thursday through Monday at Tahoe and I’ll be back this weekend.

But — as much as I would’ve loved it — the post isn’t about me or my exploits (which I suspect bores everyone).

I’ll be going along with half a dozen ski virgins this weekend to Northstar Ski Resort, who will be taking their ski lessons. This might just be the largest ever collection of Indians at a ski resort, actually skiing.

Most ski resorts offer learning sessions for 25$ at the start of the season, when crowds have not yet picked up. Here is the link to the Northstar store — do take a lesson atleast once before giving up on skiing. If you do decide to pursue it, there are tons of financial optimizations you can do make the sport economical (else skiing can be a very expensive sport). Feel free to contact me for those.

***

The season looks exciting, with a trip planned by my hiking partners to the Bay Area for a skiing weekend, a weekend skiing trip to Colorado and possibly one to Salt Lake City. Some winter hiking can also be expected, if I can finally put my dreams of running regularly into action and maintain my fitness level over the winter. Skiing is exhausting, but not sufficient to maintain fitness — the feet get plenty of exercise; upper body, not so much.

If anyone lives in the Bay Area and wants to come along for skiing, you are more than welcome to join me and my skiing partner.

For others who plan to hibernate at home all winter, think that this post never happened. You look fit, I’m sure you have your adventures and remember : walking around in Walmart every weekend is exercise.

***

So why skiing ?

To be honest, I don’t know why I love skiing. I don’t think I love snow, or going down a slope at high speed or the chilling cold. Perhaps, it’s just the mountains. In summer, they allow to be climbed, so I climb; in winter, they allow to be skied, so I ski.

This is a very quick post — the TED India talk by Sunitha Krishnan. It is one of the most powerful talks I’ve seen. I’m still under its effect.

You’ll soon realize why.

Also, a Q&A session with her.

Amit Varma, of the India Uncut blog, who attended this talk as a TED fellow, writes :

When Krishnan’s talk was over, and the standing ovation subsided, a woman in the audience stood up and said that she would donate US$10,000 to Krishnan’s organisation if ten other people would make the same commitment. Within moments, 10 other hands were raised. These weren’t empty promises. Krishnan says in her interview that she has received around US$200,000 so far, but because she “did not bribe an income tax official”, has been asked to pay taxes of around half that amount.

End.

If you want to order any products till the end of this year (and know what company I work with), kindly let me know soon before I expire this year’s employee discount quota. This notice is especially for friends and acquaintances. You can write back at the blog email ID.

Regards,

This video has made my day — ironic, since it’s already midnight. But FWIW, almost one year late, I came across this video of Sagarika Ghose interviewing (rather, trying to interview) Ram Jethmalani regarding the Manu Sharma/Jessica Lal case.

This is called totally pwning someone :

I can hear the birds chirping; I can hear the raindrops falling; from a Chinese guy, I got a bargain; life is looking up again.

Much thanks to @flyyoufools for the tip.

P.S. : If you are visiting the blog for the first time, please think about subscribing to the content — if you liked it.

It’s been a while since a pro-feminism post appeared here. I’m still a hardcore feminist; I just didn’t find any news worth mentioning, until I read this Newsweek article:

In investigating the question of whether men are smarter than women, British researcher Adrian Furnham came up with some startling results. His analysis of some 30 studies showed that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ, but women underestimate their own intelligence while men overestimate theirs. Surprisingly, both men and women perceived men being smarter across generations — both sexes believe that their fathers are smarter than their mothers and their grandfathers are more intelligent than their grandmothers. And if there are children, both men and women think their sons are brighter than their daughters.

This is ridiculous and I outright reject it. As a hardcore feminist, I took pride in the fact that women achieved the amount they did inspite of being less intelligent. This research has just spoilt everything for me — now they’re just as intelligent as men. So why be proud of women ?

As I read further, my hunch proved right : the research was spearheaded by a man — Prof. Adrian Furnham — who is clearly chauvinistic. I call upon all women to see through this attempt at making women at par with men and vilifying the pride of being a woman.

I hope to receive unanimous support from all female readers in this endeavour.

On a related note, I’ve been asked a few times the reason behind the larger female following at this blog. The answer is obvious : women like to read the blog of a hardcore feminist, while men feel threatened. There, I said it.

I promise this is the last technical post for a few more days. I do not intend to alienate readers who aren’t versed with technical stuff and computers — in which case I’d be curious as to how you access this blog.

In what I think is one of the first firings related to installation of SETI@home, a system administrator was forced to resign for running SETI@home processes on around 5000 computers of the school district.

Brad Niesluchowski has resigned from the Higley Unified School District in Gilbert after allegedly downloading software that seeks out alien life forms.

“We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research,” said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. “However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T.”

Birdwell held a news conference Monday, where she stated that the former technology supervisor downloaded a University of California Berkeley program known as SETI@home onto more than 5000 district computers.

The program seeks out people around the world to volunteer their home computers to scan data in the search for extra terrestrial intelligence.

Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts. Apparently, the alien-seeking software had been running since Niesluchowski was hired nearly 10 years ago.

“Basically our processors were hooked up and running 24 hours a day, 12 months a year, every day of the school year,” Birdwell said.

For readers without a technical background, SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, a massive project that performs computations on signals received from space. Since these computations are humongous, they are sent as small packets of calculations to users who install the SETI@home software. This is done automatically when the computer is idle, usually at night or when the user isn’t using his computer. So there is certain merit when the authorities said that the processors were being extensively used.

There is a huge community of users who actively let the software run on all the PCs they have access to. An added turn on is the ranking of users based on how many packets have been processed by their PCs.

But that’s not why I was amused by the news.

A former coworker of mine was a SETI@home fanatic. He was infamous for having installed the software on all machines of his department at the University of Pune. When at the company, he had quite sneakily installed it on all machines. We mostly had Linux-gurus who would promptly kill the process as soon as they sighted it. Some novices like yours truly weren’t aware of it, and unknowingly contributed to his world-wide rankings, which was in the top 50 those days.

But once we knew about the process, we decided to shoot-at-sight. He followed it up with assurances that it would run only at night after we left, so some of us allowed him to install it again. The night thing never really happened — it was just a way to con us noobs.

So a cat-and-mouse game started and continued for long — with him trying to install the process, and we trying to kill it whenever we spotted it on any PC. Months later, the company cracked down on SETI@home and the war was finally over.

It’s the year end, and all major search engines have released their Zeitgeist (list of most popular search terms). The list follows :

What is most amusing are the explanations offered (esp. Bing) as to how the list was selected. Google says :

To compile the 2009 Year-End Zeitgeist, we studied the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search this year. We use data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools. We also filter out spam and repeat queries to build out lists that best reflect “the spirit of the times.

Quite Google-like. Concise, technical, sensible.

Yahoo goes next :

To develop the Yahoo! Year in Review, our editors analyze Search queries based on a number of factors, including absolute volume and growth versus previous periods, to see which themes and trends bubble to the surface. Individual users and their Search queries always remain anonymous.

Yahoo-like. They seem to have something cool going on, but frankly, no one cares.

Last is Bing, and the gem of the lot :

If you’re curious how we determined the top searches, we analyzed billions of search queries and developed the list based on searches made with Bing.

Heh.