Grassroutes 2009 Summer Edition

This winter some my friends from the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and myself went on a road trip to the Nilgiris (read more about it here). 

Now you can too. 

And not only to the Nilgiris to understand the plight of the tribals, danger to the animals and discover different viewpoints belonging to the scientists and the environmentalists. You can also go to Pochampally to witness a dying industry or to Eastern India to see a group of committed medicos dedicating themselves to rural India. And some more too.

Grassroutes, a roadtrip for social change, an initiative of Yofa is coming up with its Summer Edition. Applications have started pouring in and from what it looks like , its going to be very competitive. I suggest all of you to go for it.

APOGEE Digest 1

APOGEE, BITS Pilani's tech festival ended today.

Being a blogger I always get jacked on campus. Everytime I have an interesting conversation with another person the first thing they ask me is "So you are probably going to blog about this aren't you?"

And my answer often pisses them off too. "Yes".

The build up to the fest and then finally the fest itself was an exciting experience. Anyone who knows me to a decent extent also knows that I am not one to brag about BITSian events, but this APOGEE was different.

I have so many posts lined up for this APOGEE, but for now I thought instead of sitting down and writing all of them one by one, a digest should suffice. The only order the following list shall follow is the order in which my brain spits it out.

The list of speakers for this years APOGEE was phenomenal, it was awesomely awesome. There was Jimbo Wales, John C Mather, Stephen Wolfram , Dilip Chabbria and a long list of others (For the complete list head over here).

Dilip Chabbria's lecture was like a management class. The fundas he presented were quite similar to those I've read in Seth Godin's Purple Cow however Chabbria is quite monotonous, to the extent that he at times even bores himself by his speech. I don't know if that's just how he is or if he was too tired. His catalogue though was the highlight of his talk. It was the sort of stuff that would make backpackers want to get a permanent high paying job.

Jimmy Wales delivered a talk on Wikipedia/Wikia. The man knows how to keep an audience engrossed. He also now knows that a village in Rajasthan has the highest number of Gults in the state.

From what I hear and see on the merit certificates, APOGEE is now the only 2nd technical festival in this country to be ISO certified.

Tanks rested in our gymkhana.

It was a green fest.

Something I wouldn't exactly endorse, but even then, find me a tech fest in India sporting a laser show!

John C Mather's talk was really well received, Cremo on the other hand provided fodder for gossip.

As far as the Quizzes go, almost all the quizzes went down to the final question if not a tie breaker. After a good year in the quizzing circuit outside home turf, it was nice to finally win one of the big 4 quizzes at BITS Pilani, Overhead Transmission on a tie breaker. I had a killer team. Also it was quite a relief to finally get done with the hazaar academic quizzes and instead have one consolidated Science Quiz.

Samanth Subramanian is an excellent quizmaster.

But my favourite moment this APOGEE was one in which I wasn't on stage. King Diamond being crowned the new Brain of BITS, beating an equally deserving Piyush from BITS Dubai.

APOGEE has become BIG. It's heartening to see the fest really living up to its true potential. With sponsorship sky rocketing and good publicity and so many things to look forward to, these 5 days kept me (or anyone else for that matter) quite occupied. However, its important to fully exploit this thrust in the coming festivals. To try and diffreentiate from other festivals, to offer something more to the people who travel on the awful Haryana roads to come to this Oasis.

APOGEE ended today.

[All pics courtesy Jeffrey Jose]

Update: Do check out his flickr stream for more pics

Are our bowlers slackers?

After watching the India New Zealand clash where India started off quite spectacularly before Vettori did his bit, I couldn't help but get a sense of deja vu. A similar situation had arisen during the Asia Cup in 1999 where we had Pakistan struggling at 20 something for 5 and ultimately let them reach 170 odd. It was partly due to the heroics of Moin and partly due to our boys slacking. 

It would make for an interesting analysis to see how does India fare in general after getting to a vantage point with a good start.

The sample space could be all those matches where India has managed to get at least 5 wickets within a span of 100 runs and seeing the % increase in score hence.

Reading the fine print

Stories of an over stressed techie resorting to murder of his 4 day old daughter have surfaced the internet.

The horrific act was committed by S.Niranjan Kumar( or J.Niranjan Kumar as the Hindu claims), who says that wasn’t ready to have child yet and felt that no one, his wife nor either of their parents understood how he felt. He wanted to spend more time with his wife and fearing that the baby would take up too much of their time, dumped her in a well. This was after he told his wife to get an abortion done and she refused to do so.

However, this post is about something else that I noticed.

On 13th March Indian Express first publishes this. A day later they publish this. The second story (which doesn't make a reference to the earlier story at all) claims of him getting a gold medal while at BITS Pilani. Indian Express even went on to pinpoint that he received a gold medal in Mechanical Engineering while at BITS.

Being a BITSian still on campus, I rushed to the faculty division where on the walls is a huge board with the names of all toppers engraved on it. It has information of toppers from 60s onwards. I saw three columns there: Gold, Silver and Bronze medals.

Clearly, it makes no mention of branches. BITS Pilani doesn’t award degree wise gold medals. The medals are for the topper of a particular batch, irrespective of their degree. And neither can I spot Niranjan’s name anywhere.

Expected better journalistic effort from the Indian Express.

Furthermore there is ambiguity as far as the age of Niranjan and his wife is concerned. HT claims he’s 28, Indian Express says he is 30 (and she is 25) in one article and says he is 28 in the other. And Telegraph suffices with the mean of the two and sticks to 29 (and claims the wife’s age to be 22).

Apart from all this, even when it comes to the actual story, one doesn't know what to believe. Indian Express writes this

Not being able to come to terms with the reality of a child, Niranjan refused to meet Sangeetha in the months before the delivery, even feigning an official trip to China to avoid visiting Chennai to see her, said her relatives. He never called, never mailed — communication was restricted to infrequent chats.

And the Telegraph reports this in their coverage:

Fed up, Sangeetha moved to her parents’ home in Chennai seven months ago. But Niranjankumar kept up the pressure, urging her through emails to abort the baby. He is also alleged to have demanded Rs 5 lakh in extra dowry.

What happened to the Indian numbering system?

ET had a post reporting that IIM Lucknow would be hiking their fees for their 2 years program. It wasn't very surprising given bigger brothers Calcutta and Ahmedabad hiked theirs in recent times.

What was surprising though, was this:

At present, IIM-L charges Rs.500,000 for the two-year programme and that is comparatively lower than the other IIMs in Kolkata, Bangalore and Ahmedabad.

While the fee at IIM-Calcullta and Bangalore is Rs.900,000, IIM Ahmedabad charges Rs.1.1 million for the two-year programme. 

Rs 1.1 Million? Since when did we start following the American number system. The news item has been compiled by IANS which claims to report about Indian matters in an unbiased manner, but clearly there seems to be something wrong with this form of presentation.

It doesn't make Indian education look economically cheaper than their American counterparts. Now "IIM Ahmedabad charges USD 22,000 for the two-year programme." on the other hand drives the point (though I can already see you economists raise an eyebrow since the conversion made no use of the PPP) but despite that it comes out to be much cheaper when you look at it from a ROI point of view. 

Diversification of Quizzing

After returning from the NSIT quiz (about which I have blogged here ), I came across Ankur's post where he presented his case:

Iv’ve noticed one thing about ‘general’ quizzes in general: they go into excruciating details of lots of things ranging from literature, movies, music, pop culture, history, mythology and whatnot - but computers and technology is something which gets just a passing mention at best or nothing at all at worst.

He further cites an example saying,

Even at Mahaquizzer there are hardly any questions on tech. (Asking who’s the founder of Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg - in a quiz of Mahaquizzer’s level where the other questions are so good is laughable. And not many were aware of this!).

And finally comes around to make his point. 

Does computers and technology deserve to be treated as a pariah in quizzes. Most definitely not! Given its ubiquity in the current century it deserves more coverage in quizzes. Given the granularity of trivia asked in other topics, technology deserves at least some mention.

But the point I am trying to address is a much larger one. And Skimpy nails it in this post of his:

Different quizmasters have different interests. However, there are a few things that a large number of quizmasters are interested in, and these form a dominant portion of most quizzes. There is some sort of a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop at play here.

And if you don’t share these “special interests”, then your average performance automatically gets capped.

Of course, this doesn’t apply in case you force yourself to develop new interests just for the sake of quizzing, but that, I think, defeats the whole purpose

Not getting what I'm hinting at? Try to go back and recollect the number of times Asterix was the answer to a Long Visual Connect.

But I digress, what I mean to say that though most quizzes claim to be a "general" quiz. There is nothing "general" about them. Somehow it's just assumed that every quizzer just has to be well versed with "certain" topics. After having interacted with a lot of people I realised that some of my friends didn't fare that well (some even disliked) in a quiz because they found it catered only to an audience with a niche set of interests and that bringing somethng new to the table wasn't rewarding enough. 

At BITS, I know people who have a huge knowledge base in a lot of interesting topics however I also know that they can never qualify for a quiz for their knowledge will never be tested. I suppose that's the reason while BITS does exceedingly well in Entertainment, we get pwned in Business Quizzing. At the same time quizzing in other topics isn't really encouraged either.

I always used to think that Business Quizzing was useless and that there were no "fundas" to be cracked there since you either knew the answer of not. But then can't the same be said about H2G2 or The Watchmen?  And as I spend more and more time reading for the Crucible finals, I realise the questions can be quite workoutable in Biz Quizzes also.

Is Hugh Macleod's Twitter account hacked?

...or atleast that what it looks like.

As I am writing this post, Me along with some 14000 other people are being bombarded with back to back messages from Hugh Macleod, more popularly known as Gaping Void.

The spamming started at approx 3.20 PM IST and ceases to stop. All the tweets start off with a "Hi! My name is Hugh MacLeod, I make a living selling ads on my blog"

Here's a screenshot of the page

 

While majority of tweets focus on him living off the ads on his blog, there are the occasional tweets addressing a different topic

In the past there were instances of Britney, Obama and few other high profile tweeters whose accounts were hacked, so is this yet another case?

Times of India screws up their Headline: says Mani Ratnam is coming to BITS Pilani Goa Campus

Waves is BITS Pilani Goa Campus' (BPGC) annual cultural festival and after a fairly decent Quark (Tech Fest), which saw Abdul Kalam inaugurating the event, we have BITSian alumnus and famous movie director Mani Ratnam coming to BPGC for Waves.

Wait a second. Mani Ratnam? 

Well, there you have it. Times Of India messed up their headline. The Goa edition of the daily says "Mani Ratnam to open cultural fest at BITS Pilani". You can check out their news item here (which strangely hasn't been edited yet).   

The alumnus in question is actually Mani Shankar who... well isn't in the same league as Mani Ratnam as far as cinema is concerned but has had big success in the ad world/music videos. 

I don't understand what the copywriters and journos at ToI are upto, but this is just too unprofessional. Worst still, I don't see any amends nor apologies etc.

Earlier, Mani Shankar had come to BITS Pilani for Oasis back in 2006.

 

Indian Social Networking Trends

Comscore, the Global Internet information provider recently released their report on the top social networking sites in India. 

The report throws some very interesting results. To kickoff, Facebook as expected has just stormed its way into the Indian audience with a growth rate of 150%. It had 4.044 million visitors this December. Orkut is still the leader with 12 million page views this December (an increase of 81% from last year) which suggests that though Facebook is edging up, Orkut still has the masses who will probably take time to adopt to Facebook. 

However it’s interesting to notice a slump in the page views of Ibibo.com, which has been spending massive amounts on advertising and marketing this past year. The number of visitors on Ibibo dropped by 50% over the past year. Maybe the guys down at Mothership need to rethink into how to penetrate into their target audience better. They did come up with a number of contests and tie up with various college fests to gain a market share but it doesn’t seem to be working as well as they expected. Similar results are portrayed by Big Adda which has also had a decreased traffic rate of 25%.

Hi5 on the other hand has had the highest increase in traffic with an increase of 180% over the last year. 

Linkedin too has had a steady climb with more and more Indians visiting the professional networking website. Perhaps recession has played its part in directing traffic to this website. More and more people are creating a Linkedin account many of whom are still to leave college.

Gaurav says that he doesn't take these stats too seriously since it fails to recognise the traffic that comes from Internet kiosks and PDA, and rightly so. A huge amount of internet users in India don't own a computer and use it from internet cafes, so I suppose the are a lot more numbers that have to be added to this report which may present a different picture altogether.

A tool for future BITSians

Arvind, a friend of mine recently started his venture where he helps students all over India to prepare for BITSAT and answers all their queries.

As far as BITS is concerned at least, there doesn't seem to be a lot of information about it online. Ofcourse there is BITS 360, which according to me is one of the best sources available online for any doubts or queries related to BITS. I did try to write a couple of posts about admission to this prestigious institution, however Arvind has put in some serious effort into this site. He's got practice papers and answers queries, so in case you know someone who is giving the BITSAT soon, do head over to his site. It might be of great help to you.

Tribal concepts of assets and “forest dwellers”

Though I can’t really hand pick the “best” moment from my trip, there are parts which stand out. And meeting Stan Thakaekara was surely one of them. (More about him Here).

Read more about GRASSROUTES: The Road Trip for Social Change 

We went to his office and just sat there while he went on and on, hopping from one issue to another. I didn’t blink once.

When you look at Tribals, the first things that come to your mind are that they are uncivilised, they live on trees, eat leaves, go around strutting, illiterate and so on.

-Stan Thakaekara

He further said that all these were highly negative ways of describing the community, leave alone stereotypical. Tribals are social groups with territorial affiliation yes, but their idea of property is very different from the conventional idea. To tribals, the concept of land ownership doesn’t exist, (s)he thinks of himself as an integral part of the ecosystem while using its resources in a minimalist way.

So how is this relevant?

Look back through history. So like we discussed there was no concept of land as an asset for the tribals. So what happens when people start treating it as an asset? The issue of inheritence comes up. This is the real problem. The inherited land is passed on mainly to the male member of the family and this is one of the fundamental causes of gender inequality. It’s only the man who is in possession of the assets where as the woman becomes a child bearing device.

When I had gone to Chembakuli I had seen that the men and women were both equally vociferous in their opinions. I suppose it all makes sense now.

Now for the interesting and tragic part. The tribals never sought to acquire the land or try to get documents to back up their claim on this land because they never felt the need to. As far as they could remember they’d always been here and the forest had always been nice to them, taking care of all their basic needs.

Coming back to the present:

When the government goes ahead and passes the laws such as the Forest Rights Act etc, they don’t expect the Scheduled Tribes of that particular area to show the documents but instead use wells, small check dams etc as a proof of their existence. That part is alright.

But when the migrants came to this region, they started claiming the land as their property (and the tribals were obviously not aware of this).

Now of these migrants, “forest dwellers” are defined as those who had claimed the land as long as 75 years ago, and they are on the safe side. The tricky part is relating to those migrants who claim to have owned the land for less han 75 years. They are the ones with vested interests and who want the policies to favour them. Obviously, opinions differ on this.

Some people feel that 75 years is too long a time. Imagine a person who has owned the land for only 73 years

Syndicated from the Grassroutes Blog.

To know more about what we did and what we're upto follow the HUNGRY FOOLS Blog

Won the Tata Crucible Jaipur Edition

Remember how I said its been a good run so far as far as the quizzes were concerned? Well, it just got better. 

A lot better.

We (that Sailesh Jha and myself) just won the Jaipur leg of the Tata Crucible campus edition Quiz. The quiz was pretty easy. The official report is here.

In the finals we messed up the directs given to us initially but the buzzer rounds were ours to own. Got two back to back right for +15's which sealed the game for us. But obviously there are areas where we lack. Commercials for example. So this means I gotta start watching TV now :)

So now we're going to be representing Rajasthan and obviously BITS Pilani, at the national semi-finals at Mumbai sometime next month.

This was also my first crucible. Having heard so many different views over the past year about crucible, here is what I would like to say about this particular crucible.

For a city like Jaipur (which isn't really quizzically inclined), for over 100 teams to turn up on a day when you should be out there getting down, is a respectable achievement.

Since it was the first time the quiz was held in Jaipur, they decided to go easy on the questions, this meant no scope to miss sitters. Flattened field. Especially in the prelims. 

I have heard a lot of neative reviews about Giri, and this was my first Pickbrain quiz and if my opinion was to be based on this quiz alone, I'd have to confess that he was an excellent QM. 

And lastly, Tata don't give a SHIT about recession. Instead they go ahead and increase the prize money. And throw in some electronic gadets and what not.

Format:

This was the format for our quiz (though Giri hinted that it might be different at different center, dunno if he was kidding or not)

Prelims, 4 teams make it to finals directly, 2 through wild card round (for <100>

Finals has 4 rounds, first one is dry question round, where questions pass, +10, no negative. 

second round, identification of the photos, same questions passable, +10 no negatives

Next 2 are on the buzzer,

One round is a who am I round, which has 3 questions of three clues each. If you get the answer on the first clue, +15. +10,+5 on subsequent clues. -10 for all wrong answers. 

And then the connect round. +10, -5 marking.

I've tried to recollect as many questions as I could from the quiz:

Photo of Lalit Modi, identify

Photo of Deepak Parekh

Ad of Nokia (old man with duck)

Ad of sunfeast (Dhoni one)

Gave us the full form of IKEA and asked how we better knew this home furnishing giant

Bougette in French means "little bag", what word has this contributed to the world of finance?

Budget 

"One World One Dream" was the tagline of which major mega event in 2008?

Beijing Olympics

Which company makes its product using the 7X formula

Coke

Gave us a pic of an ad-Revlon

Major Indian pharma giant formed by Khwaja Ahmed in 1935 (don't remember the framing of the question)

Cipla

Expand HDFC

Housing & Development Finance Corp

Expand SIM

Subscriber Identity Module

What resulted when Ruth Handler saw her daughter Barbara playing with paper dolls?

Barbie

Logo of Bank of Baroda, Identify

Old B&W pic of Taj Mahal Hotel

On the Road Again

It's been a nice month on the quizzing front for me. Some good money and some good mental floss. First off was the quiz at UIET, Chandigarh. We had earlier planned to go to Gnosiomania but seeing that UIET offered 10k as their prize money we decided to change our destination at the last moment and dashed our way to Chandigarh. Here's a post by the Thapar Guys on their Quiz Blog about the event. :)

Kutub Quizzers hosted that quiz, t'was good wonly. A lot of stuff was quite workoutable and we won rather comfortably though Saurya's team came second by a narrow margin, who were given stiff competition by a team from Thapar. 

So with a lot of cash in our kitty and some excellent food at my relatives place, we came back to Pilani with smiles.

Last week, there was the NSIT quiz fest(check out their quiz blog here). The online quiz had been giving us quite a scare (personally the only question I could answer effortlessly was Chamillionaire, I know my Hip Hop well).

The prelims to the college MELA quiz were pretty decent with a few "weird" ones, but it was us who managed to mess it u. Turned out we just made it, thanks to the starred questions. Vivek and me had teamed up, and Saurya was with some other bloke. Both our teams made it, Saurya's team cracked the elims.

In the finals, we had a dog chase battle with the team sitting next to us (I don't quite know from which college they were) but ultimately we succeeded to narrowly cling on to our lead. Great success. 

We got hammered in the finals coz we missed some sitters. The highlight was the Absolut Connect which no one got. Except me. But even that wasn't good enough to land us the 2nd place which we missed by a couple of questions. It was quite disappointing. But oh well, shit happens. This semester is going to be about conquering Delhi and Jaipur and Chandigarh and what not. Here's a post about the NSIT Quiz in which Ankur raises a valid point, shall address that in the coming posts for sure. And yes, Avinash Mudaliar does look like Baba Ramdev

Hopefully my fellow BITSian comrades will follow my lead. It's a pity that we're so bloody far from any city.

P.S: I fell while snoozing in the bus and now have a dirrrty black mark on my leg. Yes, you did not have to know that. 

But now you do.

Extra Innings at WAT

For the last 2 years I have been actively leading a virtual life, spending a lot of my time online, trivia crunching. A lot of the info has been feaces, but in between I also managed to gain insight into a few things here and there. I have taken a particular liking to Social Media and the Web and wanted to reach out to a larger audience and that is where WATBlog comes.

I shall be blogging about Social Media, Technology and the Internet over here. Do check it out if you're into that sorta stuff.  And visit this link to see all my posts at WAT

If not, well, Whatever Things will aways be basecamp. You can chill here. 

Luck by chance

How true. 

How of us really think what we're learning right now in college might be beneficial to us? Forget those who have not taken their course seriously, I am talking to those who have. How many of you are satisfied with your education?

Most of the times we end up where we don't want to. At the same time, some of the most wonderful opportunities come our way when we least expect it.

I suggest keep trying newer things. However, it's also important to let go of stuff that's not helping you in anyway. Be it stagnant projects, past memories and undesirable people.

I am all for perseverence and hard work. But what about that initial spark? The first crude idea? College can't help you there. Well, not entirely atleast...

(Image courtesy: xkcd)

From Digital Print to the Fine Print: Online Media hitting the stands

I can never stop talking enough about Mutiny Media. What might have at first seemed like a social experiment 5 years ago just became too big.

An amalgamation of several voices (which many a times have conflicting views amongst themselves), Mutiny.in,ventured into the print space becoming Mutiny Magazine. Obviously, its been quite a challenge but we have been just too optimistic and above all believe in citizen media. The website has been revamped recently with some new features.

What I want to say is, can social media resurrect the presumably stagnant print media. I came across this awesome experiment the other day. It's called the Printed Blog and does exactly what Mutiny was doing. They take in user generated content and publish it. They have already signed up a lot of bloggers (300 when I last heard) and have got advertisers readily accepting to associate with them. I wish them all the best and will be closely following the venture.

And ofcourse there is the inspirational story of the photoraphy magazine JPG (whose content is user generated), which is unfolding as we speak. The magazine was about to shut down had it not been for the heroic acts of the readers who found new acquirers for the 8020 Media, the media house that publishes JPG.

As everyone as been saying, this will also be a very interesting time for the publishers for obviously the credibility factor will come into play. The views will have to be backed up with facts and bloggers will have to take responsibility of what they publish. 

It's the same story as that of the indi music scene I suppose.

BTW you can download the first issue of the The Printed Blog here

To subscribe to the Print issue of Mutiny, click here

Winter classes and attendance

Here's an effective way to reward dedicated students in class during winter. Give them marks for attending early morning classes instead of bombarding them with tutorials.

For example:

Janurary in Pilani is a nasty month. Coffee can't be left unattended for more than 5 seconds, baths are postponed by a week and mist gives the campus the appearance of a dream sequence.

And since BITS doesn't believe in shifting the 8-5 timetable to a more convenient 9-6 one, a student is left with 2 choices: Either force himself to wake up using all necessary forces or give up.

In economics one always reads about the work-leisure trade off. In this case the trade off between being wrapped up in the quilt and attending a lecture is little. So while the student will come for the tutorial where the marks are at stake, he will not bother with the class since there's nothing tangible at stake. Give them a little incentive (and no, education isn't good enough) and they will come.

Ofcourse, the other way is to threaten to cancel their registration from the course :)

How will you feel at your high school reunion?

Richard Millington while trying to bag an internship with Seth Godin came up with an excellent post which I feel deserves to be shared.

Someone will have a better job than you.

Someone will have a more attractive spouse than you.

Someone will have a better home than you.

Someone will be more famous than you.

So what?

Measuring yourself against others is dumb. It creates tension, rivalry and you might end up chasing someone else’s goals just to beat him.

The only thing you should measure yourself against are your own objectives. Are you where you want to be in life? Are you as far along in your strategy as you should be?

The moment you begin comparing yourself against others, you have missed the point of having a dream.

Pretty true. And what fascinated me here is how easily we forget this advice. Just think about this for a minute: When was the last time you wanted to do something or take part in something just because others were involved in it?

BITSians in CAT 2008

Here's a list of BITSians who have cleared CAT, I'm sure there are many more, just add the names, %tile and the calls that they have got in the comments section below.

Update: There are rumours flying around that BITS Pilani, has the highest number of call getters from any single institution in India. I don't know the authenticity of that claim though.

Abhishek Humbad 2005-2009, 99.93%,

Aditya Radhakrishnan, 2005-2009, 99.8%,  C, I

Akhil Puri, 2005-2009, B & L

Aravind Vijayasarathy, 2005-2009, 99.96%, 6 calls

Ashwin Iyer, 2005-2009,99.9%

Astha Modi, 2005-2009, C (and some more)

Ayshwarya Vikram, 2005-2009, 99.7%,

Bharat Mimani, 2005-2009, S,                                    

Gaurav Lunia , 2005-2009 99.43% B, K & S

Harshit Didwania, 2005-2009, S

Ishan Bhanu, 2005-2009, 6 calls

Karan Dhall, 2005-2009, 99.83%, 6 calls

Krishna Mohan Radhakrishnan, 2005-2009, 99.7%,

Krishna Prasad 2003-2007, B

Kuhu Sharma, 2005-2009, K

Manav Preet Singh, 2005-2009, all calls,                       

Muralikrishnan Nair 2005-2009, 99.7%

Navin Madhavan, 2005-2009, 98.8%, B & S

Narayanan 2003-2008, A,C,L,K

Nikhil Agrawal, 2005-2009,S

R Vijay(Psyche), 2004-2008, S,L,A,B

Ritesh Agarwal, 2005-2009, A,B & S,

Shashank More,2005-2009,B,K,S,I,L                               

Sri Harsha Majety, 2003-2008, 99.97%, 6 calls

Meeting brother after a while

I am home for a couple of days to spend the remainder of my winter break (to read about my road trip click here). And what's the first thing that greets me here? My brother.

I am 20 and my brother is 11. That’s a difference of 9 years.

However, I believe he’s all grown up now. He’s started playing GTA and started referring to Bipasha Basu as “that sexy thing”. It’s brought a tear to my eye. I have been waiting for this coming of age for so long. Sigh.

He asked me if I'd watch Bachna e Haseeno with him. I obliged and listened to him explain how Deepika Padukone is simply too simple in the movie and hence isn’t worth the hype. Bipasha on the other hand is the real deal and deserves Ranbir.

Also, the other day I was asking him if he plays a character of African American descent in GTA San Andreas. With a look of contempt as if mocking my ignorance, he says “they’re called niggas bhaiyya!”