There are thousands of articles on the world wide web talking about getting maximum mileage out of your car. Just like the millions of car owners that wanted to get the most mileage out of their cars, I was reading through dozens of ‘how to’ articles on ‘hypermiling’. Hypermiling is a term coined by Wayne Gerdes, and hypermilers are those drivers striving to exceed the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) fuel economy rating of their vehicles.

I’m not going to talk about the cars and their mileage efficiencies in the US and Europe, but in a country like India where one cannot exceed 35-60 kmph inside congested city roads. Also, enormous traffic jams that happen due to the callous..

Well, this can be considered more of a rant (or a rant-laundry-list) than a creative post..but I believe many fellowmen concerned about the future of this country would second my thoughts..

1. Government servants - Respect your office and portfolio, allow your subordinates to do their duty and keep a check on them. Money isn’t everything, think about your future generations.
2. Revise the pay package for the people in secret services and the police.
3. Stricter laws against corruption - corruption may not be eradicated, nevertheless, can be made to stay at the top-most levels. Corruption starting from the bottom-most levels up to the top is not a..

Well, after my (new) experiences with the corporate culture of our present day multi-national companies for a couple of years, I moved on looking for better opportunities. I must say, it was pretty much the same in the new company too, but I wasn’t affected much by those anomalies that I came across in my first couple of jobs - essentially, I was able to better manage the situation, practice some politics, and things like that. Considering the fact that I spent more than two years in Western Europe, I was not entirely comfortable with certain things the new age multi-national companies in India practice.

So much hate… Whenever I see bomb blasts and terror attacks, and eventually when these attacks are linked to a religion, I always wanted to write something about this. World over, atheists are related to being either the communists or negative thinkers. I pity those ignorant, though educated, souls that cannot do a simple reasoning of who is who or what is what. Communism was written, since the days of Plato, to scientifically manage the society. Communism may have failed in many ways (people always talk about the Russian failure, but they seldom comment on the success of China..

It was a nice saturday morning, 6:26 AM. I was staring at the deep orange eastern sky sipping a cup of hot coffee…lost in a train of thoughts. I’m aware of the chirping of the birds, and an occasional flap of the wings of birds flying hither and thither silhouetted against the orange sky. ‘I wish I were a bird’ - that was the first thought that came to my mind when I envied at their happy life, not needing to worry about salary, escalating costs due to inflation, saving money, investing in real estate (or rather protecting it from the cluthes of the tax department), paying for my car and educational loans, and so on..

During the last quarter of 2007 there were various offers by vendors such as HP, Dell and Acer, and my brother was wanting one Compaq notebook powered by AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor and 1GB memory. The good thing (at that time!!) was that the notebook was pretty cost effective and it included the Vista Home Basic 32-bit version, and a HP Webcam & HP stereo headset were complimentary. My brother and I were fascinated to lay our hands on a Vista-loaded computer, and finally we bought it!! We never knew we were…

It happened in 2005, when I first applied for my credit card - ahem, I know what you’re thinking about; yes, ‘m pretty late to this money borrowing business. Way back in 1999, when my father used to swipe his credit card for purchases, I used to drool at the glittering gold card gleaming with the name of my dad in raised letters. I yearned for one add-on card at that time, and my father said…

When I became an Orkuttant, the first thing I wrote was a small note, which in Orkut is called as scrap, to my friend who made me an Orkuttant. So reads my first scrap, “wassup buddy, hwz work?”. FYI, he was in the seventh floor and I was in the sixth floor on the same building. I used technology to the fullest extent that the message got routed via a huge Google server farm in the US to the old creaky CRT monitor at my friend’s desk - whoaaa, my first successful…

There are quite a few in my office who own diesel-powered cars and the street price of these cars are close to nine lakh rupees! It’s sad to realize the fact that they will be paying lesser than most of those unfortunate middle-class people who yearned to own a car, putting a major portion of their savings on a good small petrol car. This is the kind of discrepancy that arises in a society that is neither entirely capitalist nor communist. The capitalist oil companies would want the government to…

From my vast experience of my encounters with dogs and traffic policemen, I never look at their eyes, and if I did, I’ve invited trouble already. One vague stare at a rabies stricken dog, it starts barking and comes running at you. It actually pains me to draw an analogy here, but…