Good News India

Just in case, if you haven’t heard about Good News India, please do take few minutes of your time to visit the site. It is a site run by a one-man-army – a 63 year old Shri D V Sridharan, whose mission is to show-case the heroic efforts of thousands of little known men, women and institutions, while skirting celebrities, politicians and publicity-hunters. I have been reading this site for close to 3 years now and till date he has been doing an excellent job. To sample one of his works, just check out the story of a man who over a period of 25 years changed a rocky hill site to a full-grown forest. What more do you need to get inspired? The main aspect I liked about the site is, Sridharan focuses on the individuals who are ignored by the mainstream media. Do support the site by visiting it, spreading the news about it and also by clicking the unobtrusive Google adverts.

What I am about to say would go against the very name of the website I talked about earlier. But in the realistic world, good & bad comes in equal share and one must be aware of both. I thought quite a few times before adding this paragraph, as I thought that this might go against the spirit of GNI, but nevertheless I decided to go ahead. Sometime in December last year, there were no updates in GNI. A month later, GNI came back to life and Sridharan explained the reason for the lack of updates. Read it yourself to get the full picture. I don’t want to make a generalised opinion that all the whistle-blowers meet the same fate. But it pains. Whats your thought?

Mushy boy’s website – yes, the guy who is the President of Pakistan. In terms of the design, it looks very impressive and fares better than his Indian counterpart’s. But in terms of contents, the site looks more like Mushy boy’s personal site rather than an official Government site. Well, that is not my problem and one can’t expect more from that fella. Apart from the usual rhetoric about ‘freedom fighters‘ and why Pakistan is great, the site does provides some light entertainment with jokes like “President General Musharraf is a sincere believer of democracy”, “Kargil war taught India a lesson” etc. It is like covering the shit with silk. Couldn’t think of a better phrase.

A specimen called Lalu

Rajya Sabha MP & BJP member Hema Malini, has gone on record that she is Lalu’s fan. Lalu returned the compliment in style. “If she is my fan, then I am her air-conditioner”. Check out this article for more funny stuff on Lalu. Thanks for the link, PVS.

Customer Service

After wearing my new Hush Puppies formal shoe for less than 2 weeks, the thread in the shoe came out and the shoe was in the danger of giving up any moment. I wrote to Bata India, from whose showroom I purchased the above shoe, asking whether they could do anything if I take the shoe to Bata showroom/office in UK. Following was the reply I got.

Dear Mr. Chakkarapani Sampath

MANAGING DIRECTOR ‘s Office,
Bata India Ltd.
Kolkatta, India.

Though I have got the shoe mended through a local cobbler, I am pleased with the way Bata responded to my mail all the way from the Managing Director’s office – apologising for the bad quality and offering to give a replacement. Now, this is an example of what I call a good customer service. I promptly wrote back to them appreciating this.

Jokers

I don’t know what the guys in “dhamil nadu” Congress think when they talk about Kamaraj rule in TN, but it does provide us a good laugh, though its very difficult to match what is being offered by our Captain in his movies.

Google results by email

If you wanna reeive Google search results through e-mail, just email google@capeclear.com and with the text of your query in the “Subject” line.

To get the web contents of a particular URL, send an email to web@pagegetter.com with the URL in the subject.

I tried both of them and it works great. The only problem is with the latter, if you request the frames page you end up receiving numerous mails – one for each frame.

Would be useful to those in offices that only has an e-mail service but no Internet access. Cool one, huh?

Glamour & MGR

Few weeks back, I was reading an article on MGR written by an old director (or may be producer) in some Tamil website. He was talking about movies of those days, current day cinema, glamour etc and said “MGR always took care that there was no glamour or lewd scenes in his films. His films could always be watched by everyone in the family….blah blah…”. Well.. it would have been a lot better if he had stopped at this point. He went on like, “If at all there had to be a glamorous scene or song in his movie, MGR made sure that it is only part of a dream sequence”.

What a brilliant logic! A scene couldn’t be considered vulgar if it happens to be in the dream sequence. I was simply bowled over by his profound wisdom. Perhaps, he wrote something and thought that the readers would remember those deep-breathing sequences by the female leads & skin coloured translucent dresses in the yesteryear movies, including that of MGR’s. I do apologise if I sound more like Selvaraghavan, but you get the point, right?