Ji re...ji re...ji ji re baji

It's difficult to come out of cinema-hall featuring Bajirao-Mastani without humming ji re..ji re...ji ji re baji, such is the captivating tune featuring wonderful representation of Bajirao's magnificent life. This post is not a review of movie but some thoughts around it. First of all, it's a huge shame that history-text books of Maharashtra causally mentioned one of the greatest warrior of Maratha empire. 

The movie has a long disclaimer claiming it has taken artistic liberties to increase the dramatic appeal. When I have this in mind, I'm not sure how much of the movie is truth. Did Mastani seek help from Rao by storming into his tent and impressing him in process or she first met him while being gifted by King Chatrasal? With such basic doubts, I'm not sure how much to believe in Bajirao-Mastani's epic saga as shown in movie. But, it surely made me aware that this part of our history should have been better known. 

There have been some protests against the movie since it deviates too much from actual events. I believe protesting against the release of movie is plain stupid since this is one solid attempt in a long time to tell the world about Bajirao-Mastani. But, at the same time I wish Sanjay Leela Bhansali should have been courageous enough to stick to the facts and possibly dropping a song or two, in order to bring more authenticity towards the story-line. In my view, the movie trivializes the great life of Bajirao to a 3-hr entertainment. Bajirao who took Maratha empire to great heights and fought orthodox line of thought to get societies' acceptance for his love, I feel deserves much more respect.

Story of a DisCo project at Sokrati

 This is about a side-project we did at Sokrati, I hope people are not at Sokrati still be able to connect it.

One fine day Gouthami came to me and asked, "Dude, Ashish has asked me to setup intranet and talk to you regarding this." I was like, yeah I've heard about it, oh yes, we did a DisCo about it. DisCo? yeah thanks to Santosh we've a wiki for that too  

With my sprints running behind the schedule and no more 20% time allocation to disco, there was hardly any chance for me to be actively involved in it. But, with that I remembered we've a new joinee Sameer who is working on sokrati.com, so I took my chance believing if he could build the external facing site why not an internal site. Vishal, Pardeep and I had done the research earlier that there are many platforms available but BuddyPress meets our requirement and thankfully Sameer knew it. He got the basic version up in less than two days, then I gave him overview of all functionality needed in the system and he swiftly got them incorporated and set the ball rolling.

Still, Sameer and I being developers were not enough for giving the site aesthetic uplift. Our only option out there was Apoorva. Gouthami and I took Ashish's consent to rope in her. She had to first design a logo but for that we needed a name, till then we were calling it sokrati_social. Many suggestions came up but nothing could be finalized and one day while we were discussing it in Erawati's compound, Santosh came in and said, "wassup dude". Instantly Gouthami said why not "WassupDude" for intranet. I found it great too since we all kind of use that phrase, it would help connect very easily and intranet is in a way is about knowing wassup with everybody. Within a day or two Apoorva designed ten odd logos and we finalized the current one. Following weekend, I saw the movie "The Social Network" and there comes a scene where Sean Parker says, "Drop the 'The.' Just 'Facebook.' It's cleaner." That was the Eureka moment for me too, I thought, we need to drop 'dude' from wassupdude, wassup.sokrati.com would sound much better (cleaner). Don't connect too many dots here and try to find logic in this, I know it sounds a little weird.  

We were using default layout but from the free world could not come up with anything that was impressive. But still demoed it to Ashish who came back to me as, "Dude, those buttons suck, you've to improve the look and feel." After getting convinced no free layout is good enough for us and with a little skepticism we bought BuddyBoss. Default one was okay but Apoorva gave it nice touches to it by suggesting changes to background, header and other items. Sameer quickly integrated them and Apoorva reviewed it which went on for couple of iterations. At one time, Apoorva said those tri-angles are not symmetrical on boarder of header bar. I was actually getting mad in my head CampaignSync is failing with RateExceededError and why on earth anybody would care about buttons and tri-angles. Well, it turns out if you want to build a product which people are happy to use, you have to think of everything right from how it looks, how easily it can be used, what all use-cases should be added, how do you make it secure and even what it is called.

Finally with all things in place and missing many deadlines, we zeroed in launching it with August-AllHands. But, before that we wanted to do a good promotion, Apoorva and Gouthami came up with wonderful ideas of putting up a WASSUP wall and creating a launch video. A launch video would contain everyone right from security-guy to Asha saying wassup also it'd capture responses to crazy questions. Instantly, it hit me, the only guy with the right flair to do this would be Teju that's how he became party to our team and rest is history.

What started as Ashish's resolve to get it done, the wassup-team was formed and we got an intra-net. Well, if we were to first think of a team and implement intra-net, I am not sure if we could have formed a team with such equal distribution of blokes across different teams and floors we have. Along this journey, I got to know all the folks better, Sameer might not speak-up in meetings but can get things done as good as others. As I earlier thought, all work HR-folks have on their plate, Gouthami is way more loaded than that. Apoorva might wanna paint everything pink but she makes great choices with UI and pretty fun to work with too and Teju, dude was roped in last minute but without making a single fuss joined the team as he was always there and did such a fab job with launch-video. I guess this in reality is the essence of a DisCo project.

George Strait - Check Yes Or No

Artist: George Strait
Song: Check Yes Or No

It started way back in third grade
I used to sit beside Emmy Lou Hayes
A pink dress, a matching bow in her ponytail
She kissed me on the school bus, but told me not to tell
Next day I chased her around the playground
Across the monkey bars to the merry-go-round
And Emmy Lou got caught passing me a note, before the teacher took it, I read what she wrote:

Do you love me, do you wanna be my friend?
And if you do, well then don't be afraid to take me by the hand, if you want to.
I think this is how love goes, check yes or no

Now we're grown up and she's my wife
Still like two kids with stars in our eyes
Ain't much changed I still chase Emmy Lou
Up and down the hall, around the bed in our room
Last night I took her out in a white limousine
Twenty years together she still gets to me
Can't believe it's been that long ago
When we got started with just a little note

Do you love me, do you wanna be my friend?
And if you do, well then don't be afraid to take me by the hand, if you want to.
I think this is how love goes, check yes or no.

Do you love me, do you wanna be my friend?
And if you do, well then don't be afraid to take me by the hand, if you want to.
I think this is how love goes, check yes or no.

Check yes or no
Check yes or no
Check yes or no

We are the Champions

Yes, the dream that every Indian who has not experienced 1983-win and was shattered in 2003 and 2007 has become reality. These are surreal times, nobody wants to go to sleep, people are dancing in roads, more fire-crackers are being set of than Diwali or Eid, the roads are jam packed with vehicles, strangers without any kind of discremination are sharing joys all because India has beaten Srilanka in world cup final.
All credit to Men in Blue, the run up has not been easy with a tied match with England, lose to South Africa, close win over West Indies and couple of high pressured against Australia and Pakistan, it has been one hell of a ride. Though Sachin deserved all the accolades in the world for his services not only to India but also to cricket would remain un-paralleled for times to come, but it has been a team India win in complete sense. Yuvraj and Zahir Khan have fired in all the games, Gambhir and MSD both of them came out real good in final, Sachin played couple fine knocks and also people like Virat, Ashwin, Munaf, Bhajji and Nehra delivered when team needed them.
When Sachin had fallen of early in today's match, I thought our team would choke but Indian team played like champions. All credit to Gambhir, young Virat and MSD to take India to home safely. Thanks team India for making us proud....all hail Team India

Construct binary tree using Post-order and Pre-order Traversals

Is it possible to build a binary tree given only Post-order and Pre-order traversals of that tree?

Silver lining from Bihar Elections

Politics has always interested me and I closely follow political developments. Many incidents stun me like how Vajpayee led NDA lost power or even how Congress managed to gain so much ground in last elections. Today's development has been equally surprising to me, Nitish Kumar reigning in with a land-slide win.
Most election results are quite understandable with elections being won by money, muscle power or cast/religion equation. This is a sad situation but this has been the way all along since educated people would hardly vote and the class of people who would vote, would easily fall for any of above. But, I guess with the advent of news channels slowly people are waking up to realty. They now at least can figure out the lesser evil. I think that is how you can explain even with adversaries of likes Lalu Prasad who in muscle power can fight naxals or Ram Vilas Paswan whose paper on cast/religion calculations can be considered a worthy study in advance mathematics or prince charming Rahul biting the dust against Nitish Kumar.
I believe media in general has played a huge role in making people aware of faces behind the masks. For me there definitely is a silver-lining in Bihar's election results that voter today isn't as blind as it used to be 15-20yrs back and although slowly it is making the right choices but still a long way to go.

Top 10 activities people do at onsite

I have been onsite for short duration on couple of occasions to US and currently in Sweden. When I was travelling for the first time a colleague asked me what would be the first thing you would do after reaching there, I immidiately replied change location on Orkut. :-) But, Dhruv who was also supposed to accompany me and had more wild plans as in absconding to avoid deportation, running around on beaches etc. none of which materialised though.
In past few years, I have seen many people who have traveled for work and things they do. All things are basically dictated by the Golden rule, 1$ is equivalent to 40odd INR. With this thing mind as solid as anything, many people do stupid things like skipping meals, gorging on free food available in office, spending time in lousy rooms rather than exploring places and culture around or even not making the effort to lead a normal life with basic necessities covered. So what is it that people actually do, let's take a sneak-peek,

10. Work. Well that is the reason people are onsite, so got to be on the list.
9. Eat out. Food in restaurant is generally expensive plus tip is mandatory, converting the sum into INR would fetch ten extra dinners back home, so such luxuries are rare.
8. Travel around. For most, it's the fear that if you went back without visiting few places, bragging would get difficult or you might just be pulled up, so with cheapest possible deals, such journeys take place.
7. Cook and clean. With less probability of eating out and Mom not around, cooking and cleaning is something that one has to be burdened with. Effect of which is, if you are cooking once, make sure you cover at least 2-3 meals.
6. Watch English movies and serials, once the popular stock is exhausted take up classy Bollywood ones, when that's done with go for Marathi, Mallu, Tamil, Korean, Irani and Japanese ones. Piracy Iindabad, long live torrent. Aha, finally something that's free or almost free.
5. Keep pushing updates on FB by way of changing status messages, comments and Likes, watching videos on FB and YouTube. With so much time to pass and very few things to do for free of cost, this is probably one of the best ROI activity.
4. If phone is available for free, call up each and every fellow back home including those whom you have not talked in years. If phone isn't free, still call but keep the talk short.
3. Start practicing the foreign accent in your speech.
2. Check the currency conversion rate and calculate how much money would be saved. Something that brings a instant smile :-)
1. Click photos of all possible places, from all angles, in different camera-modes, in all clothes, of-course with and without sunglasses, finally just to make sure photo is perfect, click a back-up too. Gather all the photos and upload them to internet. I just wonder the amount of hard-disk space, internet bandwidth and server-space would have been eaten up by in all this.