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.

India-mania

Okay so bunch of foreigners visit your town for their official purpose, how big a deal is it? Well not much, heck who gives a damn. But, if you are twelve Indians and you are in north Sweden's city, you might have caused stir.

Yeah, couple of journalists took our photos at work and one of them actually publishing our article on internet too. I guess, what called for immediate attention towards us was our very strange for them food requests in restaurants (pure Vegetarian). Whatever, I am not thinking about it, I am on cloud nine with this publicity, my photo is weired but I do not care for that too, what matters is I AM THERE :-). The link to original post is here and I am pasting snippet below

Explizit lägger ut jobb till Indien



Magnus Andersson, Explizit, och Mikael Peiper, Tieto, instruerar de indiska programmerarna i deras arbete.

Explizit från Skellefteå knyter tolv utvecklare från Indien till ett treårigt projekt. En vågad satsning kan tyckas, men Arne Viktorsson, vd, menar att man nu blir starkare konkurrensmässigt samtidigt som man pressar kostnaderna.

I ett samarbete med Tieto har it-företaget Explizit ett mycket stort projekt på gång. Affären innebär att man knyter kontakt med tolv indiska utvecklare som kommer att jobba med utveckling av produkten i tre år.

The Skellefteå days

I have been Skellefteå for over two weeks now and in the short duration I have already witnessed the good and bad of its weather. Good being 20C, sunny, cool breeze coming from Skellefteå river and bad being overcast, rainy and damp. It is a small city with city-center, picturesque landscapes and woods all in close vicinity. When you come from India, a place buzzing with gazillions of people, lot of garbage dumped everywhere and to click a photo with beautiful surrounding most of the times one would need to travel few miles at least but the western world with its cleanliness, neatness and planned roads overwhelms you, at times so much so that you open the door and it makes you wanna click photos.
We have been put up in a place called Stiftsgården in a shared accommodation, can't be called a lavish arrangement but we have adjusted well. The place has some history associated with it, one of its buildings is the oldest construction in city and it is in middle of complex belonging to city's biggest church and graveyard. It is not far from my work-place and city center, makes it easy to cycle to both places every day. The conditions have been suiting well to me with cycling adding the zing to daily routine. We are in all a group of eleven people here and all of same age-group so helped in connecting well. In the two weeks, we have been to a beach, a lake and hiked to a rocky mountain top apart from daily explorations on the bike.
This is end of summer here in North Sweden, so people are in general celebration mood, they have had their vacations, been to beaches and charged themselves enough under the Sun. Pretty soon they have to prepare themselves for the ugly side of weather, the harsh winter. All summer there have been various events held in and around city making it a worthwhile tourist destination this time around the year. For past four days there was a food festival on. It is mainly showcasing the food from this part of world specialty being Reindeer meat and Solomon fish. A special note should be made for couple of Thai food vendors; sadly they were too selling non-veg food. Though I am a big foodie, being vegetarian my options had been really limited, out of fifty odd shops I could try only couple of things. Still the whole experience has been quite good also as it helped me check out Swedish girls. In the nights there was a band performing which used to get the whole neighborhood alive. Young hearts of all ages thronged the place in dead nights and danced under the tents and at times sing with the band.
Five more weeks to go and many things around Skellefteå, I hope to have more enriching experiences.
Few tips if you are travelling to Skellefteå:
* If travelling in Aug-Oct, carry an umbrella and a rain-coat.
* It would be handy to carry a cap to cover your ears and hand-gloves.
* For vegetarians, Max burgers offers veggie-burger, also you could get Falafels and veg burgers at other local vendors and of course there is subway with couple of pure veg products.
* Bikes are probably the best ways to move around in Skellefteå, you should be able to rent it for around 50SEK/day.

Different Worlds

Vow, a lot of big events have happened in my life in last couple of months than last two years, I got possession of my house in Pune, I switched job, left Coriolis to work with Tieto and now I am visiting Sweden for seven weeks on official assignment. Though I had booked the flat for quite some time now, but getting the possession has changed lot of parameters, full EMI payments are being deducted from my account, a lot of money just vanishes in fixing little things in house and yeah this flat has made me a land-lord as well :-).
Tieto has been a quite a different experience, I spent four and half years at Coriolis, a twelve people strong company, but Tieto has offices possibly in each continent with more than seventeen thousand employees all over the world. The challenges for both the companies are quite different creating very different cultures and processes. Both of these things have caused subtle changes in my life but being in Sweden has had a direct impact on my lifestyle although for a short while only.
I am currently in Skellefteå, a small city even compared to Swedish standards with a population around 32k, and it is a very quiet place. But, like the whole of western world, it is well equipped with most luxuries of life. I have stayed in USA for few months and though back home when we might feel whole of western world is same, within a week I could spot lot of distinctions between the two places. US is more multi-cultured, it is very easy to spot Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Mexicans, Africans and of course Whites and natives. You can find Indian grocery shop and Indian restaurants on each corner and if you are (un)lucky you can catch Himesh Reshammiya performing live in concert. On the other hand, I did not find as many different races or colored people here in Sweden. Also, Indian food is kind of alien here. There are some products available in super-market offering Indian taste but they are all made in Britain and I am quite sure they must be lowered a lot in spices to comfort the western-stomachs so the purist that I am, I don't buy them instead preferring to settle for the native falafel :-)
Other big difference is language, it is not guaranteed here that everybody here would be fluent in English actually it is easy to bump in to people who know hardly any English. All the signboards are in Swedish though the script is Roman but the words are very different; their length and heavy usage of umlauts make them difficult to read and remember. In general I found people very friendly, relaxed and at leisure. In US, I used to see more cars and hardly any people. Definitely cars were shinier in US and you needed to get on freeways more often. Here bike-lanes are very well developed and highways are not as big. I must admit, I found US more political there is some charge, stress about US that is missing here. Of course being Europe and that too countryside, this place is more picturesque. I am not sure if this phenomenon is all over Sweden or it is limited to Skelleftea but lot of people here move around on cycles and even I am given one.
Alright folks this is it for now, I am hoping to check out more of Skellefteå and Sweden and possible other parts of Europe during next six weeks if things fall in place. bfn.

LSD: Life, Success and Desires

You want tons of things in life, probably everything that you see around or ever dreamed off. But, what you want and what you get is rarely in sync, the happy case would be to get what you want or get more than that; sadly for most of us this does not happen often and even in the happy case we eventually get over it and in a while something else catches attention. Thus, life keeps on moving and we are almost always running after something. Also, all things come in packaged deals, you see benefit in something but overlooked the side-effects of it. So, first you struggle to achieve something and at times after getting what you want, you struggle with the unwanted features you got.

But, do people really attain Nirvana and move out from this rat-race (is it a rat-race??), ofcourse I have heard such people exist but not really met anyone in person, a person who has grown over all his desires, all the beautiful things life has to offer. I have seen many people who have been defeated by the pressures of pursuits and stopped going after what they want or some be afraid of failures, don't strive to achieve their wishes.

This brings me to think how to be happy? Does happiness has a relationship with success? In that case, how do you define success?

Clearly, by abjecting your desires, you leave less complicated life but that is not happy life. The path to happiness goes through fulfilling your desires. But, of-course when I say desires, I find it foolish to include desires that could be anti-social or for that matter which could be harmful to you in the long run, like the habit of excessive alcohol consumption or smoking. Most of us have heard success is a journey and not a destination but few mis-interpret it and think success is all about the fun along the ride without caring for the destination. Those people would be surprised by the destination they reach. But, it also does not mean that you just keep on running from one achievment to other. I intentionally changed the word to achievement in last sentence because success for me is not one journey to some destination, it is the amalgamation of all the desires and journeys along them. So, success for me would be, you dream for something and you put efforts to achieve it, did you enjoy pushing yourself and finally did you end up where you wanted to be? After which, the cycle completes and you move on to the next level in life.

Pelican Brief

Long time back, I had read John Grisham's The Firm and was really impressed by his story telling, then I got to know his books are always centered around law. Mukul recommended me Pelican Brief which is also a thriller on the similar lines but fairly different story. The start might appear a bit slow but it quickly grips a fair pace. There are enough twists and turns to keep one engaged with couple of incidents that stun you in disbelief.
The protoganist is a a twenty four year old female law student who prepares a report charging a powerful individual with the murder of two Supreme Court judges and this report sends jitters in White House and all across America which causes the girl to run for her life while seeing dead bodies falling all around her. Author has also given interesting inside accounts of how things work in power-houses and in press-rooms. The climax is a bit elaborate and though in final 15 odd pages there are no more surprises in this suspense thriller but each paragraph is thoroughly enjoyed and relieves the mind of all the tension built up all along. Certainly, a highly recommended read.
The book has been adapted in a movie with the same name starring Julia Roberts and Danzel Washington but I am not very optimistic with the movie because movies seldom do justice to the original story.

Godfather

Last weekend, I licked up the novel whose story has been one of the most famous stories in our times, re-told over and over again in several languages and via different mediums, well I am talking about The Godfather. Over the years, many of us might have seen its movies adaptations as in The Godfather, Velu Nayankan, Dharmatma, Sarkar or even Rajniti. I haven't yet seen Godfather the film but of all the other's I reckon only Sarkar could exhibit a higher level of terror. But, one should read the original novel to believe me when I say that nobody could match the ferociousness of novel. Mario Puzo has put in few sequences quite explicitly which could be disturbing at times. But, one should not mistake it for some psycho details, the whole of book is high class writing.
The central character of the book is Don Corolene who is king of New York underworld, more respected than feared. His journey from a simple, smart family man to a shrewed, cold-blooded gangster. Equally important is his son, Michale, a college professor who although being miles away from mafia world gets involved with it under extra-ordinary circumstances. There few other characters and their transformation in behaviour and values have been beautifully worded. All in all a must read novel very engaging and a classic.

Dead Poets Society

Starring Robin Williams Dead Poets Society is a story of an un-orthodox teacher trying to revive the consiousness of students which is long crushed under the age old schooling methodology. When the movie started it gave me impressions if it is going to be on the lines of Mohabbatein but with Robin Williams' entry I thought it's going to be like Taare Zameen Par, well that's me trying to look beyond the picture. I immidieatly gathered myself back and continued with the movie, somwhere it felt like Three Idiots and ending in Munnabhai style.
All said and done, the story does not have drastically new to offer but having seen enough movies and world in general somewhere emphasis is less on story than the way it is told and on that account DPS scores full marks.
The crux of the story is about a new teacher on the block trying to challange the established norms, creating a reformed group of followers, consequences of young, restless mind and prejudice of society. The interesting aspect of movie is its theme revolves around poetry. The teacher helps students to come out of own imagined fears and think beyond which is how poetry should be treated. It has to be fantacy, it should make you fly and not be prisoned by the practicality or the physics laws. On the whole a very good movie, a must watch.

Jaane bhi do yaaro

As the curtains are drawn on the year's biggest entertainment extravaganza, the action does not seem to stop any time soon. IPL's growth has been phenomenal not only it has attracted the best talent from all quarters but also conjured the best possible resources. But, a rise which could be any organization's envy has been coupled with some or the other controversy right from the start. In the first year it was dressing up of cheer-leaders, the second IPL being played in foreign country to guard against any untoward incident but could not escape the wrath of a certain self-claimed impersonator. But, third edition of tournament has beaten all the previous records, started with upsetting our beloved neighbour but towards the end brought large chunks of Indian high-flyer to ground.
If there is one person who is to be credited with IPL's success it can only be Lalit Modi, IPL has been in totality is his baby with him making more appearance than even Sachin Tendulkar. In my view, what Steve Jobs is to Apple likewise Modi is to IPL.
It is now amply clear that IPL's behind the scenes deals are as murkier as it could get. The latest controversy which has been on for over three weeks now has engulfed Shashi Tharoor, a decent but naive politician, Lalit Modi, N Shreenivasan, owner of CSK, Prafulla Patel and scores of other businessmen and politicians where each one swearing in the name truth to be on the right side of law but all of us have fair idea about everyone's position.
Seeing all this drama, what immediately comes to my mind is Jaane bhi do Yaaro, a dark comedy about the Indian political scenario. What we are witnessing now must be climax of film where a suitable deal is being worked out that takes care of all the deal-makers interest abjuring to any type of ethics. I wonder among all this falling off how difficult it is to build large organizations without any serious allegations around it. I think it is a herculean of a task of creating something like Tatas anyways that would be a completely separate topic.

To Kill A Mockingbird

"To Kill A Mockingbird" is the best literary work I have read in recent years, not only the writing is of highest quality but also it tells a very moving story of a single father parenting his two young children and standing up to a cause he believes in amongst a very hostile environment.
The story is set in times of Great Depression and told from the perspective of a six year old girl Jean Louise "Scout" Finch who along with her elder brother Jem and Father Atticus Finch are staying in Maycomb, Albama. Jean Louise's mother had passed away early enough for the girl not to have any remembrance of hers. The family is supported by a black governess, Calpurina. Atticus who is a lawyer by profession, is entrusted with responsibility to defend a black man accused of raping a white girl. In the times when racial discrimination is very much prevalent in the society, the family puts up one a very brave and sincere efforts to walk the chosen path. The story very beautifully traces childhood's frank, unabashed and careless attitude through Jean Louise, end of innocence in maturity through Jem while Atticus serves as the righteous hero.
After writing such a master piece, I wonder how could Harper Lee, the author, stayed away from publishing any other novel ever. I was a little dis-appointed with the way story finished because I just could not have enough of Jean Louise and I too have that expectation which wants an all happy ending but real life is not like that nor the novel.

Lose your weight

I don't know how many people are interested in losing weight but I have been longing for it since forever it seems. I recently picked up the book "Don't lose your mind, lose your weight" by Rutuja Diwekar (Kareena's "size zero" is lot to do with her). In this book, she shatters many myths related to weight loss and I found the content quite crisp with adequate information to back it up.

She has very effectively communicated why things like extreme diets, detox diets or any other form of fad things don't work. She advises to eat a balanced meal and couple it with regular exercise.

The crux of her advice comes down to following four principle that one should incorporate it in lifestyle:
1. Eat something in first ten minutes of waking up but strictly avoid tea or coffee as the first thing in the day.
2. Eat every two to three hours in the day in smaller portions.
3. Eating habits should be in proportion to levels of activity.
4. Maintain a gap of at least two hours in your last meal and bed time.

The book has no literary value but it is high on knowledge which is expected from a fitness expert. I must add that the book startled me with some forthright expressions, also time and again she presents some analogies from completely unrelated domains that again surprisingly keep you intrigued. She has written down many of her client interactions which you definitely can relate to people around you and her sharp remarks, leave a chuckle on your face.

There is loads of more information available in the book on different kinds of food, nutrients needed by body. All in all it is a very educative yet fun to read, now I must follow it to see how effective it is :-).

Strategy Pattern

Few weeks back I started reading about Design Patterns and Madhur kept on nagging (he reads it as encouraging) me to blog about it. So, I am kicking off a series of blogs on design patterns, starting with the Strategy Pattern.

As the name suggests, the pattern deals with how to organize different strategies in your application. Before starting with the pattern, following are the basic principles that one needs to grasp:
1. Encapsulate what varies.
2. Favor composition over inheritance.
3. Program to interface than implementation.

So, let me formally introduce you the Strategy Pattern, it is a design solution wherein you combine a family of algorithms, organize it separately in interfaces, prepare it concrete implementation and in your client-code work exclusively with the interface.

Let me give you an example, suppose there is a base class animal with concrete implementation as in dogs, leopard, fish etc. All these animals exhibit moving behavior, but differently as in walking or leaping or swimming. Thus, we can write a interface MovingBehavior with move as its method. It should have WalkingBehavior, LeapingBehavior and SwimmingBehavior as concrete implementations. The base class Animal would maintain a MovingBehavior reference with getter and setter method. Thus, for each animal, we need to specify its corresponding MovingBehavior. It has one more advantage, if our dog decides to swim, we can appropriately set its behavior.

I hope this served as a good introduction to Strategy Pattern. If this blog let you down, you know where to send your hate messages (he thinks good wishes) :-)

PS: I am reading Head First DP, thus the content might appear strikingly similar, its a great book to read, in fact the whole HeadFirst series is awesome.

The Sachin Tendulkar

What more we need to say about this dude, every other month he is breaking some or the other record. In my opinion he is the greatest cricketer to have graced the game as far as I have seen in last 20 odd years. I rank Rahul Dravid very highly but Sachin beats him with sheer genius and attitude. Playing for over two decades now and attributed with success that hardly could have ever managed in history, this guy has never been known for any star-tantrums. The humility and character he brings to game truly makes him the biggest gentleman of the game.
Sachin has graced the game for two decades now and his strive for excellence still continues for me which is more evident by the dive he attempted in last game to save valuable boundary than today's effort.
Even if you are naive and you do not hear from experts of game but if you see get to see Sachin batting, his caliber is evident with the perfection, poise and follow through of his shots. For quite some time now, there has been expert advice that Sachin should retire but if we look at the way he has played for last year or so, boss I don't think so this run-machine is going to stop anytime soon and pretty soon we will see a century of centuries. Apart from this, there are always comparison made between Sachin, Pointing, Lara etc. Statistically speaking we might be tempted to make such a comparison but if you take a look at some factors as in the kind of atmosphere a person has played, the team combination and the character one has built, un-arguably Sachin beats everyone hands down with carrying expectations of over billion, rubbing shoulders with players half his capabilities.
For all the talent he possessed, things I admire more of this person is his always ready to take on attitude, humility and efforts to keep on going. Truly he is not only a great cricketer but a great person. Wishing him all the successes for his last un-fulfilled cricketing achievement which is to win ODI World Cup for India.

Favorite movie dialog

There is a contest run by my favorite blogger (GreatBong), the winner of the contest would get a book authored by GB himself. The contest requires you to write your favorite movie dialogs. The rules and other entries are listed here.
I could probably write tons of quotes from Hindi movies but to maintain equality with number of favorite English movie quotes, I am going to restrict to three. So, below is the list of my most loved, used and abused movie quotes of all time, yenjaay :-)

Fultoo Bollywood:
[Sholey]
3. Ab tera kya hoga Kaliya?

[Waqt]
2. Yeh bachon ke khelne ki cheez nahin! Haath kat jaaye toh khoon nikal aata hai.

[Kaalicharan]
1. Ise liquid oxygen me fek do, liquid ise jeene nahi dega aur oxygen ise marne nahi dega, ha ha ha.

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From Hollywood:

[Blood Diamond]
3. Sometimes I wonder will God ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? Then I look around and I realize... God left this place a long time ago.

[Gladiator]
2. My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.

[Matrix Reloaded]
1. Choice, the problem is choice.

Now, I need five of you people to qualify for the contest, that way you could probably enter the contest too, so guys get on your keyboard and punch in your favorite dialogs and possible win a book :-)