This was the second movie starring the Beatles, and in color unlike their first movie (A Hard Day’s Night) and not very successful, again unlike the first one which is considered one of the best movies of all times.

Moving on from Beatlemania to Google mania, Google has finally decided to give back to society as they had promised in their IPO to give back 1% of their profits. Their modus operandi has come in for some flak especially since it’s taken them almost two years to come up with a strategy of how to spend $ 175 million. 

The Bill & Mellinda Gates Foundation on the other hand manages philantrophy so well that the revered investment guru to the world Warren Buffet decided to ”invest” his philantrophy money with them.

It’s early days for Google.org, and “the road ahead” can be expected to be better.

Remember laughing at the native African innocence and then feeling awe for their wisdom, and maybe then laughing again over the bottle of Coke.

What do you make of these headlines then:

1. Wall Street Journal has a story of the Visa Balaji in Chilkur where devout prayers are answered by visas from the American consulate
2. In the northern Ahemdabad, it is the Visa Hanuman who does the trick as per the Times of India
3. Washington Post starts from Trichy and talks about this website Saranam.com where one can do virtual pujas from the US

So, in India it’s not the Gods, but people who are going crazy over US visas or maybe not …

This movie based on a novel (by the same name) by Michael Crichton shows the cultural differences between Americans & Japanese in their businesses & in their lives. This book came at a time when Japanese were everywhere in the coroprate America, buying up the Empire State Building, setting up huge car companies, etc … Overall, the impression which emmerges both from the book & the movie is that the Japanese are smart and should be emulated (atleast in some areas).

The wheel has turned a full circle now, albeit in a different direction.

The New York Times reports that more and more Japanese are turning toward the Indian educational system to learn how India does so well in the “industries of mind”. Lessons from the Indian schools are Japan-bound these days, where eager parents are lapping it all up.

Read further here.

A brilliant story about a New York Times journalist and his Cambodian intrepreter set in the land occupied massacred by Khmer Rouge. The movie won three Academy awards, and in the first half shows how the western media present a different version of the story when an American plane bombs a village “accidently” while the second half depicts Cambodia under the muderous regime which eventually claimed 1.5 million innocent lives.

Back home in India, the killing fields have yeilded a rich harvest, and the man responsible is set to be the “elected” leader all over again.

Read all about it here …

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  • Hindu Radical Is Re-elected in India
  • Reading Gujarat’s message right
  • Hindu Nationalists Win Key Vote in India

I remember seeing this “action” movie and was always under the assumption that this Isaac Asimov’s tale was an action packed one, until I read this wikipedia article.It is now clear that the only Asimov about this movie was the allusion to “Three laws of Robotics”, which are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These three laws at the time of Asimov had become so popular that Asimov had given permission to other authors to use them in their science fiction stories. Apparently this movie too has borrowed the same without the Asimov’s robotic spirit which is that robots generally do good for the society.

Not to take anything from this movie I, Robot which was a box-office hit, as much as I think iGoogle will be soon. For those who have not created thier iGoogle page, let me give a primer. Most of us are used to visitng certain portals say Yahoo, Rediff or MSN for our daily information needs.  At these portals, we get all the news neatly categorized and arranged.
However, iGoogle takes this one step forward and allows you to customize the clips as per your interests and needs. So be it NY Times or Reuters news, world clock, GRE word a day or just funny quotes, you get it all, along with what we’ve always known - the Google search.I know critics will say Yahoo was first with ”My Yahoo“. Well, it’s been ages since I tried that, but one thing’s for sure - iGoogle is more usable and maybe with lot more content too. Or to rephrase in the vein of this post, Google’s used the Yahoo laws and made a block-buster out of it.

Remember the movie Shawshank Redemption and the poster of the Rita Hayworth in it?

Well, the movie Cover Girl was a movie made for Ms. Hayworth … With eight song-and-dance routine with elaborate sets for them and the “cover girl” amidst them all, the movie was a big success.

These days when girls head to say Saks Fifth Avenue, apart from the designer stuff they carry out of the shop, what’s in vogue is the bag you get to carry them all. Retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Bergdorf, Bloomingdale’s,  Bulgari, Cartier, Juicy Couture, Lord&Taylor, Macy’s, Ralph Lauren, Scoop, Swatch and Victoria’s Secret are scrambling to get bags out which customers will love to reuse.

Back home in Tamil Nadu, the trend is evident from the ubiquitous yellow cloth bags to the “big shopper” kind of bags to the real classy ones now.

The covers are changing; girls remain just the same…

A high altitude thriller with all masala elements (sans the song and dance from a bollywood movie) along with Harrison Ford make this ideal for some hot popcorns and a lazy couch anytime of the day. However what came as a surprise was that Kevin Costner had refused to do this movie as he was busy and had suggested Ford for it, and Ford is still grateful no doubt.

For a long time, for an average American and a B-School student anywhere in the world, there is just one airline that occupies the grey matter all the time - Southwest Airlines. There are numerous stories (and equal number of case studies) on how this airlines excels on operational issues (like turnaround time at the airports) while having the best hospitality record in the business.

There are many small things this airline changed and made it an industry benchmark. One of them was the flight boarding pass or the lack of it rather. People would generally queue up and typically seats were on first-come-first-serve basis. I remember the long queue when I had to get my flight in Frisco. Though the queues were long, people liked it and I now know, people were able to choose their partners this way - partners for that flight, partners for life some times …

Now there is a change - Southwest has started the boarding pass, like any other airline and people are not happy. Southwest is insisiting that only this is changing, and nothing else. While the traditional fan-base feels cheated and feels this is bigger than the “New Coke” disaster, while the management is confident that people will forget, adopt the new “habit” and start to fly Southwest again. Watch this space for more …

Dunston was a sweet monkey, who turned the hotel upside down, as much as the theatres where the movie played successfully. But the monkey menace in Delhi is anything but sweet, and the corporation efforts to rein in the same all but unsuccessful.

It took a deputy mayor’s death by monkeys to trigger some action, and looking at the numbers to be caught (25000 at the minimum) seems a daunting task indeed.

The master director’s known for his ability to extract the best from the kids - Anjali had proved that way back in eighties. But, then “Kannathil Muthamittal” truly showed how Mani Ratnam can ellicit complex adult emotions from a child.

The movie revolves around a ninth grader Amudha who is told by her parents that she is adopted, and not their own offspring like her two younger siblings. Amudha then sets off to find her biological parents while the “adopted” parents try bringing her back into the fold. Awesome movie, complex emotions, soothing music and a nice end.

There is now a regular blog in the New York Times on adoption called “Relative Choices“, and in one of those stories I came across this gem - “Finding Zhao Gu” which I loved.

So now you can read the blog or see the movie. The choice is simple and for you to adopt.

I made two mistakes while going for this movie:

One, I took a large family contingent, the youngest one at eighteen and the oldest one almost a senior citizen; I knew I may have got it all wrong.

Second, I actually did go for this movie.

But this post is not about the “mistake” of having been to this movie, but about an earlier blog, wherein I may have unwittingly glorified smoking and made a mistake to say the least.

Smoking kills.

And the fact that I have quit smoking, and stayed quit for more than seven months now, should be ample enough proof for anyone to quit cigarettes before it quits you.

A good place to start would be these two websites which helped me immensely before I was able to quit:

- http://whyquit.com/

- https://www.stopsmoking.ucsf.edu/

However I had liked the quote at the beginning of this movie:

Millions of people quit smoking ever day. By dying.