Quote from "Catcher in the Rye"

J.D. Salinger also passed away yesterday. Here are two quotes from Catcher in the Rye:

"She was a pain in the ass but she was very good-looking" (from my memory)

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

More nice quotes: http://www.quotegarden.com/bk-cr.html

Howard Zinn passed away on 27th Jan

Image from Wikipedia


I read a couple of his books including "A Peoples History of the United States". The books were a great way of relooking at history, from the point of view of what was going on with common people rather than with the power holders, hence "Peoples History". They were pretty cool reads and recounted lots of unknown stories of resistance and courage of the common people. He was a pretty cool personally, he followed through on the theoritical understanding of racism as a bad thing, by actually walking the walk at a very early stage when it was difficult to do so and when there were no examples or role models for what could be done. He was a teacher at a school and hung out with the black kids and encouraged them to resist and fight discrimination, stuff like that, and lost job in the process.

I had the opportunity of listening to him talk in Berkeley once. Extremely warm and gentle person, he came across as.

Noam Chomsky spoke warmly about him to the press after his death: "He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture. He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect".

Read the Hindu's piece here: http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article96513.ece
On Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

His books are well worth a read (and for me a re-read). Unfortuntely I don't have my copy with me.

There's lots of his stuff on YouTube, here's a random one :




Bye "Howie" and thanks.

This year's Padma awards

Today's announcement of the Padma awards gives some scope for criticism:

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, A.R. Rehman, Resul Pookutty: We must be the only country that gives national awards to our people after they get international awards. I guess we give awards to people for having gotten international recognition, not for their work. A thoroughgoing shame. It would be interesting to dig deeper and see how often we are able notice and recognise peoples achievements before they reach international renown. I don't think we do a good job.

Prathap C. Reddy (Apollo Hospitals), C.P.Krishnan Nair (Leela Hotel Group chairman), DLF Chairman Kushal Pal Singh : I find it disturbing to see awards going to successful businesspersons whose where the work done or the business concerned doesn't have any otherwise important or socially relevant features. In the case of Apollo Hospitals and other corporate hospitals there is a definite ambiguity about them - there is a common perception of money-driven practice of medicine. Why award Leela Hotels for running a business of luxury hotels which 99% of the country will never stay at? And how many think DLF got to where it is without underhand dealings ? On the contrary, I find the award to Venu Srinivasan of TVS and current head of CII appropriate. M.S.Banga of Unilever is a bit on the borderline.

Looking through the entire list of awardess, overall, for a poor country like our, perhaps the awards should be more focussed on people who are contributing a bit more directly to national development.




Comments ?

Annaprasanna

Using Twitter

I'm learning and enjoying Twitter ; here are my notes on how I'm currently managing the overload that is always waiting around the corner when you use Twitter:

1.) I'm using TweetDeck which is pretty nice, haven't tried any of the other Twitter tools so far other than Twitpic. I post on two Twitter accounts @ahminotep and @indiawater and TweetDeck allows me to manage both of those, though currently I'm constantly 'crossposting' due to negligence

2.) I've gotten over the initial phobia of following too many people ; now I feel comfortable following interesting accounts I come across. The way to manage this is to try lots of accounts and unfollow or use lists to manage an overflow of information.

3.) I'm finding that its actually not difficult (and its fun) to scan quite rapidly through the 'pending' tweets. The trick that made this work for me is to keep clicking on links that are interesting but *not* follow them right away. Earlier I used to look at each link as I viewed the tweet and found it too disorienting and needing too much context switching. Instead now I go through all the tweets, click-click-click, till I'm up to date and then go and look at all the links that I've opened up (or even just keep them up and look at them later when I want a break). The only difficulty with this is that when one of the links is interesting and you want to retweet, you have no easy way of finding the original tweet.

4.) Its become a little game now to try to see how many mentions and direct messages I can get to happen

5.) Here's my take on some prominent Tweeters and why I follow or don't follow them. Its also interesting to follow well-known people and get some idea of the kind of people they are, but you often find out later that they (or atleast their tweet persona) are not so interesting:

-Kevin Smith, the director @thatkevinsmith : Great guy, really genuine and authentic, raunchy, but huge amount of tweeting, so I had to unfollow and move him to a list instead.

-N.Ram, @nramind : Wider range of interests than I expected him to have (don't ask me why), retweets stuff from prominent foreign newspapers, but I generally don't find his stuff interesting enough to clickthrough. Still following

-Pritish Nandy @pritishnandy: Bursty tweets, often annoying because its like a blog post divided into tweets, lots of analysis of news headlines, intelligent but I don't agree with a lot of his opinions and am not clued into the mumbai stuff he tweets about

-Gautam John @gkjohn, a goldmine of interesting links

-Anand Mahindra, @anandmahindra, just unfollowed :-) , insipid (sorry!)

-Jack Welch @jackwelch, doesn't tweet very often, goes on about sports teams, and I'm beginning to find his opinions pretty annoying, a big difference from the persona that came through in his books which I was a big fan of

-Sivakumar Surampudi, @s_sivakumar, CEO of eChoupal (I think), quite an interesting tweeter especially for a head honcho type, seems to get Twitter

- Genelia D'Souza: @geneliad, seems to tweet quite a lot, does the next generation style grammer that puts me off, I think I'm going to have to unfollow soon

- Brahma Chellaney @chellaney , security analyst and writer for the Hindu, fairly bland

- Chetan Bhagat @chetan_bhagat : Very much like with the books, just a nice down-to-earth kind of guy to follow

- Manjit @chefmanjit : Not exactly famous, but is the chef at one of Bangalore's good restaurants, Herbs and Spice. Just checking him out.

- Shah Rukh Khan, @iamsrk: I just started following him. It looks like its the real guy, not a fake.

- Gates Foundation, @gatesfoundation : Utilitarian news and publicity stuff, worth followingt

I've purposely desisted from following Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai and their ilk (though keep bumping into them in retweets), and same with Shashi Tharoor.

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Update (18/4/2010)

- Vinod Khosla the venture capitalist: @vkhosla : Just started following him

Here are a couple of interesting Twitter related episodes:

- Did live tweeting from our Coromandel colony get-together ; find this much faster in reporting events than trying to do a blog post and uploading photos

- Even without an internet connection , my phone hooks up to a wireless internet access point. This is really convenient and cheap to tweet photos from the phone without having an internet connection on the phone (expensive).

- We have multiple instances at work now of Twitter enabling us to make connections with people we didn't know which has lead to productive results. In one case we met up with an org and tweeted about it and got back negative feedback about the org from someone with relevant links -- very useful.

- N.Ram responded to a crack I made once about Hindu content. Cheap thrills :-)

-- Makemytrip.com corrected the spelling of Visakhapatnam on their site after I tweeted about it.

I'm stuck right now in trying to increase my followers on Twitter .