Sarovar : Open Source in India

“Sarovar.org is India's first portal to host projects under Free/Open source licenses. It is located in Trivandrum, India and hosted at Asianet data center. Sarovar.org is customised, installed and maintained by Linuxense as part of their community services and sponsored by River Valley Technologies.

Sarovar is hosted on a Compaq box running Debian woody and GForge.

Please read the site documentation http://doc.sarovar.org for effective use of Sarovar.org. Contact raj at linuxense dot com if you have further questions or comments”

Sarovar.org

I always had a sneaky suspicion that there were a lot of really smart guys in Trivandrum, my home town. This more or less confirms it.

I have joined and have plans of putting my nucleus plugins over there. I have started out on a couple of new projects which hopefully will have a larger user base.

Open Source is a natural fit for India. Behind inherently less materialistic than the West and with a long scholarly tradition of distributing knowledge behind us, I am quite sure that Indians will make their mark in OSS.

India really is shining ;-)

India's one billion population could leverage growth'

“R.K. Somany, president of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham), revealed that what struck him most during his recent visit to China was the fact that "Chinese look upon its growing population as their biggest strength. So why should we look at our population as a drag?"

The experts stressed that with the changing concept of business and the knowledge economy driving growth, there was a revival of the "direct equation with the customer".

This has led to the era where the human mind and not machines dominate, said Rajendra S. Pawar, chairman of NIIT Ltd., one of the country's leading computer training and software development companies.

"The knowledge economy is bringing back the best tradition of communication. With it the dependence on human mind is coming back," said Pawar.

According to Pawar, the need today was for "leaders to perpetually create dreams and inspire people to keep the process going".

Jalan supported this view by citing the examples of Japan, South Korea and Israel, which have inspired its people to withstand adversities and lack of natural resources to become a thriving economy.”

Read more.

An excellent Boys review

Go here for the complete review.

“Inga panam illaama irukara ovvoru payanukkum padippu kedaikanum,
Padippu ezhaingalukku etta kaniyakida kudathunu thaan sir naan ippadi paninen - Gentleman

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Naattaiye azhikera oru governor irundha enna illana enna - Kadhalan

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Podhupanithurai, Pokuvarathuthurai, Kalvi, Sugadhaaram, Minsaram ippadi
ella thurailayum lanjam vaangi vaangi naatai seer kedhututeenga - Indian

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Indha America cosmetics ellam nekku pidikaathu. enakku therinchathellam thallaikku seiyakkai, udambukku manjal thool. Please itha ellam edhutundu poidungoo - Jeans

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Enakku thevayellam ettu mani nera thookam, poo pola naalu idli, pudhina chatney, mansakku niraivana vellai, appa ammavoda oru kai rummy, pooncholai kiramathilai oru azhaghana ratchashi - Mudhalvan

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And now BOYS.

Completing half-a-dozen movies successfully with BOYS is the whiz kid Shankar. Brought up in the neighborhoods of Chennai and having done his schooling and college in Chennai, this is shankar's wish to celebrate the coming of the age of adolescence. His boldness to describe BOYS as they are has helped him to come out of his pedestrian fantasy movies.

Keeping out the controversies of the media to the end of this review, Boys is a movie with no false pretensions, no intended puns and a no-nonsense movie. Even if you have the smallest nail in the world, I can write the story on it. Five guys and a girl find their hidden talents due to unforeseen situations and take an elevator to their career. The thread that unites them is friendship and love. What begins as a small time eve teasing ends up in a relationship that displays a spectrum of emotions, debacles and re-unions.

Sidharth playing the quasi-hero, leaves a distinctive influence of a typical lover boy in us. Harini playing the full-time heroine is the most natural of all the characters. To use an often used cliche, amazingly brilliant performance. Not a typical heroine to just run around those lavender farms. To our surprise, she often gives a FINGER. Good one.

The other BOYS have done their best and 'natural acting' comes so easily to them. That innocent looking Kumar has given a flambuyoant performance. Vivek as Mangalam sir is a typical drunkard whom we find in every other bar in Chennai. He has downplayed his comic sense to match the character. The surprise is senthil's cameo role. It is a sure shot shankar punch to explain Information is wealth through a most unassuming character of senthil. Glimpses of classic characterization.
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Happy Birthday

It was the october of 2001.

Our client, a small internet based startup, had already been hit hard by the late 20th century collective madness , the dot com boom ( and the subsequent bust ). 911 proved to be the killer blow for our project and we parted ways saying solemn good byes. Faced with nothing to do, our situation was something like that of soldier pulled out of a gruesome war and put in a budhist monastery. We just couldnt take the silence and lack of work.

After days of tea time terrorism discussions and idea generation sessions, we invented creative methods to spend time like network roadrash races and chatting.

Now ever since Internet was introduced in the late 90's by VSNL, I have been online. Those days, you had to fill a form, send to VSNL chennai office and then wait for a good amount of time before VSNL send you back the connection details. Over the last so many years I have done most of which can be done on the net except for one thing : Chatting.

Why ?

Right from my childhood days, I have been this shy silent guy whom you will more often find in a corner reading a book than in the centre of a crowd talking. This has changed considerably over the years but still in many ways I remain such a person.

So chatting was not something that came to me easily. But when it came to text chatting on a computer, I had a small advantage. It is my belief that I am a better writer than a talker. So armed with a keyboard I was a wee bit more confident than I would be otherwise. Using a combination of instant poetry and fancy icons, I managed to build huge friend list in my messenger within a short time.

It was during this period that I met the person for whom this post is being written. The first thing that stuck me is the unabashed joy of living seen in the person.

I need to digress again and detail a personal quirk. By the by, a complete listing of my personal quirks might take more space than my host provides :) Anyway this one details my friends. A long time back when I was an antisocial nerd ( I still am in a small way ), I had oh so serious friends, People who find it easier to quote Nietzsche than wear a smile on their face. Luckily this guy stepped in and more or less changed the way I used to go about life. Ever since, I have been fascinated by people who are genuinely happy. Pretty soon, my craze for chatting died a natural death but my friendship with my new friend endured.

Thus in the strangest of circumstances started this special friendship. Now I have a couple of friends who could perhaps one day start a new cult among them with the title, “The Joy of Living” :-)

Today is my little friend's birthday and so here comes the wish for which the whole post was written.

Happy birthday, my dear friend.

History

Tomorrow, I complete one year of blogging. It is only natural that I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia at this moment and look back at what led to the birth of this site.

Long back ago, during the time of the internet boom, there was a company by the name namezero which decided to give away domain names for free. Yes, you read that correct. Domain names for free. I must admit, a bit shamefacedly, that I took full advantage of this offer and ended up booking close to 50 domains :-) In addition to itismylife.com I had other interesting names like infosys.org and imaginati0n.com. But I never used them for anything other than vanity email ids. By the by, I used to get resumes from unknown people hoping to land a job at infosys !

This state of affairs continued for a long long time. At around this time last year, India was rocked by the Gujarat riots. In a mail to a classmate, I wrote up something which I thought needed a much wider audience. The idea of putting it on my website came to my mind and I searched for methods to do it. It was at this point that I came across the word blogging for the first time and immediately I was hooked. I signed up for a blogger account and published my article at blogspot.com.

The article was later on published at rediff.com.

Within a short time, I understood the deficiencies of the blogger system and jumped over to upsaid.com. I was with them for a long long time and it was a fruitfull association. Meanwhile, I was send to the united states for an assigment.

With a few dollars in my hand, I suddenly had an itch to move to a self hosted solution which is what I did, getting a new domain in the process. I also discovered the power of nucleus and ended up contributing quite a few plugins as can be seen at the forum.

Since then, Things havent changed much but for the entry of suresh.

So that in a few words was the history behind this site.

What lies ahead ?

I am planning to relaunch itismylife.com at some point in this month. The idea is to have a couple of niche blogs ie blogs targeted at a niche audience and highly specific to one topic. The pages here will continue to be the place holder for my general writings and link collections.

If all goes well, I will be writing a similar post one year from now :-)