The One With The Bicycle Guy

Today when I stopped by a small corner shop to fix my bicycle stand, I noticed an interesting piece of reality. The guy who does the fixes went to get the spare and I was exploring his small (2 by 5 meters) shop. There were a couple of cans of 'Pan Masala' i.e Tobacco gums which I'm not sure he chewed or used to store stuff, a damaged bicycle (not surprising since he repairs such stuff) and a couple of trophies with the same thing applied to them as is applied to the forehead of religious deities and priests in some parts of Southern India as a Hindu tradition. He obviously worshiped the trophies the same way he did the gods. Besides that, there were a bunch of posters of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Saurav Ganguly and the Indian cricket team players. No doubt he was a cricket fan. It was then that I saw a photo frame tucked behind the trophies whose color had faded and the edges worn out. It was the photo of a post-match victory team with a manager, the coach, the players and a trophy, a trophy similar to the one kept there.

When he returned with the spare, I asked him what all the trophies and the photo stood for and he told me his story of being a cricket player and fracturing his arm 4 years ago. He had won several tournaments but the accident changed everything. He had left studies for cricket and cricket had left him dead, almost. So he now fixed bicycles for a living earning a meager amount on a daily basis. He had a wife and a mother to take care of and they lived just behind the shop. The state of affairs wasn't that bad but definitely not as good as it would have been had he been able to continue cricket and reap some dividends out of the cash-rich Indian Premier league or one of the several other money driven cricket leagues.

This reminds me of the dialogue between George Cloooney in 'Up in the air' and Bob, the employee he fires.

Ryan Bingham: You know why kids love athletes?
Bob: Because they screw lingerie models.

Ryan Bingham: No, that's why we love athletes. Kids love them because they follow their dreams.

This cycle repair guy tried his dreams but failed. Maybe I'm wrong in making that assumption here. He seemed content and did not exactly regret what happened. That's why India is such a box of contradictions and its people even more unpredictably brilliant at living lives. Most people around here who have steady jobs no longer have real dreams, the one that they cherished since childhood. Maybe they are just being practical and have substituted their bigger dreams with many smaller ones like buying a house, watching a movie with someone, getting a better job offer, travelling to places and so on. Nevertheless it takes strong guts to pursue strong dreams and hopefully despite eating all that junk food, many of the generation will still be able to build those guts.

Now for some random stuff.

An ode to the valentine's day that was :) The Android bots signify that roses are no longer acceptable gifts for valentine, funky Android tablets are!

Random musings across T1

Apart from using blogger for scribling out randomized info about myself, I just thought I would give some space and time for some interesting things that I came across during Test1.

For those of you who use firefox(or chrome) there's this firefox extension called Mashlogic available at Mashlogic Download that really adds a lot of functionality to the web page you are viewing.Btw a mashup in web terminology is a tool that integrates existing services pertaining to a specific domain into one tool.I have been using lots of extensions and add-ons including the one on which I'm blogging right now(Scribefire & coolIRIS)but this is the best I have come across till date. Also for a reason that could be any or all of the below:
1)Network restrictions in BITS Pilani Goa Campus
2)Installing Google Gears (I'm not sure if this comparison is valid but I would rate the caching ability of Gears way above the Squid proxy used in our campus)
3)Exam time blues
..I started getting download speeds almost 10X times the normal downloads on this network without using any non-browser based software.


Fist of Rice(FOR) is a non-profit organization started by a group of students most of which are BITSians from our campus with the purpose of solving the grassroot level food deficiency problem, based on the concept that a fist of rice donated by an individual summed into hundreds of donors in thousands of locations would generate millions of rice bags helping to solve the food problem to a considerable extent.Check out FOR. Another site to check out would be Bhook and Poverty.


Valentine's and the color codes also came and went.Unfortunately for St.Valentine, there wasn't much to do with his original idea of Valentine.However Love is not something that is to be celebrated on one day.It's much much more than that 'coz it involves friendship,childrens', teachers',independence,and every other day of the year 'coz unless you work for it, you ain't understand it and till you understand it you won't get it.That's something that gphone.exe has been teaching our computers of late in BITS.The virus has inflicted almost all the CC comps and half the student PC's and lappies.The best way I found to remove it was to use Glary's utilities.Available in our software repository or free download, it's very much like a task manager which would have been otherwise disabled by the virus.

that's all folks :)

C ya

Gnite