போன சனிக்கிழமை குடும்பத்தோடு நாங்கள் ஸ்ரீமுஷ்ணம் கோயிலுக்குச் சென்று இருந்தோம். ஸ்ரீமுஷ்ணம் என் பாட்டியின் பிறந்த ஊர். ஆனால் இதுவரை நாங்கள் பலர் அங்கே போனதில்லை. இந்த முறை உறவினர் ஒருவர் அழைப்பை ஏற்று அங்கே போயிருந்தோம், நல்ல தரிசனம் கிடைத்தது.

வைஷ்ணவத்தில், இந்த பூலோகத்தில் சுயம்வக்த (சுயம்பு, தான்தோன்றி, Natural, Not man made) க்ஷேத்ரங்கள் (புனிதத் தலங்கள்) என எட்டு க்ஷேத்ரங்கள் பெரியவர்களால் கூறப்பட்டுள்ளன.  அதில் ஸ்ரீமுஷ்ணம் (தூய தமிழில் திருமுட்டம்) விசேஷமான ஒன்று, விருத்தாசலத்திலிருந்து இருபது கிலோமீட்டர் தூரத்திலிருக்கிறது. சென்னையிலிருந்து விருத்தாசலம் 220 கிலோமீட்டர் தூரம் - NH45ல் சென்று விழுப்புரம் தாண்டிய பிறகு உளுந்தூர்பேட்டையில் இடது (Left) பக்கம் திரும்பி 20 கிலோமீட்டர் செல்லவேண்டும்.

இங்கே இருக்கும் புஷ்கரணி (குளம்) - பூமியைப் பெருமாள் (விஷ்ணுவின் அவதாரமான பூவராஹ ஸ்வாமி) தூக்கும்போது பெருமாளின் வேர்வையிலிருந்து உருவானதாக ஐதிகம் (நம்பிக்கை).  இங்குள்ள ஸ்ரீ வராஹப் பெருமாளை (மூலவர்) வேண்டினால் சொத்து சம்பந்தமான தடைகள், பிரச்னைகள் விலகும், பூமி/சொத்து இவை கிடைக்கும் என்பது ஐதிகம். அது போல குளத்தின் அருகிலிருக்கும் அரசமத்தின் அடியில் ஸேவை தரும் அஸ்வத்தநாராயணனின் (ஸ்ரீ நரசிம்ஹர் ஸ்வாமி) சந்நிதி சென்று பிரார்த்தனை செய்தால் குழந்தை பாக்கியம் கிடைக்கும் என்பதும் ஐதிகம்.

(கோயில் புஷ்கரணி குளம்)	(ஸ்ரீ பூவராஹ சுவாமி கோயில் கோபுரம்)
(நாங்கள் தங்கியிருந்த ஆனந்தா லாட்ஜ்)	(ஸ்ரீ அஸ்வத்தநாராயணனின் சந்நிதி)

குசேலன் - பசுபதி, மீனா, நயன்தாரா மற்றும் பலர் நடித்துல்ல ரஜினியின் புதியப் படம். கடந்த 14ம் தேதி அபிராமி அரங்கில் பார்த்தேன் - ஏன் போனேன் என்றாகிவிட்டது. பி.வாசு போன்றோரு சிறந்த இயக்குனர் இப்படி ஒரு சுமாரான படத்தை அதுவும் மலையாலத்தில் வந்த ”கதபறயும் போல்” என்ற நல்ல கதையை இப்படி எடுத்துள்ளார் என்பது மிகுந்த ஏமாற்றம்.

படம் ஏமாற்றம் என்பதை காட்டும் விதமாக அபிராமியில் கீழ்த்தளத்தில் ஒருவர் கூடயில்லை. வெளிவந்த சில நாட்களேயான  ரஜினியின் புதிய படம் என்பதை நம்பவே முடியவேயில்லை.

• படத்தில் ஒருவர்க்கூடக் தங்களின் கதாபத்திரங்களோடு ஒட்டவேயில்லை
• பசுபதி படம் முழுவதும் எதையோ யோசனைச் செய்துக்கொண்டேயிருக்கிறார், அவர் பேசும் காட்சியில்கூட அப்படித்தான். ஏன் இதில் நடிக்க சம்மதிதோம் என்றோ?
• இசை பிரகாஷ் - ஒரு பாடல்கூட நினைவிலில்லை. பேரின்ப பேச்சுக்காரன் பாடல்கூட வெயில் படத்தின்வாடை தான் அடிக்கிறது
• ரஜினி நடித்திருக்கும் அசோக் குமார் கதாபத்திரத்திற்குக் கடைசி காட்சி தவிர வேறு ஒரு காட்சிகூடயில்லை. பாடல் காட்சிகள்கூட முந்தியப் படங்களின் தழுவல் -  புதியதாக எதுயும் யோசிக்க முடியவில்லை என்பது வேட்கம்.
• முழுப் படமும் ரஜினியின் சுய விளம்பரம். இதைப் பார்க்க ஒரு தொலைக்காட்சியில் ரஜினியின் முழுநீள பேட்டியே போதும்.

நானும் என் சிறு வயதில் ரஜினியின் ரசிகன்தான். ஆனால், குசேலன் திகட்டுகிறது. 

படம் இப்படி என்றால் அபிராமி அரங்கம் இதைவிட மோசம். வெளியில் நன்றாகயிருந்தாலும் உள்ளே சென்றவுடன் ஒரு பத்து வருடத்திற்கு முன்பிருந்த  திரையரங்குகளை சந்தேகமில்லாமல் நினைவுபடுத்துகிறது - அவ்வளவு பழசு.

I searched for articles on India's performance in Beijing Olympics so far and so I typed in Google "India Olympics". I was surprised to the see the first result as the medal count tally (see screen shot below). Checked it in Live Search as well on how smart it was behaving. It too gave similar results and added more details than Google. If Search Engines improve at this same rate, I guess we will one day have them answer any question we throw at them (Do you think this will happen or it is only a science fiction, please post it in the comments)

I am very happy when I first heard the news in Radioone while driving to work in the morning now. India's Abhinav Bindra has won a gold in men's 10-metre Air Rifle event in Beijing.This is India's first ever Olympic gold in any individual event and ninth in total. So far the nine gold medals have been won in group events like Hockey. India is growing by every other parameter in the last 50 years - whether it is eradicating poverty, education, economy, Nuclear Power, IT Services, etc. but it was a shame that India hasn't performed well in sports. We are all celebrating this in our company now with some Cadbury's chocolates. 

 
(Image Courtesy: NDTV and DD Sports Live)

The New Imperialists (How Five Restless Kids Grew up to virtually rule your world) by Mark Leibovich is a book I read recently. Though the book that talks about 5 technology leaders and visionaries is little old (it was written in 2001/2002 and a lot happens in technology industry in 5 years) I still purchased the book as I got it for a steal in Landmark sale last year (Rs.149 against the original price of Rs.1025, a saving of nearly $22). 

Leibovich a technology reporter for the Washington Post sets out to explain why he selected this particular 5 people whom he calls "The New Imperialists". The list of 5 are AOL's Steve Case, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, Cisco's John Chambers, Oracle's Larry Ellison and of course Microsoft's Bill Gates. Leibovich tries to show throughout the book that these men's ruthless drive must stem from childhood and the reason he calls them imperialists are because they are near equivalent of modern-day emperors. Leibovich's narrative style which makes the reading very lively and you can't keep the book down without completing it. If you thought you know a lot about these 5 people, Leibovich tries his best to show a side of them public haven't seen before. At the same time the book is not imtruding their privacy and most of it seem to be written with the individuals (or their PR) permission. 

He talks about Ellison's Larryland near hills of Woodside designed by a Japanese Zen Monk; about how Jeff Bezos wrote the business plan for Amazon on a car trip with his girlfriend to Seattle and about Jeff's thing; How John Chambers battled dyslexia and for a time believed he was stupid; The equation and friendship between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and how the loss of his best friend Kent Evans 30 years affected Bill Gates; How Steve Case saw with clarity what was happening with the connected world.

Last week my son had the whole week off from Tuesday through Friday for his school annual day. My work in office was relatively light, so I decided to take him (of course along with my wife ) for a tiny-vacation. We had been to almost all resorts in Mamalapuram near Chennai, so we decided to go to Pondicherry. Though I have travelled through Pondy numerous times (on the way to Cuddalore or further south) and been to few places there, I haven't stayed and seen Pondy in its entirety, that way it was an ideal choice.

From Chennai, Pondy is only 3 Hours drive - you have two choices for the route. One route through the scenic "East Coast Road" where you pay a toll-fee of Rs.45 from Chennai to Pondy; or the multi-lane world class NH-45 from Chennai to Dindivanam where you pay toll-fee of Rs.20 twice. I went by ECR and while returning come by NH-45, while coming back we had darshan in Panchamukha  Anjaneyar (which is at near equidistance from both ECR and NH-45). Driving my Honda City in NH-45 was a joy by itself, the car did (thanks to the wide road) effortlessly 120Km/Hr most of the time, of course I could've done more but the official speed limit was 80 Km/Hr !

We stayed in Ashok Resort (a part of ITDC), which had decent rooms overlooking the sees at good rates (Rs.4000 for Standard AC Room per night). The food and service was good considering that it is a public sector hotel.

The beautiful french quarters area of Pondicherry with its white buildings on the side lanes of the beach	With the Pondicherry Pier behind me (we couldn't find the entrance to get in to it though)
The first time I have seen a portable toilet (the blue boxes) for public convenience in an Indian city. Kudos to Pondy govt.	The famous pondicherry beach and Mahatma Gandhi statue

For nearly two decades now we haven't seen any innovation in design from makers of Wintel PCs or laptops. Over the last few years it has been solely Apple that was coming out with cool designs - whether it was Mac Mini or Macbook Air. So I was happy to see finally a PC manufacturer investing on design. I am talking here about the new Dell Hybrid desktops. Check them out they don't seem to have compromised on the technical specifications either which seems to include everything you may want in an average desktop PC - Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Vista OS, 320GB HDD, DVD Writer, 5 USB, IEEE 1394, Ethernet, Wi-Fi and more. What is very cool is the availability of a Eco-Friendly Bamboo casing.

I wish this is just a beginning of design innovation coming from all the competitors in the Wintel PC world (Dell, Lenovo and HP) and we will see some new form factors in laptops as well.

Virtualization (the ability to run multiple OS simultaneously) is gaining lot of traction nowadays. In the PC world this started initially with VMWare and Virtual PC (which Microsoft acquired from Connectix) for development and testing purposes soon gained popularity in the servers. In servers virtualization is used to consolidate servers and applications into fewer servers and also used for running legacy OS and applications.

Today the entry barrier is greatly removed for Virtualization software with many of them available free (as in free beer), following is a partial list of them.

1. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for desktops
2. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 for servers
3. VMWare Player for desktops
4. VMWare Server for servers

Recently few more has joined the list, they are:

1. VMWare ESXi - A hypervisor that allows you to run production applications at near-native performance is now free
2. Sun Microsystems' Virtual Box - A popular desktop virtualization software that Sun Microsystems recently acquired from Innotek and turned into an Open Source GPL software
3. Microsoft recently released its Server class production ready Hypervisor product called Hyper-V that is going to be part of Windows Server 2008 for a nominal fee of $28.

Two weeks back on my way back to Chennai in Mumbai Airport I picked up this book - Cold Steel "Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion-Dollar Battle for a Global Empire" by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey. The book is about the story of the world’s biggest and most hard-fought industry takeover of recent years. It is the story of Lakshmi Mittal taking over (or merging) with European steel giant Arcelor to form ArcelorMittal.  What I liked about the book was that it is told in a thriller fashion on what happened each day of this six month battle. Each day is being narrated by the authors in a scene by scene fashion including dialogs spoken. Once you start reading the book you can't keep it down.

I always admired Mr.Mittal for his humble beginnings to become the "King of Steel" and for his vision which he followed to grow his company at unprecedented rates. His growth story is something that is made of numerous acquisitions of assets around the world which have all been successfully integrated. My admiration keeps growing as I read more - all his ventures have been outside his home country (India) in all far off places of the world and he still proudly sports an Indian Passport.  This book goes into detail of all the things (Politics and Racism) that happened behind closed doors to prevent him from taking over Arcelor. As the book says it - Mr.Mittal certainly is someone who is "Stoic" - a term meaning someone who just puts up with whatever is thrown at them. It is a very apt term to summarize what Mr.Mittal had to put up with during this battle - right from Racist like comments to protective behaviour of several European governments and finally the unprecedented stone-walling by Arcelor board for every step of Mr.Mittal.

The takeaway for me as a Corporate head from the book was how the entire team at Mittal Steel worked together as a single team to triumph over the fragmented Arcelor team. Consider the fact that Mittal Steel team was not composed of one organization but it nearly a dozen entities from Investment bankers, lawyers, PR Agencies, to Mr.Aditya Mittal and Mr.Lakshmi Mittal himself. The whole battle is pure project management brilliance of how all of them were kept in sync, said the same story, were in the same page all the time. Add to that the fact they used modern communication tools (Email and Blackberries) for effective collaboration increased my interest on reading the book fully.

I highly recommend this book for any one wanting to survive in today's globalized corporate world.

If you are following US Business news you would have read about Starbucks closing over 600 of their stores around USA. I am wondering on what took them so long to do it.

For instance every time I visit Seattle (their headquarters) I am puzzled on how come Starbucks have nearly half-a-dozen stores in the downtown area around WA State convention Center. Aand all of them in walking distance to one another. In one of the streets for every block they have a Starbucks store. Naturally each of their store will eat into their other stores - if it is carpet bombing strategy against competition, I don't find it impressive.

Here is the full list of stores that they are closing.

While returning from the USA in my flight I saw this movie "The Bank Job". The Bank Job is supposed to be a true life story of a bank robbery that took place in London in 1971. The robbery was allegedly plotted by UK's secret police to cover up a prominent member of British Royal Family. It involved thieves digging a tunnel below a shop into a near-by bank, get into its vault and rob it. After finding millions of pounds in the vault they also discover lot of dirty secrets - and realize why the secret police plotted them into this. They use the mud uncovered to negotiate for getting their safe passage. In the true life it is claimed none of the robbers were arrested due to their safe passage given by the government.

A good movie that is enjoyable and also well taken. A must see if you like this "Genre" of movies.