Blog@GraceJunction

Every morning I approach the news papers with the fear of getting de-sensitized. Today for instance, The Times of India, Ahmedabad Edition carried news about an act of unnatural proportions – Man having sex with a calf! The matter was brought in to light due to the animal protection activists you may read the entire article here.

Thank God, there are at least some people in the society (People for Animal) who think that there is something called as evil / wrong and the matter was brought to light. A voiceless animal found some one who could fight for its cause; unfortunately our big mouthed society has none! (more…)

Hey hello Mr. Blog Reader. I am the brain of Mr.Hyde Junior! Thinking? Wondering? Trying to figure out? Leave all that hard work to me. Relax and just listen carefully to all that I have to say and things will be clear. And yes, don’t try to make an impression. It will not help. Just plainly simply listen now, period.

I am one of the most important parts of any human being’s body but when I get a wicked heart to scheme, I become the most powerful tool of the modern man! Yes I depend on the heart for oxygen, you see!

But let me tell you what I did to Mr. Hyde Junior. His mother was devout, God loving lady. Her parents brought her up in the fear of God and she slowly became a beautiful young woman in the eyes of the Creator. All the people around adored her, Miss.Wisdom as she was always called by her parents then one day went off to study at the IIM. (more…)

A friend of mine once took his dad for finishing some errands and to visit some friends. His dad never knew riding I suppose, but from the time he sat behind my friend’s two-wheeler, he kept on giving directions about what to do, when to change gears, when to apply brakes, whether to speed up or slow down, which road to take etc. Since it was his dad, my friend obliged and his dad’s assertions just grew stronger and stronger! At one particular point during their adventurous journey, his dad literally tore him apart for his allegedly irresponsible riding! That was it. The last straw. My friend stopped his vehicle. He asked his dad to get down. When he did, my friend quietly rode off asking him to reach home on a rickshaw!

We have had many a laughs about that incident, and poor uncle learnt a hard lesson that day. Now, by no means have I cited this incident to celebrate my friend’s decision making skills. It was not a good thing by any (Indian) standards. But I have highlighted the incident just to bring to your notice what happens when someone is victimised by back seat driving. Its really bugging when there is someone with you who gives you directions all the time. It’s as if they don’t trust your skills at all and also that they are judging distances and anticipating objects and vehicles better than you! It can be annoying. (more…)

It was mid April when I read about the elaborate plans of the Chinese government, on how they are preparing themselves for the upcoming Olympics. Frankly, I was quite impressed about the level of thought & effort they are putting in, to make the event a success. If you’ve ever been to China and if you had a glimpse of what they have built it to be, you would surely bow down to their achievements. In everything that they did, they’ve shown it to the world.. what sheer human grit could achieve!

The news article read something like this “The Chinese government hopes launching shells containing silver iodide pellets into clouds will curb rainfall and ensure clear skies for the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. According to the plan, 100 staff at 21 stations surrounding the city will have 10 minute window to blast away at the clouds so that they can be dispersed before they come near the stadium. Three aircrafts will also be on stand-by to drop catalysts on the clouds…!! (more…)

Three weeks before Christmas 1993, Wolfgang Dircks died while watching television. Neighbors in his Berlin apartment complex hardly noticed the absence of the 43-year-old. His rent continued to be paid automatically out of his bank account.

Five years later, 1998 the money ran out, and the landlord entered Dircks’ apartment to inquire. He found Dircks’s remains still in front of the tube. The TV guide on his lap was open to December 3, the presumed day of his death. Although the television set had burned out, the lights on Dircks’s Christmas tree were still twinkling away.

It’s a bizarre story, but it shouldn’t surprise us. Each year thousands of people are found accidentally days or weeks after their solitary deaths in the affluent cities and suburbs of the world. If a person can die in such isolation that his neighbors never notice, how lonely was he when alive? (more…)

The economy is troubled. The US Fed has cut interest rate by another 25bp to 2%. Markets worldwide are worried by this trend. Prices of food and gas are rising. But a growing population is almost oblivious to these realities.

They are looking forward to the release of “Grand Theft Auto IV”, a fourth generation videogame release of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ series, known to have sold 70 million copies since its launch in 1997! And GTA 4 is expected to be the biggest videogame debuts ever. I know this is news to many of us! But the videogame market is excited, as it has countered the general negative economic trend of the US and infact the industry has registered a 63% growth in softwares and 46% in equipments! I mean, salary or not, increment or not, let’s game! (more…)

The 80’s to the early years of the 21st century has seen the most happening time in history and I am privileged to have witnessed it all. Mankind has seen many changes in and around him. We have seen rapid strides being taken in education, technology and research. Communication has become faster and information is flying. Things which looked impossible in history are a reality today, what could not be achieved in centuries is getting achieved in a short span of time. Everything is measured in speed and size. Gone are the days, when parents used to tell their children that slow and steady wins the race, the fast and furious have taken over. The rabbit is worth emulating and he wins over the tortoise every time, or so it is believed to be!

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Denied his daily staple of porn and horror films on his personal computer, a youth from an affluent family in Kolhapur, Maharashtra decided to get rid of what he thought was the root cause of his misery. Abhishek Patil (21) confessed that he had murdered his grandmother Shantabai Patil (67) in cold blood on April 3. The youth was apparently angry that he had been asked to vacate his room to accommodate his grandmother after she had moved to their house recently.

Shantabai had recently shifted to the home of her elder son and Abhishek’s father, Shirish Patil, who is a doctor. Abhishek was upset with his grandmother using his room as he could not get his dose of horror and porn clips which he used to watch on his computer, he said. Abhishek was told by his parents to share a room with his brother, Viren. (more…)

The Hadron Collider is not just bent on changing the basic laws of Physics, it is already paved the way for dismissing the current worldwide web and its outdated components such as routers and cables as jurassic.

When the ‘red button’ of the collider will be pressed this summer, this particle accelerator will not just give a preview of the origins of the universe but will also generate annual data that would require 56million CDs. That is a stack almost 50miles high!

The only option before them was the internet but then, the speed was crippling and therefore necessity forced another child to be invented, ‘The Grid’. The Grid uses state of the art fibre optic cables and some 2,00,000 servers interconnected to form a parallel internetwork connecting various nations. And the fascinating thing is that, it is almost 10,000 times faster than the internet! (more…)

Many of you would never have heard the name ‘Tim Berners-Lee’. No, its not the full-form of ‘TB’.

About two decades ago Tim Berners-Lee had thought up a project based on the concept of hypertext to facilitate information sharing among researchers at the Europen Organization for Nuclear Research, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. He never realized the potential and scale of his invention.

Yes, he is the ‘Father of the Internet’. But a very worried Father!
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