Chalo Copenhagen

My cousin Ramsha is headed to Copenhagen for climate negotiations

Here's a picture of hers (extreme right) with rest of the official youth contingent and the Environment Minister




Picture taken from Hindu web article

http://beta.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/article60174.ece

Track your comments

This seems like a very friendly feature of blogspot

Now you can get intimated of any follow-up comments on a post... Meaning ... if you write a comment on a post and want to get an intimation whenever someone else writes another comment on that post - you can easily do that ... you just have to check an option box while posting your comment ...

this picture shows the option box that needs to be checked -



I always wanted a feature like this ... and was very happy when I discovered it today ... am wondering if its been around for a while ... and also wondering why blogger's has not publicized this new feature

$urpri$e

There are small surprises in life that give us much more happiness than their monetary costs ... Getting a box of your favorite chocolates as gift ... finding the long forgotten 500 rupee note in the jacket pocket ... one can think of numerous examples ...

Today I had one such small-joys-of-life experience ... I got a cheque ... not too much in value ... but totally unexpected ... It was the payment for my piece in "Men's Health" ... I remember writing that stuff with no expectation of getting paid for it (Had I known maybe I would have written it more carefully) ... I was under the impression that people wrote such stuff just for the kick of it ... but then the cheque came ... and it gave me a high that no drug (at least none worth the cheque's value) could have managed ... :-)

Makes me wonder if one can sustain ones self just by writing opinion, insight and analysis pieces. There are a truck load of topics out there ... eco, Int relations and trade, health issues, climate issues, race/religion issues, rich-poor issues, moral-immoral issues ... If you can think about it , then you can write about it ... there can be many interesting pieces on many interesting topics ... but the point is - will people like to read them ??? will someone pay for them ??? does anybody apart from Vir Singhvi(or is it Sanghvi?) make a living by dishing out his style and guile, cheers and fears, vices and biases, fakes and takes ..et cetera et cetera for public consumption ... and then make a good life out of it ...

All you journalists out there ... tell me ... is it possible to make ends meet just by writing off your heart's content ???

(It's very unlikely that any journalist will ever read this post ... so the question passes to anybody who has foggiest idea about the publishing industry :-))

* I remember that I had promised a piece on Sudoku .. and I will definitely keep my promise some day ...

Radio Ga Ga

Sometime near the beginning of time, when I first started off blogging, Delhi was already a quasi-modern city. Even in the ancient days of 2004, the city boasted 3 or 4 FM stations. Some of those stations were passably good, some weren't. One knew which was which - There weren't too many alternates and each station had its musical leanings (broadly angrezi, punjaabi-based-khichdi, akaaswani-based-oldies+social-message-trash). They also had well separated frequencies- one knew them by heart (hardly surprising since there weren't too many channels ... moreover it helped if you receiver had the tendency to lose "stored stations list" on each power cut)

All this has changed now.

Delhi, these days, has well over 11 FM stations and the list is growing fast. I found this out when I sat down to configure FM channels on my mobile phone (small miracle of convergence ... sometime in near future I hope to write about configuring a few zillion TV channels on my "portable electronic sustenance thing" - PEST) . Now my phone also has the "feature" of assigning channel-names to stored frequencies - This forced me to spend about an hour trying to figure out the names of various FM Stations ... it was not a very difficult exercise, the RJs helped me in this ... every 5-10 minutes the RJs tend to announce something like "its a gloomy day and you are listening ABCXYZ FM". On the whole this might look like a huge waste of time, but it wasn't - my efforts revealed two well-hidden facts - that "Meaoon" is the only FM station which is "just for women" and that "Gyanvaani" is Delhi's only full time "educational" FM radio channel ("educational" should not be confused with "educational films" like the classic legend "mysore mallige" which used to be afloat in hostel LANs)

So here's the current list of Delhi's FM stations. (hope it helps you in configuring your PEST or in case your receiver has the habit of losing "stored stations list" helps you in tuning into your fav FM station)

91.10 MHz - Radio City
92.70 MHz - Big 92.7 FM
93.50 MHz - Red FM
94.30 MHz - Radio One
95.00 MHz - Hit 95 FM
98.30 MHz - Radio Mirchi
102.6 MHz - AIR FM "Rainbow"
104.0 MHz - Fever 104
104.8 MHz - "Meaoon" 104.8 FM
105.6 MHz - "Gyanvaani"
106.4 MHz - AIR FM "Gold"


Point to note ... While most channels are separated by multiples of 0.8 MHz ... this rule does have some exceptions ... I wonder if some sort of optimized-station-separation is mandated in the policy for spectrum distribution.

Goodbye Shaheer

Shaheer, the 3 year old from Peshawar, died today ...

I hope there actually is some place called heaven and the little boy goes there ...

Makes me wonder ... Why the children? ... and then my thought goes to the parents ... They came with two kids and hope for a cure ... and now, when they are leaving ... one of the boys will be in a wooden box ...

For ages their land (near Khyber-pass in Hindukush) has been one of the most important connections between India and rest of the world ... today they have to fly to a third country (Dubai) to get back home ...

Life is strange ...

A Thought for Shaheer

Folks spare a thought and a prayer for Shaheer, the 3 year old boy from Peshawar who underwent a Bone Marrow Transplant. Shaheer's graft (donated by his 2 year old brother) was accepted, but he has developed a serious complication called (possibly Drug Induced) Interstitial Pneumonia. None of the medicines seem to be working- the kid is on lung machine, heavy dose of Morphine and Steroids. He is fighting for his life in the ICU.

Such Interstitial Pneumonia is not very common here (someone said more common in radiation tratment patients in Australia). This is the first case in 15 years in CMC. If you know a Heamatology/Oncology/Pulmonology doctor who has successfully dealt with Interstitial Pneumonia (after Bone Marrow Transplant) and would be available on mail/phone then do let me know at baawara@gmail.com - Pls stop your search ... the little boy is no more


I hope the kid pulls thru ..

Piracy -- what he heck i like this one

Cric in my head:
Someone said
"friends who could have been more
friends who were more and decided to be less
friends who are reconsidering whether to be more or less"

Funda of a perfect life

Here's an excerpt from a mail conversation

My friend : Howz life otherwise?

Me : life is going on well...except for the lack of a decent girl ....life is sort of going perfect;-)

My friend : I think the lack of a decent girl is the reason for life going on so perfect ;-)

:-))

Low low low

It is that empty hollow feeling...creeping up on me....

Boss is home.. she took a half day...other (so called) senior guys are also off....

some part of me tells me..........don't do anything............
And what am i doing??? ....well..........nothing..

But hold on....surprise surprise surprise.......
Instead of being happy about being idle.....i am getting restless...
"doing nothing" is worse than "doing a lot of work".....
Its a very bad state....an empty head...nothing to do....its scary.........

This seems like the catch 22 of life....
When one has a lot of work...one yearns for idle time
and when one is idle........one gets restless for work.....