I saw the following email in my mailbox today:

Dear Customer ,

ICICI Bank wishes to inform all its valued customers that we are experiencing a virus attack recently in our software. We are undergoing a system upgrade and hereby we mandate that all our customers update their Online Banking Account now so that you can be able to enjoy our full service(s) of your Online Banking Daily Transactions.

You are requested to update your passwords by following the reference below.:

Sounds fishy, doesn't it? I thought I will report it like a good samaritan. So for next 10 minutes or so I searched the legit ICICI site for any email or phone I could use to bring it to someone's notice.

The email link didn't give out any address, it was just a page to send them a message. The numbers were for phone banking which demanded some code or other which I neither had time nor patience to hunt around for.

I was on the point of giving up when I found this:
http://icicibank.com/Pfsuser/spoofs/bewareoffrauds.html


There is an email address buried at the end and I finally forwarded the above mail to that address :-) Can't you see the Halo that's framing my face now? :-)

बाप्पा, तुम्ही येणार येणार म्हणताना आता तुमचं आगमन दोन दिवसांवर आले। :-) तुमच्या मंगलचरणांच्या नुसत्या चाहुलीने स्वाईन फ्लूने काढता पाय घेतलाय. आता एक क्रृपा आणखी करा. येताना तुमच्याबरोबर वरुणराजाला घेऊन या. यंदा आमच्यावर रुसलाय तो. चूक आमचीच आहे म्हणा. झाडं तोडून पर्यावरणाची वाट आम्हीच लावली आहे. त्याला का दोष द्यायचा? तरी एव्हढी चूक पोटात घाला बाप्पा. येताना पाऊस घेऊन या. मग भले तुमच्या दर्शनाला आम्हाला छत्र्या घेऊन उभं रहायला लागू देत.

लवकर या. आम्ही सगळे आतुरतेने वाट पहातोय. :-)

And now, some food for thought! This one was sent by a friend last week:

When you rise up, your friends know who you are.

When you fall down, you know who your friends are.

English, as they say, is a funny language and it gets funnier in India. A couple of days back I was in the "Subway" for my favorite veggie salad. I was happily munching on it when 2 teenage girls walked by for a veggie sandwich. As usual, the guy at the counter asked them about their choice of vegetables.

Now, these girls wanted all the veggies but in small portions. So they started saying "less....less....more less....more less". It was all I could do not to laugh at the bewildered expression on the face of the guy behind the counter as he struggled to understand whether the girls meant "more" or "less" - without realizing that what they really meant was "lesser" :-)

It was not the first time that I was reading anything about the Nazis in general and about Auschwitz in particular. But every time I read about both, I am shaken to the core. This time it was an excerpt from a Marathi book that mentioned the concentration camp. The writer talked about how he saw rooms full of discarded baggage from the Jews - with their names marked out in chalk. There was another room which contained empty tins of the deadly poison that was used to snuff life out of the unfortunate ones. And then the place where gold was yanked out of the teeth of the corpses.

And then there is a room that is filled upto the ceiling with toys that the children must have carried with them to Auschwitz - it's just that their owners are no longer around to play with them.

It took me a while to push past this all and read on the rest of the excerpt. :-(

I have often wondered in the past as to how the world could turn a blind eye as millions were slaughtered for no fault of theirs. And then I realized that the world was busy with its "life" - just as I am "busy" with my job, my family and my petty complaints while there are many who need help right here in my country :-(

What's with these BJP guys? First it was LK Advani who was bitten by the "Jinnah" bug. And now it is Jaswant Singh. As if that wasn't enough, it seems that it was Advani who hastened Jaswant Singh's expulsion from the party on this ground.

They see it is hard to understand a woman. I guess it is even harder to understand a politician!

Two little boys, ages 8 and 10, were excessively mischievous. They were always getting into trouble and their parents knew all about it. If any mischief occurred in their town, the two boys were probably involved.

The boys' mother heard that a preacher in town had been successful in disciplining children, so she asked if he would speak with her boys.

The preacher agreed, but he asked to see them individually.. So the mother sent the 8 year old first, in the morning, with the older boy to see the preacher in the afternoon.

The preacher, a huge man with a booming voice, sat the younger boy down and asked him sternly, 'Do you know where God is, son?'

The boy's mouth dropped open , but he made no response, sitting there wide-eyed with his mouth hanging open.

So the preacher repeated the question in an even sterner tone, 'Where is God?'

Again, the boy made no attempt to answer. The preacher raised his voice even more and shook his finger in the boy's face and bellowed, 'Where is God?'

The boy screamed and bolted from the room, ran directly home and dove into his closet, slamming the door behind him.

When his older brother found him in the closet, he asked, 'What happened?'
The younger brother, gasping for breath, replied, 'We are in BIG trouble this time,'

'GOD is missing, and they think we did it!'

Two of the culinary shows on TV didn’t treat yesterday as just “Business as usual”. They made sure that the significance of the day was taken cognizance of during the course of their show.
The first was “Chakh Le India” (NDTV Good Times). Host Aditya Bal was in the City of Joy – Calcutta. He visited Netaji Bhavan.

I must confess that I have never been much impressed by Gandhiji’s idea of a non-violent freedom struggle – especially when it resulted in heavy casualties on the Indian side. Netaji’s “tum muze khoon do, mai tumhe azadi dunga” sounded much more practical. It was a tragedy that he died in a plane crash. If we had more firebrand leaders like him around I guess we could have put a tighter leash on our errant neighbor long time back and it wouldn’t have grown to become such a nasty headache that it is now. That said however, there is no denying that all those conspiracy theories about the possibility of his surviving the plane crash and being alive in the Himalayas make good teatime stories!

So it was amazing to see all his personal belongings preserved in the same state since the days he was residing at the premises.

I have been to Calcutta once – during the Navaratri festival. It was an experience! But I have always regretted that I couldn’t see the famous Howrah Bridge :-( Now I have one more place to visit during my next trip to the city :-)

The TV Guide said that the episode of The Foodie (Times Now) was going to be at Wagah. So I tuned in hoping that I will be able to see the Change of Guard at the border amidst cheers of “भारत माता की जय”. Host Kunal Vijayakar, however, took the viewers to the National Defense Academy.

And the dining hall there had a table that was cordoned off on all sides. It was a table meant for the POWs (Prisoners of War) and MIAs (Missing in Action) – in short, for those who could not make it back home from the battlefield!

The book that’s beside my bedside table these days is Robert Ludlum’s "The Scorpio Illusion". I can’t seem to get enough of the Agency and the Bureau :-)

The Lazarus Vendetta - by Robert Ludlum

Just finished reading “The Lazarus Vendetta” by Robert Ludlum. A few years ago the storyline would have seem outlandish. But in these days of sudden rapid outbreak of diseases like SARS, Bird Flu and Swine Flu, it’s not a question of“if” anymore but “when”. :-(

The storyline then, without further ado. It all begins at a remote village in the strife-torn country of Zimbabwe. The workers of the Lazarus movement who are trying to promote natural farming there are shocked to find that all the residents have been killed in the most grotesque way imaginable – their bodies reduced to a pile of slime and bones. They don’t get much time to react though as unseen snipers gun them down. The scene is repeated outside the Teller Institute – that’s housing research facilities of many Nanotechnology companies – when the members of the movement stage a protest rally there, just ahead of US President Sam Castilla’s visit.

The world watches, terrified as its worst fears about US secret weapons of mass destruction are confirmed day by day. And Lieutanant Colonel Jonathan Smith who is called upon to make sense of the situation that is rapidly sliding out of the control of Uncle Sam, finds that somewhere in this saga of death and destruction are involved two of the most prestigious US intelligence services – the Bureau (that’s FBI, for the uninitiated!) and the Agency (that’s CIA, again for the uninitiated!) - and Britain’s MI6!

I was amused at the brouhaha over Shahrukh Khan’s 2 hour detention at the Newark airport. The man has been spoilt by the fans closer home treating him like God. So I was delighted that someone decided to point out to him that he is – like the rest of us – a mere mortal. C’mon Shahrukh, as you yourself said in one of your movies – बड़े बड़े शहरोमे ऐसी छोटी छोटी बातें होती रहती है. I guess the yanks weren’t amused by the line “डॉन को पकड़ना मुश्किल ही नही नामुमकिन है” :-)