Last week, a friend forwarded this to me:

The letters A, B, C & D do not appear in the spellings of numbers 1 to 99.

D appears for the first time in HUNDRED.
C appears for the first time in CRORE.
B appears for the first time in BILLION.
A appears for the first time in THOUSAND.

अर्ज किया है…

जान कर  भी वो मुझे जान  नही पाए
आज तक वो मुझे पहचान नहीं पाए
खुद   ही कर  ली बेवफ़ाई हमने दोस्तों
ताकि उन पर कोई इल्जाम ना आये

(From the internet)

Last week, I was watching a program on the Discovery channel about the Nagarhole national park in Karnataka. It showed how different animals there cope with the change of seasons. While following a herd of wild elephants, the narrator drew the viewers’ attention to a blind female elephant with her little one. He commented that it looked like female was shot when she entered a plantation, thus separating the two from their herd and that the going was likely to get pretty tough for both of them.

When the season changed to summer and dry parched land, the camera captured the two again – fresh green grass was hard to come by so the mother was starving and the baby, who was entirely dependent on his mom’s milk, looked positively malnourished. It hurt to see the baby suffer like that.

Inevitably, the show then captured the arrival of the monsoon and the change in the look of the land. But there was no mention of the baby elephant and its mother. The show simply left the viewers wondering whether they survived or not.

I just hope that they did. :-( L

Jaggu Jaundice

Danny Diarrhea

Tatya Typhoid

If you think these are names of characters from some gangster movie, think again. These characters are part of the ads by Domex, the toilet cleaning product. I agree, the rest of the ad, though effectively depicting what exactly the product is all about, is rather unappetizing. It shows assorted germs leaping out of an Indian toilet straight on to the towels or tooth brushes of hapless unsuspecting human beings. One can’t, of course, rule out the shock value - makes you almost dash to the nearest store selling the product.

I, however, have taken a liking to the imaginatively titled characters. I hope there are more of them in the offing.

Are you one of those who like to tinker around wires and plugs and switches? If yes,  maybe you need to check the following sites:

Little Bits

Raspberry Pi

I managed to watch an episode of “Highway On My Plate” after a long time. The episode seemed to feature Rocky and Mayur’s journey along the southern coast of India. At one point, they talked about a temple in Kerala, the Ananthapura temple, where a crocodile – a vegetarian one at that(!) –has been guarding the temple since many years. The temple person mentioned that the crocodile eats only jaggery and rice which is used for offering at the temple. He called out to the crocodile but he seemed camera-shy, preferring to nap in its cave instead of coming to meet and greet Rocky, who in my opinion had ventured too close for comfort.

When the camera zoomed in on the crocodile  the top of his head seemed to be covered with rice. There was rice elsewhere in the cave too. Clearly, the food offered was more than what the animal could (or would care to) eat. This disturbed me a lot. Aren’t these people wreaking havoc on the natural eating patterns of the animal, its digestive system and health – all in the name of faith? Isn’t it unhygienic to let the rice stay in its cave, possibly rotting and polluting the lake? Wouldn’t it be wiser and more practical to feed some of the offering to the needy and the poor instead of letting it all go to waste?

P.S. you can read more about the crocodile at http://www.mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=broadcast&broadcastid=33896

अर्ज किया है.....

कमाल का हौसला दिया है ख़ुदाने हम इंसानोंको
वाकिफ हम अगले पलसे नहीं होते और वादे हम जन्मोके कर लेते है

(From the internet)