Beyond Technology: Jai Kannada, Jai Karnataka

I was sitting next to my friend when he pointed out an Orkut community, which is for hardcore residents of Bangalore. Its message goes:


This is a community for all those true blooded, hardcore Bangloreans who believe that people from outside Bangalore, who come and settle down here are the ones who should be majorly held responsible for the recent collapse in infrastructure, bad traffic amongst other negative developments in the city. Facilities originally created for us are being exploited by non-Bangloreans. Growing up in this wonderful city, we knew how this place was 10-15 years ago..or more. We feel extremely attached to this place and we express our hatred and anger towards all 'immigrants' here!!..Come on in and express your solidarity as a Hardcore Banglorean.. and for all you wimps at heart.. stay away!!


If this wasn’t enough for me to use the F word, he pointed me out to the following comment:


they shld be kicked out..as soon as possible..instead if we make infrastructure in bangalore better then junk,happless guyz will come in more numbers....North india is anyway slum...they want to replicate it here as well!!!



Albeit, I have been a part of Bangalore for less than 8 months; and even though most of the time I am confined inside the walls of our campus, Bangalore does have problem. And it’s not because of North Indians. And it is not hard to notice it. You notice it first when you land at the airport. You notice it when you look around for a taxi. You notice it when you take a cab and move around Bangalore. You notice whenever you go out for a walk. You notice it every time. Is it that people of North India, which includes myself, came here and ruined the beautiful airport that exists at Bangalore, damaged the roads that existED, and of course took over all the pubs in Bangalore? Isn’t this regionalism, in its worst form? In the end we all belong to one single nation, India. So, why have this commotion? Why show this immaturity? Especially, since most of the people around actually KNOW the root cause of all this so called evils that plague Bangalore. It is nothing but mismanagement, by the powers that be. I won’t be naming any single person, but I guess deep inside every “hardcore Bangalore resident” knows about it.

But personally, I actually find this whole thing funny. Consider the case of US and UK, there people complain that we, that is Indians, have ruined their economy, and here in Bangalore we complain that Northern part of India, has ruined the economy here. But the question is where do we draw the line, if nations can ruin each others economy, states can ruin each others economy, cities can ruin each others economy, then why not just lock our doors and start living in a closed world, a closed economy? A world where nobody interacts with anybody else. A world where you grow your own food, cook your own food, grow your own cotton, stitch your own clothes. A world without interaction, a world that does not exist.

Where Am I?

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Thanks to Herecast
And of course to the wonderful Wi-Fi network that we have in our campus.

Paul Graham

Finally, Paul Graham has started blogging. Check it up at

Paul Graham

Free At Last

Free At Last


     It was just a matter of when, but I had to pull the plug. I am talking about Orkut which promotes, social networking, a concept which aims at bringing everybody together. People you have met, people you meet, people you hope to meet one day, and people you won’t ever meet. They are all there. For some months, my friends thought it would be great to introduce me to this concept of Social Networking, so they kept on sending me these “Orkut Invites” and finally, one day I gave in and created an account at Orkut. For quite some time my account just existed, with no information about myself except my name and “Afrikaans” being the only language I could speak. And then, I start getting messages to update my profile, and I decided to do it. Just for the heck of it, I decided to try to invite some of my friends; however, it seemed that most of them were already there. Two days of peace and then somehow I get these fifteen friend requests, and when I approved them, having a figure like twenty on my friends list, when one of my friends had more than two hundred people in her list. I know it wasn’t right, but I just imagined of having a figure like that. The worse part however was that I got addicted, I really don’t know, but in hindsight, the only way I can describe something like this is akin to sleeping with a whore, you know you are not doing it right, but then you just feel like enjoying the moment, except in case of Orkut it is probably worse. Everybody seems to be using Orkut as a substitute to e-mail and worse in some cases as a substitute to Instant messengers. If there is something really relevant, if there is really something I want to share with _MY_  _FRIENDS_, friends I really care about, I would prefer to use mail. Scrapbook on Orkut just seems to be a public place to pee, except that everybody can see you pee. And somehow people seem to be interested in seeing other peoples pee. I don’t mind admitting that somehow during my one month of association with Orkut, I myself did fall in this trap. And the only way out was to pull the plug, so today morning after a lot of thought I decided pull the plug. I logged into “Google Account Manager” and decided to delete my Orkut profile and the only way to describe of what I felt after pressing the button was like getting independence. I could finally be connected to internet and not worry even once about somebody scrapping me, and thinking about what I should write in somebody’s scrapbook.


As far as I am concerned, I am free, at last.