NaMo, are 100 smart cities a smart promise?

I love Monday Morning Meetings for more than one reason. You have grudgingly mourned the end of a weekend and have managed to bring your languid body to the office with great trouble and voila! Before the hectic week begins, you have a ten-minute joy ride to paradise where everyone, from the boss to the peers, talks about their exotic weekends – given the limitations of living in a city as dense as Mumbai. You relive every microsecond all over again like a power capsule that leaves you refreshed and energized.

Today’s meeting was going to be slightly different. On Friday, the week had ended with BJP’s victory, touted as a landslide-win against the Congress. And the weekend had seen conversations among joggers in parks all over the country waiting with bated breaths while pondering which direction the change would pioneer in.

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On language, cognition and nothingness.

To talk about all that in just one post, keeping up with your interest level, is a challenge for my language,difficult for my cognition and will eventually end up in nothingness. So pardon me for trying to put too much stuff in one.

I won't take stand for or against the populist Gladwell bashing (for Outliers, that is) and simply move on to the point he makes regarding the chinese language and mathematics.

http://paulscottinfo.ipage.com/history/mark/mhh.html

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Slingshotting the Goliaths of Indian Politics

We have all read that overly exaggerated biblical tale in which a young man named David kills a giant named Goliath using but a slingshot. 

(pic credit: Marcantonio Raimondi [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

What we are witnessing these days in Indian Politics after the historic Delhi elections results forces one to think, ‘Are we witnessing the David-Goliath story of our times’?

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Carnatic Music and Beyond

Tuesday, Week 1:

A request by a reader for a post on Carnatic music makes me jump up. How do you write a good, comprehensive article that does justice to this, an art which actually becomes a way of life, and introduce it to someone? Especially when you have been learning for more than a decade now and yet, feel absolutely like an amateur! Needless to say, the entire morning was lost racking my brain than being an attentive student in class.

Raja Ravi Varma’s Oil Painting of Saraswati, the Goddess of Vidya

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The dazed twenty-something.

This ordinarily mundane age has been so widely celebrated and exploited through its fulsome usage by the internet media , that there is a certain subconscious whisper constantly ringing a cacophony in the mind- “You’re in your twenties. What have you achieved?” This is followed by a balletic nerve-wrecking activity in the tummy, a quiet moment of deep introspection, and ends with me facing back to the computer screen, leaving the mind-fuck plaque to gradually decay the mental peace.

Meg Jay in her TED Talk, ‘Why 30 is NOT the new 20’ quite calmly puts forth a statement that ‘the human brain has its second and final growth spurt in a person's twenties, as it re-wires itself for adulthood.’

Coming from a psychologist [I don’t know why, but I have this inexplicable reverence for them], it scared the shit out of me. My decade had arrived. Now was the time. I had to change my life.

 Convinced me? Yes. Motivated me? Yes. Entirely? No. 

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aS –featured: Why should the Microsoft-Nokia deal worry Samsung?

One who reads, writes. As promised, We keep bringing to you 'aS featured' where we publish select ‘arbit speculations’ submitted by our readers to us. The article featured below has been written by Mr. Sushil Malani, a product marketing professional, currently working with one of the leading telecom companies of India. This article will be followed by some more from the same author on connected topics in future aS-features.

Disclaimer: The Views expressed here are personal and do not represent the POV of any particular company or team arbitSpecs.

One more giant fell in the quest to shape future of digitized, connected and mobile world. Nokia respectfully succumbed to the vortex of power struggle for operating system dominance.

It’s Interesting to witness 3 players left to lead the future. And this F1 race is entering into the last lap. Who has taken pole position and has an advantage? Over whom? Who will win? Would there be any other player, ready to emerge from the dark? What are the side effects? What is the future going to look like?

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Atop Karnala fort in Rains: Drenched Bliss.

So how do know whether you have entered a travelling hiatus? Why, do a trend analysis on your daily routine for the last month. If there IS a month long unchanging daily routine, then sadly, you have entered one.

I was pretty confident that after joining the corporate world, my personal lust (yes, lust) for travelling and trekking and all things related would be taking a back seat. One such uneventful Thursday, I was sipping my second cup of coffee in my Mumbai office when one of my colleagues forwarded an itinerary e-mail for Friday. It said something about trekking around Karnala. Few google searches down, I was already wondering where had I kept my cam’s charger!

That's what was up for grabs! 

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