I have always loved the Kashmir valleys and the little sparkling lakes that flow down these valleys... The beauty of the hills and the enchanting towns of Ladakh and Srinagar... The movies where Shammi Kapoor wooed most of his Saira Banus and Sharmila Tagores... Those were the times Kashmir and its valleys attracted the most...
Over a period of time, like anywhere in the global scenario where there is a certain section of a religious community motivated with certain religious doctrine take to arms, the beauty of these valleys have been destroyed... when the majority of the population inhabiting these valleys belong to the same group, the minority naturally has to bear with the torture... It has been the doctrine of some religious community to wipe out non-believers and non-followers... I have never been more shocked to learn that the same community has justifying theories of women being rapped... girl child being molested ... infidelity and et al…
It has always been the liberal culture that the Hindus followed then that has brought down this upon themselves (and to us all)… Had we been a little more stringent we could have avoided the furcation of a religion which could have been the greatest in the world… we all know that the neighboring countries have all followed the principles of a Hindu man who had spread his extensive knowledge on the Hindu culture and resorted to Moksha…
My viewpoint on the state of Kashmir now is that the Hindus have let themselves down time and again… on the other hand, there are groups and communities making the land their breeding place where more and more people are being trained to capitalize on the current hold and destroy more … It all boils down to the selfish motives of theirs to either convert a non-follower or behead him… and they call it in the name of a religious principle… and to the world “fighting against foreign policies”… the same foreign policies, as I understand is the non-believers and non-followers…
The Indian Jawans die everyday saving this nation… and that too mostly from the neighboring country… Had our ancestors not given them the standing that they so proudly and shamelessly show signs of, the Jawans deserved a little bit of serenity and calmness around them… There are numerous policies and acts to pin point and blame for the state of affairs in the state of J&K but I can only be angry about them… I only realize what could have been done, should have been done…. Now, we will cry in despair when another major city gets attacked by terrorists from our neighboring countries, who were trained or picked up from our own country… we will protest the policies of the government… but what we need to do is a call of action amongst ourselves… let bygones be bygones… the awareness needs to be spread… there cannot be more destruction of another paradise on Earth… let us fight terror and the motives behind them…
Internet search major Yahoo! India appointed Arun Tadanki as the Managing Director of its India operations on 20th May 2009 keeping its vibrant image in the industry in mind while doing so. This was a position which remained vacant for 20 months from August 2007 when the previous MD left the firm. Yahoo! India was on a winning streak and the dynamic profile of the job required someone as dynamic as Tadanki who could not only continue with the new dimension of the search engine business but also enthuse a flesh blood of purple in the organization.
Tadanki is one of the most contemporary business personalities that we have today. A part-time DJ who likes playing rock music, mostly from the 70’s and 80’s and a passionate music lover, he got trained at the Denon DJ School in Singapore. He likes playing at the ITC Luxury Hotel and Mojo, Gurgaon. His area of interest is not limited to music alone. He has a marked innate ability to sell ideas that are distinct and unconventional in nature. With net users being constantly bombarded with a plethora of choices, it is very challenging to attract a user to come to your website on a consistent basis and evermore difficult to retain them. However, Tadanki has been entrusted with the onus of spreading the realms of the internet horizon in a market with increasing capacity.
Tadanki has a rich professional background coupled with one of the best educational backgrounds from esteemed institutions in the country. He has a B. Tech Degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai and a PGDM from none other than the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadabad. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Tadanki was President, Asia Pacific and Middle East at Monster.com. He had also served at JobsAhead.com as its Head of Sales & Marketing and was the Head of Culinary Business at Nestle, India. At Yahoo!, he will be responsible for expansion and consolidation of the business in India as well as sub-continental Asia, Middle East and Africa. His office is based in the NCR (Gurgaon) and reports directly to the Vice President of Emerging Markets, Keith Nilsson. He played a crucial part in bringing the high-profile CEO of Yahoo!, Carol Bartz to India last year in November. It brought about an investment campaign of $ 100 million in India and extended its advertising campaigns in a major way across the country. His efforts have also been rewarded with an increase in the user percentage by 40% and usher in the involvement of the company in the UIDAI Project.
It has further helped in stabilizing the languishing internet business of the company in India although there is a stiff and strong Google’s presence in the market. Tadanki has been honored in many ways for his outstanding leadership and abilities to turnaround businesses in his favor. India Today listed him as one of the “Top 50 Young Leaders of India” in 2005 while Business Today rated him as one of the “Top 25 Hottest Young Executives in India” in 2004. He is also very active in social networking websites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Arun Tadanki is one of those few executives who have matched the profile of his CV to the profile of his job. He maintains a very healthy attitude towards challenges and takes them on with intensity. He has inspired thousands of young managers in choosing the right career paths and moving ahead with a clear set of ideas that directs an individual with passion and an appetitie to win.
Bangalore Photography Race which was heldin September 2010 was the first of its kind. It was nothing but a platform to bring together people of varied cultures, art and literature of this maximum nation. An endeavor to bring together aspirations and hopes of a significant part of our lives by way of generating essentialities such as fitness and art. What is extremely essential is to note that the feature of this event is to enable the people of Bangalore to de-stress and adopt a healthy lifestyle by exploring within ourselves, all through the medium of photography and fitness.
However, in the world scavenged by the rampant advent of technology, it is seen that human perceptions have been conquered with the dominant presence of material wants and needs. In fact, it is beyond belief that not many Nobel laureates have written deeply about the beauty of photography in the way it permeates through our lives. Photography is an art of retrospection and the camera becomes an extension of the eye to perceive the world differently. It helps in ushering the aesthetics of how it is perceived from what is.
Using the format of photography and fitness, the BPR team is making an effort in conveying an implicit level of creativity that is predominant amongst the contemporary generation. There is an inert interest in all of us yearning for some sort of connect, love and acceptance to the point of being addicted to it. The concept is to very carefully shoot and frame all the photographs capturing the city of Bangalore in all its shades and hues. Any mention of the event without the participants would be incomplete. Everyone was seen sinking their teeth into their roles and responsibilities of the torch bearer, the innovator, the leader! It is popularly said that a good picture is equivalent to a good deed. Hence it is important that the photographs throw a bunch of eclectic characters ranging from automobiles to buildings to people to dust and dirt.
In the end, photography is a form of art that will appeal only to those who appreciate it and stresses on the way it explores what the eye just glanced.
English is a funny language. At the moment, over 1000 people in the world speak Mandarin as their mother tongue whereas about half of that speak English. Following this, Chinese must be the global language and yet analysts have considered English as the global language. Most English words have been derived from Latin and Greek. With the arrival of the Royal British Empire, the language transformed and found its way into all the colonized lands of the Queen even to the United States of America by the twentieth century. So what makes this very global language very funny?
There are no such people quite so arrogant as people for whom English is their mother tongue. The British, The Australians, The Americans and not merely them, everyone in Canada and New Zealand too. Each native English speaker has his own mannerism in the way he speaks with heavy accent. For instance, the Americans love to pronounce and stretch their words whereas the English prefer short and crisp pronunciation often making it difficult to deduce for us Indians. The differences are obvious in the way a F.R.I.E.N.D.S character speaks from that of a Hugh Laurie or a Michael Sheen. Here in India, we are very prone to vandalizing the English language as a result of diversification. We have introduced such variances of the same language with no such intent but only in an effort to put across the meaning which few have informally termed as ‘Hinglish’. In the 1975 Hrishikesh Mukherjee hit comedy Chupke Chupke, an ardent Hindi speaker Dharmendra curiously asks his master why the English language does not have same pronunciation for words like ‘go’, ‘do’, ‘to’ or why ‘chacha’ and ‘mama’ are both called ‘uncle’. His master finds himself in a fix unable to explain and says that that was the way English is spoken and written. Russell Peters often trusts the Indian accent to bring the house down.
There are other such rather nonsensical examples of the funny English language viz., Boxing rings are square… A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig… We have noses that run and feet that smell… When a house burns up, it burns down… and a lot more. I must say however funny the language seems and difficult to deal with for many, it has become a prerequisite in the global world that we live in, for one must communicate well in English in the modern development of science and commerce. It becomes the imperative to learn the English language to foster change, innovation and development. The Japanese, in contrast do not use English as the official language nor do they have any training in schools and colleges and yet are well ahead in terms of innovation with respect to science and commerce.
There are also the new fashionable English words that do not seem like English in the first place. The Americans are much ahead in this regard, creating new vocabulary, which of course are meant for their own use and understanding. ‘Ba-donka-donk’, meaning a very curvy behind of a woman. ‘Shawty’, meaning fine girl. ‘Flossing’, meaning showing off one’s asset are rather new entrants in the English vocabulary. The British on the other hand love to use the old English and their choice of vocabulary is certainly more profound than the rest. The Australians too have theirs as much as the Americans and the British. I have observed that if you ask a set of different questions to a British, an American and an Australian, you might get one word or two words responses to all the questions. (British) - How are you? Fantastic. How was your day? Fantastic. How did the presentation go? Fantastic. What did the clients say? Fantastic. Great, I’ll get ready and we’ll go out for dinner… Fantastic. (In the restaurant)… Sir, we have a special guest who will be performing live tonight… Fantastic… (American) - How are you? Awesome. How was your day? Awesome. How did the presentation go? Awesome. What did the clients say? Awesome. Great, I’ll get ready and we’ll go out for dinner… Awesome. (In the restaurant)… Sir, we have a special guest who will be performing live tonight… Awesome… (Australian) - How are you? Mighty good. How was your day? Mighty good. How did the presentation go? Mighty good. What did the clients say? Mighty good. Great, I’ll get ready and we’ll go out for dinner…
The English language is hard to learn… Some like to condense their speech while some like it elaborated. It is also seen that eloquent speakers love to elaborate. Barack Obama loves to articulate and speaks with gusto while Steve Jobs likes it straightforward. Both are exceptional speakers. But inorder to be able to convince a large audience, one must be proficient vis-à-vis the environment in which he delivers his speech. English is a very important language in the corporate world where the interactions mainly occur via e-mails as well as in conference halls. This is one area where Indians appear to have lacked even with the growing number of university graduates. The language proficiency is below what is expected of an average person and very few universities have set guidelines to solve the issue. I recently read about the need of 8 million graduates by 2014 for our GDP growth curve to keep rising. Presently we have only 350 recognized universities against the 1500 needed and only the IIMs and few top B-Schools seem to be looking into the need for prioritizing the knowledge of English. Some state politicians even coerce parents to send their children to schools where the medium of instruction is in a regional language. In no way should this help India progress at the kind of pace that we educated lot expect it to. The question is, who will teach English, how are educated graduates going to improve their language, how are we going to thrive upon the fact that we are a competent lot, until we announce it? We could help ourselves by triggering an eagerness to learn, willingness to accept the importance of English in every line of business and create an atmosphere where somebody learns and teaches another.
Let the government-run institutions do the fine job of delivering highly qualified engineers and management leaders. Private institutions need to scale up their capacity to not only get in students and teach them but enable to grow and develop themselves. It is highly recommended that internships are encouraged and companies should render co-operation. Schools need to correct everything at the roots. Making English mandatory, stressing on grammar, pronunciation, etc. can prevent damage in the future. Meanwhile, we need to understand that we need to improve and work on it ourselves. It is important that we speak well, write well and communicate well even among ourselves. We all must make the effort to improve. We might be able to tap our own potentials and take the road to a higher level bridging the gaps with a common language. We need to be part of the global paradigm where more inter-person communications takes place. Though there is an underlying threat of neglecting other languages, I would like to maintain a belief that we are all wise enough to uphold our national languages and not risk it by holding it too tight. Life itself finds its meaning when compared to a grammar lesson… we find the past perfect and the present tense. It is no more an exception to be part of the global phenomenon but the norm and we must participate.
