Personal Reflections – Page 36

I was at a Barista (Connaught Place) today to meet someone and I saw something which was really touching. Not referring to the sadhu who was sitting near a table next to mine, wearing Armani spectacles and chugging pricey Himalayan spring water. (I would’ve taken a snap but I figured that in case he did have a terrible wrath I did not want to end up as a pile of smouldering ashes.) Maybe he misses the kind of water he generally gets ‘back home’. Our ancient religious texts – given that the people writing them were [so-called] seers – should have foreseen the oncoming march of Armani and coffee shops and added them to The List Of Things Thou Shalt Have To Give Up When You Become An Ascetic. That was odd; you often run into cuckoo people at coffee shops. For instance, another guy who walked in with a camera tripod and a huge guitar amp. We may presume that he’s some sort of rock photographer, pending further information.

Pictured – a rock photographer
photo credit: Miguel Vera

There, see? I sidetracked again from what I wanted to share. OK, so my main point was the counter guy at the shop. He was – to put it the blunt, old-fashioned way (since I’m not aware of the what’s the kosher, ‘politically correct’ term for it these days) – deaf and mute. All the other support staff were conversing with him in sign language. This dude was deftly handling orders coming in – ‘listening’ to what the order was in sign language – and going about preparing those orders.

‘Affirmative action‘ gets brought up at times, mostly around the budget when the government is urging companies to take ‘corporate social responsibility‘ (CSR) seriously. It would seem that more often than not CSR gets relegated to departmental memo, or a best a photo-op for the CSR mini-site on their corporate site. Rarely do you get to see – with your own eyes – what CSR steps a company may be taking. Obviously, it must have cost Barista money to train its staff (at least in this particular cafe) to understand sign language – and yet it’s heartening to know that companies do go ahead and perform actions out of general goodwill. Seriously, please let’s not get cynical here. You can make as many conspiracy theories you want that their “objective was to see exactly this kind of blog post to provide viral publicity”, but at the end of the day a company did make at least some effort towards affirmative action.

Rarely does one feel really good about actions being taken by corporates. Some of them are genuinely into full-on philanthropy – like Bill Gates did. I might not be a Microsoft fan and I still say Gates, Ballmer & Co have used sneaky tactics to gain monopoly, but I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates in the regard that despite becoming the richest man in the world, he did not hoard the money – instead, he donated (and still donates) hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal wealth for various social welfare projects across the globe. Naysayers can say all they want about the monetary value being a fraction of what he has earned, but at least he did donate that fraction – and it’s still quite a lot of money!

On a slightly related note, I would also like to say that in an effort to make terms politically correct ultra-liberals go a bit too far. Differently-abled. I mean, seriously? What’s wrong with ‘persons with disabilities’? People with disabilities need acceptance, not an overdose of protectiveness. Now don’t get me wrong, er, what I mean is something along this lines.

(Now that I included a South Park reference, people would be expecting me to include a Douglas Adams quote to come full circle and reinforce the Ankur = 42 = lolz stereotype. Sorry to disappoint you guys. I don’t think DNA said anything on this.)

Originally posted at Youthpad.

It has been two weeks now since gyaan.in was launched. Let me take this opportunity to, once again, say a big ‘Thank You!’ to all members of the gyaan.in community and visitors of gyaan.in who have ensured that this initiative is off to a great start. We have ‘question of the day’ threads going on at gyaan.in daily, and this post is a compilation of the best questions asked in the month of July 2009. These are in no particular order.

Which is the Indian city whose Maharana was the only royalty who did not attend the Delhi Durbar for King George V in 1911, and why? (by bhavika)
Maharana Fateh Singh of Udaipur. He kept his place at the Delhi Railway Station, where the King Emperor came to meet him—as one ruler meets another with equal honour, because Udaipur is the only city which has never been captured by the Mughals. Their defence was impenetrable.
1908 Summer Olympics were actually to be held in Rome, but something happened that eventually made the venue shift to London. What was it? (by nasri)
Mount Vesuvius erupted in 1906, so Italians couldn’t afford to hold the games while reconstruction was going on.
Which dictator titled himself: “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor____________, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular”? (by Galen)
Idi Amin
What is a wrackground image? (by Kush)
Any kind of texture or background image on a web page that does not let the viewers properly read the text displayed on the page, due to bright colors of the image/texture.
Rolex has created only one digital watch till date. Where can you find it? (by crystalunicorn)
Wimbledon
There are only two batsmen in the history of English cricket who have scored centuries on their away and home TEST debuts. One of them is the current opening batsman Andrew Strauss; who’s the other? (by venky)
Ranjitsinhji. He scored 62 and 154 not out against Australia at Old Trafford in his first Test, becoming the second batsman after W. G. Grace to score a century on his debut for England and also the first batsman to score 100 before lunch (on the third day, moving from 41 not out to 154 not out in just over 2 hours). He scored 175 in the first innings of his first overseas Test, also against Australia in 1897 (at that time it was the highest score that had ever been made for England in Test cricket).
Which noted Indian personality’s father was one of the three main (Indian) contractors who built Connaught Place? The other two were Sardar Dharam Singh and Rai Bahadur Narain Singh. (by bhavika)
Khushwant Singh
Which organization was started after its founder came to know about two students who had been sent to jail for a period of seven years for raising a toast ‘to liberty’? (by ankurb)
Amnesty International
Codenamed ‘Milan’ this piece of ‘hardware’ was introduced at the D5 conference in 2007. As soon as it was launched on April 17, 2008, it found a place in the Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, Innoventions Dream Home and was used by MSNBC for the 2008 US Presidential elections. It was the brainchild of Mr. Steven B and Mr. Andy W. (by boris)
Microsoft Surface
The first thing you notice about the Red Fort is the great wall or the ‘curtain’ which stands in front of the Lahore Gate (the one on Chandni Chowk). But this wall wasn’t built by Shah Jahan; in fact, it was a later addition by Aurangzeb. Why did he build it? (by bhavika)
Court etiquette decreed that, as long as the nobles were in view of the emperor, they had to move about on foot and not on horseback or palanquins. They also had to keep bowing, à la Mughal-e-Azam. So Aurangzeb built the curtain wall, and the the courtiers simply became invisible to him. He probably did it because he found all this protocol irritating.
What is in the dark (refer to the picture)? (by achu_182)
‘Tumbler’ (better known as ‘Batmobile‘) from Chris Nolan’s Batman franchise.
Born in 1963, who holds the position of Chief Happiness Officer in the company he works for? (by achu_182)
Ronald McDonald
Which Bollywood film’s director offered a money back guarantee if the audience did not like it, but kept his promise to only 5000 viewers across India? (by crystalunicorn)
Mani Shankar for Mukhbiir
What connects the names of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? (by pearlsinghal)
They’re all named after Renaissannce age artists – Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Connect Youtube, a game called Zero Wing by Sega, and Simply Awful. (by achu_182)
Zero Wing gave us “All your base belong to us” which was popularised in the forum Simply Awful (similar to 4chan) and was used by Youtube as an April Fool’s prank)
Fool On The Hill is a song originally written by Paul McCartney and recorded by the Beatles in 1967 eventually appearing in the Magical Mystery Tour album. In April of ’75 it also entered history. Why? (by Rhead)
In April 1975, at the Homebrew Computer Club fourth meeting, Steve Dompier programmed his MITS Altair 8800 personal computer to play The Fool on the Hill. The trick was that the output device was a nearby AM radio. Dompier had programmed his computer so that the electromagnetic interference created by the primitive PC produced recognizable tones on the radio.
An estimated 100,000 copies of the Playstation version of Tiger Woods 99 were recalled when something was found as a hidden file on the disk. What was found? (by Rhead)
The Spirit of Christmas, a small video, that eventually became South Park.

School quiz archives: DPS Noida eSpice 2009, Montfort School Gateway 2009, DPS RK Puram Geography Quiz.

Now that that is done, let me give some statistics. gyaan.in is currently getting around 250 unique visitors daily; pageloads are 4-5 times that figure. This is in a sense expected for a forum, but it also indicates that a lot of people are visiting multiple pages. The odd thing is that we have around 90 registered members till now – so that means a lot of visitors are just browsing content without signing up. I call this odd because signing up for gyaan.in is an extremely simple procedure:

Fill up the shortest sign up form in the history of sign-up forms. You only need to fill in your login/user ID, email address (will be used to notify you of new wall posts on your profile; we promise we won’t spam!) and what you want to keep as your password. If you want, you may also fill in your real name.
All sign-up requests go into a review queue. One of the gyaan.in moderators will have a look to weed out ‘obvious’ spambot accounts. Your request will be approved within 24 hours, but generally it should be within a few hours.
That’s it! Post anything you want. There’s a quickstart guide for gyaan.in and guidelines for posting question of the day which you might want to read up to get your bearings.

I understand that some of you might just want to read the content. That’s OK! 🙂 But the reason why I’m suggesting signing-up is because that will make your browsing exprience on gyaan.in a lot easier. Our forum keeps track of the last comment you read in any thread since your last login, and when you come back to visit again it neatly shows you which discussions have unread comments (and how many of them). It will also automatically take you to the point in a discussion from which newer comments begin. So even if you’re just going to read content, signing-up will make navigation easier.

A few more stats. Around 57% visitors are returning visitors. A whopping 81.4% of visitors spend a significant amount of time on the site (‘significant’ is defined as visit length from anywhere more than 10 minutes to greater than one hour); 20% spend 30 minutes to more than one hour on the site. Browser wars: 62.4% of visitors use Firefox, 21.4% use Google Chrome, and the rest use Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari / iPhone Safari. And we’re definitely .in – 98.4% of visitors are from India; 75% of those visitors are from Delhi / NCR.

Do check out gyaan.in if you haven’t already!