Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Personality tests

Haha.. Some interesting facts I found out about myself !

I am 77% Grown Up, 23% Kid


Congratulations, you are definitely quite emotionally mature.
Although you have your moments of moodiness, you're usually stable and level headed.

I am 37% Addicted to the Internet

Internet? Please. You're definitely not geeky enough to be that addicted.
You have a full life off your computer - and the internet is just a small pastime.



My Dominant Intelligence is Interpersonal Intelligence

You shine in your ability to realate to and understand others.
Good at seeing others' points of view, you get how people think and feel.
You have an uncanny ability to sense true feelings, intentions, and motivations.
A natural born leader, you are great at teaching and mediating conflict.

You would make a good counselor, salesperson, politician, or business person.

Friday, January 12, 2007

A poem from down memory Lane

As a part of the ICSE syllabus that I studied, there was a full book of poems that we studied during class X. One of my favorite poems out of that book, one that I understood and appreciated at that age, and one that makes sense even at this point of time in my life, was the poem "IF" by Rudyard Kipling.

Our English teachers Mrs.Rebeiro did full justice to that poem when we studied it at school.

This is how it goes:

If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Bible College and Me!

If someone who knew me really well, typed out this URL (http://rekharaghav.blogpot.com/), they would fearfully quit the site worrying that they may have got a virus on their system. Because what you see on that website is "SO NOT ME"! Well, in case you haven't noticed, the URL above is wrongly spelt - just missed out an 's'.

What happened the other day was that I sent this link with the typo to my friend and asked him to check out my blog. He got back to me saying he read all about Bible college online and that Jesus loves me and stuff. I clicked the link I had sent him and saw the same. Here's what we saw!



So, I immediately tried to log in to http://www.blogger.com/, to check out what had happened. Server was down! Tried to go and take a look at http://www.ndtv.com/ on which my previous article was based and all I saw was an XML file in a browser. I was really convinced, that there had been some huge virus attack which had probably attacked all those servers on the Internet. I called my husband at work and asked him to go look at my blog. I tried to see if my friends' blogs had been changed as well. Surprisingly they were all normal! So I tried logging into orkut.com and then clicked my blog address from my profile. Worked fine! I was really surprised by that time, and that's when I realized I had misspelled the blog address in my browser.

Apparently my elementary school teachers had a reason to frown upon spelling mistakes!

Appreciate any comments on what your blog addresses if misspelled could take you to.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

The Noida Killings - Are we in the same world?

This morning during our customary phone call, my mother asked if I had read about the Noida massacre. I used to read the news on ndtv.com quite regularly, until it began to get boring with news of politics. She gave me an outline of what had happened, and I got interested and decided to catch up. Since I had the time, and I was intrigued and disturbed by the numbers on the headlines, I decided to read the entire time line on ndtv.com. If you dont know what I am talking about check out this.
Two men, abused and killed so many women and children! If that was not hard enough to digest, the police took this long to find out what was going on, when 30 something children had disappeared within a 100 m of this place?? Everyone knows - politicians are selfish, they only care about power, bureaucrats are well bureaucrats, the police are corrupt, inefficient.. but I wouldn't imagine they could let matters get to this!
In a place of that size, if so many people just went missing, which policeman in his right sense could sit easy? Its their job to investigate and make arrests. Its their job to protect the public. I cant believe a policeman can be so judgemental as to dismiss complaints saying "Your daughter must have eloped with someone". How can they make those statement to the poor parent without even investigating the matter. They refused to file FIRs? Why are these people being paid salaries and allowances and pensions - to make those assumptions?
The bureaucrats didnt bother. Some of them wrote to the police, some of them said they would do something, some of them didnt respond. Well, they only work if the politicians put them on a hot seat.
Politicians are so selfish - to them all these missing people are just numbers. Numbers that dont matter to the number of votes. What are the citizens of India - they are mere numbers to them. Some are numbers that will vote, that can be made to vote, that can be bought to vote, that can be brainwashed to vote, that can be aligned with a religion, that can be aligned with a caste! Well, the people in that Noida village came under the "Dont matter" numbers. They were migrants, who didnt have a vote in the place that they lived in. So what if they were also people? So what if they also had children? So what if they were poor? So what if they were worried about one of their family not showing up at the end of the day? They didnt have a vote!
I can only pity the state of affairs in the country. The system has got so corrupt and inefficient that when an attrocity of this nature is exposed, one can but wonder, if we indeed live in the same world!