What we lost because of SACHIN!!

SACHIN RAMESH TENDULKAR, batsmen who possibly holds every sought after record in batting on modern cricket arena, a cricketer who has carried the burden of Indian batting for more than 25 years, a player who freaks out best of best bowlers in their sleep, a batsmen who has mastered every possible shot of batting bible, played with most accurate technique and who is not only considered as sportsman but work shipped as demi GOD. He holds about every batting record worth owning in the game and compared with the Sir Don Bradman, the greatest cricketer ever. During his playing years, India achieved greater heights on fields and emerged as a team to reckon. Albeit all these achievements, there is something which worked against us cricket frenzy country because of SACHIN!! Sounds unimaginable, but yes true at the same time. 

15th November 1989 when little master took guards for the first time against Pakistan, the day marked the start of a journey which will continue to inspire for next 25 long years. These next 25 years will make spectators shout SACHIN..SACHIN when ever he is on field, will make them breathless when he is close to hundred, known more commonly as nervous 90's, make them switch off their television when he gets out and will also make them rate SACHIN as the only savior of Indian cricket. The records keep breaking and new records created probably to be remain untouched for ever. Riding on his herculean effort team India kept on moving from strength to strength. Spectators were happy, sponsors were minting money, TV channels were making lots of money due to increased viewership and BCCI was gaining clout on international cricket arena.

During these 25 glorified years there is something which SACHIN changed, although neither physically nor voluntarily but it happened in sub conscious mind of every cricket lovers. The country moved from cricket lovers to a die hard fan of SACHIN, for them SACHIN is not just a player but much above this beautiful sport. The impact of this devout worship is evident, India has not produced a single world class bowler for last 25 years, the last Indian bowler who captured the world's imagination was Kapil Dev, after that hardly anyone. Everyone who dreamt of growing up and adore blue jersey, saw himself as SACHIN. Nobody wanted to be a bowler, every one wants to become a batsman like SACHIN.

Digging one step further we will realize the reason behind such frenzy fan following is the success SACHIN enjoyed as a cricketer. He has conquered every peak which a batsman can achieve, in all forms of cricket. This success acted as magnet for future generations, they got blinded by the glitter of this gold and could not see any thing else related to game. And even the same parallel can be said about other sports as well, which ever sports got a Hero, he could inspire the next generation of players. let it be sania Mirza in tennis, Vishy in chess.

No doubt contribution of SACHIN can never be made little and there is no second thought his contribution has gained unimaginable success to Team India but during all this laurels unintently he became a reason of underdevelopment of other sports and also other forms of art apart from batsman ship.

P.S: We love you SACHIN!!.........SACHIN...SACHIN....!!

Get your Marriage Registered!

Any work or dealing with governments department has left most of us with displeasure and uncomfort. Probably because of long waiting time and prevalent bribery. I am writing this blog to share my experience and learning about the process of marriage registration.

Marriage Registration is compulsory in India and a bill is already tabled in Upper house to make this mandatory. Please read TOI article: Link.

Hindus can get their marriage registered under Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. Main requirement is both bride and groom should be Hindu and married. I got my marriage registered in Jayanagar 4th Block sub registrar office. Every area has a sub registrar office, visit the office of groom's permanent address.

Procedure and documents required are:

• Fill Marriage registration form. Form
• This is just a specimen form. Sub registrar office will give a similar form, infact 3 identical forms which need to be filled
• Three witnesses are required either from groom or bride side(blood relationship not necessary)
• Witnesses need not accompany to office
• 7 joint photos of bride and groom with white or blue background. Size required is 2B
• Age proof document. Valid documents are birth certificate, passport, 10th marksheet
• Address proof. Groom should have a valid address proof of the area at which registrar office is located. Bride can show address proof of her hometown. (not sure of vice-versa)
• Marriage Invitation card

With above documents in proper place, you can directly walk into sub registrar office and get your marriage registered and walk out with certificate with in 3  hours. There is no need of hiring a service of broker. 

There can be few changes in procedures/documents in different sub registrar office but more or less basic procedure remains the same. Main point is, this is a very simple procedure, so please don't shy away from it and get your marriage registered soon.

Facebook vs Orkut

This year's birthday celebration happened as routine as every year. 1% of friends named as CLOSE FRIEND wished by calling on my cell, other 5% of friends termed as GOOD FRIENDS texted me, other 4% called as SMART FRIENDS using their smart phones wished through trending APPs like whatsapp, viber & skype. Remaining 90% of friends did their formality using one of the craze of our generation SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES.

Little analytics showed me, compared to 150 comments i got in FACEBOOK, i got only 2 scraps in ORKUT. These numbers are not at all significant for me, but it is very much an issue for a company called GOOGLE. This is because i stay in INDIA and India happens to be its base of second largest users after Brazil. And these numbers reflect the story for ORKUT, they are loosing to Facebook on all grounds and the gap is increasing every second. Currently orkut has just 66 million active users worldwide compared to 750 million facebook users. If we drill down the history pages, we will find out that both these sites started during same time, with orkut being 15 days senior. Both of them enjoyed a good acceptance level from people but in different countries, on one hand Facebook was mainly popular in United States, Germany and France, Orkut on other hand was accepted well in Brazil, India and Japan. In India, Facebook took really a long time to make any in roads, till 2008 facebook hardly had any presence in India or to the matter in any Asian countries. But acceptance started shifting, slowing the new generation got bored of orkut and started their trail with facebook and today Google search itself tells the real story

These statistics and people behavior raises curiosity about what caused the fall of orkut and such stupendous rise of facebook, there are plethora of reason for this but the most prominent one is; orkut stopped improvising and the very need of networking sites. From its advent, apart from some paltry changes, orkut didn't bring any major path breaking change to hold its users interest. People got bored of scraps, testimonials and shared photos. Games and apps also became routine and less interesting. On the other hand, facebook not only kept on changing their look but also their features in terms of apps, interface and usability. 

Today facebook not only allows personal accounts but also allows business to create ads to target a specific demographic through pay-per-click campaigns. Its analytics division helps in putting right ads at right time on right page, to increase visibility and conversion, hence no wonder even big multinationals doe not want to miss out on this opportunity and have their pages created in facebook. 

With innovative thinking and understanding customer needs facebook has built a brand which is much more than just a social networking site. And on other had ORKUT just didn't changed much, and result is for everyone to see. Ok enough of analytics and analysis, let me login and check my facebook account and also share this blog on my timeline.

The need of the hour for India

From the golden summers of 1991, when India started taking its baby steps towards the prosperity and inclusive growth, it has definitely come a long way now. Today we are fourth largest economy of the world, and this position is very contrasting to the fact that we were in the position of defaulting our loans to IMF and held the reserve which is just sufficient to support 3 weeks of imports just 20 years back. But this blog is not about investigating the reasons of success, rather it is about pondering whether India is capable to maintain this momentum for years to come or is there any dampening factor looming over us?

If we ask this question to 100 reasonable people, no doubt 90 will come up with Recession as the biggest threat to India's growth momentum. Today the whole world is so much interconnected to each other, that economic crisis in one spreads to other in no time. Therefore we saw our stock market crashing from 21000 levels to 7500 during the recession times. This was the period when many our computer genius serving the IT companies of India and MNC lost their jobs and those who escaped being fired, didn't got their annual increment. So the blame for this economic and political crisis was put on recession. But let me take this opportunity and make it clear once and for all, India was never into recession...we just faced a slowdown, where our growth rate which was touching 9.5% during the hey days of 2006-07, came down to 6.1%. As per the definition given in any economics book, "When a country suffers negative growth for two consecutive years, than only that country is called to be in recession" and that is what happened with United States and other developed countries of west. On the other hand because of the strong economic fundamentals and good banking policies, India came out of this period almost unhurt. Within a year our job market was back to the 2007 level and our sensex was touching 18000+ mark. So recession cannot stop our growth momentum, at the most it can only slow down our speed for a while...

For finding the actual problem, we don't need to dig ourselves into graphs and histograms of past economic activities, rather lift any day's newspaper, and we will find at least one of the news which talks about some or other forms of corruption. Especially from last one year, there has been a prominent rise in high profile corruption cases like CWG, 2G and Adarsh Scam. Now question which arises is why now there is so much brouhaha about such cases, India is not a first timer here. We rank 88^th as per the World corruption Index. We have the experience of Bofors case, hawala and kargil, so why it is paining us this time. There may be multiple reasons:

• As per the latest census, 63% of our population are under 30 years of age and these people have seen the stupendous growth of India, they have seen big MNC's coming to India and opening the bundle of opportunities to them, they have seen the McDonald’s and Pizza Hut's of the world opening up in India and they have seen FDI's and FII's pouring in. They have seen a completely different India, which is respected by other countries of the world, so now they cannot let some corrupt people ruin this Image of India.
• Taking another statistics from 2011 census, there is a phenomenal growth of 9.2% in the literacy rate of India. So as more and more people became literate, more and more aware they become towards such scams.

Hence the problems which can derail our growth train is not external, it is something which is permeated within our country and eating it from inside. So what is the solution, again i can think of multiple solutions here, which need to be implemented in both short term and long term basis to address this issue:

• Empowerment is required, one of the basic reason why such corrupt people get away because of the slow speed of our jurisdiction, it takes such a long time to arrive at any decision that by the time all the evidences are forged in the favour of the culprit. If decision makers are sufficiently empowered, they can take quick decisions and justice can be made. Therefore i completely second the formation of Lokpal bill, this will be a good positive step in the direction of corruption less politics
• The next important step which needs to be taken is for long term solution and complete eradication of this problem. Today corruption is not only restricted to politics, it has spread across the circles of corporates, bureaucrats and various other governing bodies in the form of fraud and forgery. So importance of proper Governance needs to be imparted to people at position of power. They should understand, such forgery with accounts and taking bribe will of course do good for a short time, but in long run, this leads to far negative consequences. Once they understand the importance of ideal Governance and start practicing it, we can dream of corruption free India.

Intelligent Strategies and strong fundamentals have brought India to this level, where it is counted among the fastest developing nations of the world. After reaching such a level we don’t want ill interests of some greedy people to play a spoil sport for the whole country and push us back into the same old wells of poverty with a tag of Third world country. I hope the message is well understood by everyone....

A first time blogger's first blog...

Ok putting to rest, all the dilemma and confusion about should i blog or not, here i am with my first blog.

As always being a result oriented person or putting in some crude words like a selfish person, first thing i always used to think what will i get from this blogging. Will anybody ever bother to read my blogs and even if some body dares to do that, would they appreciate it. But i got some motivation when i saw every Tom, dick and harry around me blogging, this provoked me to enter in this rat race, and since now i am in this rat race, i would like to be the fastest rat around...

Once decided to be a blogger, next decision which i need to make is on what should i write, should i start with bashing our corrupt politicians or should i start with singing victory songs of our World Cup Winner Dhoni and Co, but for both of these topics there are thousands of other bloggers around....so after giving too much pain to the grey matter in my brain, i came to this conclusion that why not to start by narrating my not so fasinating but ofcourse worth inspiring journey from a non blogger to a devoted blogger.

So what prompted me to become a blogger, as i mentioned earlier there is not much worthy results i could think of when i decided to enter into this world, but one fine day, when i was killing time by browsing through photos of my graduation days, One wierd expression of mine in one of the photo caught my attention, and how so hard i hought i could not recollect the happenings of that day. Finally tired of trying and feeling pity on my memory, i called up one of my brainy freind, may be he takes Megamind2+ dipped in Shankh pushpi syrup thats how he still remember things i guess.

That night i got the realization of why people write diaries and some how i myself felt an urge to do so and not land up in such pathetic situation again but writing something with pen and paper has never excited me, So only option which was left for me was blogging.

But sooner or later i started realizing many other added advantages which comes along and i knew i have taken a right decision. Blogging helps you re-live those happy moments of your life which you cherished and you recollect all the important deatils of that day. Another benefit is, as we indians have a view in every happening around us, let it be approval of Lokpal bill concerned with driving away corruption from politics or decision taken by Dhoni to play one more batsman in place of a bowler, we have our views. Now problem is, most of the time those views die out among our friends during a bus drive or in a tea shop conversation, but blogging gives you an opportunity to share your gyan among more broader spectrum of people, although it may end up irking some against you.

So guys go on, start blogging and most importantly don't leave when this initial enthusiasm dies out....