Indru Oru thagaval

"Inrou oru thagaval", was a popular AIR program on weekdays at 7:40 am during my school days. I am not sure if the program is being aired even today . its a 5 min program and the agenda was pretty straight forward. A small story with a big message and the program ended with a small joke.
Initially I started listening to the program to keep up my time. The broadcast was my breakfast time during school days. During the course of the time , I became a big fan of the program for its short and sweet stories. The hero of the program was Thenkachi Ko swaminathan whoz there in the foto right above. His voice suits a grandfather's voice who tells bedtime stories to his grand children. the morals and teachings in the program come a long way in ones life.Mr Swaminathan, seems to have retired from AIR and seems to have joined SUN TV . I just happened to see him in the morning show during my breakfast at 9:00 AM the other day and I was reminded of some of the stories narrated by him.

One of the nice stories that I still remember goes like this .

" There were 2 buddhists monks . They were crossing a river. They saw a beautiful woman who was struggling to cross the river. She asked the monks to help her cross the river by carrying her in their shoulder. One of the monks said it was a sin to carry woman. but the other monk carried her along and helped her cross the river. The woman thanked the monk and lleft on her own way. After abt 10 mins , the monk didnt help the female told the other."Our Guru has asked us not carry woman".
For this the monk just replied , "I have left the woman in the bank, but it seems you have carried all until here ". This monk realised his folly .

Sucha small story with a huge meaning aint it..

Madhu

Hair cutter...

Today is sunday. Enakku thalaikku melai velai irukku. adhu thaan ba hair cut pannanum. I have a lot of sentiments about choosing my saloons. Dont know how I picked up this habit. Barbers are unique and have a philosophical aspect . They are the ones who reduce your headweight :-) with your consent .
The first vivid memory of mine when ,I was taken to barber was in Kalpakkam wa "MADURAI Saloon" in the shopping store complex with my appa. The barber placed me in a swinging chair. Iwas small and hence he put a small wooden plank so that he was ok with settings.
He took out his pair of scissors and booooo... i started crying . I was thinking he was going to cut my head :-( and that cudnt happen . I didnt know what was happening , a couple of other barbers with my father tied me up and finished the act.
From then on I tell you till I came out of my town, I dont remember having got a hair cut from any other barber. Any Sunday , i went to the saloon , I would be given priority over others as I have been one of the regular customers. Even in my college days, I used to wait for my trip to kalpakkam to have a hair cut. the charges were special for me. The barber charged 5 rupees lesser for me . Its another matter that i would tip the barber wth the same 5 rupee.
I picked up the habit of reading sindbad in dinathanthi , varamalar ,etc in my wait for my turn. I have seen several small kids cry like what i did. I used to laugh at myself. Now I miss all the dinamalars adn the tunukkus . All i get to read is the telugu newspaper ...I dont read them , I just see the jalebis printed in the newspaper thinking if these are to be eaten.
i dont remember having a single freak incident with my barber. he was careful inhandling me . All that he wud ask me was "long" or "short". When I was introduced to C datatypes , iwas thinking kerninghan and Ritchie would have had a barber like mine. He just waited for my reply and started his artistic task of cutting the 60 adi koondhal of his highness. Poittu vaanga sir .
mission completed ..I would walk back home or drive in my champ as a victorious gladiator . After every hair cut Amma would say, innum konjam kooda cut panni irukalamay .."Amma idhukku mela cut panina mottai thaan adikanum " was my regular reply.
i was dictated to walk to the bathroom straight and poured water as if i had attended a funeral. After a quick bath my coffee and The hindu are ready and thalikku melai velai slowly accumlates till my next hair cut.

Madhu

ஓரு நடை பயனம்

Hyderabad Heart walk is on Sept 24,2006. This event in association with Yashoda Hospitals has been initiated to create awareness among people on heart ailments and prevention. After the Hyderbad Run , this is one big event in Hyd with a lot of corporate participation.
Walking is the simplest of excercises. It involves most of the muscles and reduces the chance of heart ailments.
One of the first things the parents feel proud abt a new born baby is when it starts walking. These days I have seen parents having clicking fotos as memoirs of their kids first walk in this mother earth. I dont remember when I started walking ..should have been slower than others of course . In my school days, long distance walking was a rare oppurtunity . The max I would have walked would have been from my school to my home on the days when school bus used to be late.
My family members were great walkers . All my uncles walk for Kms together just to keep them fit. Even to this day my uncles wake up at 4:30 am (yes you read it right ..AM) and walk for about 1-2 hrs ....mm...
Sitting in front of the dumb terminals, we bug fixers have forgotten to walk.More so I have forgotten to walk. I had been to chennai to meet my Patti who was in Nanganallur with my chittappa. My periappa from madipakkam, came to meet my Patti. while returning back, he asked me if I would want to accompany him. I said why not ? First he said he wanted to visit the Anjaneyar temple. It was a saturday and periappa has a habit of doing 108 pradakshinams on Sat.
If this old guy is able to do it why not me ( Madhu come on u can do it !!).Like a good boy I followed him for all the 108 ... Got some good puliyodharai and sakkarai pongal ( will later write how to make them ) .
We both started and I thought we would either take an auto or a bus . But to my dismay periappa started walking ..WALKING another 5-6 Kms ...not possible..My thoughts were on the great Dandi march ..Gandhiji had a purpose for that walk . What was ours ? Why should we walk this far ..
After walking for abt an hour and half we reached home . My legs were abusing me . I hadnt used my legs continously for this long . I was feeling tired. Oru Coffee kidaikuma periamma .."2 mins da " will get you .. While i was sipping my coffee my 3 year old niece came home after playing out . Ah !!! now the walk made real sense . I always believed after a hard toil the result is always sweet . Talking to my kutti niece I felt the walk was sweeter .

Madhu

Mutual Funds - Basics - Part 1

My Cousin asked me whats a Mutual fund and he asked me to give him some advice on choosing advice on Mutual funds .Well I am not a Warren Buffet to give him advice nor am I a free consultant. So I thought I would give a small write up on Mutual Funds so that the adsense picks up proper ads and I advertise my blog.
Coming back on Mutual Funds, i would like to share the basics on Indian Mutual funds once in a while.

Basic : A Mutual Fund is a company which invests money in the stock market on behalf of investors. The money is pooled in by the investors and inturn they are issued units or shares.

NAV : The net asset value (NAV) of a mutual fund is simply its assets minus its liabilities.
In other words, NAV equals the fund's worth. If a fund has assets of 50,000 and liabilities of 10,000
it would have a Net asset of 40,000.

It is from NAV that the price per unit of a fund is calculated.
By dividing the NAV of a fund by the number of outstanding units, you are left with the price per unit.
In our example, if the fund had 4,000 units outstanding, the price-per-share value would be 40,000 divided by 4,000 which equals 10.

The NAVs of funds are constantly changing and, as such, so are their price per shares.
Funds usually wait until the end of each trading day to recalculate their NAV and individual share prices.

See You after some time on another round of Mutual Funds.

BTW, tip for my cousin :
Some good Mutual funds I am invested are HDFC Prudence, Reliance Growth Fund .

MMTS Timings

I have been a strong recommender of travel by MMTS . It saves a lot of energy and time . I have pasted the train timings from -to Sec/Hyd and Lingampalli . Check it out

Train no	Sec/Hyd	Begumpet	Hitech
FL1	6:57	7:13	7:30
HL1		7:56	8:13
FL2	8:15	8:31	8:48
HL2		8:46	9:03
FL3	8:52	9:08	9:25
HL3		9:51	10:08
HL4		10:41	10:58
FL4	10:57	11:13	11:30
HL5		15:16	15:33
FL5	15:32	15:48	16:05
SL1	16:05	16:21	16:38
HL6		17:16	17:33
FL6	17:27	17:43	18:00
HL7		18:26	18:43
FL7	18:37	18:53	19:11
HL8		19:41	19:58
FL8	19:40	19:56	20:12
HL9		20:36	20:54
FL9	20:50	21:06	21:23
HL10		21:51	22:08
FL10	22:00	22:16	22:33
Train no	Hitech	Begumpet	Sec bad
LF1	4:59	5:14	5:42
LF2	5:47	6:04	6:22
LF3	8:12	8:31	8:47
LF4	9:27	9:44	10:02
LF5	10:17	10:34	11:02
LF6	15:22	15:39	16:02
LF7	16:52	17:09	17:27
LF8	17:27	17:44	18:05
LF9	18:57	19:14	19:32
LF10	20:02	20:19	20:37
LF11	21:12	21:29	22:00
Train no	Hitech	Begumpet	Hyderabad
LH1	6:42	6:59	7:15
LH2	7:12	7:29	7:45
LH3	8:57	9:14	9:30
LH4	9:42	9:59	10:15
LH5	11:17	11:34	11:50
LH6	16:17	16:34	16:50
LH7	17:32	17:49	18:05
LH8	18:48	19:06	19:20
LH9	19:22	19:39	19:55
LH10	20:37	20:54	21:10

Lalu- Masti Ki Patshala

Lalu in IIMA should have been a great learning experience for the guys. Good or Bad , thats for the guys to say. Most of us always have an opinion that Lalu was no Good. he is proclaimed for his Gundagardhi and the Fodder Scam. Imagine Cows were foddered for multi millions ( I hope I was one of the cows which the Prof. took care off , i wouldnt be working in a SW company and fixing bugs this way :-( )
When he became the railway minister in 2004 the white elephant( Indian Railways) was in huge loss and was falling towards bankruptcy. here comes our prof and makes a turn around. his philosophy is simple as he claims , "milk the cow else the cow will be sick ".Prasad said: "Wagon is the bread-earning horse of the Railways. Load it adequately. Make it run and don't stable it." The idea was to load the wagons in a better fashion and have a better turnaround there by increasing the freight capacity. His magic worked . The elephant is getting colored !!
I did see a couple fo people writing that lalu didnt do much the beauracrats were running the show and making this possible. Now where were these officers in the previous govts ? Probably they were milking the cows too . Some others were making remarks saying India's GDP is the factor for the turnaround .mmmm this is a good argument . But guys why take credit from Lalu... If a company makes a loss the CEO is cursed and if it runs into profits CEO needs to praised.
now whom wud u accolade for the railways performance ?

Madhu

Places to visit

Check out this link ....

Can you see me grow ?

Madhu

Puzzles

One of my favourite passtimes is solving puzzles. My all time favourite is
Fill up the blanks with numbers
There are --- 0s,---1s,---2s,---3s,---4s,---5s,---6s,---7s,---8s,---9s in this sentence.

Hope to get puzzled and keep puzzling again.

Slice of Life

It defies the laws of nature if you are a Tamilian and you dont read "THE HINDU". I Love the paper, dont know why .. esp with the morning coffee in a davara tumbler. Sipping Coffee slowly is like drinking the divine ambrosia, with the newspaper of course. Now dont ask me whihc one is better , the newspaper or the coffee. both complement each other and i cant leave out the other.
Infact I feel the day is lost if I miss either of the two.
The newspaper comes out with a lot of great journalists penning different speicailised articles. notably a few of them are R.Mohan (hez not longer with the Paper I guess) , Malini Parthasarathy( I always thought it was she , but never could guess it was he until I saw him in my cozins marriage) , Nirmal Sekhar ( another sports editor). Somehow these guys are serious in their columns . they ought to be for the content they are publishing . They give detailed analysis of the economic and socio political scenraios.
But one of them several of us who wouldnt have noticed at all is One Mr V.Gangadhar. I love his style of writing. i dont see him write off late ( probably hez not being paid enuf due to cost cutting ) . he used to write on alternate weekends in the Sunday Magazines.
Most of his works were on food esp palakad food. I am a connoisseur of food myself . I vivildly remember that he used to give a detailed descriptions of the cuisines that he used to write about. mmm..My mouth used to water. he had a mumbaiya attitude which were clear in his writings. his subtle humor reminded me of the great RK. When other articles on were on Education , Tourism etc , his slice of life with a cartoon by keshav used to increase my hunger on a weekend.
There were times in college , I used to discuss about the food that he wrote with one other roommate of mine. We used to have lengthy discussions on various food items and of course the proper combinations that need to be served without which it wouldnt go well.
I am not sure if he has stopped free lancing as I dont see any articles from him these days. But I continue to enjoy my food and try out various dishes ( courtesy my mom ) and relinquish my weekend lunches.

After all my motto is " YOU EARN AND FIGHT ALL ONLY TO EAT and SLEEP" if you cant do either the whole purpose of struggle goes for a toss .

Madhu

FLASH NEWS

One of the most silly professions today is media . It could be any kind of media , be it television , newspaper, Radio ,internet any thing . Why do i feel this ? Is it my individual thought. I believe most of you would agree with me.
There are hazaar tv channels who are flashing news around . FLASH NEWS : Manmohan's flight takes off .... Now what kindoff news is this .. Most of the news channels create news rather than recording news . All channels want to be the first to air the contents, no one cares what content they air. The Pranoys and Rajdeeps are busy making big time money minting channels just by debating with no results coming out of it .
Gone are the days when all of us used to wait for the DD news at 9:00 PM at night. That was the only half an hour my dad used to let me watch the old black and white EC TV( dont know if they have stopped their production). The news used to be precise , clean and the English used to be unpeccable. DD still has the quality but they maintain a sombre tone which has let them down .
What has led to my frustration is the same Sachin who was "END"ulkar a few weeks ago has become a Bradman. Is this the way media needs to report . I agree media earns their bread and butter, but at the cost of being first , content is compromised and is lost.
At this rate one day you would see news flashing, LALU prasad sleeps today . Hope that day is far off and media personnels tie up their sleeves and present content rather than spice.

Madhu