Fooze Control !!

I really don't know to spell it!! I guess we call it 'Fooze Ball'. By the way it currently has the biggest fan-following on the 4th floor of G.Pulla Reddy Building (the place where the cafeteria of DEShaw India resides) . It came in our cafeteria as a part of the renovation process going on. Now that Polaris (the company which used to share a floor of the building some time back) has totally shifted to some don't-know-where land, the radius and span of our cafeteria suddenly doubled and we, the fooze-controllers, happen to make the best use of it.

By the way, its a very very addictive game. When I was new to it, right after a fooze-ball-session it was really tough working on my workstation. I somehow used to move my left hand to shift the mouse cursor from the right to the left on the screen :-). Now that I have had a hell lot of sessions (thanks to raza - the most enthusiastic fooze-controller of DESIS), these paranoid experiences have stopped happening to me. But yes, the presence of a fooze-ball table has made our visits to the cafeteria pretty frequent, and now I come to my machine (code-named 'porcupine') only to take breaks between two consecutive sessions :-)

Ideas on e-globalization

I have been reading articles on something called as "We-Media", and really it seems a great revelation to my small little mind that how is the media changing today. I guess that media keeps undergoing constant changes from generation to generation - just that we are not really 'globalized' to realize it. We are living in a society and society is affected a lot by media. There is a tight coupling, whether we realize or not. But they are coupled very tightly.

We can have a debate on what we consider as media. Some skeptics believe that today with the invasion of web, absolutely anything can be considered as media. Well, as far as a formal definition is concerned, I believe media is some thing which has a lot of people (or fans) following it. Be it newspapers, be it TV channels, be it Hollywood/Bollywood industry, be it sport-stars, be it any damn thing that has the potential to attract thousands of people to it! Media is something which people see everyday, and get affected by everyday. If you view your favorite sport-star struggling with a rape case, it does have an effect on you. Some of your believes are shattered, some new ones are made - and you, while undergoing a change in your belief system, make an infinitesimal change to the social structure in which you thrive. When you watch killer Katrina waves washing away thousands of houses, or the deadly Tsunami affecting several cultures on this globe at the same point in time on a TV channel, it again does affect you. Again some of your beliefs are shattered, and new ones are made, you either begin to curse GOD/Nature, or pro-actively begin to volunteer for help. Once again changes in you - though this time they didn't stay confined to you, but directly affected people near you - have induced changes in the society. Just imagine, if people in Indonesia never came to know what the same waves have done to Chennai, how different the world would have been.

Today, we don't exist if we are not connected! News has become an important part of our lives. Information used to be power in times of Steve Jobs, today its the life-line! Thanks to web and the blogging culture that has given a new shape to the media. And this is what I term as 'E-Globalization'. Where the communication between the different cultures of the world would result in them merging in one another; when there will be only one e-culture, and the things like 'We are becoming very western', or 'stop the invasion from western culture' would be no more existent in our country. And I see that coming in the near future. We are embracing the west and the west is embracing us. We do go to disco theques, and the western people do yoga everyday :-) Its not that we are becoming them and they are becoming us; its just this that we are all becoming one.