Ramya's pad

Vote for Ganga

2006-09-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

I request all the fellow bloggers to visit Gangadhar's blog, Dexterous Doings and
kindly vote for Dexterous Doings in the category “Best India Blog” at Asia Blog Awards.

Chilling true story

2006-06-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

True Horror, which took place last month.This happened about a month ago near Lonavala.
A guy was driving from Mumbai to Pune and decided not to take the new expressway as he wants to see the scenery. The inevitable happens and when he reaches the ghats his car breaks down - he's stranded miles from nowhere.Having no choice he starts walking on the side of the road, hoping to get a lift to the nearest town. It's dark and raining. And pretty soon he's wet and shivering. The night rolls on and no car goes by, the rain is so heavy he can hardly see a few feet ahead of him.
Suddenly he sees a car coming towards him. It slows and then stops next to him - without thinking the guy opens the door and jumps in.Seated in the back, he leans forward to thank the person who had saved him- when he realizes there is nobody behind the wheel!!!
Even though there's no one in the front seat and no sound of any engine,the car starts moving slowly. The guy looks at the road ahead and sees a curve coming.Scared almost to death he starts to pray, begging the Lord for his life.He hasn't come out of shock, when just before he hits the curve, a hand appears through the window and moves the wheel!
The car makes the curve safely and continues on the road to the next bend.The guy, now paralyzed in terror, watches how the hand appears every time they are before a curve and moves the steering wheel just enough to get the car around each bend.
Finally, the guy sees lights ahead. Gathering his courage he wrenches open the door of the silent, slowly moving car, scrambles out and runs as hard as he can towards the lights. It's a small town.He stumbles into a dhaba, and asks for a drink, and breaks down. Then he starts talking about the horrible experience he's just been through.There is dead silence in the dhaba when he stops talking ..... . . . ... . . . . . . . . ....and that's when Santa and Banta Singh walk into the dhaba. Santa points and says "Look Banta - that's the weird guy who got into our car when we were pushing it."

Over fishing

2005-11-22T23:25:00.000-08:00

Should the number of people who fish for fun be limited?

Just how much of the world's fish is taken by recreational fishing? It's well known that commercial fishing takes millions of tons of fish out of our oceans each year, but what about the people who fish recreationally?

"We had always heard that recreational fishermen were responsible for about two percent of the landings in the United States," says Felicia Coleman of Florida State University. So she, along with Duke University's Larry Crowder analyzed all available federal and state data, much of it gathered directly from the sport fishermen, and found the impact to be much larger, especially on over fished species. Coleman says their study shows the impact is actually, "23 percent of the over fished stocks."

Writing in the journal Science, Coleman says they wanted to study the impact on just the over fished species, "Because that was the most meaningful thing." She points out that half of the total fish caught, "comes only from two species, that's menhaden and pollock and neither of those species are over fished." Instead the researchers wanted to concentrate on over fished species such as red snapper, black sea bass, and rockfish.

Colman says the study also found some, "pretty impressive regional differences" in the impact of recreational fishing. She says the impact, "for instance in the Gulf of Mexico for the over fishing it's probably 64 percent recreational and the rest is commercial." Read more

Each day I love you More..

2005-11-20T21:43:00.000-08:00

A Smart Salesman

2005-11-15T04:07:00.000-08:00

A neatly dressed salesman stopped a man in the street and asked -
"Sir, would you like to buy a a bottle of this mouthwash for $200.00?"

Aghast, the man said, "are you NUTS?, that's robbery!"

The salesman seemed hurt and then tries again -
"Sir, since you are a bit irate, I'll sell it to you for 1/2 price at $100.00?

Again, the man replies bluntly - "you must be crazy pal, now go away!"

The salesman then reaches into his briefcase and pulls out 2 brownies and begins munching away on one of them. He tells the irate guy -
"Sir, please share one of my brownies since I have annoyed you so much".

Unwrapping the brownie, the guy takes a bite; suddenly, the guys spits it out and says:
"HEY," he snarled, "this brownie tastes like crap!!!"

"It is," replied the salesman. "Wanna buy some mouthwash?"

Bangalored

2005-10-09T00:35:00.000-07:00

"Bangalored" is a verb which recently got added in the dictionary. A person is said to be bangalored if he lost his job because the work got outsourced to Bangalore or any other city in India.

"He got bangalored last week" is an example of its usage.

It refers to people who have been laid off from a multinational because their job has been moved to India—a business practice designed to save money that is arousing passions in some countries, especially Britain and the United States. Bangalore is cited in particular because of its reputation in the USA as a high-tech city, the Indian equivalent of Silicon Valley, that has benefited significantly from such outsourcing. When this piece first appeared, in the newsletter, many subscribers immediately connected it with the Bangalore torpedo, a tube packed with explosive used by troops for blowing up wire entanglements, which got its name because it was invented in that city.
One Web site is selling T-shirts with the slogan “Don’t Get Bangalored” as a way of telling people about the issue. What’s odd about the term, from the point of view of language, is that it’s unusual for a place name to become a verb, though we may remember Sodom from the Bible and Shanghaied has been known since about 1870, at first in the sense of kidnapping a person to make up the crew numbers on a ship, but now more generally to be forced into doing something against one’s will.

Great that bangalore has a verb in its name but bad that it has a negative meaning.