Ponnas

I thought of adding my url to all available search engine. So I tried Evrsoft. It looked quick and easy. I was amazed to see so many search engines listed. But I quickly googled to find many other google like search engines hakia, clusty, karto ( was a bit different) etcetera. Then I found a statistic that pointed 99.99% of searches go through Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). So just went back to the individual search engines to add my URL! That was easy

Whirlyball – the only place where you can drink, drive and bump the car! You will never know how entertaining a sport can be until you experience it. Playing for the first time I had think of multiple games – Bumping cars, basket ball and lacrosse to understand how to play whirlyball.
All the whirlybug were not of the same quality. So we watched others play and selected the ones that had good speed to bump other cars with great impact.

Yesterday we(me and my wife) had one of our memorable evenings. It was AR Rahman live in Chicago at Sears Center. He is one of the living legends in Indian music industry. I have been following all his music albums from “Roja” till “Sivaji”. It was a blissful moment. We felt lucky to see a person soo talented, hard working and humble.

I was a bit unsatisfied by the acoustics. At times it was too loud and couple of times it did not pick up the voice. But I can understand planing a event in such a big arena that can accommodate 11800 (max) is not a easy task.

Another disappointing factor was the song selections. It was mainly concentrated around Rang De Basanti, Guru and Sivaji his three latest movies. It would have been a bit entertaining if he had selected few hits from his other movies.

The last point that I would like to make is the incomplete introduction. Shiv Mani/Blaze introduced all the musicians in the troop but no one introduced the vocal artists/singers. Its pretty clear that most of them need no introduction but it took some effort(how else … googled it after reaching home!) from my side to identify the young artists.

The overall event was planned and handled well. It had all the ingredients of a standard ARRahman concert pattern - Shivmani’s performance, Hariharan demonstrating his multi lingual skills, Sukhwinder’s Chayya Chayya and Thayya Thayya, Rahman finishing the show with his ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’

To beautify the event they had good illuminations, fireworks, synced with great talents like Chitra, Hariharan, Sukhwinder Singh, Shiv mani, Sadana sargam, Madhushree, and Mr A.R.Rahman.

Above all Rahman introduced his new skill in using continuum (invented by Lippold Haken in Champaign, IL) for Indian classical music.

By the time the concert was concluded every one was tired clapping, screaming and cheering the troop. This for sure will be one of the memorable events of my life.

P.S – I missed my camcorder at the event as I carried only my point and shoot camera!

Today I came across two instances which explains the advantages of saying positive NO.
First – Today morning my wife pointed a excellent write up titled “Life lessons from Narayana Murthy“. This article is truly amazing. In the final story Mr. Narayana Murthy explained how his “NO” became the turning point for Infosys. I was thinking about how difficult it would have been to say NO at the right time and at the right place.
Second – Later today I was just browsing through some books at a local book store and came across William Ury’s – “The Power of positive NO“. It had a real cool 3 step approach to say NO – Prepare, Deliver and Follow up. This book had some good real life scenarios in which I normally would have accepted and said YES, but Ury teaches us how to assert the positive NO.

Overall it was a nice coincidence to learn so much about the advantages of saying and also how to say positive NO.

Its about 1AM and almost 1/2 day past since I decided to start blogging (may be regularly). I am writing this just for the sake of kick starting my new hobby.