How would you feel if someone’s watching you all the time, knowing even the most intimate details about you like “the last time you visited a pornographic site” or “where you were last Sunday” etc.  Sounds creepy, huh? Well, someone’s really watching all of us all the time. Oh well, this is not a philosophical post and I’m not talking about God Almighty. Wait a second,  if we define God as  someone who is supposed to know everything about everyone, then Internet is not far from enacting the role of God.

Here, it’s us who are denying ourselves our privacy, by feeding all our information to the internet. The amount of information we are making available for someone else to interpret, by using the social networking sites or other internet applications is huge. I have seen movies like Eagle-Eye and I-Robot, where a computer takes over control from the humans and becomes a dictator.  I feel this kind of a scenario is not far from reality.

Let’s take the simple example of photo tagging feature provided by most of the social networking websites. Lets take Orkut for now. By tagging your photo in Orkut, you were giving away your photo id to Google. Now let’s say Google comes up with an advance face-detection algorithm, which can identify your face in any photo, by using the photos in which you were tagged.  Assume you were in a party and you were clicked in one of the photos. And that guy uploads the photo into his Orkut account under an album 09/09/’09 party. Now, Google knows where you were on 09/09/09.  This is just a simple example. Combine this information with your emails, blogs, search trends, the stocks you regularly check etc, the extent to which Google can know about you might be mind boggling.

I’m not making a judgement here on what is right and what is wrong. Probably, having an online identity might be a way of life  going ahead and there might be some good things that can come out of it as well. Google might come up with an app, which would provide recommendations on your social life based on your activity on the internet Sounds interesting isn’t it.

P.S.: I just used Google as an example in this post. I don’t necessarily mean that Google is planning all this stuff behind our backs . I’m a great fan of Google btw.

I don’t have a whole lot of hobbies, but I do like watching movies and reading books. I work for a company which demands 26 hours of work in a single day, so it’s kind of tough to allocate time to spend on other activities like these.  But I still try to cram in some time for reading books or watching a movie in my weekly schedule. If I’m reading a book, I try to read atleast a few pages from it everyday before I go to sleep. But I do run into some problems especially while reading books.  If I start an interesting book, I forget everything until I’m done with it. This madness, sometimes, impacts my work as well. That’s the reason, I refrain from starting any novel if I’m nearing a project deadline at work. This is another reason why I haven’t still bought the latest Dan Brown novel. Movies are more manageable in the sense that I can get done with them in a matter of a couple of hours.

I managed to watch a couple of movies and read a book recently. The movie I watched was ‘Dil Bole Hadippa’. Though the reviews weren’t great, I felt it was an ok movie.  Especially Rani’s performance (specifically as the Sardar) was amazing. One of the reasons I chose this movie was ‘Wanted’ was that I didnt feel like watching the latter, as I’m not a great fan of Salman. Added to that, I was also put off by the ‘Wanted’ promos, when I heard one of the punch dialogues of Pokiri in it’s Hindi version. Obviously, the hindi dialogue is no match for it’s telugu counterpart. The telugu version is crisp and short, while the hindi version looks forced.

Pokiri: “Okkasari commit ayithe naa maata nene vinanu”
Wanted: “Ek baar jo maine commitment kar di, uske baad to mein khud ki bhi nahin sunta”

The other movie I watched this week was ‘The Hurt Locker‘.  It’s about an elite US  bomb squad in Iraq, and the various emotions each of the officers in the squad go through, while doing their job of disarming the unexploded bombs. It’s terrific.

And coming to the book I read this week: it’s ‘Wise and Otherwise’ by Sudha Murthy. The book is a collection of anecdotes from the author’s life experiences. Some of the stories are really touching. I would recommend this book.

Happy Dussehra to everyone.

About a couple of months ago, I was going through a very disappointing phase at work. I was expecting a promotion I wanted so badly, but it didn’t happen due to some office politics(I know this is a familiar sounding situation in the corporate world). Even my co-workers felt I deserved it(or atleast they say). I had some really frustrating days at work after that. I even thought about switching my current job because  I started to believe that I deserved much more and I couldn’t get what I wanted, only because some asshole held a grudge on me.

During that time, I happened to watch this movie ‘Rocky Balboa’. The movie itself is just about ok, but there are a few quotes which I instantly took a liking to. This is one of the best inspiring dialogues/quotes I have heard:

“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you!”

When I was watching the movie, I just heard this as one other dialogue, but then I started thinking about it, and felt how aptly it applied to the situation I was in.  So, that’s when I decided it’s time to move on and focus on what I need to do, to get to where I want to be. 

I put a short version of this quote as my IM status msg, but then I realized I became a 21st century philosopher. Here’s how.