Chetan Bhagat goes back to his roots in 2 States. Taking off from where he left with Five Point Someone, he bases this one on his own love story that began on the campus. The protagonists Krish Malhotra and Ananaya Swaminathan meet in the mess of IIM Ahmedabad, become friends, fall in love and decide to tell their parents. Predictably, just like in a Bollywood potboiler, trouble starts when their parents meet for the first time and disapprove of a relationship between the Punjabi boy and the Tamil girl. The novel is a humorous and witty take on inter-community love marriages in India, citing the numerous awkward situations that the couple has to pass through, before their wedding can be finalised. It is a tailormade script for a feel-good commercial film with all the stereotypical characters and the happy ending. His best work after the engaging Five Point Someone, the book is as good as a Chetan Bhagat can be! What you expect is what you get and if you don’t expect too much, you won’t be disappointed

After the incredibly successful and controversial The Da Vinci Code, it’s probably too much to expect for Dan Brown to duplicate the same formula in The Lost Symbol. He gives it the old college try, though.

Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist who was Dan Brown’s protagonist in The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, is back. He’s called to Washington, D.C. on the spur of the moment to give a speech in the Capitol Building. The request ostensibly comes from his old friend and mentor, Peter Solomon. Solomon comes from old money and power and is a leader in the Freemasons. Langdon agrees to the request, only to find that the invitation was a hoax. Not only is there no speech to give, but the only evidence of Peter Solomon’s presence in the Capitol is his severed hand. It’s found in the center of the Capitol Rotunda, tattooed with symbols from the Ancient Mysteries, and the hand is pointing to the ceiling.

Anyone who has read and enjoyed The Da Vinci Code will wonder how The Lost Symbol stands up in comparison to the novel that made Dan Brown famous. The answer is not very well. The main difference is pace. The Da Vinci Code began immediately with a corpse and the suspense never flagged until the end. Dan Brown mixed in enough esoteric information, ancient clues, and conspiracy theories to keep the reader hooked as Langdon managed to stay one step ahead of those who wanted to stop him.

The Lost Symbol starts slowly. Peter Solomon’s hand isn’t discovered until many chapters into the book. There are bursts of thrilling suspense only to have everything slow to a more somnambulist pace as Mal’akh’s story is told or Katherine Solomon is working in her lab. These stops and starts are frustrating. Neither Mal’akh nor Katherine ever becomes that interesting. When the novel revolves around Langdon, it moves sharply while Langdon decodes clues and throws out historical information. About halfway through the book, the story takes off, and for 200 pages, you don’t want to put the book down. Dan Brown knows how to make a thriller chilling and interesting.

The ending is disappointing. The climax occurs well before the end, and Dan Brown goes on for way too many pages exploring the final mysteries of the Masons in Washington, D.C. Instead of heaving a sigh of contentment as the book is closed, many readers will be left with the reaction, “That’s it?” The best part of any Dan Brown book is that he makes you believe that the newly found secrets, the forgotten or hidden histories, and the conspiracies just might be true. At the end of The Lost Symbol, though, you’re left not really caring whether they were true or not.

The Lost Symbol is not a bad read and very enjoyable for large parts of it. It doesn’t live up to the standard set by The Da Vinci Code, and it would wrong of anybody to expect that. Dan Brown may write clunky prose at times, but you can forgive that when the thriller is running at full tilt. When the plot sags, that same prose grates on your nerves. If you think The Da Vinci Code was overblown and famous for all the wrong reasons, you won’t enjoy The Lost Symbol. If you loved The Da Vinci Code, then you will enjoy some of Dan Brown’s new novel. Just don’t set your expectations too high.

As I was preparing for my exams using my laptop today, I suddenly realised that why do we have the alphabets randomly placed in the keyboard. It could have conventionally arranged in the Kindergarten format of A,B,C… etc

So I thought , i should get the knowledge of how this Keyboard format of QWERTY was adopted, why not any other…

Whatever information I could get, I have posted it here.. So, if you do not know something/anything about this, read to know everything

And if you knew it, still read it and see if the post is right…;-)

In 1874 Remington & Sons manufactured the first commercial typewriter, called the Remington Number 1. This typewriter was designed by Christopher Sholes and used the “QWERTY” keyboard we are all familiar with.

This early typewriter used a mechanism with characters on the end of a bar. When a key was struck, a linkage would swing the bar into a tape coated with ink. When the character struck the tape, the impression of the character was transferred onto the paper, which was positioned behind the tape.

Sholes’ original prototypes had a problem with the bars colliding with each other and jamming. So the story goes that he arranged the keys with the most common letters in hard to reach spots, to slow typists down and try to avoid this problem.

Whatever the reason for the QWERTY layout, it seems pretty unlikely that one of the first keyboard layouts invented would be perfect. The QWERTY keyboard is very different from the Dvorak keyboard layout. The Dvorak keyboard layout tries to minimize the distance traveled by the fingers. It also tries to make the typist alternate hands on consecutive letters as often as possible.

The Dvorak layout places all of the most commonly used letters in the home row so your fingers don’t have to move at all to hit these keys. The left hand has all of the vowels and some consonants and the right hand has only consonants. So there are very few words in the English language that can be typed with only one hand on the Dvorak keyboard (two are “papaya” and “opaque”). Both “pumpkin” and “minimum” can be typed with one hand on a QWERTY keyboard — give it a try.

The pic above shows the layout of the Dvorak keyboard. If I had typed this article on a Dvorak keyboard, my fingers would have traveled 30 meters versus the 54 meters they traveled on the QWERTY keyboard I use.

Some argue, however, the Dvorak keyboard is no more efficient than QWERTY. An independent study in 1956 showed that QWERTY typists and Dvorak typists had about the same rate of speed, and continued studies don’t show a clear winner between the two. This may explain why QWERTY is still the standard.

If you want to see for yourself, you can switch your keyboard to a Dvorak configuration just by changing a setting on your computer’s operating system. Depending on your keyboard, you may even be able to pry off the keys and rearrange them in the Dvorak layout.

As I was coming back from my college, I happened to sight the most emotional moment that I could have seen in the past.

The street, in which I live, has many stray dogs; which are very friendly and protects the whole street from the other dogs or even strangers who seem suspicious to them/us from entering it.

Each of the 4 dogs was adopted by many homes here, where they were fed, and some houses preferred to give them shelter.

One such dog very close to all the inmates in the street was, Jhontie, as we all had fondly named her. She was left betrayed by her sister and her mother, who went looking for Jhontie’s sister who was killed in an accident for months together. Her mother lost her way and never returned. Jhontie was only few months old then. From then on the homes here decided to take care of her. She grew up literally in my street and she knew who would feed her when and who would play with her when. She used to guard the street, and also have her part of fun playing on the sand, in bushes, in the gutters, yet kept herself neat.

One of the inmates took care of her hygiene. Gave her frequent showers, snapped on her the Anti tick powders, brushed her, vaccinations, etc.

Recently she gave birth to 8 pups and had gone out leaving them in a place where she thought was safe. She went missing for 2 days. The dogs that were close to her kept looking for her. But to her unfortunate time, she was taken by the Local Pet Corporation (SPCA) along with her pups.

Most regrettable thing was that she was operated for not having pups anymore and was not even given something to eat after her surgery.

She was thrown out on to our street ruthlessly from their nets of their Animal Van.

She was in half sedation, lying on the middle of the road. People rushed to see if she was ok.

She was lying there for some time. We offered her water to drink, but she dint want to.

I was keeping a close watch on her from then on. She got up slowly and walked till my house and looked at me, I rushed to her to ask her whether she was feeling ok.

She saw me through her eyes filled with tears of pain. She quietly walked ahead to the vacant plot that is  next to my home. She struggled to walk, and reached a point where she thought, that was the place for her to rest for that moment. She stuffed herself on to the bushes where she used to play around as a young pup.

My eyes couldn’t get out seeing  her pain. At the same time I was standing helpless not understanding as to how I could give her solace. My pet Sankey was also her friend, she too kept looking at her, not knowing what happened to her.

After few hours, I saw Jhontie getting too restless. She got up from the bushes, and started walking around the plot in a rectangular form.

I thought she was looking for food. I quickly got some food for her to eat. But again my efforts went in vain. I failed to understand what she really wanted.

She kept walking around the same plot. I then realised that she was looking for her just born PUPS.

Even in her sedation, she was only looking for her babies, and NOT food. A mother’s Love so clearly visible.

I asked one of the inmates here about where the pups had gone. And she said that the SPCA had taken them off with them, and that they would never come back here.

I was shocked to hear that and only thought about Jhontie at present. Her picture with the eyes filled with the pain of losing her babies and added to that was her physical pain that the merciless Human had caused to her.

She is still looking for her pups, No matter what happens to her; still lying in the same plot waiting for her pups to return. I sincerely pray to God that she is given the strength to bear both the mental and the physical pain she is undergoing. Hope she comes back to the normal, jumping, bubbly, active Jhontie we had been seeing till 2 days back.

Only thing that I request people who are reading this post of mine is: Don’t let anyone or anybody to take animals for granted. They’re after all are living beings on this earth too. They have the equal rights to live on this earth as we do. So in case you see any such instances happening at your vicinity, do take some action, or at least do report to the NGOs which are fighting for such pets. Let’s do Justice.

Thanks for reading this patiently.

I recently saw a Television programme on Sony television, in which this guy – Rabin Bar from Guwahati stunned me.

When the jury asked him about his dress that he had wore for that prog, he happily said that he had made the painting on the dress with his legs and his hands..(hands and legs I mean – both) :0) I was still not sure whether really could he have done it!

He was so confident about his talent that he asked the audience / jury to scribble something on the paper and that he would make a painting out of it. I thought that he was risking his performance.

Immediately as the jury scribbled a “no figure” on the paper, it shook me to the way Rabin had made a drawing out of it.

But later when he was just given a Min’s time to make a painting look what he did by yourself. Just click the below video to watch his achievement

Truly an ambidextrist and an achiever filled with tons of talent and god’s blessings

A star-spangled film that starts off well, builds the plot nicely, but goes completely hay wire in the second half. New York is long, tiresome, but well intentioned. Director Kabir Khan tries to delineate the insidious process of the making of a terrorist. It all boils down to a climax so shoddily imagined and executed, that you cease to relate to any of the characters. Saddled with a plot-holed script and poor performances from half of its star cast, New York falls short of expectations. Watch it if you have three hours to kill.

The film is constructed from such a sloppy script, that point is lost under all the creative liberties and convenient short-cuts that the screenplay takes. Instead of this film, watch the excellent Pakistani film Khuda Kay Liye to see how a terrific script and convincing performances can go a long way in telling a similar story. This film, unfortunately, lacks both.

Brown’s novels, by design, unfurl like a full season of 24, swapping political deception for religion-versus-science conspiracies. Though his Angels actually preceded Da Vinci, both utilize the same storytelling method of cramming ancient mythology and artistic history into rollercoaster chapters that hinge on impossibly breathtaking cliffhangers. Pick up one of Brown’s Langdon adventures and you probably won’t put it down until you’re finished.

So why does it feel like it takes longer to sit through Howard’s adaptations than it does to read the books themselves?

Tone is an issue. Brown’s stories are implausible campfire yarns peppered with ticking time bombs (made out of antimatter), daring fights, dueling plot twists, mysterious clues hidden in cultural artifacts, and other giddy clichés. They are exhilarating, but intentionally campy.

Howard continues to treat Brown’s material as sacred text, however, resulting in a faithful and serious adaptation of Angels that removes all the fun. Where Brown’s book throws caution to the wind as it drags readers along on its wild ride, Howard’s film dutifully shuttles us from Point A to B, maintaining the posted speed limit while constantly checking its mirrors and asking us if our seat belts are securely fastened. And though Angels isn’t half as inflammatory as Da Vinci, a needless change made by co-screenwriters David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman regarding Ewan McGregor’s character, Carmerlengo Patrick McKenna, will raise the ire of Brown’s dedicated fans as it squelches possible complaints from the Catholic Church.

There are signs Howard’s team tried to lighten the mood. Salvatore Totino photographs Rome as if its gorgeous architectural structures are separate characters. Hans Zimmer writes a playfully ominous score. And Hanks tries to inject humor whenever possible.

It can be a slippery slope, blending dry educational subject matters with bloody-good, guilt-free fun. Venture too far down that path, and you’re left with the entertaining but hollow National Treasure series. Pull back too far on the reins, though, and you’ve got Howard’ s two adaptations. Of course, the Indiana Jones films successfully found that happy medium between history and heart-racing action. We can only imagine how high Brown’s books would fly in Steven Spielberg’s hands.

The theme behind choosing this title for my blog is to express the most burning and chilling topics.

So guys! Be the first ones to encourage and comment on my writing..

Have a great journey

Love,

Vanitha