Ameen Sayani & Colombo

The two nouns in the title are pretty well known. The later one is obviously the Sri Lankan capital city. And the former, a well known celeb from the good old DD/AIR days, whose voice any Indian (from the DD era ofcourse) can recognize. But why do i mention the two together? For the uninitiated, Ameen Sayani shot to fame with “Binanaca Geet Mala” which was aired on radio ceylon. Which is quite strange, because sri lanka doesn’t even have a sizable hindi speaking population. Bit of wiking let me to this piece of information .
So i always had this desire to see how different Sri Lanka really is. And my recent trip to the land of sinhalese (also of tamils of indian origin, Moors, Burghers and Malays) led to me the conclusion that the country is not much diferent from India. Probably the only difference was clean roads and imported cars (casinos also, but they are not that gr8 over there, so dropping it). The people, their dressing style, the language, the auto rickshaws … everything is same or bears resemblance to their counterparts in India. One feels at home over there. The city is like any other british established indian city (like mumbai and chennai). It has an old fort area, crowded markets with small bylanes near it, best hotels-offices-govt building in the same vicinity, temples, churches, mosques, autoricks and lots of BATA showrooms.
However, the place is bit expensive compared to india. (Imagine paying LKR 40 or INR 17.4 for a newspaper!!!). And the only thing cheap over there is liquor (that too bcoz its heavily taxed in India). 

The next time you visit the place, take my advice and expect an extension of India. The place is as desi as any indian city can get.

the Power of WWW 2.0

The recent blasts in mumbai have brouhgt many
things to spotlight. Be it the brave elite forces like NSG and Marcos,
or the failure of govt of India, or even resignations from top
bureaucrats and politicians. But one thing which stands out is the
power of web 2.0. My first reaction to the blast news was to check
blogs, flickr and other social networking sites for informaion on it,
so were thousands of people across the globe. And to my surprise i did
find entries on the tragic incident within an hour of the blasts.
Twitters were updating their status round the clock. Some sources even
claim that twits on ‘mumbai’ were getting updated at the speed of 14
twits per second. Now that’s Blitzkrieg news. A blogger
‘vinu’ uploaded ground-zero pics on flicrk within hours of the
incident. Wikipedia entry on the incident was being updated every few
minutes. Where traditional media companies had failed, web 2.0 worked
and my it worked like fire. people had even updated google maps with
details of the incidents. One need not  sit in front of the idiot box
and listen to boring, repetitive news readers. You could get all the
information you want on the web. And if you had configured search
alerts, you could  even get the latest news from the web/blogs/news on
your cellphone.
Although web 2.0 did a prety good job, i hope that the need for such services never arises again.