The Śūnyatā (Openness) Blog

I have always prided myself on my ability to keep up with news and developments in various fields. I accomplish this by regularly visiting a few top sites in the fields that I am interested in. But from June 2005 till Jan 2006, for almost 6 months, I stopped looking at what's happening in Silicon Valley, due to a variety of reasons, personal and professional. And when I started looking at the sites, blogs etc., again in January, I discovered that Web 2.0 has made a really fast move and in just 6 months, there may have been literally hundreds of new sites and services. While most of the services are based on technologies that existed since 2002, some of the new services are a testament to the creativity of the promoters. And friends from San Jose tell me that the dreamers have come back; people are getting offers to quit companies like Cisco and Oracle to join these startups. See the story on Newsweek for example: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/ Is this another b...

Last Sunday (March 12), my daughter Lasya completed one year. We would have celebrated it grandly if we were in India. Here, in the UK, one needs to plan everything months in advance. And in typical Indian fashion, my wife and I kept talking about it but did not really plan anything till a week before the birthday. In hindsight, it was good that we didn't plan in advance. As the options were limited, we decided to go to East Ham, visit a Hindu Temple, have a good lunch and then spend the rest of the day, roaming around Central London. We left Reading in the morning, reached Paddington, and made it to East Ham on the tube. The Hammersmith and City Line was closed for engineering works. But luckily, we got the connections to Liverpool Street and then East Ham quite fast and reached the temple by 11.15 AM. My uncle and aunt, and their two children Neha and Naren joined us at the temple.They live in the country side in Suffolk and do the 70-mile journey to London regularly. East Ham is...

This is another personal essay I found from my files from 1998-2001. Its about Azhar, one of my favourite cricketers.At that time, Azhar faced a lot of media bashing.I was among the few who felt that Azhar is either being framed or at least being made the scapegoat for what was a systemic malaise. I wanted to send this to a newspaper or a web site, but then was too lazy. Read on... ________________ For those of us, teenagers of the 80's, cricket really started after the '82 Asiad. With TV happening everywhere, India winning the World Cup, and kids like me coming of age-that is, starting to comprehend The Hindu's sports page dialect and BBC's fluid commentary, we the Andhra and Hyderabadi kids, longed for someone of our own in the national team. Shivlal Yadav tweaking a few and being a brave tail-ender in Tests wouldn't satisfy us. And none of us had seen Jaisimha and Abid Ali play. Hungry eyes scanned the junior cricket score sheets for upcoming stars. And then he c...