So, let’s quickly move to the story.. Story? haha you must be kidding.. but still, let me try.. A guy and girl, who hate each other very much but eventually they end up falling in love with each other and get married..

Now, to cook up this 1 sentence story, they brought in Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, Sylvester Stallone, Denise Richard, the great Javed Jafri (no I am not serious), Kirron Kher and the producer had some extra money in pocket, so they roped in non actors, Aftab Shivdasani & Amrita Rao too…

So, now what, they had some more extra money.. so they thought we can bring in Annu Maleeeeek (I am sorry about the spelling, he keeps changing it every now and then, I hope that’s the latest spelling) and Annu bhaiya ne de daala super duper music.

Okay now what else? Some funny stupid kissing scenes, some so called “stunts”, some pathetic plot where the lead actress, who happens to be a doctor, leaves her watch in the stomach of the lead actor (while operation) (and then the watch beeps in “om mangalay” shloka every hour.. oh damn, what the hell is this..), so the lead actress tries every other possible thing to get the watch back and make sure that the lead actor doesn’t know about it and do not file any case against her.. but this so called “meri ghadi sirf meri hai” process ends up making both fall in love with each other and all that crap..

Each and every scene in the movie is predictable, infact, from the start of the movie, you can easily predict what’s gonna happen in the end..

The actors were forcing themselves to make everyone laugh, they succeeded in couple of scenes too but they failed miserably in other scenes.. Kareena Kapoor thought, her skin show would attract some eyebrows but she forgot, she was supposed to act too.. I have no idea what was Javed Jafri doing in the movie.. same for Kirron Kher.. she is such a good actress..

And why the hell there was need for Sylvester Stallone? Just to make him say Kambakht Ishq in Hindi? Even role of Denise Richard was a big joke..

In short, these guys had pockets full of money, so they decided to cast all good actors and asked them to act their worst.. and even these actors didn’t bother to read the script before signing the movie..

Pathetic, bakwaas movie.. don’t bother watching the movie.. If you really want to waste your time.. watch Tashan instead.. atleast it has some better songs..

Are you still expecting the rating from me? Hell no.. I want my money back first.. PATHETIC MOVIE..

Oh, I was supposed to talk on Blogcamp Pune 2, OK OK.. I am back on track.. Vada Pav was pretty good at SICSR – Symbiosis (the venue), but I missed the Poha as Annkur had recommended..  Will try it definitely next time..  I loved the wind blowing on the 7th floor.. and the few babes roaming around in the girls hostel opposite of the venue.. and Yeah.. I enjoyed couple of sessions too.. The session by Ankesh and Annkur were pretty interesting.. but apart from that nothing impressed me much.. But the purpose of the post is not about criticizing Blogcamp Pune 2 but it is my bit improve the whole thing..

Following are the loopholes I found..

1. No proper management, Yeah, there were couple of guys at the registration desk but that’s it.. the white board did not have any session details for the first couple of hours (the unconference started at 10 AM)
2. The intro session ate up good amount of time..
3. No proper sync between the 2 rooms, I think most of the people were sitting in a single room and there was no proper tracking of the activities in the other room.
4. A person hijacking the sessions (Known as Thakkar from what I understand).. I know I know, everyone loved it.. he was good at what he was doing in fact.. but knowingly or unknowingly, he hijacked and pulled up all the people to listen to his comedy skills. I don’t think it was the right thing.. Come on guys it’s Blogcamp.. not any entertainment show.. there were people in the other room trying to give out the sessions.. but there was no one in the rooms, everyone was enjoying his jokes..

   Those guys might have spent hours of time to make presentation, prepare for the session and their hard work goes in vain.. The whole traffic gets attracted to something which could have been done after all the sessions were over too..I definitely did not attend Blogcamp to waste my time in the funny show.. and I am sure, others too did not come for the funny show..

So, how do we improve the whole thing? I would suggest, we should take some lessons from Blogcamp Chennai.. (the first one), it was very well organized, everything perfectly set and managed..

So, here are the pointers..

1. Cut down the intro session or just take it off. I personally don’t think it will be of any use getting 100 odd people introduce themselves one by one.. this kind of exercise just takes lot of time and yields nothing.. I think the same kind of problem we had faced in earlier blog camp Pune too..
2. Be sure to have a list of the sessions before everything starts.. Yea, I know it’s unconference and all.. but having a list of sessions is pretty much convenient for the visitors (Obviously, things can be added / taken off from it over the time)
3. Categorize the sessions in 2 types.. say, Advanced and Newbies, or whatever categorization you feel like. Or simply, divide the sessions timings based on the theme.. I am saying this because, in the 2nd half, most of the sessions were boring.. they were boring for me but it’s highly possible that certain group of people will look forward to those kind of sessions.. frankly speaking, from what I saw, most of the people were either yawning or doing some other stuff, so this might give wrong signals to the person who is taking the session.. so, I feel it’s better to categorize so only target audience will attend the specific sessions..
4. Time is money.. we have to make sure that the sessions start and end at the specified time..
5. And yeah, most important, don’t allow anyone to hijack the sessions.. Yeah, I know it’s an unconference but think from the point of view of the guy who is going to take the session, what will be his state of mind (seeing no people around), what about his hard work? Still funny sessions more important?
6. Accept sponsorships, I know few people will be against it.. accept the money from the sponsors but don’t allow them to spam around in the sessions.. use the money in getting better conference hall, get some free food, snacks, goodies etc… it helps to make the whole environment much better..

I think if things are slightly more managed, everything will go pretty much smoothly..

I hope we don’t repeat these kind of mistakes again in the 3rd Blogcamp Pune and I am sure there will be lot of improvement in it..

And finally.. thanks to Tarun and other guys for organizing the Blogcamp Pune, if you feel, I can be of any help in organizing the Blogcamp, do let me know, I will be more than happy to join in

As shown in the promos, the movie has a plot roaming around the shadows of 9/11 attacks happened in New York. 3 very good friends (Omar – Neil Nitin Mukesh, Sam – John Abraham & Maya – Katrina Kaif), Sam & Maya get married and Omar loses touch with both of them as he moves to some other place. But suddenly, the FBI detains Omar claiming that he is part of the terror group. But the purpose of detaining him to find solid evidence against his friend Sam, who according to FBI is heading a terror group. FBI forces Omar to befriends with Sam & Maya and stay with them for sometime, so that they can trace activities of Sam. But Omar does not believe that Sam is a terrorist, he goes on a journey to prove that his friend and himself both are innocent.

Overall, I really liked the movie, the story, it was pretty much strong, for a change the movie did not have any unnecessary songs and unwanted scenes.. perfect direction and editing, except for that “kind of” love making scene between Sam & Maya, it could have been snipped easily, it wasn’t required according to me.

What I liked about the movie was, it tries to shows one of the reasons for some of the guys taking the path of terrorism, it shows how FBI deals with innocent people etc.. But at the same time, I did not find ending of the movie proper, something was lacking, raised few questions.

On the acting front, all the actors did their job pretty well, Katrina Kaif is growing movie by movie.. and on the top of it she looked very cute too.. Really liked the character of Sam i.e. John Abraham.. nicely played.. Neil Nitin Mukesh was pretty impressive.. Irfan Khan was pretty decent, he didn’t have anything much to do, he just played what he was asked for.. nothing exceptional.. nothing to show his actual acting skills..

On the music front.. I don’t think anything was original.. the music was good but nothing original.. it sounded like copied partly from his previous movies and the main song (Hai Junoon) from an Indonesian song. Cinematography was pretty good..

So, overall, the movie was very good, I would rate it Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars It is definitely worth a watch.. Go for it..

On the box office front, I think it should do fairly well as there are no good movies around.. and this one was pretty good one too..

• There was were bunch of kids trying to start a website which will allow the users to setup websites in just few clicks. The concept was pretty good but their idea was broken, they decided to implement something social, where as a user will make template and share it with other users, so everyone can use it. I am not sure how practical it will be as the business model. Apart from this, they were not even ready for the alpha stage and they were having demo at the demo pit. In short, they were not “ready” yet..  They did not have clear picture of what they are going to do in the future. (And if they had, they could not convey it to me…)
• There was another team with the idea of making something on the basis of Getsatisfaction.com, again, no clear business plan, the voting manipulation wasn’t taken care of. The making money part wasn’t so promising at all.
• Another one was based on GetAFreelancer.com, again no proper business plan. There were no answers when I asked, there are plenty of other biggies providing same kind of services, why would people come to your site? Frankly, speaking, this guy was pretty much new to this and needed some boost, I gave him few ideas and if he works on those ideas, the things should work out for him. 
• There were many others, from something like Google docs / MS live document sharing clone, to some educational portal with great idea in mind but no proper planning etc..

I am not going to list them one by one but if you notice, everyone had some kind of base idea ready, be it based on any international site or not, but none of them had proper process lined up. No business model. Infact many of these guys never thought of any business model. They were like, we will see when things work out..

From what I understand, their thinking might be like.. we will make a good product and sell it off to any company and earn some good bucks.. (Well, I might be wrong too) But I don’t think this is what business all about… You need absolutely planning and clear picture keeping the worst conditions in mind. You should have a backup plan ready.

And most importantly, the high focus should be on money, profit.. you are spending lot of time over the project.. and for what? Social service? Just to make your name? Don’t you want your daily bread and butter? Think about money.. make a proper business plan and then just into so called startup bandwagon. If you don’t have any plans ready, I don’t think you have any right to start any business..

I know I know.. there will be people with examples like Twitter, Facebook etc.. but they all have a proper business plan, it is just that it’s been kept under the wraps and they are waiting for the right time…

I think people should not simply get into the hype of “startup” and all.. they need to sit, get back to the basic and make a plan, think about the future and think about the worst conditions.

That’s it.

Oh Yea, I am not any so called “startup guru” or anything. I am just a businessman. I understand money, profits, loss along with the great ideas. That’s it. So these are the things which always run in my mind and thought of sharing with everyone, so atleast some of the guys planning to do something new can get tips from this topic.

Yes, I am a pro BJP guy, I would always like to see BJP getting elected but at the same time, I don’t believe in following anyone blindly.

To be frank, in this election, I had high hopes for BJP, the way they started their online campaign was showing some good signs.. the good signs of stressing more on the development factor.. but as the day passed, the whole scenario changed and it turned into cat fights..

There were few incidents which I feel were given more importance and blown out of proportion by media and rivals.. e.g. being classic case of Varun Gandhi.. everyone said, his speech was inflammatory (Video), even he was slapped detention order under NSA. At the same time, Sanjay Dutt too gave in inflammatory speech, but no one bothered to care about it.. (I feel this was something not at all fair)

Apart from these issues, the issues like Modi as CM was also blown out of proportion.. Godhra riots ghost was brought back..

BJP tried to fight back with the genuine issues like black money, Afzal Guru and Bofors but I guess, these issues made no impact on anyone. You can read about failure of central government on Hassan Ali case here (Government cent forged document to Swiss bank) and also over the issue of Quattrocchi. Afzal Guru is still enjoying his stay in the jail instead of the hell.

I am not trying to say that Congress is bad but they are certainly not the good ones.. I feel there is some kind of layer which is between a common man and what actually the truth is. BJP is always portrayed as anti-muslim party and Congress is a secular party. But I don’t understand how can a reservation system be secular? There have been many instances where congress tried to play vote bank policy keeping monitories in front. Is it secular? But when BJP tries to talk about development, Godhra and Babri issues are brought back and BJP called anti-muslim party talking about Hindutva all the time. (Where BJP has clarified meaning of Hindutva zillions of times). Congress even went on to doubt the existence of lord Ram but at that time too Congress was secular party.

I am not getting deep into this as I don’t want this post to become more like Congress Vs BJP. But my point here is, don’t just follow any political party blindly, if everyone says Congress as secular party, it certainly does not mean that they are secular. We should not ignore the points I have mentioned (and many more which have happened in the past).

Now, coming back to the point of “What actually went wrong with BJP?”

• They started well with promoting themselves online, infact they were pretty early at it and they were doing good. But somewhere in between they lost the track, the blog never got updated properly. Basically they should have used online medium to echo their views and clarify on things like Godhra, Kandahar etc.. but they never utilized the online medium. And on the other hand, the young crowd always remained unclear about BJP’s stand and they always considered Congress as a secular party. (As no one clarified the things) 
• On the rural front, Rahul Gandhi did a fantastic job by reaching out to the people.. in fact I feel, it helped Congress a lot to gain more votes. At the same BJP did nothing as sort and even if they did, they could not tell the people about it. So, it was Rahul Gandhi all over.. (I would call this very very smart politics – I see him as India’s next PM)
   
• BJP never promoted young leaders. I know, they must have tried it but to the common people, they never tried. Where as congress sent everyone signals about Young leaders.. Rahul Gandhi, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora are the best example.
   
• Anti Muslim image – I feel it hit BJP the most. Even though Narendra Modi did fantastic job in the development of Gujarat. Just check his interviews, this guy has got the power, he never talks crap but since BJP could not clear it out properly (as mentioned in the point 1), the opposition parties kept hitting them on the same issues. Some funny people even blamed BJP for Mangalore pub incident. BJP ruled Karnataka government took care of the issue and made sure that they (Ram Sene) do not repeat these kind of incidents. Even the Varun Gandhi issue hit them really hard. (I would blame Media and other parties for this), BJP clarified their stand but it did not help. In fact over the Godhra issue too, they have welcomed Supreme Court’s decision of speeding up the investigations.

So, I feel above issues have hit BJP the most. They need to work out on the issues from now itself, change the image of the party. Get more young people.. be more active online.. and keep 100 miles away from getting into dirty politics.

Now, apart from all these things, let me share my views on few things like Godhra, RSS and about everything which is there in my mind.

Godhra – I know, whatever happened in Godhra wasn’t right but if government feels, Modi or BJP government is responsible for this, then they should work on pacing up the things and make sure that everyone gets justice. (I am not talking about the castes here) There are many people out there.. (at least what I see on Twitter and other social networking places) blame Gujarat government for this and call them Anti-Muslim party. I suggest them to put more time in pressurizing the government to act fast. (We have seen zillions of petitions happening around) So we can have clear justice. Do not blame anyone if we do not have the facts right.

RSS – Some silly people call RSS as Indian Mujahedeen or SIMI of Hindus. I mean, it’s like WTF situation for me. On what basis? Do you guys even know anything about RSS? What do they do? What are they into? They don’t support bullshit of religious war or beating up girls.  They are far away from these things. Wikipedia has excellent article on them. RSS.org is their official website. (Check their archives section for their views and resolutions)

The Rest: Since, Congress has come into the power, I expect them to squash terrorist organizations. Do away with the vote bank politics, get rid of quota system, do fair and transparent politics. Focus more and more on the development front, think how Indian can grow. I really like the fact that Congress has got the most seats, so they won’t have to depend on the left or other parties.

So, that’s about it.. I am quite disappointed that BJP could not win but I see the bright future ahead for the BJP, they can learn from their mistakes and come out as party which focuses on the development.

This is how the mail goes…

You already know that here in the U.S. we are outsourcing almost everything!  For you to acquire new clients might you consider this possibility?

Alexa, Ranking, and Compete.com all rank xxx as #1 in its category with more than 100,000 absolutely unique start-ups and online & eCommerce Business Owners per month (plus we operate the #1 ranking Web Hosting Directory with more than 300,000 monthly owners/visitors at xxxx)  …and xxxx for SEO interests.   And note that more than 50% of our 300,000 monthly visitors at xxx are in India with 25% in the U.S.

The mail ended with…

  Stay well,
  xxx

I am not sure what exactly was in their mind while planning out these kind of mailers but I personally find these things pretty funny.. I mean, writing couple of words in Hindi doesn’t make you familiar to India.. get some info on what’s happening around in India.. write those things in the mail, so Indians feel a personalized mail.. and it will make more sense too..

So, the point of this post: If you are planning to start marketing campaign to woo people from other country, make sure you do good amount of home work about that country and then you start sending out the mails..

I have been planning it for quite few times, even got the designs and integration done but was not satisfied with the design, so I kept on delaying it.. but finally today, I decided to launch it with a temporary theme.. (which is one of those paid themes)

The blog is mainly going to be company specific, my views on certain things like business, jobs, careers, programming, designing and lot more..

Apart from this blog, I am hoping to become bit more active on this personal blog too.. many things in the pipeline.. hoping for the best

Okay.. so I am gonna cut the crap and give you the URL.. http://blog.web1.in

So, visit it if you like to follow what’s happening with my company..

Cheers,
Deep

In many situations, I have noticed high emotions in them.. I have seen, all of us (friends) going out and not talking the dog, the dog just stares at you with the hope that, we will take him.. (the eyes show the emotions), we see him being sad.. but after coming back, once we start playing with him.. he is back to normal.. the same joy in his eyes.. same happiness…

This post is dedicated to one such dog named Coco.. no he wasn’t mine but a friend’s.. 3 month old kid.. he died today early in the morning.. he met with a freak accident yesterday at home, hurt himself on the neck.. started bleeding heavily, it affected the brain and it stopped working.. had to keep him on oxygen.. but he went into the comma.. doctors gave deadline of 36 hours… but he could not survive.. he died within 5-6 hours…

I remember playing with him.. he was a brat.. he could never stand at once place.. in the car, if we all are going somewhere, he will always look to bite our hands or anything comes on his way (Since he was a kid, the “tooth” thing was pretty new for him, so he used to love biting everyone.. haha).. the kid used to make everyone mad at their home.. he had habit of peeing on the floor or on the bed.. even if you take him in the bathroom… he will come out and pee outside.. haha yea.. It was funny.. I know, it’s irritating too.. but that’s how the kids are right? The kid was very nasty too.. friend had 2 dogs.. so the kid used to first finish his food and then used to jump to other dog’s dish and eat from there too..

I have been with the the kid only few times but whatever time I have spent, I got so much attached to him that I can’t stop tears coming out from my eyes.. I have seen the joy in his eyes.. he used to be really happy while playing with us.. he was just a like a couple of month old child.. who doesn’t know anything, who always tries to explore new new things.. breaks whatever comes in his way.. make things dirty and what not.. but you still love him.. coz he is just one of you..

This post is not about being sad over the death of a dog but this post is an attempt to change the perception of a human towards the animals.. they are one of us.. just be with them once.. love them.. and you will get more love in return.. like humans.. they also need love.. they also need to be pampered.. they are like one of us..

Here are couple of pics of him..

Lots of love.. RIP..

Yes, I know they do help people in cases like theft and all but what about minor issues? Instead of solving them, they try to cut short and find the temporary solution…

Examples would be.. e.g. when you are sitting with your girlfriend or anyone in a area which is not so busy.. and it’s night time..

The police guy walks in, check your license and asks you to leave from that area as it’s not “safe”…

I don’t understand, if it’s not safe then why they can’t increase the security… instead nabbing the miscreants, they prefer asking common men to leave the place, so that miscreants don’t trouble common people and a common man doesn’t go to police station to lodge FIR..

This is the solution that they have… (Yea, I had faced this problem couple of years back near Lokhandwala, I am sure many of you must have faced this too)

RTOs (Traffic Police) too are equally responsible in this.. most of them look get “extra” money most of the time..

A year back or so, my sister had parked the car in no parking, they took the car and when we went to collect the car, they started asking for Rs. 1,000 fine.. we actually fought with them as there was no such rule where they can fine us for Rs. 1,000 (rules related to PUC or Car Parking), we made them read their rulebook and had to make them realize that they can’t fool people.. in the end, they charged us what they were supposed to (legally) – around Rs. 400.

2nd incident was today.. infact, an hour back..

The RTO guy stops my car, tell me that I have to take off my car’s film (on the glasses), the reason? There are  many illegal activities going on in the cars with the dark glasses.. I was like WTF.. dude, does it mean, people with cars with transparent glasses won’t get into illegal activities?

They just don’t understand the basics.. they don’t understand that, they have to work harder on catching those 1% of people who are into illegal activities.. not trouble 99% of the people who are not doing anything wrong..

I guess, I will never understand their logic being rules and regulations..

I am sorry but I am really angry at this point so my words might not be right but that’s the fact and we can’t deny it..

First, I noticed around 3000 odd tables in the DB, thought it might be the reason (spambot attack) but later found out that this is how BuddyPress RC 1 behaves.. it creates 3 activity tables for each user.. and we have around 1400 users. (I figured it out quite late actually haha)

So, after spending numerous hours finding the issue, I got on to IRC channel of BuddyPress, got in touch with the user Burt (Burtadsit), We spent around 2 odd hours, tried out few things and then we moved on to the plugins section, disabled all the plugins, enabled every plugin one by one and finally found the issue.

The plugin Sexybookmarks was trying to connect to its server and the server was throwing back 500 error code (actually, 403 error, this means mostly mod_security rules are blocking it). So, our server was retrying or getting stuck and causing the page to load very slow.. (it used to take around 12 minutes to load the page).

Finally I traced the issue and fixed the things up.

So, the purpose of this post is to make you guys aware that, whenever you feel something wrong with your Wordpress installation, first thing you should do is, check the plugins. (Apart from the normal routine checks, DB check and all)

That’s it guys..

Cheers,
Deep

Note: If you wish to see detailed issue, you can check this thread on BuddyPress forums