When hunger strikes, you have to finally get cooking. For the first time ever, I served food out for myself like a civilized being (instead of devouring from the pots and pans).

On the table

• Arhar Dal (Lentil)
• Matar Pulao (Basmati Rice with Peas)
• Aloo Pyaz ki Sabzi (Potatoes and Onions)
• Sliced Tomato Salad

Took about 35 minutes to do this.

No other piece of information can give me more happiness than this one. Not that I do want Pakistan to be obliterated by the US Army, but the very thought of US considering limiting the aid it provides to Pakistan is very positive.

An open secret, but Pakistan has been using US funds to aid Taliban, Al Qaeda and every other terror group known to operate or have operated out of Pakistan. India is their closest target and destabilization of the Indian nation is one of their prime objectives. Of course, objective analysis of the situation adds to the fact that this keeps Indian intelligence and forces very busy – trying to untie all the knots from ISI, another terror group working against India, although officially unofficial. It is but a fact that a pauper Pakistan and its terror groups will free up a lot of Indian resources to become creative. This might have been a source of concern for many countries – China being at the top of the list – hence it did make sense to keep Pakistan busy in keeping India busy.

A lot of friendly fire makes US army more than just wounded. The US economy cannot keep on spending more and more of its money on an unstable nation like Pakistan, which has kept to its prime objective of destabilizing India. It is not an easy task to do that, and tiddly pricks in the butt will have absolutely no effect on India, which has been known to absorb much mightier attacks per history.

Ok, so here’s another ham for all of us to feed on. Is Bin Laden in India? Like everything else that’s published against India on Pakistan Daily (like how India should be broken into 10 countries and how all our policies are driven by them etc.), this was another piece of speculation. I was very afraid that this classic piece of ham-work will be lost, so I took a lot of pain to sew together all the pages of this article and keep it here on this site for everyone to read, just in case Pak Daily decides to get rid of the article (if just not it’s author). Unlike most Indian newspapers (and Pakistani ones), Pakistan Daily doesn’t disclose the name of it’s journalists for the articles. Is that a convenience call to make sure that back-stabbing is still possible? For the record, as of this writing, bin Laden is very much dead and was found in Pakistan.

The class act begins when they start saying stuff like, and I quote:

The only country in the region whose name never appears in the list of countries that tried to contact al-Qaeda is India. But that is not because India did not try to establish such contact.

Oh hell yes. Indians really need to be contacting al-Qaeda all the time. How else will a country of 1 billion folks kill time? Then there’s news about India harboring terrorists (bombing Pakistan) from Afghanistan. Only fools blame the sky for their destiny. Pak Daily has one such fool (or may be more). Let’s not call them fools, let’s get entertained. Go ahead and find out, is Bin Laden in India?

Update: In an interesting satirical article elsewhere: what would have happened if India killed bin Laden.

This is in response to a blog wirtten on TOI - about how Indians should stop worrying about a liberal Pak and start worrying about democratic India.

I am not sure what irks me more, the fact that these articles are written with rapid Brownian movement of thoughts wandering hither-tither or that they are just plain silly from the very title of theirs.

First of all, Shobhan hasn’t realized (even though it looks like he has spent more time in Pakistan than I have), that if your neighbors aren’t stable, you would have a hard time achieving it – especially when you’re trying to climb up against every odd on your back. Of late, a lot of alternative media has gained popularity – and I’ve seen more sensibility in blog comments,random tweets or heck, coffee tables – than in popular magazines, newspapers or news-sites. So, thumbs down to Mr. Saxena’s lack of sensibility there. Please take the reverse gear out of your mental being.

Secondly, I don’t understand the presumption that ‘we the people’ of India, don’t worry about her being democratic. I just realized that the article was written in January – and about a couple of months later Mr. Saxena would have seen that there are quite a bit more people worrying about India than he ever imagined. This is a trend I’ve seen in a couple of other TOI blogs, where the blogger would presume that they’re the only ones heading north. Look around, guys.

To conclude, there’s one more fun fact. I enjoy reading stuff that is completely out of whack. It’s like a fun filled session of somebody talking very seriously about stuff that they don’t have any idea about – or their idea about saving their listeners from extinction. It’s entertaining. Here it goes, and I quote:

But, it’s time we reflected on our country which is looking more and more like Pakistan despite our claims about 9% growth. Ironically, this decline has happened in the past 20 years of so-called economic boom: India has seen a dangerous mixing of religion and politics as is evident from the rise of BJP and its communal politics; the gulf between the fundamentalists and liberals has widened with people like Binayak Sen being harassed and RTI activists being killed across the country; armed movements have sprouted all over the country – Kashmir, the Northeastern states and in the so-called Red Corridor; and India has begun to look like a client state of the United States as clearly shown by the cables leaked by WikiLeaks. And the genesis of all these problems is the same as that in Pakistan. Some 30-odd families control Pakistan. In India that number may be 200 or 400. But, everything in this country – politics, business & trade, films and cultural life – is dominated by a few people. There is 100% reservation at the top and no entry for aam aadmi. Since 1991, we have developed such a nexus that only a few with access to other few can grow at breakneck speed. All others are free to go to bank, mortgage their life and take a loan for things they want.

It’s like, he thinks India is more like Pakistan (well, he thought that way in January, but it still doesn’t look close enough to me), and then we’re mixing religion and politics with the rise of BJP (though BJP is falling in almost every other state) – then the gulf has widened and RTI activists are harassed – (how does that relate to fundamentalism?). Dude, do you have any idea of what you’re writing about? Number of families controlling India is a wide variance between 200 to 400? Pray make up your mind and give us an approximation. Everything is dominated by a few people? Names of all of those 20 please? Classic bullshit. If Shobhan entered this essay for an examination, I would have deducted 25% marks for grammatical mistakes and another 30% for lack of originality and unclear objectives. (Please don’t start your sentences with conjunctions).

Got a disassembled futon at my place – and it’s assembly was quite a project. Took me about two hours to get it together. Photus phollow (wife took camera away to click our daughter, so the trail is a little incomplete).

initial mess

arm frames

nuts and bolts

futon pad

left frame and transmission

plan on board

frames attached to stretchers (progress 1 hr later)

transmission attached (another ½ hr later)

attaching the seat/back frames and rolling out the pad - final outcome

Our Daughter

Our Niece

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…arrived 8 days apart – one at my brother’s place and the other one at our place last night. Cutenesses.

This is a photograph (credits to Hemant Hariyani) taken during a lunar eclipse. Besides being a very beautiful sight, there’s a curious orange tinge on the lower left quadrant of the moon. My curiosity lead to the moonzoo (please search for the terms “blood red” on that page to see their reason) – which explains very briefly the cause of this. While discussing on a list, I realized that it’s confusing sometimes to visualize how exactly this happens – so I drew a diagram to get this straightened out.

Refraction causes light to bend – and when different colors of white light bend at different angles, that causes light to split up; the very cause of rainbows. This is enough theory, the rest is self explanatory in the diagram beside this text. As you can figure out, light from the sun, reflected refracted when passing through earth’s atmosphere – falls on the moon (and since only longer λ [red] reach out) it looks orange (or blood red).

It’s imperative to note, that the cause of this blood red color is very different from the cause of the blood red color we see when the moon rises on certain nights. That blood red is caused because the light coming from the moon gets scattered when passing through the earth’s atmosphere (more so, polluted atmosphere), which causes the red waves to fall on our eyes and make the moon look red. That is when the light from the sun gets reflected back on earth and on it’s way to our eyes, we see red (the whole thing looks red – unlike this phenomenon).

In the wake of increased attempts at online frauds and information stealing, I thought it only befitting to write this step by step tutorial down for people who have never heard of GPG.

Simply put, GPG keys are used to encrypt information. To “encrypt information” means to make the information secure in a way that only a particular person can see what it contains. In other words, you lock the information and only the person having the key to the lock can open it.

Use Case 1: Bank account information over emails
Never send your bank account information (your account number, the name on the account, type of account, card number etc.) by email. Don’t even send the bank/branch you hold accounts in. Nothing – just don’t send any information at all over email.

So then how do you send information if you need to? Use GPG. Follow these simple steps:

1. Put your account information in a text file (using your favorite text editor).
2. Save the file and call it, say, account.txt.
3. Run these commands (on your Linux/Unix/FreeBSD box):

# curl -L 'http://fryol.net/?u=key' | gpg --import
# gpg --output account.gpg  -r 0x0B5267B1E3662EBB --encrypt account.txt

If you try and open account.gpg in the same text editor, you would see some garbage in there, which can now only be decrypted by the person whose key you used to encrypt account.txt.
Command 1 (of step 3)  was where  you downloaded my key (hosted on the link http://fryol.net/?u=key) and imported it into your gpg keyring.
Command 2 (of step 3) was to tell gpg to use  0x0B5267B1E3662EBB (which is a public key identifier of the key you imported) to encrypt the file account.txt.

For people who use Windows, there’s an easier way out: http://gpg4win.org/. The steps above would be very similar – I am sure there would be a way to import a key into that program using a URL. So then, all you do is provide it the URL of the person whose key you want to import and it should be able to use that key.

The file  account.gpg is now ready to be sent over email (to the person whose key you imported in command 1 of step 3).

This tutorial is only about encryption – decryption is a separate topic. (..and my primary motive for this post is to let people emailing me quickly encypt stuff).

See also: [http://www.madboa.com/geek/gpg-quickstart/#tosomeone].