Retiring an immigrant

Sounds weird but yes it seems possible thanks to the INS and the Green Card processing times. It’s been about 6 years now and no green card in sight and for some it’s been longer  - totally ridiculous. The government talks about all sorts of reforms for everybody but what about us legal highly skilled workers who play a very important role in the American economy. How would an American citizen feel if they were

1.       The one’s who spent a fortune in getting a graduate degree from a reputed school

2.        The one’s who had to go through job interview after job interview getting rejected not because they were not good or the company didn’t want them but just because the company couldn’t sponsor an H1 visa

3.       The one’s who have to stand in long lines with a folder full of documents to prove you are legal in spite of having worked in this country for 6-7+ years.

4.       The one’s who have to possibly get married to their girlfriend/boyfriend earlier (at a certain stage in visa processing) that they want to just so that the other can get in the same line of green card with you.

5.       The one’s who pays Medicare and social security without even thinking about getting the benefits from that

I am no statistician, but I’m sure us legal immigrants are paying a big chunk of that Medicare and social security benefits that everyone else in America is enjoying, but yet most of them still look at us with that look “you b***** immigrant”. What about us? What happens to us, even after giving almost 10 years of our life to this country, paying high taxes and helping grow their economy we are not even close to getting a simple green card or any other benefits. What happens to people who are in the line to get their green card but lose their jobs especially in these economic crisis, they don’t get any social security benefits, and will they get all the money I gave up in paying others social security and Medicare back? NO. It seems like it’s just the price we have to pay to be in this land of opportunity, and it surely seems to be a big price. I know a lot of readers would say, why are you here just go back to your home country if you don’t like the processes, but that’s not the point I am trying to make here. I am here because I see a great future for myself here which I didn’t in my country but at the same time I would like to have the country to also have some apathy towards me, even a simple thing such as granting me a green card within 5 years of working here – is that really too much to ask for from a country which was established by travelers and people from all over the world.

 

Looking for restaurants – Try Thummit

Since I moved to San Francisco Yelp has been the default application I use to look for places to eat or look for recommendations from my friends. Yelp does most of the basic things I would expect it to do, and I haven’t seen any other site be as successful and do such a good job at it . But seems like yelp is about to get some competition from Thummit(http://thummit.com/)

Yes, Thummit is a new site that is based off Washington DC and is very similar to Yelp. You could think of it as a subset of Yelp that focuses mainly on Restaurants. Although, I think the idea of creating a site that concentrates on one particular aspect is awesome, I am not sure how long it can stand against yelp or the other similar site such as Citysearch out there. Although the UI is much better than yelp, the functionality seems exactly the same. I will surely watch this site, which is currently in beta, to see what they do next.. maybe audio comments, videos or notifications on new restaurant openings or maybe it could become the new Zagat, which is a reputation that I think yelp has failed to achieve or maybe never tried to. I think it might take some innovative features and great business plan to keep this afloat for long especially in the current economic situation

 

Online traffic monitoring in India

India is busy and everyone knows that. Creating a map with all the roads and lanes could easily go out of date in a matter of days because of some construction or government deciding to dig up some roads. But mapunity (http://www.mapunity.in/) did do a great job at mapping out the streets and providing information on directions etc. Its not only roads that’s a problem but today in cities like Bangalore its the traffic that has become crazy. One would rather walk than drive in Bangalore, and even if you are walking make sure you cover yourself well to make sure you don’t get covered in the soot of the vehicles.

I always wondered why someone never created a system similar to our traffic tracking system here in the US that could tell me which roads are clogged and help me figure out the fastest route based on traffic. But, now I am glad to see a step in that direction. Check out http://btis.in/live.htm, it has traffic cam’s across Banglore, Hydrabad, Pune and Chennai which will help you look at the traffic on the main streets. Its a start, cant wait to see a full blown system and I’m sure its coming soon.

 

Does a spouse need to know everything?

The other day when I was in a conversation with a friend of mine, who just recently got married, he asked me a question which I found very weird at that point. He asked me whether I had asked whether I knew the passwords to my husband’s email accounts etc.? My immediate reaction was – Of course not, why would i?,  he was surprised by my answer. We conversed on this topic at length, stating examples, analyzing situation such as arranged marriages where people don’t know each other well enough or don’t talk about their past etc. which brings up insecurities and the need for something like this or even just plain and simple insecure couples. It does seems that in some cases it might be something that one does just to make the marriage stronger or just an involuntary act of convenience to be able to handle tasks etc.

Although we couldn’t really come to a conclusion, this conversation did stir up a flurry of questions in my mind.  I still don’t understand why a spouse would want passwords to private email accounts, don’t they trust the other? Isn’t that what marriage is based on? Don’t they think that they can each still have their own space and private lives? or are is it just about keeping an eye on the other to make sure neither slip.

 

Mukhbir – movie review **

Mukhbir (drama)
Cast: Sameer Dattani, Raima Sen, Om Puri
Direction: Mani Shankar
Rating: **

Mukhbir is an OK movie, give it a watch and I would say more like a DVD movie.

It’s very few times that I would say that a movie was a good attempt at being inspired by a Hollywood movie, but this one is. You can see shades of ‘Departed’ in the movie but they have done a real good job with the rest of it. The plot is decent but the acting could have been better. The story is about the life of an informant who doesn’t get into the job by choice but rather the lack of a choice given to him under the circumstances. The script is quite nice, although the dialogues could have been better. The characterization and casting needed a lot of help. Om Puri was a total waste, Suniel Shetty was good maybe he should have been given a longer role. The female lead (don’t know if I should even call her a lead) was a total waste, it was not required at all not by the story and she didn’t add any value to the viewers either. The only person I could say I liked was Rahul Dev as the villain, he does justice to the character. Why have I not talked about the hero yet, well I am undecided about him. There were times when he seemed very promising in the movie and other times just flat. I think I would have to wait for his next movie to make a real opinion about him.

 

Creative advertising – using simple things to say so much more

Advertising has always been my interest. If I wasn’t a technical geek i would have surely been in the advertising field (..I could do that even now..:0 ). Being a painter I find print advertisement very interesting and recently I found a very interesting piece of print advertisement by Viagra. I think this is a great example of how you can use everyday things to say so much more.

fun viagra ad

 

How many twitters do we need?

When I was introduced to the concept of twitter I didn’t really get it. I understand micro-blogging but twitter  seemed like just too much noise and a “Facebook status messages on steroids” type application. Although my outlook changed when i went to the enterprise 2.0 conference. I got to see a complete different perspective on twitter, everyone out there was twittering and it help me understand the value of following the right people, twittering about the right things and the fact that its up to every person who tweets to get value out of twitter. You could sit an twitter about random things or you could actually twitter about things that mean something, attract audience or stir a conversation which lets to see the value of twitter. I mainly just use the functionality of following some key people in the industry to know what they are into and whats the buzz.

That said, like any other new cool concept that comes into picture there are multiple implementations. I haven’t used a lot of them but have used Plurk and yammer. Plurk is very much like twitter with a different interface and tries to do some different things with karma points etc. but at the end of the day it still seems to be another twitter.

Yammer, on the other hand claims to be an enterprise twitter site, but I still fail to understand its value. Why would any company employees share important information with each other on a public site? Such an application might make sense on an intranet but I am unable to see the value of it on the Internet. I guess I don’t understand what the founders were thinking.

All these tools make me wonder – how many places do they expect me to twitter? Whats the value of so many twitter type applications? why will one person type the same thing in three different sites? Get this,  there are 45 different tools used to post to twitter (http://twitterfacts.blogspot.com/2007/10/tools-to-post-twitter-messages.html). Which makes me ask the question again. How many twitters do we need or How many twitters can we handle?

 

Men and their wandering eyes

Ever noticed what happens when any woman with a decent figure and decently dressed walks across the street? - All the guys on that street will surely have their eyes wander. I’m sure all girls will relate to this and yes, all the guys will say - ” you girls do the same when a guy passes by”. Sorry to break it to you guys, we don’t do it as often as you do and we do it for the cream, not every ‘ass’ that walks past us.

Why does it bother us so much? Well it does, especially if we are walking by our man and his eyes keep wandering all around appreciating whatever is around him rather than pay a little more attention to what’s right beside him.

But the bigger question, which I am still wondering about is… should we really be bothered? ‘Cos we do like it ourselves, when a guy would stop what he is doing and glance at us. It does make me sound hypocritical but its true, but it still bothers me when my man does it more than a few times. Why? I’m still in search for an answer

 

Do you really want to Chrome?

Google Chrome has generated a lot of buzz in the past few days with a great marketing campaign that reaches all the geeks first and also highlights the upsides of the chrome. Full marks to Google for that. There has been a lot of analysis of the browser, comparison with other browsers and speculation around what Google will do with it in the future but the one thing I saw very little discussion upon was the privacy aspect. The following excerpt from the Terms of Use of Google Chrome tells you why I am scared:

“11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.

11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license. “

Just one thing I have to say to all those Microsoft skeptics who say that they don’t want to keep their data with Microsoft… Google is no better, in fact in my opinion its worse in this aspect.

 

The Maligners weekend..

It had been 4 years since we – the maligners had spent time together. Although it was not the whole group it was at least the half that could meet vasudha, amrita and myself.. and we enjoyed every bit of it.

Day 1: Vasudha and thakur came into the city early morning around 9:30 by the cal train and of course vasu bitching about how cold it was and the fact that some lady bumped into her for no reason (why do such things always happen to her). We headed home to patch up vasu’s wounds and be covered up for the weather and then went to have some great brunch san francisco style. The food was amazing and we were still the same loud and laughing bunch of girls, reminded me of how we would sit in Kalyan and chow down the Frankie’s . Then we headed to do the touristy stuff, esp. since vasu had this great camera and her great photography skills hanging on her neck. The tour started with the great cable car ride – or must i say the wait for the cable car ride, yeah  we waited for like an hour to get on that thing but it was fun. Gave a great feel of the city, we got off Lombard enjoying at the views and vasu clicking away. Then we started the Long walk, walked all the way from Lombard to the marina seeing the sights and sounds and enjoying the now clear and sunny San Francisco weather. We headed to Girardelli square to have some yummy ice cream and some horrible free pomegranate tea (well it was free so we took as many as we could ) and then we head out to walk towards the golden gate bridge. Yapping, laughing, clicking and making fun of everything .. yeah that’s what we did besides yeah enjoying the sights and sounds. On the way back we had another great adventure with the cable car- the wait, losing our patience we started looking for cabs, having no luck with cabs finally we took the MUNI all the way to market. After walking for almost about 6 hours we were all exhausted, our shoes were killing us we couldn’t walk anymore.. but what do girls do in such a situation – Yes, shop for shoes and thats what we did. Headed down to union square to go to Macy’s and look for some shoes to make ourselves comfortable and then headed home to finally rest our legs. And yes the night ended with the girls getting decked up, hitting a club with some cocktails and finishing it up with some great wine and lots of giggles at home.

Day 2: What do three girls do after waking up early in the morning on a saturday? Yes, watch Om shanti Om .. hehe thats what we did before we cleaned up and went for a quick brunch at tryptich. We had great plans for the day.. NAPA – sterling vinyards, which meant all three of us got decked up and hopped into the car and headed to NAPA.. the drive apart from the traffic was a lot of fun and so was the trip. Except that the tram broke down on our way back and we landed up spending an hour waiting for the shuttles to take us down (we could have practically walked down in that time).. anyways the drive back was great. All we did was sing all the random govinda numbers and wierd songs we could remember like ” jab tak rahega samose main aalooo… “, how do we know all these songs you ask? ahem.. what do you think we did at MSU . We were dead tired by the time we got back, with just enough time to chill, get ready and grab dinner with Rahul and finish our girl weekend in style with some great cocktails

What an incredable weekend, there is such a pleasure one feels after meeting spending quality fun time with old friends.. just priceless. Cant wait for our next reunion