Some money, and lots of time!

I got the idea for this post after listening to my neighbour, whom I think, is a bit of a Communist :D

There are 3 things, according to him, one can do when he/she has some money to spend in the pocket. I have elaborated more on each thing.

1. Buy food: This, everyone always does. Being Bangalorean, one loves eating. No second thoughts. Drop into the nearest Darshini ( small restaurants where you get good food ) and order a Masala Dosa + coffee. That coffee is "by-two" if you have company and don't want to spend 6 more Rupees. If you are a bit more posh, and have more money of course, you go to Pizza Hut and order a pizza. For me, either way, I return home and pester mum to give something more.

2. Buy clothes! : Yes, that's what he said. But one doesn't generally buy clothes out of pocket money. But, by any chance if you have forgotten to spend it and have saved it, one may buy clothes. Again, Bangaloreans look out for big red banners that say SALE! 50% OFF!!! But let's not get carried away, anything greater than 50% is considered too cheap and mediocre!

3. Buy books: This, people don't generally do. One considers that a waste of precious pocket money, which was supposed to be spent on a burger! But personally, a book is a pretty good investment. It pays back in the long run. Food, you eat and throw out next morning ( :P ). Clothes, you wear for a few months and give it to someone poor or throw away. But books, one can treasure it!

Now, heeding his advice, I had Rs. 100 with me today morning. I had just eaten a Dosa with an uncle of mine! So, I didn't want to buy food. Not clothes also, since it takes a lot of time for me to make a simple choice. No, I went to a near-by book shop, a second-hand book shop for my Bangalorean instincts, and bought 'The White Tiger' by the Mangalorean Aravind Adiga. I found that the 100 Rupee book is pirated, but luckily no pages are missing and the Xerox is legible enough! But the Xerox-wala hasn't done good enough job. By skimming through the pages, I found out that he has xeroxed an ant on Page 314! R.I.P ant!

What Mother Nature thinks of us?

Search engines love Wikipedia

Wikipedia, which prides itself in being 'anyone-can-edit', almost always shows up at the top of the search results of any good search engine. Here is my take on why this happens
It's like a cycle of events. When Wikipedia started off, people simply started creating numerous articles. The number of such scholars kept increasing, and number of hits to the website increased day by day. However sophisticated the search algorithms ( read Google PageRank ) of the various search engines are, it always depends on hits to the site. Now, Wikipedia is the 7th most visited site in the world. So, it naturally shows up at the top of search engines, even though it ranks low, on my scale at least, as the most trustworthy. And, people keep searching for stuff on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc, and Wikipedia keeps popping up, which leads to one more hit from the user. And, the cycle continues....Anyway, personally I don't like Wikipedia. If comedian/TV anchor Stephen Colbert is editing every other article ( http://bit.ly/160zYE ), I would just stay away from Wikipedia. I remember that, about a year ago, I searched for some info about our dear, former Indian Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda on the website. A laugh-out-loud moment soon followed.... In the introduction it said that "Him and his son Kumaraswamy are scars on the face of Karnataka." How true!
One more thing, Conan O'Brien on The Tonight Show said that Wikipedia is being written as a book. The funny thing is, he mentioned that he got this information from Wikipedia itself! But here is the catch: the database of the site has almost 3 million English articles. If all that is printed, it would be equivalent to 956 volumes of Ecyclopedia Britannica, with 500 pages each. I'm giving a link to the same website itself! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes ). Here is a picture of a publication which is 0.01% of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, converted by a UK student:

So, please guys, save paper and don't print your wrong information from the site, just read them off your screen!