Mayank's Blog

Legends and WikiLeaks have it that the supposedly future Prime Minister of India will discuss about the greatest dangers facing the country with the US ambassador. He did and made the observation that “Hindu terror“ is the biggest threat to this country. Not Lashkar-e-Toiba, not Jamat-ul-Dawa, not even Naxalites, but Hindu terror. The perpetrators of 26/11 attacks are bewildered and are crying foul. They had spent so much time, energy and money in devising and implementing this whole plan and now entire credit is being taken away from them. Not fair. Rahul Gandhi, the Baba of Indian politics (about whom some crazy people say that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth), had earlier equated SIMI with RSS . Its only fair to equate SIMI, which has engaged in mindless violence and is now banned by the government, with RSS, which fought for India’s independence and has produced leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L. K. Advani. That this equation might be an attack at the base of only...

I never thought that I would be writing on this topic. Its a no-brainer why governments across the world are pissed at WikiLeaks. And I naively assumed that every ordinary citizen would automatically see the potential benefits of WikiLeaks. My belief was cemented by the presence of 600,000+ fans of WikiLeaks on Facebook.  But I have come across people and watched shows on TV which basically debate whether WikiLeaks has done a good thing  by leaking the embassy cables or whether they are essentially an anarchist. Some people have argued that it leads to an erosion of privacy as the cables are private conversations between two individuals. The leaks are nothing but voyeurism on WikiLeaks part which may even lead to deaths of human rights activists across the world. Another argument that is put forth is that WikiLeaks is specifically targeting United States as all the cables are US embassy cables and not of any other country. While all these are good arguments, I will try to show...

A new feature has been added to OrkPic which lets you download your Orkut friend's photo albums too! (Click for a larger view) Download the new version here ! P.S. - Don't forget to uninstall the previous version first before installing this.

Orkut usage is on the decline. Frankly, hardly anyone uses Orkut nowadays. They have all migrated to Facebook. Naturally, new applications developed for Orkut are very far and few. This may also be the result of Google's apathy towards Orkut and its OpenSocial API. But there was a time when Orkut was hugely popular in India when people uploaded hundreds of photos on Orkut but now have no way of getting them back (except manually going through each of them). That's where OrkPic comes into picture. This tool lets you download your Orkut albums onto your system in a flash (depending on the speed of your internet connection, of course). (Click for a larger view) OrkPic lets you choose the albums you want to download and stores them in your "My Pictures" folder. OrkPic is built on .NET 4/WPF and uses DotNetOpenAuth library. Download the tool and liberate your Orkut photos. UPDATE - You have to install .NET 4.0 Full Setup before installing OrkPic. Pleas...

Clearly the best movie of the Harry Potter series; it is also the most honest one. For once, the movie does not take “cinematic liberties” and make the original story a complete mess. It sets the tone of gloom and darkness from the first scene itself in which Hermione “obliviates” her parents. There is death and despair in the air as we miss the familiar surroundings of Hogwarts and the warmth of Dumbledore. Instead there is Nagini , writhing and hissing, as per Lord Voldemort’s will. Harry as the chosen one, Hermione and Ron take upon themselves the mission to find all the Horcruxes and destroy them and we follow their story as they continue on this dangerous mission. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) has clearly matured as an actor, as was also displayed in his play Equus. Rupert Grint (Ron) is at his funny best. The icing on the cake is the restrained yet powerful performance by Emma Watson (Hermione). Probably with Hogwarts out of the picture, it was easier for her to stop acting bookish. ...

Few days ago I had a heated argument with my friend about religion. Still fresh from watching " Religulous ", I was countering his every argument. Fed up, he asked me to read Bhagavad Gita and then tell him if I find anything wrong with it. Faced with the prospect of reading a book running into hundreds of pages, I asked him to keep it cool and let it go. He anyways went ahead and gifted me the holy book. Now I don't have the patience or passion to read such a thick religious book (yeah go ahead, judge me), I was thinking of a shortcut. That's when the idea of Bhagavad Gita Reader came into my mind. Snapshot - (Click for a larger view) This application divides Bhagavad Gita into chapters and verses. Then each verse and its translation is shown. There are no extra "interpretations to clutter up your mind." This application is built on WPF/.NET 4.0 with MVVM Light framework - A great framework with a very small learning curve as compared to Prism  albeit ...

Not withstanding the media’s  (TOI in particular) constant attempt to force Halloween down my throat, I have decided again to write about the festival which indeed is part of the Indian tradition – Diwali. Some may criticize me for being uncool, but I guess Delhi need not be any more cold than it already is.   I grew up in an era when SRK-ization of India was happening. Come Diwali and we were inundated by “Say No To Crackers” campaigns which told us horror stories about how crackers led to loss of someone’s limb/life. We were made to believe that one night of cracker bursting led to more deaths than the number of causalities in road accidents everyday. They employed all tricks of the trade to keep us off the fireworks – environment being the oft cited reason. Apparently, it was good for us to plant saplings on the roadside (which will eventually wither away in two days due to lack of care) as it would help in reducing the pollution “others” will create on Diwali night. ...