Archive for December, 2005

Bangalore to be renamed to Bengaluru ?

Now sure how serious this is!. They are planning on renaming Bangalore to Bengaluru. That’s how you pronounce Bangalore in Kannada.

Link : Bangalore to be re-named Bengaluru (and here)

This is what the above article says…

Chief Minister N Dharam Singh told reporters in Gulbarga on Sunday that he had asked the chief secretary to take steps for renaming Bangalore.

He said Kannadigas were calling the city as Bengaluru but taking an Anglicised form, it became Bangalore.

Dharam recalled that a suggestion to call the city as Bengaluru had emanated at a meeting of prominent Kannada litterateurs he had called recently to seek their views on celebrating the golden jubilee of the formation of the state of Karnataka.

Well, if this is true, then Bangalore would be the 4th major city in India to undergo a name change. First it was Bombay to Mumbai, second was Madras to Chennai, third was Calcutta to Kolkotta.

So, would the next one be Bangalore to Bengaluru ?

Personally, I strongly feel that the government should give more stress to important matters related to development, infrastructure, rural reform etc. It should not get into overheads like these. Renaming Bangalore to Bengaluru wont make the city any better.

My friend Harsh asked me, ……. Is Mangalore next ? Since it sounds like Bangalore. But, in case of Mangalore, renaming wont be that simple I guess. Why ? Its because, Mangalore has different names in different languages!

In Kannada, its known as Mangaluru (like Bengaluru)
In Konkani, its known as Kodiyal
In Tulu, people call it by the name of Kudla
Malayali people use the term Mangalapuram!

And since Kannada is not what majority of people speak in Mangalore, I seriously doubt it would be called Mangaluru. (i.e., if and when it would be renamed!)

31 comments | December 11th, 2005 at 11:20pm

Stealing, and copying ..

With blogs becoming popular these days, everyone wants to start up a blog. But once the blog is up, some people wont know what to write in there (or they are too lazy!). So.. what do they do ?

Yes. … you guessed it write! Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+V. Copy. Steal.

The first such major incidence in the Indian Blog Sphere came into full limelight when a blogger called Rohan Pinto started copying posts from other blogs (which he thought were intresting) on his blog without proper attribution. And, he got back what he deserved! (A search of his name on google would show the results). Rohan ended up pulling down his site, and issuing a public apology for his innocent copying act.

Then, there was this case where one of the Neha’s posts was convienently copied!. (I love the first comment!)

Then the next one that gained quite a lot of attention was the post by Jagadish called ” IT is not like that !“. Its an Kannada+English mix post which was widely forwarded by mail as “….yavaag foreign ge ?”, and quite a lot of folks posted it on their blog (including me!, but with proper attribution). Some did not know who the original author was, and they posted it saying that they received it as a mail forward. That’s fine too, since they did not claim that they wrote the post.

Now, whats interesting about this episode is, one lady converted that post from Kannada+English to Tamil+English with the title “eppo foreign pore ?”, and posted it on her blog claiming that she was the original author! That too a month after the original post was made. The original author was notified by a third person about this!!! But Jagadish did a fantastic job in this regard and the effect is …. the Lady’s blog + profile is no more on the net! (but you can still it on Google cache for some more time)

The latest victim of plagiarism is of a blogger by the name Suyog, who had posted a photo on his blog. This photo was picked by an advertising company and used it one of their campaigns without Suyog’s permission. ie, for commercial purpose, and this episode too has evoked a strong response from bloggers! [Via Kribs]

Just wondering what next..?

7 comments | December 9th, 2005 at 10:16am

Just Another Sky

Just another Sky - Click to Zoom

Somehow, I liked the coulds in the above snap.

Yet another Sky - Click to Zoom

The above one was shot when were on our way back from Tirumala to Tirupati. Liked the coulds and the rays projecting out!

3 comments | December 7th, 2005 at 09:14am

Real-time tracking of US bound flights

My wife is finally on her way to US as I write this post. Her trip was postponed many a times. But now things have been sorted out. She would be reaching Houston on Sunday.

The good thing is, I can track all her flights online. And that too in real time! And if its a US bound flight, I also get to see a graphical view (map kind) of where the flight is, its altitude, speed, distance travelled, ETA etc.

There are lot of sites which offer this facility of flight tracking. But most of it seems to have some kind of common back end.

Here are a few of them which I use:

1. Google! - Just key in the flight no, and it gives you an option to track the flight on TraveloCity or Expedia or fboweb.com (When you reach this site via Google, it also lets you track the flight in Google Earth, which is too cool!)

2. FlightArrivals.com - this one too is pretty cool. Doesn’t show a graphical map, but is updated often and the details are pretty good.

3. There are tons of other sites which let you track US bound flights. (FlightView.com, FlightExplorer.com, Aeroseek, Flytecomm)

Apart from the above, most of the airlines let you track their flight from their homepage itself.

Hope this info helps.

2 comments | December 4th, 2005 at 10:38am