Mary Poppins hangover here. Yes, I watched my first musical play yesterday night. We managed to get a ticket 3 days earlier to the show and as expected the theatre was packed. It was really surprising to see people coming in coaches to watch a play.
Grand stage, beautiful sets, amazing choreography, incredible perfomances and a jaw dropping scene of Mary Poppins flying over the crowd. Altogether, an helluva experience it was. At the end, it had its deserving standing ovation.
Now, I want to see the Beauty and the beast as well and I am missing it by a week's time. I hope that it comes on a tour to India. Yeah, I know that is too much to ask for but you never know. So till then I sing,
Chim chiminey Chim chiminey Chim chim cher-ee! A sweep is as lucky As lucky can be...
In a country where eligible bachelor status is directly proportional to the duration you spend in a foreign land, it’s always considered blasphemous when you don’t have an ambition of settling in a foreign country. Its not that I don’t like traveling (for that matter I really love traveling and visiting new places) or I have any personal grudge against a country, but just that India is so beautiful that you would realize it only when you are visiting another country. Yeah, some would argue that it’s all about people and not place. In a way it is true, but India works better for me even as a place. After visiting places like Statue of Liberty, TowerBridge (LondonBridge), Big Ben and the most-hyped skyline views, Taj Mahal still stands out at the top as my first choice for the second visit. The skyline view of a city would be the most boring thing to do as sightseeing and you get to do this more often in the “developed” countries. Given an option of free stay in NY’s most luxurious hotel for a week or a stay in a farm house of a village in Kerala, it would be Kerala hands down for the very obvious reasons. This reminds me of a conversation I had with an American-born-Chinese girl in a flight from Chicago to Atlanta and here is the conversation excerpt.
She: so, when are you going back to India?
Me: Next month.
She: Oh, so you have already planned for the vacation?
Me: No. Actually I am here only on a short business trip for two months.
She: Wow. That’s great. I have been to India for few weeks on a scholarship program. It was this city called Cochin in South India. I just loved that place; it’s so beautiful with the rivers. I loved the samosas over there. I was so happy that I would get 10 samosas for 1 dollar.
(Me trying to say something about samosas but she never stopped)
She (continues): I went to Mother Teresa’s home in Kolkata and I cried there. I didn’t manage to learn wearing a saree. It was so great in India.
Me: Wow. That’s so nice.
She: So how did you like US?
Me: Hmmm. US is Ok.
She (with a wide-opened-mouth in surprise): Jus’ ok?
She was really surprised that I wasn't excited about visiting US. Like that, it wasn’t that fascinating to be there except for taking some new pictures.
Onsite trips are not always fairy tales, at least for me. You will be bored to death in a new place that you start eating lunch in your cubicle; your only entertainment would be internet in home as well as office. Even worse if you are on a completely different time zone, you will not have any of your friends in your messenger in your time. All you get to do is work non-stop which would ultimately increase the productivity. You get to eat everything which has a tag ‘ready-to-eat’, ‘frozen’ and ‘instant’. Above all this, there is a soft part to these onsite trips, where you get to meet your old friends in that land. But mind you, if you don’t have any friends in the place you are doomed. Well, it is a different case if you are settling with your family.
That said, onsite trips are always good where you get to see new places, earn lots of money, meet new people and learn new things in work, but the place you want to get back soon is always, you know, home.
Google Chrome. The new browser from the Google team is out and am blogging from it. Here are my some first (random) thoughts about it after using it for 4 hours.
Simple design and fast in loading the pages.
It doesn’t look great with no toolbar and menu bar. People who were used to clicking home buttons will have a problem with this.
It failed to import my settings from my live Firefox. I didn't want to close it.
The idea of running a multithread for every tab doesn’t look so great with many processes running.
Open in incognito window is already there in Firefox3. So it isn’t a new feature.
A little delay when opening a new tab when you have more window previews in Most Visited.
The autocompletion of URLs work as same as the Awesome bar of Firefox3.
I will have to try out the bookmarks bar on a new window. It looks cool.
Opening a new tab with "+" button is very easy. It still follows the firefox shortcuts to open and close the tabs. The tabs are shown above the URL bar.
The “Press [Tab]” option to search for a string in the website which you have typed in URL is very cool.
That said, it has got its own advantages and disadvantages at this beta stage. It can be a very good alternative to IE but it will take ages to beat Firefox. With Google renewing the relationship with Mozilla Foundation till 2011 and a strong response from John Lily, my fingers crossed for the next version of Firefox. Now let me go and have a look at this.
Update: When I was about to publish this post, Chrome went to non-responding mode and popped out a small dialog to stop the Shockwave player and after stopping that, I got back the control.
Update 2: Mozilla is back with a sneak preview of Firefox version 3.1 alpha, which shows the performance of TraceMonkey faster than V8 (the Javascript engine used in Chrome).
