Hillary Rodham Clinton is at the horns of a dilemma, she is unable to make up her mind as to what is more embarrassing, the ‘Rodham‘ part or the ‘Clinton’ part of her name and yet here she is aspiring to run and be the president of the great U.S of A come 2008. In my not so humble opinion she has sold her soul to the devil for political gains. Infidelity is a sin which any female in the ‘RIGHT’ mind would not be able to forgive, the retribution to which is only death and castration. She forgave and stood by her husband and this is where the story-line takes a turn, she pardoned her husband’s carnal meanderings and campaigned for his re-election conditional to her own political mileage which she was promised by the devilocrats. Clinton was re-elected and voila Hillary becomes the senator of New York and is now a presidential hopeful.

“Hillary is everywhere. Last night she’s on Barbara Walters, this morning she’s on Katie Couric, and tomorrow she goes on Diane Sawyer. This is the first time Hillary has been on more women than Bill.” - Jay Leno

“The A&E network is making a movie about Senator Hillary Clinton and they want Sharon Stone to play Hillary Clinton. Which explains why President Clinton has volunteered to play himself.” - Conan O’Brien

“Hillary also said in the book it was a challenge to forgive Bill, but she figured if Nelson Mandela could forgive, she could give it a try. Isn’t that amazing? I didn’t know Clinton hit on Mandela’s wife.” - Jay Leno

Note: Just stumbled upon another very like minded site dealing with the said topic. http://www.blogsagainsthillary.com/

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I have the honour in coining a new oxymoron; ‘Mass Exclusivity’ and I do so in respect to the marketing blitzkrieg launched by Gmail. I would be none too surprised if Philip Kotler himself is behind the marketing campaign, for only a marketing genius of his stature can contrive up such a potent plot. The bare basics of marketing is to create demand even if its non existent. We all have email accounts and more than one at it too; but then why all the hoopla around gmail? Gmail’s strategy was/is excellent; its a mixture of niche marketing and mass marketing. By making the product exclusive, an enormous amount of interest was generated and they capitalized on this interest by applying theories of mass marketing to it. Gmail is still ‘by invite only’ which makes it a very exclusive club but then again when you give each account holder 6 invites its non-exclusive to say the least; in effect their audience is increasing 6 fold at any given time. Almost a year since the launch and the demand still hasn’t abated. Gmail is an average product; email services like fastmail.fm are light-years ahead but the naive netizens like the rest of the world are more enamoured by the packaging than by the product..

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When it comes to software and services, everybody has their own personal likes and dislikes and it may differ from mine but I know that mine are always right and hence I outline my top 5 blog tools

• BlogExplosion: If you are planning on keeping your blogs private without the whole world coming and reading your innermost thoughts then this is NOT for you. Au contraire, if you want to increase the number of visitors to your site exponentially then this is the only service that you need  signup to.
• Blogjet: Whether it be email or blogging, composing the same online is something that I’m not very keen on. Blogjet helps you compose your blogs offline and publish it as and when you so desire. In its latest incarnation it works flawlessly with all the major blog hosts.
• Blogrolling: As one ages in the blogosphere, the tendency to visit blogs of like-minded individuals or friends increases, blogrolling helps in making links of such friends/individuals/sites with the click of a button. If you register, don’t forget to blogroll me bud.
• Feedforall: It is the ultimate RSS feed creation tool allowing users to easily create, edit and publish RSS feeds. SauceReader; is a simple and efficient feed reader. One can always start with my feeds
• Statcounter: This is a really customizable, feature rich yet free counter service. Ability to insert invisible counters and a geographic breakup of your visitors make this one indispensable tool.

Note: Its an honour and a privilege that one of the most read arabic sites in the middle east has linked directly to this post, thank you farstec.com and amirfs

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From time immemorial the human race has been plagued by double standards and none more prevalent than the male-female divide. When one has a new baby, if its a boy the room is painted blue, if its a girl; the room is painted pink. You buy the girl a barbie doll and the boy the biggest gun you can get. The girl is given a doll and a tea set and is given the first lesson in house keeping whereas the boy is given a free for all with his mighty gun. The little kids then grow up and with the exceptions of a very few ‘rebels’ who stray from the set standards the rest all fall in line with the stereotype expected from them.

I believe in gender equality, the probability of me abusing my female subordinate is as equally high as the probability of me abusing her male counterpart, I play the gender game very fairly and without prejudice. I for one have never been party to societal male-female stereotypical expectations until very recently where I too became a part of this menace. A bunch of us guys and girls were all hanging out together, finally we all returned to a friends place, where the booze started to flow, I am a teetotaller and hence I abstained from it (but mind you I have no problems in pouring the drinks)… the guys as usual were drinking as a fish drinks water… the girls also joined in and after an hour or two they took their leave of absence. When they had left the first comment that was made by a good friend of mine were “what sluts”… in the Indian cultural ecosphere the female stereotype is that of docility and homelinesses. The males are not chided for alcoholic consumption but a female who does the same is looked down upon with contempt in our society. Maybe the fact that I don’t booze did play a part but rather than rebutting his remarks I too nodded in agreement. I’m unable to reason why I did this, was it just that being brought up and being subjected to such stereotypical expectations I too unconsciously imbibed the same, or is it just that I don’t prefer females who drink?… I guess its a mixture of both.

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The answer to your first question is, No, the pope has not turned communist and again No, the popemobile was not spotted in the vicinity of any redlight district… then what? I hear you ask… well infidels, the pope joins the legions of the Tifosi.For the first time in its history, Ferrari were received by the Pope, John Paul II. The audience was held in the Sala Clementina at the Vatican’s Palazzo Apostolico. Present were a delegation of 95 Ferrari representatives from all the company’s departments including their F1 wing. The prominent attendees were Luca di Montezemolo, Jean Todt, Micheal Schumacher, Rubens Barrichelo and Luca Badoer. Haven’t I been telling you all till date that Ferrari was a religion and Schumi our prophet… now I guess we have official ‘religious’ status with the prancing horse being one of several religious symbols. With Scarlet Fever in the air and the pope by the side, only God can beat us now. I can smell the burning chicanes, screeching of tyres and am already intoxicated and can picture Scuderia Ferrarai beating Mclaren, Williams and co. with a jubilant Schumacher in the cockpit steering us to victory and in turn earning his unprecedented 8th F1 drivers title.

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My heartfelt condolences and prayers for those affected by the Tsunami. It has had a crippling effect on the Asia-Pacific region. But to be brutally honest, my first cogitations on the issue were far from grief and empathy. My foremost thoughts were apportioned between The Malthusian Theory of Population, Business and Fraud.

• Thomas Robert Malthus in his essay, The principles of population growth, states that
  

  - Food production increased at an arithmetic ratio while population increased at an exponential ratio.
  - Population growth would outstrip food supply, and mass starvation would follow.
  - Man is incapable of controlling his own numbers, so natural calamities such as floods and epidemics serve to control/reduce his numbers.

  The Tsunami that occurred; was it just one of the vagaries of mother nature or was it the justification of Thomas Malthus’s population theory. If one were to look deeper, you would realize that those places that were affected the most were areas where measures for population check were not in place. These were areas where the birth rates were much higher than the death rates, these were places were population growth outstripped food supply and hence I am rather sceptical that the tsunami was just one of the caprices of weather.

• I concede, its my materialistic self thats in the drivers seat as I post this but the fact of the matter is that the Tsunami equates to good business. Only a few industries in the Asia-Pacific region, including tourism, are expected to suffer short-term adverse effects, while others, such as construction, could actually enjoy long term benefits. So the economic effects of the tsunami in the long term scenario is positive.
• The tsunami, if one were to look it from the security perspective is very alarming. There are many tsunami scams on the net already but rather than scams I more concerned about the physical security breaches that might occur on account of terrorist identity thieves. The waves pretty much washed away all documents pertaining to identity a la passports et al, thousands of dead bodies have not been identifiable which makes for a hotbed for terrorist who would love to make use of this misfortune to steal another identity and blend into the surroundings waiting for an opportune moment to strike. The terrorists in the Indonesian belt of Aceh is the most worrysome in this regard.

Thousands of lives lost and a many more displaced, I can only empathise with those who lost everything and everyone. Boxing day 2004 will always be remembered for the wrong reasons.The images from the Tsunami are very gruesome and though I am able to have a pragmatic approach to the ;same as neither me nor anyone close to me is affected, I ponder how I would have coped had I been not so fortunate.

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This is the first time that I am posting from my new laptop, so it does justify a plug on my blog I suppose. Its nothing fancy, just the bare essentials that I need. I dont like spending money on laptops for irrespective of how much you spend on it, a laptop can never be as powerful as a desktop P.C, so one should never get cajoled into buying the ‘desktop replacement’ by sales executives. My P.C at home has 2gb of DDR400 memory, powered by a 3.2 ghz processor; now if I were to purchase a laptop with similar specifications,or rather if I didn’t; with that money I could afford a top of the line desktop P.C and an entry level laptop and still have enough money left over to buy a bunch of pirated cds.

[Edit]: January 17th, returned the amilo as it was not powerful enough for my needs, bought a very powerful p4 instead, Acer Travelmate 2500 series.

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Unconditional love, i.e. love sans frontiers, love without conditions or reservations; absolute love; is not a myth. I have experienced it first hand; from my Princess. Its only a fortunate few who can ever give testimony to experiencing the same.Only once in your lifetime will you ever get this unconditional love; I had my chance and now she is no more. Those who have never experienced unconditional love wait in anticipation for the same but what about those of us who has had it already. The statistical probability of hitting the jackpot twice in your lifetime is nil and the same analogy applies in this scenario as well. So what happens to those of us who were lucky to have it; let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that we hit the jackpot twice in our lifetime.

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I am down with a flu, a real bad case of it might I add but I am recuperating quite fast. When my princess was around, the moment I would sneeze she would tell her maids that she too would catch it, and no this was not on account of her low immunity but due to the fact that I would just jump into her bed and snuggle up with her and by the morning she too would have contracted the cold…am missing her a lot now. But I know that even from up above she is watching me and praying for me.

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No, the bottle of mineral water that you just conjured up in your vivid imagination is ‘Evian’; I’m talking about  Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who was the centre of a diplomatic furore between the American and Cuban Govts. at the turn of this century. A gazillion human rights group campaigned the cause of the Cuban  kid. One couldn’t turn the tele on without being inundated with news pertaining to Elian. The supreme court ruled against these groups and Elian was rightly sent back to Cuba with his father. Since the kid was sent back home, the Human rights groups have been silent. If they were genuinely interested in the welfare of the boy, they would have maintained the momentum. But once the case was lost and the publicity abated, those who championed his cause forsook him as there was no more political mileage to be made. So when I label the majority of the humans rights groups as hypocrites; I do it with valid reasons… and why am I bring up such an old topic… well, actually I was just drinking a bottle of Evian and it just struck me..  

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I’m commuting back home from work, coffee in one hand and the steering wheel on the other and lo and behold one of the greatest abominations ever on four wheels pulls up on the next lane. I take a sideward glance and am overwhelmed by sheer disgust; a Qatari on a Mini Copper. Jesus Christ on a Harley Davidson, I can’t comprehend why someone would buy a car that would fit in the boot of my Rav4. But you have to give credit where credit is due, its quite fast. It hurt my pride that I was on the same lane as the Mini Cooper and raced to 140 KPH but he still kept up with me, had to drive to 200 to speed away from him. The reason for the cooper being fast can be attributed to its high power to weight ratio. Coming back to work today I was fantasizing and no this one does not involve Beyonce I was fantasizing that I was on a Hummer chasing the Mini Cooper down the highway and finally ran over it, how I wish I could just do that.

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The united nations has outlived its purpose. Alike its highly unsuccessful cousin ‘The League of Nations’, United Nations too has become redundant and unnecessary. The objectives with which it were formed does not represent the ground realities and hence changes have to be implemented immediately. The preamble to the U.N charter states:

We the peoples of The United Nations determined

• to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,
• and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,
• and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained,
• and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Since the inception of the United Nations numerous wars have broken out, with the exceptions of international intervention in The Korean War and the Kuwait War, all others have not been with the U.N approval. The reckless haste with which the United States declared war on Iraq without the U.N mandate is a prime example of the United Nations ineffectiveness.

The United Nations has stood by the most repulsive human rights abuses in the modern era, it stood by the slaughter of the Tutsi’s in Rwanda which could have been prevented by timely intervention, the abuses in Sudan, Haiti and Somalia have all fell on the deaf ears of the U.N. For heavens sake, North Korea and Cuba are on board of the United Nations Commission for Human Rights..Need I say more?

International justice has become a farce, its implemented on a might is right basis. Dead bodies of Americans were shot by the Iraqi soldiers and a hue and cry was made about the violations of the Geneva Conventions, where were the Geneva Conventions when Saddam Hussein was humiliated on T.V, what about the Abu Gharib tortures. Where was the United Nations when Pakistan permitted hijackers of an Indian Airline to land and use their airfields for international terrorism?

Three fourths of the world still live in poverty and acute hunger and the United Nations has been unable to do anything about it. To be honest, yes they have done something about it.. does one recall the oil for food programme scandal of the U.N wherein billions of dollars were involved.

The time has come for either fundamental changes to be made to the Victors Club, err I mean The United Nations or to do away with it in totality. The latter option involves a lot of hurdles as the void created by the demise of this behemoth will create a virtual black hole which might suck the whole world into it. So before the latter option is pursued, mechanisms have to be put in place to counter this void. My final parting comments on this topic is that, Eunuch should be spelled UNuch. Case closed, end of discussion.

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I am not an elitist, I am The Elitist. I always restrict myself to a few selected group of friends with whom I can relate to. The advantage of this is that the relationship lasts the tests of time; since I keep myself to a small group its easier to form a very close knit fraternity. I really don’t prefer to have scores of friends with whom you can’t have a close relationship. Today a very good friend of mine; Rajesh Sharma a.k.a Raju leaves Qatar for good. We have had some really good times together. I wish you the best of everything mate; hope to see you some time soon… adios amigo.

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