Behind Dow's Human element mask

Thanks to Jace for this link.

Dow Chemical, unapologetic perpetrators of the Bhopal tragedy, have launched a “Human Element” campaign that “reintroduces the company and announces its vision of addressing some of the most pressing economic, social and environmental concerns facing the global community in the coming decade.” While continuing to deny responsibility for Bhopal.

This naturally requires a rebuttal. Paul Phare’s series of artworks, A glimpse behind the mask of Dow, is a personal response to the campaign. The series including 16 pieces, available in high resolution for distribution as printed posters or online. Spread the word.

Creativity redefined!

Backstreet boys -I want it that way- a must see video. Njoy! :)

Pakistan travelogue

Pakistan - to me - was just a neighboring country, probably very much similar to India, and I'd never ever imagined that I'd want to visit it, until I read this Pakistan travelogue (in 6 parts) by Mumbai Girl. Her narration kept me captivated throughout and gave me a new perspective about the people and the country. The posts have done much more, for me, in making the country and the people real and alive, than any advertising bash could have done.
Start here.

Thanks to Premalatha for having posted it on Kathambam.

Hmm...

Is it possible to guess the gender of a person, from the way a post is written? This was a question that was raised by The Girl, co-writing Spoken Like Two ENFPs with The Kid. Well it seems that it is possible to easily figure out man-write from women-write. :)

Quite some time ago, if you recall, Ammani had a feature called Letters For All. I was looking at some of the letters again, when I came across this letter. If you look at the comments, one of the commenters thought that the letter was written by a lady, while another thought that it had been written by a man. I re-read the letter and found that there were no references to gender in that entire letter, and the individual perceptions of the commenters, must've been influenced by their own preconceived notions, based their experiences. If you have nothing else to do, Try to guess the gender of the letter-writer. ;)

Happy Birthday Dear Piscean Bloggers

What should the title be?
My homage to Piscean bloggers?
They are'nt dead - one pays homage only to dead people.

Perhaps - A Tribute to Piscean bloggers?
Well, looks OK, but again I am not sure that tribute is used on living persons, think again.
Hmm...
Of forget the title -here's what I have to say:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR PISCEANS
Paint the town RED.
Have a grand birthday and a great year ahead.

I am partial to Piscean bloggers - somehow I find their posts appealing to me. Here's my list of fellow bloggers who are pisceans:

Boo
Madura
Gounder Brownie
Premalatha
Jay
Marutham
1$saint
Syam
Harini
AS of Unrestrained Verbosity

I thought there were some more in the list?! *puzzled* My blogroll is not appearing - so I couldn't look at everyone on my blogroll to verify their sign.

I would love to extoll on each person's posts and given links to some special posts of theirs. Maybe I'll elaborate on another day. But some general comments are in order.


From various readings about signs of the zodiac (specifically Sun Signs /love signs by Linda Goodaman) my idea of 'the fish' is that they are romantic, idealistic dreamers, prone to a lot of introspection and such. I cannot say that this holds for the above clutch of pisceans. Each of them is different from the other as chalk is from cheese. The one common thread is that I like all of their writings. But then I do like a lot of other bloggers' writings too, who are not pisceans.

Addenda
Boston Bala of E-tamil has posted a comment to this post! Wow! And from his comment I deduce that he too is a Piscean.
There is a comment from Sandhya (another self-confessed 'weird' piscean) - Of Marriage, Jobs and Murder Cases. If you are one who likes to read about murder cases - you can go there. She has a delectable style of writing.... I suggest that you start from her first post.

PS: If you cant understand what I am trying to convey in this post - do not be worried - I too don't know what I want to convey. The Visitor is afflicted by senile dementia.
PPS: I will try to get in a "real" post sometime soon. :)

A clarification on the title:
* I looked up tribute and homage on dictionary - both the terms would have fitted my feelings for pisceans, but then its better to wish them a grand, freaky birthday than make them self-conscious. ;)

I don't know what to say

These days I spend more time in just reading other blogs and commenting (when possible). Seem to have lost the drive, energy etc. Maybe some steroids would help :)

Just resurfaced to say that I'm alive and Ranjit gave me a link that I felt I should put up. Thought-provoking post by Siddhu - A lament for my motherland. I didn't have any answers - except retreat further into my shell/cocoon.

The common theme for the links in this post seems to be anguish, even though the topics of the posts are totally unrelated:

Summer in my veins
My Valentine Guru

An Interesting Experiment

I read RKVS Raman's blog, because quite often he gives quite different perspectives of life and one's attitude to life. In his most recent post, The Game of Giving,he describes an experiment done by a friend of his (the results are not yet out).

He has numerous thought provoking posts, a few of which I present here:

Open Intentions Initiative

Riding with the drizzling cloud

The Experience Capsule Technology

Lurking, Delurking and Comments Policy

Boos recent post, Here's to more comments prompted me to write this post. She writes about lurkers and the move to delurk them. Read about it on her post.

I myself love to have comments to my posts and also responses to my comments. :)

In my travels across the blogworld, I've come across some interesting Comment policies. I did think that some of them were interesting reads by themselves. Unfortunately I did not keep a tab on the sites.

Here are some that I can recall:

Here's what Shelly has on her blog Retrospectacle
Commenter Policy:
I love constructive comments! However, I reserve the right to delete comments that abuse this forum. Voicing your opinions is great, just be respectful. :D
She also asks a question: Is Commenting a Right?

Kevin Vranes of No Se Nada has this comment policy

Mike the Mad Biologist says: Comment policy: say what you want, but back it up with an email address. I don't like anonymous trolls.

Razib of Gene expression has this comment policy

Many of the above were from scienceblogs. Now here's one with a religious background

One of the most comprehensive comment policies that I have seen is that of Thinking Girl.

The Darwiniana comment policy states that good comments may be converted into separate posts! That's nice.

How about your own comment policy?

In case you don't have one - here's a post on developing a blog comment policy.

Disclaimer: This is not a comprehensive survey of all possible blog policies. Most were from Scienceblogs and random selections based on a search of blogs using the search string Comment policy

Emily

This post of Emily's was so powerful, that I couldn't help putting it up as a separate post - Me First.

Merry Christmas

Christmas is that time of the year when I feel different - maybe its the winter or its the holiday season or the influence of an education in a christian school or its the general festive mood.

I recall an anecdote in relation to Christmas. Maybe a score and five years ago or more, I saw a lovely card - A Christmas cum New Year card - it had a lovely scene of a white winter. I bought that card wanting to send that card to the most special person in my life - and to this day that card hasn't been sent (I lost track of it a couple of years down the line). That doesn't mean that I haven't found that person yet. I dont know why I was reminded of that card today, maybe a reminder not to postpone things or whatever. Anyway here's wishing everyone a

Merry Christmas!

On the spur of the moment...

Posts that I want to share as and when I read them.
I've created a section in the side-bar On the spur of the moment, which will contain links that I felt I must share immediately.

Read Emily - here

Teens in the blogosphere

I'd wanted to do a post on blog mammas for some time - somehow haven't yet got down to it. Meanwhile, if the mammas are wondering what their little ones may be in saying their teens here's a sample selection. I hope you enjoy these:

The following are my own blog acquaintances:

Viva la Vi of Vibrant, Verbose, Voracious, a college fresher, asks herself 30 questions to be answered by her on her 30th birthday.

Harini in her A Babble of Emotions, touches us with her emotions, recounting an experience By the beach. A singer and music fanatic hosts her songs here.

Prachi of preity place says charity begins at home. (Link from Mama says so)

Cloudy Musings with Vague -in-vogue thoughts of mine!! does a tag from The not-so artful dodger

The following are mostly Cvians (students of Chinmaya Vidhyalaya, Chennai). I got these links from Vishesh and Tariq's blogs.

This is Vishesh. Vishesh is active on the commenting circuit, seems to be a philosophical guy. Read his poem on Mother India

Atul of Hitchhiking Across The Infinite crabs about EXAMS ! Imperative or Out-dated ??

Vishnu of With The Lights Out.....Its Less Dangerous.....Here We Are Now...Entertain Us writes about Some stuff i felt are twisted and evil.some serious.some just weird n funny..

Dman of Life is a jueey writes on being detached.

Priya says, N'fin much!!, but you can see her in action.

I seem to have left out Bharath, The Philanthropic Cynic, who warns Risk addiction if you enter his blog. A person particular about precise use of words, reviews a school play and records a Bionic ET attack.

Rusty Neurons Archives of Tariq; he seems to be a techie guy with quite a fancy site. Read his rant on school in Symbol logic. He too tracks The Brownie!

Vishal, The Green Monster talks about his blues.

Meet the Hrushita the blabberer at Junipers in the sun.

These are just some sample posts from their blogs. All of them are real cool blogs. You can navigate to other blogs (of their friends) from their blogrolls, which are equally fun. Have fun.
PS: Hey Kid, looks like not all schools are like Velammals.
PPS: This does not purport to be representative of all persons in this age group.

The Question Man again...

Mr Pregunto never ceases to amaze me! Here is his latest question:

If you were to create your own religion, what would it be like?

As usual some of us responded with lacklustre comments; that was all that Senor Pregunto needed, to go into analysing out thinking process (rather our imagination); the issue was no more about religion, but our capability to imagine. I am humbled, Sir, by your thinking. I will henceforth think, think and think, before I venture to answer your questions. Even if I give a shallow answer, I can be sure of getting some other aspect of your question in your response. I enjoy reading your discussions.

In a related post Paul F. gives his version or understanding of Christianity. Definitely worth a read.

Is it just a coincidence, or some invisible hand at play, that I should come across different posts all relating to the same topic?

Emily expresses her anguish relating to God.

Life on the Sea

This is for readers who know Tamizh. Mr. Kadal Ganesan (கடல் கணேசன்), a marine engineer, writes of his experiences in the merchant navy. This series (கற்றது கடலளவு), which has already appeared in Junior Vikatan, is being reproduced here again. Here are some snippets. If the snippets are anything to go by, I think the series is going to be very engrossing. I found the passages very touching. The first instalment of the series (published on Oct 3, 2006) appears here- Chapter 1.

If you have rendering problems for tamil with your browser, then you might have to change some settings of your browser. Go to

View -> Character Encoding -> select Unicode (UTF-8) (for Mozilla/Firefox browsers)
View -> Encoding -> select Unicode (UTF-8) (for Internet Explorer browsers)

Windows 98 does not support Unicode.

What Jungian type are you?

I like to know about myself; I presume that everyone else will also like to know about themselves. Atleast it is better than knowing about someone else :).
Thanks to The Kid and Archana Bahuguna, I came to know about this site that gives a description of you based on a test. I took the test and was labelled INFP (Introspective iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving) type. Here are 2 descriptions of the type given by Keirsey and Butt. They say some embarassingly nice things about me :)

If you want to know what type you are take the test here:
Human Metrics - Free test.
Myers and Briggs - Paid test.
Will you post your type after taking the test?
Do I (my blog persona) fit their description? (optional) ;)

PPS: An aside - a colleague of mine said that these tests do not reflect 'what/who you are', rather they reflect 'what you want to be seen as'. Hmmm.. that's a thought that needs some thinking.