Death smiles at us all......

"Death smiles at us all....the only thing we can do is smile back" says Russel Crowe in The Gladiator, when Ceaser asks him if he's not afraid of death.

So why is it that we dread death?

I cannot talk for others but i can surely tell you that i am scared to death of DEATH! It's not the fear of death itself that i am scared of. It has got to do with the fact that i shall never ever be able to meet all my loved ones. I cannot even imagine what my wife would do without me. Ahem..a bit of a bold statement there, you think?? Well, we are like that! We cannot think of a life without each other. What about my little daughter?? Well, she's too small to understand all this. My mother, brother & sister??? I am sure they will be shattered beyond repair. But LIFE moves on. You got to move along, otherwise it will leave you far behind.

This thought has been bothering me from the past 2 weeks. And i have been meaning to unload the burden of such thought via this blog. Can't tell wifey. Her blood pressure will shoot up to the moon. So i figured the next best thing to a wife is ...... my BLOG! Who else??!! They weren't kidding then, when they said blogging is addictive. It's a little slow in the beginning but catches speed later on. After that you can't get off.

How true then, that we cannot do anything when death beckons. Yea, we should smile. Sure! Smile... when the light in front of you is fading and darkness is blanketing your vision! Smile....when you are holding your dear ones hand and know that you won't be able to feel again! Smile.....when your heart's breaking into a zillion tiny pieces. Man!!! How can anyone do that? Can anyone do it...??? Smile??

They say in Hindu lore that our soul stays back on earth for 10 days. It (the aatma) keeps begging the soldiers of Yama to please, please let it stay back and see to its heart's content its loved ones for one LAST time. It cries and cries along with its beloved ones down there. It does not want to go to Yama, but His soldiers are relentless. They unleash the Paashaan (the whip) and drag the aatma. It keeps looking back again and again for whatever glimpses it can see of its loved ones. How for one last time it wants to go and hug its people! The unbearable pain it endures when it is made clear to it that there's no going back!

Can any living being survive that? No wonder they are as dead as DEAD when they have to go through such harrowing time.

Does somebody believe in afterlife? Is there indeed a place called an afterlife? What do souls do there? Do they exist there in the same human form they had when living on earth? What activities go on there? Are there any cars, buildings, roads, phones, water, food, sky, wind, fire ..... etc...in the city of afterlife? If there ever was an afterlife, it must be a very crowded place! Think of all the civilization who died. How do the GODs manage such humongous traffic! Really, this concept of afterlife starkly opposes the Hindu theory of re-birth. I mean, if i was to be reborn on this earth again - not necessarily as a human though - then there will be no place called the afterlife. The cycle of being reborn again would just have continued without any interval - how temporary it might be. Then why did our wise talk so much about afterlife? Surely there must be something concrete to it. Otherwise our wise - who had the concept of TIME and DIMENSION long before our Western counterparts learned to speak - were not such fools. Then the only explanation of justifying the existence of afterlife will be that it is a temporary resting place where a person's deeds and misdeeds are calculated, punishments served accordingly, and then dispatched back to earth again with some form of a living thing's 'body', of course with all the previous memory deleted! It runs like a well oiled machine, does the God's machine. It has to ! Imagine taking birth as a PIG with all your previous human life memory intact. You would be looking at SHIT and telling to yourself 'I can't eat that SHIT.....PIGS do' !!!! Some fun the onlookers would have watching the poor soul.

It's really amazing how quickly i shift gears from all serious and grim talk to stomach splitting comedy!

Now back to being serious. Well, it all looks so strikingly similar to the Wachowski brother's epic movie 'The Matrix'. I mean, look here closely and what do we got? A near perfect similarity to our Hindu theories of afterlife and Karma. Our aatmas are nothing but some global Programes whose core structure never changes (the soul never dies), into which various functions are written. Now the programs run according to the functions which are placed in it. If the function of a chimpanzee is written into the program then it displays the character of the above animal. If the function of a dog is written it happily wags it's tail and fetches!. So on and so forth for various other animals and various other humans. Here's the legend, if you like it, for those who do not know a damn thing about afterlife, aatma and karma.

Aatma == Global Program; Body == Function written in the program; Life == Matrix; World == Mainframe; God == Universe's most genius PROGRAMMER !!.......& Rajesh == A bloody fool ..!!!

.....more later on the subject which prompted me to blog.

Rajesh G Pandhrapurkar

A Worm called the I-Worm Generic/CJR

There are a lot of times when even we, who call ourselves 'Advanced Computer users', find ourselves upto our eye-balls in, not muck, but embarrassment! Embarrassment coz of the small problem we could not 'fix'. This is for all those then, who want to avoid that funny feeling of being a misfit in the computer fiefdom.

The first issue i'd be addressing is the worm called the I-Worm Generic/CJR.

The I-Worm Generic/CJR copies itself into the \Windows\System32 folder as a dll. Your Anti-virus also catches the worm and refers it to a dll file. Now, this worm tries to send mass mails from your system. It sometimes blocks the browser from connecting to the Internet and Anti-virus websites. This also does an irritating thing : it disables you to view 'hidden' files. Try as many times as you want to, but you just cannot view the hidden files even after several attempts to un-hide them from the Tools>Folder Options>View menu.

This worm can be normally removed by a majority of the Anti-virus programs. But it leaves the above anomaly behind.

Here's the solution then :

1. Use any antivirus to remove the virus first.

2. go to Run menu (winkey+R).

3. type regedit.

4. go the path : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWALL

5. Look at the CheckedValue key (on right side). This should be a DWORD key. If it isn’t, delete the key. Create a new key called “CheckedValue” as a DWORD (hexadecimal) with a value of 1. Also most of the times it leaves the 'CheckedValue' as it is but it changes the value to 2. So all you have to do is change its value back to 1.

You can now make the Tools>Folder Options>View>show Hidden files and folders function normally.

Is the Queen of England still regarded by some as a 'Monarch'??

'Dumbstruck by Queen's beauty, grace and charm' - By Kishwar Desai (March 14th, 2009)

The above titled article appeared in the newspaper Deccan Chronicle on the 14th of March 2009, in the Editorial section. Surprised that there still exist some people who think the world of her, i continued its perusal. To my amazement and shock, the author of the above article was one of us Indians, Kishwar Desai, wife of the famous Lord Meghnand Desai. You can find the article here :
http://deccanchronicle.com/neutral/dumbstruck-queen%E2%80%99s-beauty%2C-grace-and-charm-908

Although airing one's opinions in a free and democratic country has no legal repercussions, i found the article slightly favoring the Queen and her legacy, which i must say turned my stomach a little. I did not feel it is right for an Indian to be taken back to the Queen's era, where so many crimes against humanity were committed. I thought it greatly insulted the heroes of our Freedom struggle.

Here's my reply to the author :

" Dear Ms. Desai,
this is regarding your article appearing in the newspaper Deccan Chronicle, dt.14th mar 2009,
titled "Dumbstruck by Queen's beauty, grace and charm".

Let me fire the first salvo by saying that it was pathetic the way you have shown a school-girl like enthusiasm in summing up your meeting with the 'Queen'.

You may have found 'beauty, grace and charm' in the 'Queen' but seem to have happily forgotten the ruthless 400 years of lawless rule by her predecessors! There certainly is nothing 'beautiful' and 'graceful' about that Ms. Desai.

And you were right, 'for some it may not be pleasant thought to look back upon', but for you, i am afraid, it was all so glorious!! I find it hard to put words on paper after this confession. Although, a majority of the Britons themselves are quite against the Buckingham Palace's 'royal' excesses, some of us Indians seem to happily cut off their right arm just to shake the 'Queen's' hand. Now this thought is not at all 'charming', Ms. Desai.

Now on to the moment of your life, when all of you waited 'nervously' to get a glimpse of the Queen. And what of the moment, when your 'convent' school training came to your rescue and enabled you to 'curtsey' !! WOW!! That must have been THE moment of your life, was it not Ms. Desai?? You must have been over the moon, to kneel (only a little, mind you!) in front
of the great Queen. Whilst you were thus curtsey-ing Ms. Desai, i said to myself : " there goes another one ", who hasn't quite come out of the 400 year old practice of Master and Slave. Come on Ms. Desai, you seem much to be much more intelligent than Cherie Blair. If she could see it, how could you not ??

That era is long gone Ms. Desai, when curtsey-ing was cumpolsary. We Indians do not bow to anybody, much less show such unabashed subservience to a 'monarch'. You seemed quite jolly sprinkling the words, 'monarch', 'empire', 'devotees' 'rituals' .....all across the article. Now that tells so much about your love for the Queen and her 'Empire'(??) Ms. Desai, does it not?

A professional like you, who has such a long standing in the Indian media should have shown some restraint while talking about the people who had made slaves out of us. You could have addressed the sensitivities of the Indians a little more. "

I never thought that a journalist, specially a famous one, reads feedback. But the lady really surprised me by replying back. I really consider this as a privilege and honor. Thank you Ms. Desai for even bothering to read my counter-views. You are a ture sport! Here's the email reply i received from her.


" from Kishwar Desai
reply-to kishwardesai@yahoo.com
to Rajesh Pandharpurkar
date Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 3:31 PM
subject Re: Regarding your article: Dumbstruck by Queens......
mailed-by yahoo.com
signed-by yahoo.com

3:31 PM (23 hours ago)


dear mr pandharpurkar,

thank you for your observations and it is always a pleasure to get a feedback--whether negative or positive.

do keep reading!

with all good wishes

kishwar "


Thank you all for reading!