Casino Royale

Today I got my chance to watch the latest bond flick - Casino Royale and it was great. Best part of the film was the opening chase sequence in which bond chases Sebastien Foucan, the famous freerunner. It just flew so smoothly. The rest was usual bond stuff.

I did miss Q (or should I say R?) and I felt Craig isn't that great as Bond. He isn't as cool as Brosnan.

Overall, it was a great movie.

Finally, I'm on to Orkut

Finally, I have convinced myself to devote some time to create an orkut profile. It so happened that an old friend of mine located me via orkut (via my sister). So I thought I may be a good idea to create a profile of my own. Now the next big task is to add my existing friends to the orkut list, sooner or later.

Way To Go!

I really appreciate what Mr. Anand Kumar is doing. This is what India needs on a much larger scale if she wants to become a knowledge super power.

1857 Mutiny

I haven't been following the news lately, but this is an interesting article on 1857 mutiny and its research.

It is described as "war of religion" rather than independence movement. I remember from the books, that the primary cause of revolt was indeed the religion with sepoys being forced to do certain things their religion prohibited (primarily, the meat). Definitely, in the subcontinent, religion was a very strong motivating and remains so to this date as observed in day-to-day news articles. It could very well be that some souls used religion to rally support for the independence cause like the way taliban uses it.

Archives are one way to look at the history and predicting the alternate course is next to impossible. Things might have different but how much? Would we have had another "Asoka" instead of "Bose"?

I would think that this revolt would have definitely happened if not in 1857 than few years later. It was a very socialist India then and hurting people from your neighbourhood definitely causes discontent among people. Another cause would have been the uprooting of village micro-economics by opium production policies of British Empire. That had led to unemployment (or rather ungainful employment or forced labour) which would have fuelled the revolt.

Intel Laptop Gaming Technical Development Kit

This is a nice toolkit to modify the games. I always wish if my civilization III can show me the status so that I can save the game before the laptop starts to hibernate!