இன்று ஒரு தகவல் — Low Cost Sanitary Napkins for Women, made in Kovai!

Came across this cool new innovation from Coimbatore!

“The road to creating the world’s first low-cost machine for making sanitary towels begins with a man who wore a sanitary towel himself.” — The Guardian.

This is really awesome that Mr.Muruganandam was able to achieve a order of magnitude low cost sanitary napkins. I stumbled upon on this on TED channel that comes for free — Thanks Roku! I had vaguely heard about this guy somewhere earlier, but never delved into it, i actually thought it much be like 20yrs before when this guy did this innovation and that nowadays everybody uses, or at least I assumed that everyone must be using, the newer napkins shown on the commercials. To my surprise this is as recent as few months ago!!

The Guardian article gives a snippet of the hardships that he faced durin his experimentation phase. He spices his narrative with humor and self-punity in the TED talk that he gave.

I am Glad to see such social entrepreneurs sprouting out from India, where the need is, needless to say, among the highest. I was just floored when he said that he had adopted the “open-source” ideology and put out everything in the open market for people to innovate on and at the end he would like the poor women of the world to be benefited.

At the end of TED talk he throws an open question, sort of challenge if you will, on to the listeners to evangelize  spread the word and get this out to the masses by all means, which I thought was a nice touch to end with!


Visit his website To know more — http://newinventions.in/ – [His website name is cool, but not sure how he hold the gateway to all innovations from India!! ;-) ]

It would be really interesting to see how much funding and backing this venture got from government’s purse strings. This seems like a great innovation with tremendous potential to improve the life of millions of the “Aam Aadmi” that the government so passionately talks about. For all its worth, the the health minister must be carrying Mr.Muruganandam on his shoulders and dancing with pomp and show, as it would only benefit them for they would be get all the lucrative women vote!

Looks like a short movie on this is RAGS TO PADS is a Semifinalist in the $200,000 FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Competition and is in the running to become the $100,000 Grand Prize Winner. It could also be named an Audience Favorite if it’s among the ten that receives the most votes. If you love it, vote for it.

Kudos and All The Best to Mr.Muruganandam!

Thupakki: On Target!

I am guessing Vijay will cherish this year 2012 due to consecutive 2 big box office hits this year. First “Nanban” and then “Thupakki” . Credit must certainly be shared to the directors Shankar and Murugadoss for the great success too. I hope that at least from now on Vijay understands the importance of doing good movies with good directors and good team and not just anybody!!

The last time I opened up by wallet straps and drooled out few bucks to watch Vijay’s movie on theaters was easily more than 5yrs ago. This year alone I have watched two of Vijay’s movie in theater and both have been pretty good!

துப்பாக்கி / Thupakki   exceeded my expectation. A few of my hard-core “Thala” fans had tapered down the expectations and gone easy on the highlights!! But nevertheless entrusting Behindwoods.com review on the movie heavily  I pulled myself and gathered the courage to set out for the “adventure, with high probability of scary outcomes”!! — to watch Vijay’s movie on Big Screen!! I must admit that I was not disappointed, in fact I felt eerily happy to have seen at least one good Tamil movie in the theater in the last year in US as my last venture to watch Surya’s “Maatran” resulted in scars and bruises all over my face!!


The usual / default intro of Vijay still forayed into Thuppakki with a fight scene followed by song.  Thankfully the mundane, default scene sequences ended pretty soon.

The movie takes a pretty good segway into the thick of the plot. From there the movie is much more racier through the interval. The coordinated execution just before the interval was class action movie stamping!

The highly mocked trailer scene “I am waiting” didn’t look so bad in the movie itself!

It was also interesting to see Vijay speak fluent Hindi.

All the action sequences were great! Usually you get the feel of real fight when the action scenes are not too flamboyant, people flying all over the places, for example!!  Sharath kumar fight in Suriyan, Vikram’s fight in Saamy are some example. You need to get the posture correct to throw the “punches”  in a fight sequences. I think this is the first movie that it really looked / felt like Vijay was actually Fighting! I am sure the stunt master will get great accolades for this movie.

Needless to say Cinematography rocked!! Santhosh Sivan’s nuances and masterly strokes were in full display. Photography in songs and fights were pretty good although the directori could have gone easy on the number of songs as there were few too many!! While Vijay’s movies are known for great song numbers, Harris Jayaraj’s  magic was a disappointment! In fact music was only the key departments that stuck out as un-fulfilled!

Although I have never been  a fan of Kajal Agarwal, I thought Kajal did a pretty good job for her role and seems to have grown up into the groove of acting and dancing.

There were few unnecessary, hard to believe scenes in the second half with the typical sort of fight scene in the climax, but thankfully they don’t drag you too much and Murugadoss had made good efforts to keep up the pace.

Overall, I thought the movie was a much mature movie that I had expected! Both Vijay and Murugadoss seemed to have matured up in this movie and throw up a power packed, racy, action movie!

Two Thumbs up to Both Vijay & Murugadoss!!

20+ pounds and 4+ miles in 6 months.. Not Bad!!

The last 6 months has been a exciting ride in scraping the rust off my muscles! For more than couple of years I have been feeling bad that I haven’t done anything to get out of my slumber,  hibernation, albeit long, of inactive, geek potato life! Being a S/W engineer sitting and starring at the computer screen for 12+ hours on a daily basis isn’t unheard off and is almost a scenario of pride in the Geek World!!  Soon I found myself to have regained all the hard-shed pounds of fat that I lost in months leading up to my wedding (5yrs ago!) and was back to 215lbs !!!  

Checkout me at full 215 pounds!! [Ok not that lady! I wasn't that fat. The guy in the Blue T-shirt holding the helmet!!] This was back in Dec 2011.

I would haven’t actually cared  much if it weren’t for a series of nudging and yet flagrant “warning” signboards !! Like the ones below!! This was me taking the infamous snoring test!! haha!!  This freaking procedure costed me more than $1.5K out of my pocket alone after insurance coverage!!

And the snoring test.. because i was snoring like a pig!! .. at least that how Preethi  put it :)

After all this shiny tests I thought the doctor is going to actually prescribe some drops/tablets etc or heck even in operation to fix it… but ..but only to hear, from horse mouth so to say, that the doctor does not actually know where the snoring comes from!!

I am like, really!! – you really don’t know and you still went ahead with these test? Oh, we wanted to understand how severe your snoring is and its pretty serious. I am like – Oh Really!!

So what next? – We have this big machine that can help you reduce snoring or more technically sleep apnoea, which cost yous 2+ grand bucks. Cool. Will that cure me and how long will I have to use it. Oh, we don’t know. It might get rid of your snoring and at some point in the future time you might not have to use this device, but we don’t know. But as long as you use it it will help you will sleep apnoea. Ok now I am like – REALLY!!  At this point I was more than restless to get out! :)

This was one of many warning signboards. I couldn’t jog more than half a mile in a stretch and hadfrequest wheezing, cold n cough. Neck  and shoulder pains started becoming more common with 12+ hours stretches of being Geek Potato (as apposed to couch potato as I don’t really watch movies that much!)

Finally, Finally after more than year of procrastination and delays and finding all sort of excuses, I couldn’t post pone more. Moving to a new house which was far from office was blessing in disguise as this meant that I had to take the bus and had the opportunity to ride half way in bicycle!

And thus began my bicycling stint,  all over once again, it was nice to be back on the wheels and started riding like 3 miles every day to work.  It was almost a nostalgic feeling of riding bike to reduce my weight 5 yrs ago, before my wedding when I lost, in the same way 25 pounds!!!

The last time around, I reduced 25 pounds in 3 months or so! This time however, I wanted to make sure I make a lifestyle change and not crunch it out. I wanted to make sure I reduce weight over a prolonged period of time so that my habits and lifestyle changes along the way.

I am now 190 pounds down from 210+ pounds !!  Yay!! :-P

Last week it was time to swap a major chunk of cloths as by now none were fitting me sensibly :) I donated most of pants and shirts to the poor and went for a good round of shopping!!

Few things that helped me a lot on the way were:

1) Less Sugary items :

I read somewhere that sugar doesn’t just add on to your calories but also increase your appetite and increase your  ”want” to have more food. So reducing the sugar intake in coffee, sweets and almost everything helped me a lot in maintaining a routine, healthy diet.

2) Light Breakfast:

I know the age old saying, “eat like a king in the morning”. However this did not work for me. Restricting myself to just a falvored yogurt and fiber/protein bar helped me a long way in keeping my diet!  This was purely my invention or discovery!! :)

3) Eat anything but less:

I did a fair bit of research and followed the best foods to eat while trying to reduce weight, such as high protein, low calories, high fiber foods. I definitely tried to maintain a balance and tried keeping away from a lot of high fat, high sugary bakery and food items. However, by no means I was close to the rigorous diet that I followed last time around and did not follow the strict “salad” diet. I most certainly ate everything but ate LESS! Way Less! Even when my mom was staying with me over the summer I ate less but all the savory dishes she made :)

4) Running trumps everything! 

At 215Lbs I wasn’t even able to run half a mile without take a break and had tough time completing 1 mile with several breaks. Now I am able to run 2+ miles at a stretch and 4+ miles in total !

The last time around, I did a lot heavy weights and lot of gym to reduce weight. This time around, I hardly went to Gym. All the 20+ pounds were shed from Cycling, Running, Playing and Eating less!

My original goal was to reach 170lbs !! So essentially 20 more pounds to go! I don’t think I can get away this time without the help of Gym though ;-)

Forecasting Economy..hmm..er..what the heck is that?

The big economic news a few weeks ago was that Dubai was in big economic soup and that it has a debt of over $80 Billion or roughly 3 times the debt declared by AIG in US in 2008. And then I see some really top notch economist, from peppy news papers like the WSJ, Reuters, Business Week and more.. spelling out predictions and forecasting how this mega news is going to affect the stock market and how Dubai will have to deal with this mess, and then on to if Dubai is good place to invest or not and what not about Dubai economic futures!! ..

When I read such prediction and economic forecast, I get amused, irritated and then finally annoyed.. that why can’t these folks just stop this gibberish!!?

I distinctly remember reading, a couple of years ago, in this same news journals and website their lavish praises and admiration for Dubai’s Free Economy and how they have built almost a dream country with flushing richness and hi-tech sophistication that it almost serves as an example to the wealthy and developed nations. The economist gave a “two thumbs up” to the economic policies and free economy that Dubai has adopted, and served as pioneer and role model for the neighboring Arab countries. Dubai’s Palm Islands , The to-be tallest tower in the world Burj Towers and Dubai’s underwater restaurant were highly buzzed all over the internet and news media and cited as the next-generation architectures. Apparently, all these were not too long ago, but barely few years ago in 2007!

And then the great economic depression of 2008 came by, I came across a few magazines which although pointed to some scrapes off the golden plate, were still bullish about Dubai.

One clear night the government releases an official report of Dubai’s dept and dismal financial figures in stark contrast to the flushing economy so hyped by the media. All of a sudden, the same financial news behemoths start on elaborate column on how the whole economy was mis-handled, was all castles built up in the air with no strong base and so on. Go on to “predict” n “forecast” Dubai’s economy in the future and how it will affect the world economy!

A basic control system, such as air conditioner (AC) in our homes, are called “reactive” systems as they react to inputs – blows hot air or cold air after comparing the current room temperature to the preset desired room temperature. Advanced control systems employed in Air traffic and Flight route determination are more of “predictive” systems as they have to be very accurate in predicting the wind patterns “well in advance” to be able to determine the air borne flight routes. Just imagine if the flight route predicting systems became reactive and gave warnings like “OMG – you are in the middle of tornado. Please do not take this route” – “Yea Right! I know that already – i am stuck in the middle of the storm – Thank You.”

The economic forecasts are more like it.. becoming more n more use less and irrelevant! I wonder how and from where do these journalist and analyst get their source data from. From the reactive response pattern it doesn’t seem like they do have some inside information nor their analysis are based on sound, substantiative justifications.

In the days of Royal Kingdoms rules, the king throws out a bag gold coins to his royal poet and order him to concoct a beautiful, lavish song in praise of his “own” royal highness – spill over traditions apparently still being continued?

I sincerely wish these Yale and Harvard grads and peppy economic analysts stick to their basics – Evaluate, Report and maybe even go as far as Analyzing – but stay away from Forecasts!