The Vengabus

This is now my 9th week in the Garden City. Gr8 place. The bus service here is called BMTC, short for Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation. But this isn't bout BMTC. There's a parallel service of old private vans which run on routes not already taken up by BMTC. So if u want to go from point A to point B and there's no bus from A to B, then u r most likely to get into of these old green vans. Its one heck of an experience traveling in one of these rickety overcrowded little vans. A laborer in his dirt covered dhoti and a IT pro in his full sleeved shirt & neck tie sharing the same wooden bench with a middle aged woman coming back from a shopping spree. That's what I call the Vengabus.

Phir Milenge - The movie

Phir Milenge is a film bout a woman who looses her job cos she's HIV +ve (Thamanna, played by Shilpa Shetty) and her fight for justice. But more importantly, I guess it’s about how she and those around her handle the situation. There’s no moralizing and certainly no over-sentimentalism. Unlike a lot of Hindi films tat come out these days this one leaves you thinking. If it hits in the box office, may be there’s still hope for gud cinema in Bollywood. I’m no fan of Salman Khan, but this one is definitely worth watching.

XML

XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language, a markup language much like HTML. It is designed to describe data and has no predefined tags. You must define your own tags. Data is described using a Document Type Definition (DTD). XML is the preferred mode for storing data in a simple platform independent format.

Click here to get my PowerPoint slides explaining XML.