Riots, Strikes and other routine stuff

While I've lived through the worst riots in Indian history, life has been more or less peaceful the last few years.

Then, last Wednesday, the thespian Dr. Rajkumar passed away.

The subsequent riots brought back memories of 2000, when the college admission process, and subsequently, the start of the academic year in Bangalore was delayed because of the riots in Bangalore. It was when Veerappan had kidnapped Dr. Rajkumar, and Bangalore was burning for that. While I was in Mumbai, awaiting the start of the college year, I remember Dr. Rajkumar for having touched my life at that time.

This time around, we headed indoors as soon as we heard the news. However by the middle of the second day indoors, we had run of Maggi, and gas in the cylinder. This brought back hard hitting memories of 1993, and it looked like we had a hard 2-3 days ahead. That and a couple of other factors combined and we made an ad-hoc road-trip to Goa. No offence intended, but we will always remember Dr. Rajkumar for providing us with this opportunity, if only indirectly through his fans.

In other news, I was headed towards my brother's college to meet his HOD regarding some shortage of attendance letters that they had sent to my parents in Lucknow, when I received a call from him, asking me to give the whole thing a miss.

Apparently, everyone in his college was on strike, demanding the dismissal of his college warden on accusations of sexual harrasment. Thankfully, everyone included all the students, the non-teaching staff, and all the teachers, all the way up to the vice-principal. The point in question according to me was, who they were striking against, but my brother was having good fun nevertheless.

I'm almost envious of him, never having been a part of a college strike myself. This, and a couple of other incidents are making us wonder whether we should consider politics as an appropriate career for him.

509 Bandwidth Exceeded

 In my zeal to make a sitemap for my site, I ran an automated script on my site.

The stupid crawler ignored robots.txt and exceeded my available bandwidth.

My really nice hosting provider went and bumped up my limit for the remainder of the month, so that my site is up right now, thankfully.

Have I mentioned that he's a really cool dude. :)