A Tale of two countries -Google Maps India and Google Maps Pakistan

One Google geographical search giving two different search results for the same keyword is not a new onto-genesis. However, sometimes, a well thought political correctness makes enough sense to avoid disputes. Here is an example of how Google has managed to satisfy both parties at one time.

Google Maps pakistan shows Pak favorable results and Google India shows favorable geographical search results for India.

Google Pakistan - J&K limned as LOC (Technically, LOC ins't an international border)

Check out yourself :

1. Click  Google.com.pk (with search keyword - "Pakistan Map")
2. Now click Google.co.in (with search keyword - "Pakistan Map")
3. Observe the international borders of India and Pakistan. The disputed J and K region has been shown as an LOC(Line of Control) on the Pakistan based website, to the contrary the Indian search result shows Kashmir as an international border and part of mainland India.

Google Policies Then....

Google is known for stern internet policies with no compromises with state-run media or federal governments  .Google China is a coining example where the company had shutdown its offices and packed up its bags from China by standing firm its ground for "no compromise policy" on its privacy policy and manipulating internet search results in favor of Chinese government.

Google.co.in - J&K limned as international border and part of India

And Now...

Ironically, it is tempestuous to learn that Google has not been consistent in applying the same policy in its India and Pakistan based search results.

Looks like, Google's policy grows and defines its business on a worldwide basis, but continues to allocate its resources among national or regional areas to maximize the total. Afterall how long Google can carry on with online freedom and regulation values. Sometimes you get tired out of this damn and choose to go along with the state dictated flow. Isn't it ?

..and yes it is evident that Indian lobby looks stronger than Pakistanis as J&K despite being disputed has been shown in Indian side of the border on the indian website but an international LOC (and not a part of Pakistan) on the pakistan based website .



-Bhaskar Tripathi
"It is our wits that make us men"

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IRCTC : Online Passenger Reservation System

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Cooperative or IRCTC is a subsidary company of Indian Rail that takes care of online ticketing, online reservations,ticket cancellations and modifications, tourism and catering services of Indian railway.

Tatkal Booking on IRCTC:
The booking starts at 10AM daily one day prior to the departure of the train for 3 Tier AC, 2 Tier AC Classes,Sleeper Class and AC Chair Cars.

E-Ticket : Now you can Use your iPad/mobile or Laptop along with your PhotoId proof for e-tickets instead of taking a paper print for travelling in Indian Railways.

Some important web resources for IRCTC are the following :

• IRCTC Reservations website : www.irctc.co.in
• Indian Rail website : www.indianrail.gov.in
• IRCTC PNR Status Enquiry : http://www.indianrail.gov.in/pnr_Enq.html
• Easy Mobile Booking Download: Download Here 
• Irctc Login Facebook Official Page : Click Here
• IRCTC Customer Care Number :

           1.Helpline.No. 139   (24 Hours Service),
           2.Customer Care No. 011-23340000, 044-25300000, Fax no.011-23345400

• IRCTC Easy Mobile Booking - Android App : Download Here
• IRCTC Complaints : 011-23340000

Tourism services on IRCTC:
Bharat Darshan is a popular tourism package for cost conscious tourists which covers all important tourist destinations of India.

It also provides following luxury trains services :
1. Palace on Wheels
2. Royal Rajasthan on Wheels
3. Golden Chariot
4. Buddhist Circuit Train
5. Royal Orient Express
6. Deccan Odyssey


-Bhaskar Tripathi
"It is our wits that make us men !"

IRCTC Mobile Booking Android App,IRCTC Mobile Booking iPhone App,IRCTC PNR Enquiry

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Girl for whom India is fighting

The Girl for whom India is fighting

लिखना कुछ इस कदर भा गया..
उसकी रूह का दर्द काग़ज़ के पन्नो मे छा गया..

होनी से बेख़बर, वो मासूम उन राहों मे थी..
होश आया जब तो अजनबी बाहों मे थी..

वो जिस्म पर बिखरे खून के टुकड़े
वो साँसों पेर पड़े ज़ख़्मों के दाग
वो फटे ज़हन से चिथड़े..

रोते बिलखते वो जीती रही, 
दरिंदगी के आँसू पीती रही..
उन अजनबी हाथों से लड़ती रही..

लिखना कुछ इस कदर भा गया..
उसकी रूह का दर्द काग़ज़ के पन्नो मे छा गया..

मान आहत है, आँखें नम,
नहीं सहे जाते अब ये दरिंदगी के सितम

पर ना जाने उस बेटी मे,उस बेहन मे क्या खास है.
शायद मौत से जूझने के बल का ऐएहसास है..

जो अब भी ना कुछ किया तो ना सोएगी वो
जो अब भी ना सुकून दिया तो ना रएगी वो..

चलो दे दें उसको सुकून कुछ पल,
आओ मिलकर लड़ें सब, दिखा कर एकता का बल 

लिखना कुछ इस कदर भा गया..
उसकी रूह का दर्द काग़ज़ के पन्नो मे छा गया..

-भास्कर त्रिपाठी
"It is our wits that make us men"
delhi gang rape,delhi gang-rape,safety for delhi girls,delhi gang rape victim

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Introverts are not Shy : Why does the world needs Introverts?

Introverts are pretty excellent as they are...

Be it Asia, US or Europe. People across the world are enormously discriminating towards the introverts. Over the years, I have seen a huge bias in the society towards eloquent people. Many of you may be private people at home but you might consciously choose to be an extrovert at your work place in order to prove the you are good at your work. The corporate world mostly recognizes the people who are good at exhibiting self- importance.

As a matter of fact, every third person in this world is an introvert. So if you are an extrovert yourself, so unknowingly you would subject all your fellow extroverts to bias. To see the bias clearly, you need to understand the difference between shyness and introversion.

Shyness :  is a feeling or fear of social judgement.

Introverts: are people who fold inwards and tend to shrink from social contacts. This does not mean they have no social contacts, but they have limited and well established strong relations. They may or may not be shy !

I have seen that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do because when they are managing proactive employees, they are much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas. On the other hand an extrovert leader quite unwittingly can get so excited about things that they might put their stamp on things and then other people's ideas might not bubble up to the surface.

The world's greatest introverts

I am not advocating my opinions because of my close relation with the word "introvert", but modern history also shows you the greatest leaders like Gandhi, Roosevelt, Sardar Patel and even Jinnah - all of them described themselves as introverts. They were all quite, laconic in their speech, and even shy at times yet they took all the spotlight even though every bone in their body was telling them not too. They did what they did not because they wanted to stamp their authority or they liked directing others. They all grabbed the spotlight because people wanted them to be at the helm.

Introvert Leaders

Introverts are driven to do what they feel is right and that makes them great leaders. But the world takes a long time to recognize this fact and that is why you see introvert leader rising up the value chain in the world somewhat later in the careers as compared to the extroverts.

Bias towards Extroverts : 

The Biased world

At this point, it is important for me to say that I love extroverts. Some of my best friends are extroverts and its especially cheering to see extrovert kids. I just love them. Frankly, I would say that I am biased towards the extroverts. My beloved sister, wife, my ex-bosses, friends all of them have been extroverts.

Degree of Introversion : 

Coming back to the introvert-extrovert spectrum, there is no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. Such a person who is a at pure extreme would either become anti-social or unsocial. What I mean is the degree of introversion or extrovertness is my subject at hand. Some people who fall in the middle of this spectrum are called ambivalent. But many of us recognize ourselves as one type or the other.

Why Introverts are better performers than extroverts ?

I feel that Solitude is an important ingredient of creativity. Over centuries solitude has been recognized in the eastern sciences and also religion. It is only recently that we have started bragging about the extrovertness, especially in business. I do not mean the extroversion is bad, but for some people it is about the air they breathe.

People like Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Mahavir all went to wilderness of solitude and then brought back their thoughts back to the society and this is exactly what I am talking about.

Introverts are the engines of the society:

The Great Introvert Aura

We as an extrovert culture driven society must respect the introversion and its unique power of creation among its followers.

• So the question is that why are we making introverts feel guilty about their introvertness ? 
• Why don't we just respect it as a great skill to have ?
  The more freedom we give to introverts to be themselves, the more likely they will be able to come-up with their unique solutions.

What you can learn from introverts ?

Like all introverts, you must learn to work on your own because that is where deep thoughts come from.
Also, my advice to all my fellow introverts is that you need to open your suitcases because the world needs you.

If you felt some sense of pride and enlightenment for being an introvert, then do drop in your comments. I would be eagerly waiting to read the response.

-Bhaskar Tripathi
"It is our wits that make us men"

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My experiments with injury

My ligament injury

Post match ruptured knee

The other day while playing a soccer match with my office team, I sustained a terrible knee injury which ruptured my soft tissues and damaged little part of the Anterior cruciate ligament. Since two weeks now, I haven't been able to walk and have been literally limping and crawling with one leg. After taking a week off from office, I returned back this monday thinking that my leg is much better and even managed to drive down with that broken leg to office. No doubt it looked difficult initially to rest my body weight entirely on one foot, but now I have become used to it.

The strange criticism for playing a sport..

Some of my very close friends and well wishers have given me lots of suggestions about how and what I should be doing to accelerate my recovery process. While, I appreciate their advises, there have been another section of people who have been full of gustations and remarks like "or khel le football.tere ko pehle hi bola tha ki tu koi championship nahi jeetne wala hai".

Additionally, I have been quietly hearing a number of free advises like  :

• "You should not play rough sports like soccer at the age of 30" (oh yes ! Someone also discovered for me that all athletes retire by this age).
•  "Bhaskar, you are involved with greater responsibilities, be mature do not touch the soccer ball. Be considerate to your family".
•  "I told you that is why I do not play these rash games like soccer, it's really idiotic to play sports in corporate world."
•  "It is just an office match - why the hell you need to display such passion which is not good for your health and overshoots your capacity".
• "You are not a professional athlete and you do not get paid to play football, it will only pull you back from your regular job...."

Clearly, I have been interacting with the wrong set of people all this while. As a whole, Indians are not big sports aficionados. For the benefit of the larger audience who might have been supremely athletic in there school days but never got to play professional sports, I want to highlight the importance of being fit, stretching yourself to your limits while dealing with the psychological aspect on injuries. I also want to highlight few advantages of injuries and experiences that athletes undergo while on bed.

Why play so hard, when you are not a professional athlete ?

If you are not a professional athlete but still love to toil your sweat and love that feeling of pain when you get a whack on your ankle go on reading. Else, I would advise you to stop right here and thank you for spending those 5 minutes for reading me. If you loved reading my thoughts, then here you go...

Three Reasons why you should... 

Gut Running..

1.  Sports will certainly gift you injuries and injuries will give you physical and mental adversities and of course pain! Some of them might even render permanent damages to your body. But out of these events, you deduce courage. Courage is not the absence of fear, It is being afraid but being able to control that fear so you are able to perform at your highest ability. For peak performance, you need to have the courage which is a mark of men ! So I would suggest all of you to play and help yourself with the gut !

2.  Sports is the greatest motivating speech for life's more difficult lessons. When you do not have the strength to go on and you pull yourself by telling few more steps and when you reach those you again say few more till the time you collapse, then you realize your actual limits. You might get a heatstroke, dehydration or a muscle pull but you do not die. However whilst running, you have pulled yourself to your threshold.

How many times you get this experience in the corporate world whilst business analysis or coding ? 

3.  An athlete is a normal person with the gift of an undying passion to be the best and achieve greatness.Give yourself an opportunity to become that person full of passion. You learn to be at your confident best in tough situations.

Bottomline :

In one line, my answer to all critics is that no matter what injury you sustain, no matter how many complexities and responsibilities life throws at you, you continue playing because the one who doesn't take risks, doesn't drinks champagne !

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How to get rid of Annoying youtube Ads

Yes ! Google is competing in entertainment industry now.
Google has been trying to take away viewer traffic the from TV industry, Cable industry and Movie industry for a while now. In short, Google is trying to push entertainment away from the standard traditional mediums to your cell phone, to your iPhone,to your android phones and various other handheld devices. Consequently, you see a lot of annoying ads in every third or fourth youtube video.
Some videos give you an option to "Skip ads after 5 serconds" while some do not. However, both of them are devilling to the end user. Here's a quick and simple way to get rid of the youtube ads permanently.

- Bhaskar Tripathi
"It is our wits that make us men"

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Nuturing your creativity...

Nuturing your creativity...
Very often I have seen people doing some inspirational, creative work which by sheer force of  inspiration, shakes the earth under your feet and make your mind run like hell to do something similar.

So many times their creative genuis misguides you about yourself and you tend to think yourself in the same league as them and try to pull off the same creativity which is often sparked by their viral genius. However when you start doing something like them, more often than not you endup dumping it before it ends.

Technically, doing something creative in a time bound or result oriented bound fashion is like putting too much responsibility on your fragile human physche. Its like asking somebody to swallow the sun.Creativity does not work in a time bound or result oriented boundation.Creativity is free from the boundary wall of constraints.

Where does creativity come from ?

Worker ideas come through un-indentified sources. Sometimes they come at awkward times like when you are driving or sleeping. Sometimes they come at a busy work schedule or in a high packed Delhi traffic jam and that's when you have to look up at the sky and ask the almighty  "Excuse Me GOD! Don't you know that I am driving or don't you know that you are still keeping me awake at 2am in the midnight. Can't you bloody flow these creative juices in my body at a more opportune moment ? WTF my lord ? I can't even sleep (its 2.30am) and you are constantly firing the bullets of creative juices at me in this haunting midnight".

"Go bother somebody else today, please go and bother some creative fellow like Chetan Bhagat, Amir Khan or Ajay Rathee or may be my singer friend Bharat Gambhir".

That's how creative people release the pressure of that so called genius(or rather stupidity) within that was creating all the trouble at an awkward time and manage to send it back to a place where it came from. I have experienced this feeling so I ought to pen it down at this moment when it is already 2.30am midnight.

So how does creativity work in your brain ?

Creativity, as i think, is a process where 50% of you and 50% of the universal matter work in conjunction. 

For an example, While writing something creative, I go to a dressing table or a chair and tell the piece of furniture "listen dude I am done with my bit and now its your job. I will keep writing.I am already doing the best that I have. Now making it more creative you must do your 50%.

The above exercise helps me when I start writing something creative and nothing comes to my mind. It saves me from landing up writing an absurd piece of article. Otherwise I would end-up writing the worst one ever written by a human :)

How do you experience creativity ?

Creativity is sometimes divinity, when you are involved in something so deeply that even the time stops for you.Not just time but also your existense becomes insignificant, only the act holds the significance.In short it is a glimpse of God within you.

When it strikes for that ephemeral moment, you experience the zero within you and ordinary people are marveled with your thrust. Words like Bravo !, Beauty !, Wonderful !, Awesome... follow. When this happens frequently with you, don't stop to call yourself a creative chap. Thats how creativity works ! You just can't word it accurately. Let me know how you find my first piece of crap at creative writing :) 

You might want to read something similar : 

Crowdsourcing - The common man's real power !

-Bhaskar Tripathi
"It is our wits that make us men"

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How to find out where a picture was taken? कैसा पता लगाएँ फोटो कहाँ खीची गयी ?

Say you are exploring interesting places on the Internet and come across a beautiful destination that you would like to visit sometime in future. The only problem is that the web photograph carries no text caption and you therefore have no clue of the location where that picture was possible taken. 
Google will do that for you and actually tell you the location of the image where it was shot ! 
Ain't it simply superb ?
If the photograph is some popular destination, google will display the "possible location".   
Goto : Images.google.com, Simply drag an image from your desktop or another web page to the search box. 

- Bhaskar Tripathi
"It is our wits that make us men !"

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Income tax slab 2011-2012

This is Tax filing season and lot of you would be curious to know about the latest income tax slab rates for Year 2011-2012. Following income tax table will help you to refer the latest income tax slab for calculating your income tax for year 2011-12.

Income Tax Filing

Quick highlights for Tax payers

• Base slab for general tax payers increased to 1.8 lakh from original 1.6 lakh.
• Senior citizen age is reduced to 60 years from last years 65 years. 
• Senior citizens now include people between 60 and 80 years. 
• Also increased the base slab for senior citizen to 2.5 lakh from previous years 2.4 lakh
• A new category called "Very Senior citizen" added for people above 80 years.

Income tax slabs 2011-2012 for General tax payers

Income tax slab (in Rs.)	Tax
0 to 1,80,000	No tax
1,80,001 to 5,00,000	10%
5,00,001 to 8,00,000	20%
Above 8,00,000	30%

Income tax slabs 2011-2012 for Women

Income tax slab (in Rs.)	Tax
0 to 1,90,000	No tax
1,90,001 to 5,00,000	10%
5,00,001 to 8,00,000	20%
Above 8,00,000	30%

Income tax slabs 2011-2012 for Senior citizen
(Aged 60 years but less than 80 years)

Income tax slab (in Rs.)	Tax
0 to 2,50,000	No tax
2,50,001 to 5,00,000	10%
5,00,001 to 8,00,000	20%
Above 8,00,000	30%

Income tax slabs 2011-2012 for Very Senior citizen
(Above 80 years)

Income tax slab (in Rs.)	Tax
0 to 5,00,000	0%
5,00,001 to 8,00,000	20%
Above 8,00,000	30%

-Bhaskar Tripathi
"It is our wits that make us men"

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अग्निपथ! अग्निपथ! अग्निपथ! Agneepath ! Agneepath ! Agneepath !

-Bhaskar Tripathi
"It is our wits that make us men !"

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