Twitter had an interesting trending topic this weekend, #oneletteroffmovies. It’s amazingly hilarious, if you take the title of a popular movie and change a letter if you have the brains. Not being satisfied with the stupid responses lately on twitter, I compiled my own list of #oneletteroffmovies (though also including some from twitter).
Some NC-17 content also awaits you in the list, so read ahead at your own risk. You have been warned.

1) My best friend’s weeding
2) Beauty and the breast
3) Mobsters, Inc.
4) Fight cub/ Flight club
5) Top gum/ Toy gun
6) Jurassic pork/ Jurassic dark/ Jurassic bark
7) Malice in wonderland
8 ) School of cock
9) French Kids/French piss
10) Porn on the fourth of July
11) Fat and furious/ fast and curious
12) Apocalypse, wow/ Apocalypse, how
13) Terminator 2: Judgement gay
14) The deported/ She departed
15) Full mental jacket
16) No country for bold men
17) Boy story/ Joy story
18) Shaving private Ryan (Although Shaving Ryan’s privates is a better title)

Just a couple of hindi movies as well :

19) Jab we met becomes: Jab me wet (Okay, technically it’s two letters but who cares)
20) Gandhi becomes Aandhi (Okay, technically it’s not a hindi movie but who cares)

Tell me which ones were the best, and which ones were humorless. Also add some more in the comments, if you can come up with a #oneletteroffmovies list as well.

Better photography, a well known photography magazine of India organizes the “Photographer of the year” competition every year. And year after year, they have organized it successfully offline, accepting entries from the best photographers across India and abroad. This year, however they decided to take this online and canvera.com being the associate partner had to come up with a web application that would enable photographers to submit their entries through a brand new site.

Three weeks was the allotted time for the completion of the project in which the design (and its thousand iterations), development, and QA and all the tweaks would all had to be completed. And my team, i.e. Mayur (a.k.a the designer), Kanupriya (product manager) and myself (the developer) were given the responsibility for the web application. It was definitely a roller coaster ride; new designs being discussed (and partly implemented) daily, new functional requirements and the architecture slowly but surely building up.

I had an option of choosing Ruby on Rails or php or Java EE to build this application, and for a two weeks time frame the former two would have definitely been faster. But we decided for Java, and built the entire application using jsp/struts/tiles/spring/hibernate/postgresql/jboss. It’s a standard web application: A home page which briefly introduces the application, some static pages which explain the competition in the detail, a registration page (with forgot password functionality), login, user profile page, category page, theme page and upload image page. Image storage and thumbnail generation have been given a lot of importance, and is pretty scalable. But to get the thing work in IE6 was a real pain. IE7 didn’t play too nice either but they all eventually fell in place

A javascript library is needed in every modern application, and although a big fan of YUI I decided on jquery this time. And I am amazed by the variety and support in jquery plugins, and slowly becoming my favorite. Although this is the first application where I hadn’t used any AJAX in the whole application, the whole experience is pretty smooth in my opinion. The image upload could have been a little smoother(and it will be, I promise ) with the flash uploader. Some more small features like an ajax feedback modal dialog box and editing image details might follow soon.

Coming to the competition, there are actually three of those. Photographer of the year(POY for brief), Young photographer of the year(YPOY), and Wedding photographer of the year(WPOY). YPOY and WPOY are being organized for the first time this year, and as you’d have guessed, YPOY is only for people under 18.

There are eight themes each for the photographer/young photographer of the year: Family and friends, Natural elements, life on streets, man/environment, twilight magic, still life, wild life and landscapes and a maximum of four photographs can be uploaded in each theme. For wedding photographer of the year, the themes are: Bridal portraits, couple portraits, family and friends, behind the scenes, emotions and photo series of a single wedding. All competitions are open for amateurs and professionals alike, so just pick up your camera, shoot some cool shots and go uploading!

All in all, it was a very fulfilling experience developing the application, in which arguably the best Indian photographers, young photographers and wedding photographers will upload their best shots! I hope that the best photographers in India would find participating in the contest simple and enjoyable.

After writing a previous blog post on naming asklaila.com, I was thinking more and more about how do companies name their products. And does this name have anything to do with the success of the product? If the answer is ‘yes’, I fail to understand how in the world has Hero Honda succeeded in becoming the numero uno in motorbikes five years in a row!

According to me, Hero Honda has come up with the stupidest names ever for bikes. Now, what kind of a loser names his bike Achiever? No seriously! Why would anyone in the world want to buy a bike which is named Achiever? Ditto for Glamour, unless you are a yellow-pants-orange-shirts wearing Govinda yourself. With Hunk, they reached a new low, which I didn’t even think was possible. Well, maybe they thought of building an hunky Indian version of the Harley Davidson, but named it so that everyone understands what the name stands for.
Ambition, in my guess would be for the 50 year old virgin who still thinks he could marry a princess, but manages only to buy an Ambition in the end. And don’t even get me started on Splendor(and the thousand versions of it: Splendor plus, super Splendor, Splendor NXG)!

Glamour might be for Hunks who have the Ambition of being Achievers of Priyanka Chopra. Speaking of bollywood and HH’s naming of bikes, I think there is a definite correlation. In my opinion, Hero Honda names most of its bikes keeping one bollywood star in mind. If Glamour=Priyanka Chopra, Hunk=Hrithik Roshan, Joy=Joy Mukherjee, Ambition=Imran Hashmi, no points for guessing what’s Karizma for. I can actually read through the mind of the person responsible for Karizma. “Hmm.. I need to name this bike in English… I think Charisma is a good word, which although I don’t understand, would look nice. Moreover it sounds like Karishma Kapoor (big grin). But people would think it’s a lengthy version of “chashma”, so let me make it more like Karishma.” Hence the name Karizma.

With Passion, they forgot that they are selling a bike and not viagra on wheels. And I can only assume that Passion Plus would be an ideal name for a stronger medication.

Maybe I was a little harsh on Hero Honda, because other companies like Bajaj, TVS, even Yamaha sometimes name their bikes idiotically. Like Dawn or Boxer etc, but come on. You have to give it to Hero Honda for the maximum number of ridiculous names.

When Hero met Honda, a cycle company met a motorbikes company, and you can only be sure that cyclists are nothing more than stupid people, hence the awesome bike names. I could go on and an, and take a dig at pleasure, sleek, street, and the endless other ludicrous names, but I should just stop and let you know that such names not only grind my gears, but make my blood boil.

p.s.: I ride an Avenger, and if you think the name is awful, you are wrong.

I always find pretty amazing how the indian press empowers women, statistically. Allow me to explain that in a little detail: Today’s headline in the TOI read: Girls outshine boys in CBSE 12th result here, and here. Ditto with Hindustan times
What a sexist way to announced that the CBSE 12th class results have been announced!
This also makes me wonder who are TOI and HT (and all other newspapers) really trying to impress? The girls who passed CBSE class 12th exams? The girls in 11th grade who want to insult their male counterparts by claiming percentage victory of their seniors? The village idiot who doesn’t send his daughter to a CBSE school (Forget the fact that he can’t/won’t read english dailies)? Okay lots of questions, which you can answer in the comments.

If you want the same fact statistically analyzed even more, I am willing to oblige. This year, 637,578 students – 264,248 female and 373,330 male – took the Class 12 board exams in the country and abroad. If I ran a daily: the headlines would be:
1) 288957 boys and 243282 girls pass this years CBSE. Boys outshine girls, yet again
2) 19% more boys pass CBSE than girls, buck up females!
3) Mass hysteria in women as CBSE 12th girls fail to pass (as much as boys)

For one more example of selective statistics for empowering women, now bring your attention to something we’re so used to seeing that we hardly notice the prejudice. Do an exercise: Grab today’s newspaper and search for any news which mentions an accident (where > 10 people died). I bet you’ll be able to find the pattern, “52 people died in a bus accident near blahblahland. 19 women, 3 children and 4 senior citizens were identified dead in this horrible accident”. Yeah right, what happened to the men, Sherlock?
The newspaper almost wants to say: “Some men also died, we’re too lazy to count. If you’ve attended kindergarten, do the math yourself. Anyway, they deserved to die. They were not cute little children or helpless women or old dying senior citizens. We won’t evoke any sympathy from the reader if I mention such trivial details.”

And this really grinds my gears.

Having a reputation a reputation helps for sure. And if the reputation is for being a nitpicker, more so! Ujjwal has sent me a couple of gems from his Shirdi’s trip which I’ll share here:

The first one is of a guy selling gay milk. As simple as that! Now I’m no Dubey that I can even try to figure out what was going through this guy’s head when he wrote that.
And forget writing it, he earns his living out of selling the homo milk, have a look:

Now this one is a little less hilarious, but definitely noteworthy. How does an merchant sell a product meant for foreigners (or pseudo foreigners) without knowing their language? At the least he’ll try to use a couple of words, which make the foreigner understand about it’s availability. Here’s what hamara hero writes:

If I were a mineral water bottle, I would do the same. i.e. Hang myself to death(see pic above, again) rather than being avelebal hear.