VidhanSoudha

Trip to Pondicherry

After few weeks of hectic work, Its really time for desperate refreshment. I planned to join my friend (native pondy) in pondy for weekend. It was last mintue plan, manage to get to and fro tickets on Friday, I started from Bangalore on Friday night and reached pondy by 6:30 am SAT, it was Vinayaka chavithy day.

My friend came and picked me at stop, before going to his house we had bed tea (without brushing) at arubindo ashram, and reached home after few mintes, It was small and cute family of my friend, he his Akkha, Amma & Appa. Had small nap again after reaching.

Its ganapathi pooja time, i went along with my friend to buy Pilliyar (ganesh), instantly made really fresh clay Pilliyar and eco friendly no "Plaster of Paris", i was suppried to see few forigners buying the ganash idols and pooja saaman, and a looks like old germen, capturing all aound that MG Road in his camara. After pooja is perfomed by my friends appa in house with several ingredients , decorated with severl jewels and flowers, we headed for delicious typical tamil lunch with sambar, kolumbu, paisam etc. I had it to my maximun capacity but still they felt that i didnt had properly out of shy.

In the evening, we visited really intersing place with few other friends of my friend. Actually i didnt understant why these many froginer of diffent races are living in pondy.

It is all about AUROVILLE.

"Pondicherry may be French; Pondicherry may be Tamil—but it is also home to an unusual international community named Auroville"

The Matrimandir

AUROVILLE, Its simply different from rest of the world, and really only one of its kind in the world. Auroville is simply a model village, belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness. It is strange to see kids of different races (White, Black, Indian) attending school in "Mud Huts" built comletely eco-friendly. Anything in this village is eco frienldy from mud road to buildings, The Matrimandir, a golden metallic sphere in the center of town has foundation built with soil brought from almost 120 countries in world. Unfotunatly i missed opputunity to go inside that manidir as we were late. Outsides are allowed only before 3:00 pm. We have taken few snaps and had Herbel tea (frankly i didnt like it, but that is how your sacrifice counts in mother nature)

We had small party in the night, and saw someone live music at SeaGulls, It rained heavily, power cut allover, I will never forget our fight for muttai doosa at rollex hotel in the late night, and a friends (pasu) great pissing adventure in front of the city cop in that darkness. Day ended with few giggles and good thills.  On next day (sunday) visited beach in pondycherry, took some snaps, played cricket in law college with few friends. Its time, i had my dinner (mottai doosa) in house and my friend dropped me at bus to banglore in heavy rain, i left pondy with word "Nanben da" :)

An Incident can change your life..

One night I was watching television program in some channel, it was about “dhyanam”. I was keenly following it but unfortunately their was power cut in between, I thought of implementing same which I saw and started doing it in the darkness, according to instructions in the program, close eyes and let thoughts come into your mind and let them pass off, At one stage, mind will be idle and that is the peaceful state of mind.

I was doing this for almost 15 minutes and few thoughts & sounds were passing my mind. few of them are like.. someone making tapping sound of slippers on stairs while climbing, soon a thought about dinner, suddenly an auto passes the building with high volume dichic dichic music, car horn honking in front of some neighbors’ gate and etc.. light flashed as power is back again.

One thing I understood out of my perception, Mind reacts to very thing it comes across (I’m not sure of controlling mind), the reaction can proportionally change the state of life.

Everyone in this world is born with blank mind. Gandhi, Hitler, Einstein.   If someone asks what is common in above three, as per my knowledge only common thing in them is, they are human beings. At some point of time in their lives they had an affect, might be in anyways, which enforced them to choose the paths they lived in.

Complete state of life can change with small differences in the environment, background, country, religion etc one lives. All the rain drops come from the same clouds, but the point it grounds is what decides which valley it should flow through. Until some thing unexpected, unwanted situation comes in life with strong effect on mind with the affect of surrounding, all humans are same as said all are born or came into this world with same blank mind.

Just a reaction to an incident or moment can separate one from rest of the world. Rajinikanth was an incidentally an actor, Just of an incident at college turned Gates way to become richest in the world. A small train incident is actual inception for countries independence. All that it makes the difference is the intensity or the impact of the incident or a moment on the human brain, which varies from forget and move on to move forward with that effect.

I really believe that a small incident can change ones life, if it happens I wish it should be for good, good at least for rest of the world.

My bottom line is...

             “Dhyanam should be practiced only in peaceful place” J

Clicked from boat in Arabian sea, On way to elephanta island

            

In my best days...

Anyone’s childhood days are best days I believe, I am born in my grand mother’s village Thungathurthi near small town Suriyapet in Andhra Pradesh state in INDIA. My native village Gorentla is just 10 kms from it. I lived there when I was very young. I remember it’s an hour travel in bullock cart form my grand mother home to my home, I blush when I remember my innocence in surprising to see the clouds touching the road at a distance and eagerness to reach it to take them into my pretty little hands. Those wells, farms, groomed banyan trees (our national tree, how many you find now-a-days), palm fruits & kallu తాటి కల్లు. The time I spent there is best so far in my life. I studied in Christian convent school in town, but for every holiday I used to go back.

I remember when I was around six years old in my native home backyard in that village, their used be a cattle shed with few buffalos, bulls and ox tied to the pillars & the baby buffalo moving around them and green bushes and plants allover with wet soil fragrance everywhere. I and my sister were playing in and around the shed, suddenly from my fantasy of prince I felt like riding a buffalo. I request my sis to get me onto one, after crying she managed me to get onto one big size calf. For a moment I felt myself like a prince in “Chandhamama” stories riding horse. After few steps that calf felt enough for me and tilled me aside in to pit in processes of sitting, unfortunately it was the pit dug for newly constructing lavatory. My parents had rushed to pit after hearing my loud cry and got me out & my poor sis got some shunting for my mistake. Normally in families any time elders are punished and I’m already punished in the pit.

Here I would simply start saying globalization has change the face of ones living style to large extent, Now I do job in big metro in the country and stay in community flats, I feel how much this generation kids miss nature in their life.

How many times in a day will they see a real groomed trees except on occasional visit to some zoo park, and how many time will they climb a tree in their childhood.

Will they know how actually swimming is useful and how it is learned without a paid coach? They know ‘Wells’ only when they see the picture of ‘well’ in the alphabetical chart to pronounce letter ‘W’. I’m not surprised even if this generation kids don’t know the water beyond the tap in the house or in a community swimming pool.

How can they enjoy running along the mud roads with a tapping cycle tire till the end, except walking lonely never ending tar roads.

With technology or modern life style people still find their happiness in their living rooms, balconies and in gated community with swimming pool, lawns and tennis courts. But these new generation kids never know what actually the nature is beyond these concrete jungles. At least they feel it sometime watching Animal planet or NG channels.

Now I miss my young days of more innocence and less aggressive against nature.

Google Account is Hacked

Do you have a Google Account..

Now-a-days Google Account is important as any other account, mostly to secure our personal data and social relation esp. when use wide verity of applications like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Photos and Orkut. By the way it is single sign-on application. And you integrate with other third party applications like Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn with Gmail ID as user ID or communication ID.

My friend is unable to access his Gmail and Google Apps accounts today, even though he requests for "forgot password", he didn’t receive any communication to his secondary Email. Interesting part of this is, after seeing some porn’s on his profile he found that "Account is hacked". Hacker managed to log into Gmail and changed the secondary email for that account. As the same mail id is used for other applications like Facebook and twitter for communication, he requested for “forgot password" in that application and took control over them too and started posting hell through them. To get assistance from Google ,My friend couldn’t establish enough identification to Google them. He very much uses social networking sites to communicate with some of his friends and clients.

My friend is in situation where he is unable to block the hacked account or get access back on that account. Worst thing is damage to his relation with people on professional and personal network. Your identity on the social web (Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, etc.) and, most important, your online business is not in your hands anymore. This is pathetic situation where you don’t have any control except watching the show.

After lot of googling and binging i remembered a quote in telugu "Chethullu kaalinaaka aakulu pattukodam vrudaa" means:Its waste of catching green leaves after hand are burned.

Here are lessons learned and tips that might prevent your Gmail and other Google Accounts from getting hacked.

Many of us frequently receive "password assistance" email with link to reset password. Don’t ever initiate such links.

How the Google Accounts were hacked ?

Nothing much you can guess if the culprit is professional chap who enjoys exploring the web for vulnerabilities, but below could be some reasons.

Use a fairly strong password so it can be tough for someone to guess that string. And since you got a password reset email request in the first place, the possibility that the password was cracked can be safely ruled out.

Don’t use Gmail from any public terminal (therefore safe from password stealing key loggers) and have never clicked on links that may point to a fake Google login page (so no phishing attack either). You cannot associate a "security question" with non-Gmail Google accounts so the possibility that the "security question was weak" is also ruled out.

How to Protect your Gmail & Google Accounts

courtesy: www.labnol.org

#1. Log-in to your Gmail / Google Account and associate a phone number. This is useful because you’ll then receive an SMS text message whenever someone tries to recover your Google password.

#2. Create a new email address (on say Yahoo! Mail or Gmail itself) and set this as the secondary email address for your existing Gmail and Google Accounts. Check for emails on this new account manually or through a desktop client via POP3 / IMAP but do not enable auto-forward for the new email address as the original purpose will be defeated.

#3. Take a paper and write down the following information about your Google Account. You will need this to verify your identify to Google in case someone else takes over your Google Account and the secondary email address associated with your account.

• The month and year when your created your Gmail / Google Account. You can look at the last page of your Gmail Inbox (or go to Sent Items) to get an approximate idea of the date when you created the account.
• If you created a Gmail account by invitation, write the email address of the person who first sent you that invite for Gmail. Use a search query like "in:all has invited you to open a free Gmail account" to find that invitation email.
• The email addresses of your most frequently emailed contacts (the top 5).
• The names of any custom labels that you may have created in your Gmail account.
• The day/month/year when you started using various other Google services (like AdSense, Orkut, Blogger, etc.) that are associated with the Google account that you are trying to recover. If you’re not certain about some of the dates, provide your closest estimate*.

[*] For Analytics, look at the first date when it started collecting stats for your website(s). For Orkut, look at the last page of your scrapbook. For AdSense, you may take the help of your AdSense account manager.

#4. It goes without saying but do not use the same password for your main Google / Gmail account and your secondary email address.

#5. If you access Gmail and other Google services over a Wi-Fi network, make sure that you always use the secure URLs like https://gmail.com. Go to Gmail settings and set ‘Browser Connection’ to ‘Always use https.’ This might make your Gmail access a bit slower but your account will be more secure.

#6. Once in a while, do refer to that little line in the footer section of your Gmail Inbox that shows the different IP addresses from where your account is being accessed. If you find an unknown IP address, change your Google password immediately. The person who hacked my Gmail accounts configured them with his Hotmail account so he could effectively read all my email communication remotely from his Hotmail inbox without ever logging into my Google account again. I could figure that out only after I saw an IP address from a Microsoft server in my Gmail activity log.

#7. You should also consider copying emails from Gmail to another service (like Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail – it is effortless) so when your Gmail account is compromised, you at least have access to all your previous emails. Or you can configure a desktop email client like Outlook or Thunderbird with your Gmail account (via POP3 or IMAP) and thus you’ll have an automatic offline backup of your Gmail Inbox.

#8. Do a test run. Log-out of all your Gmail / Google Accounts and initiate the password recovery process for each one of them using this form. This will help you make sure that your SMS settings and secondary email addresses are configured correctly.

For Google Apps users

#9. You should always have a public email address on your website that others can use to contact you directly. This public email address will also help people find and connect with your on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. However, you should make sure that you don’t provide administrative privileges to this email address in Google Apps because if someone hijacks this account, he will effectively take over your Google Apps domain. Create a new user in Google Apps as an administrator and never share this username with anyone else.

#10. If you have lost access to your Google Apps dashboard, you’ll have to create a new CNAME record pointing to google.com to verify that you are actual owner of that web domain. To reset the password for the administrator of your Google Apps domain via your domain hosting company, the URL is:

https://google.com/a/cpanel/xyx.com/VerifyAdminAccountPasswordReset

[*] Replace xyz.com with your own domain address.