as i see it

It was fun reading "The 3 mistakes of my life" like other two books of Chetan Bhagat. The feeling was like watching some masala movie..romance, emotions, friendship and finally a happy ending. Starting is quite a bit slow..but keeps your attention untill a dramatic ending.

The story : This book contains a story of a guy called Govind Patel who had dreamt of becoming a successful businessman. The book is loosely based on the three mistakes Govind made in his life.
What follows is a mix of cricket, religion, business, love and friendship. Govind sets up a sports shop along with his friends in the temple compound with Omi’s family’s help. The shop prospers as Ishan coaches young boys in cricket and Govind teaches maths to Ishan’s sister Vidya who also captures his heart. Ishan then meets Ali, a child master with a hyper reflex condition that makes him hit each ball for a six ( This is a part i cant digest ) . Ali displays the talent which Ishan never had and Ali’s destiny becomes his own.
Omi’s Bitoo mama , a communal party man bent on converting the young into fighters in the name of Hinduism. Situations come to a head and Ahmedabad burns in riot fires. Omi dies saving Ali and Ishan finds out about Vidya and Govind, a betrayal he does not forgive. These events lead Govind to his death-bed and that is when he writes the email to Bhagat.

The book is quite similar to Chetan Bhagats Five Point Someone with respect to a plethora of aspects. Three young friends, their tryst with destiny, the romantic scenes, the ups and downs, the dark humour, the screw ups.. It’s all there. However, there are a few refreshing aspects to the book- especially the handling of the business mentality, the local Gujarati flavor and the very India style love story.

Lines I loved : Gujarat is the only state in India where people tend to respect you more if you are in businesss than if you are in service (real true!) and 'Gujarat is a dry state.. people here get drunk on food'.

What i cant understand is the importance given to the three mistakes. Does losing money due to bad decisions and unexpected circumstances qualify as a mistake ? especially in case of Gujrati businessmen - who are known for their apetite for risks? And why the huge issue about falling in love with a friends sister as long your sincere with the relationship ?

The story sometimes seems like an illustration of problems that Indians have to live with - Lack of development in smaller towns, sick politicians, religious extremism, lack of sports education/infra-structure in schools etc etc . In some places, simply for the heck of covering many of these problems, creates certain scenarios are created a tad too forcefully. Like Ish's stereotypically grumpy Indian Dad always taunting against his failures, sometimes, simply for the heck of it! or the Ish smashing the guys car- that was little too melodramatic way of portraying his protectiveness towards his sister..

As for the ending, yes it was a bit too melodramatic with half the ppl dying in a RGV movie like scene, but i think that can be spared given the nice plot and a decent pace overall… I like his hinglish writing style a lot.

The reason Chetan Bhagat got so popular in the first place was his refreshing attitude towards writing with a distince indian flavour. Thats what made him a huge hit.

My guess is you'll like it unless your a really seasoned reader of authors like jeffery archer, arthor hailey and so on - from that angle Chetan Bhagat has a lot of catching up to do.
But the plot and the few refreshiong aspects i described above make this book my favourite amongst his 3 offerings.

Finally Its fun filled entertainment and something the indian youth can connect to. worth reading once.

The hype surrounding the release of firefox 3 was unbelievable. Was it due to the interest of the open source community or because a browser has now become integral to our everyday lives?

Anyway, I ended up waiting until midnight 27th(IST) for the release. Everybody discussing ff3 and the boring wait for it over gtalk. And the download wasnt a breeze – the Mozilla site seemed to have conked out with the load and I had to wait for ah hour before i could lay my hands on ff3.

Mozilla were gunning for five million downloads in 24 hours to set a Guinness world record and not surprisingly it exceeded expectations, passing the five million mark in just under 14 hours.

I'll go through a few of the interesting improvements and new features that i found. Please bear with me for repeating some the new features as i'd already covered them in my review of ff3 beta edition earlier.


The Awesome bar

The new location bar ( nicknamed The Awesome Bar) is by far the best and most used improvement in ff3. When you start typing into the Awesome Bar, Firefox starts searching through your browsing history and bookmarks. The Awesome bar shows you a dropdown menu of pages, and when you see the page you want, you can just arrow or mouse down and select it. It also conveniently weights the search results to favor frequently-visited pages and pages you visited more recently.

The smart auto-complete function remembers not just pages' addresses but also their titles. Heres an example of how extremely simple it makes my life. If i want to go a blog with a name Amateurs coding i dont need to remember the url http://www.kgmodi.blogspot.com . juist typing "amateur" is enough for firefox to zero in on the site.


Bookmarking - Quicker and Easier

On the far right side of the location bar is a star. One click and the current page is immediately bookmarked, into an unsorted bookmark section. Click again on the star and you can edit the bookmark, where you can add tags. If you type a tag word into the location bar you will get a list of sites from your history and bookmarks that have also been tagged with that same word. try it out.


Streamlined look and the BACK button

Firefox’s skin now automatically matches the general UI of your OS and looks more streamlined with a focus on a larger back button – possibly the most used button for navigation.
Surprisingly this larger back button is missing on my Ubuntu verion of ff3 !


Add-On Manager Improvements

The addon manager provides a list of recommended add-ons. You can also search for new ones and find more complete add-on descriptions with ratings. installation is pretty simple.


improved Zoom

The new zoom is much better. The entire page zooms in and out, with the graphics, interactive elements, text, and layout all remaining in proportion to one another unlike earlier versions where zooming haphazardly overlaps various elements as you zoom.
Firefox 3 also seems to remembers the zoom setting the site for your next visit.


non intusive password manager

Firefox 3's password manager is much more polite about offering to remember Web passwords. It asks you if you'd like to save your password in an unobtrusive strip atop the browser window, not a pop-up dialog.


online app's support

In the past you’d click on an email address in a Web site and your computer’s default email application would open up to send a message to the linked address—even if you never email through the program ( read Microsoft Outlook ). Now you can choose a Web mail clients (like Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo! Mail) to launch when you click on that email address.


Reality check , Is firefox good enough to beat ie ?
Internet Explorer, for better or for worse, still enjoys a significant advantage in market share, but data show this advantage eroding. According to study that judged the market share by the traffic at a particular Web site, Firefox gained almost 8 percent over Internet Explorer for the month of May, year over year, moving from just over 26 percent of all visitors to 33 percent. Internet Explorer lost a total of 9 percent to other browsers in that time frame.
And there's Apple's Safari,another competitior that gained almost 3 percent.


Three years in development, over 15,000 bug fixes and feature improvements, remarkable performance gains, multiple OS integration—you could say the several hundred engineers working on Firefox have been busy. And their work has paid off.
a big thumbs up to firefox 3

I'll be reviewing a few good addon's for firefox 3 soon. so keep checking.
and also comment on your experience with firefox 3.

Heres a wall paper i designed in photoshop. Actually cant say i designed it but more like accidently created it while fiddling with some interesting tools in photoshop. hoping to come up soon with many more.