Books As Gifts

I have always loved gifting books, in fact during Five Point Someone days I had gifted around 10 copies to my friends on their birthday. Surely, it would be a very bad idea to gift someone who hates reading, but for occassional to bookworms it is a very nice idea. It's my wife's brithday this weekend, she loves books, after a bit of research and discussion with my friend Sajal, I have shortlisted three following books, in case you have any better recommendations please leave a comment:

Best SD Card For Smartphones

I rooting my HTC Legend, I was huting for a good phone to keep all the apps in SD card as the HTC Legend does not have much internal memory. My search ended when I found SanDisk Mobile Ultra on Flipkart, it is a Class 6 card. Ordered and waiting for superfast Flipkart to deliver it :-)

Second Show : An Really Different Movie : A Tiny Review

After hearing about the movie Second Show from my cousins during my recent visit to Kerala, I planned to watch it last night. The movie started with unfamiliar faces and didn't seem to be very interesting but I decided to watch for some more time as I wanted to keep myself awake and I also expected the movie will become interesting as the plot develops. The lead role (Lalu) is played by Mammooty's son, which I came to know today only. The movie has action, romance, some amount of suspense, shows the bond of friendship between Lalu & Kurudi amazingly well & more importantly it was very realistic, almost all parts of the movie has been written such that it connects well to the reality.

If you like watching Malayalam movies, or if you are a movie buff you should watch it.

Kudos to Flipkart

Flipkart.com is my favourite online store to buy books, I have even bought a digital camera from Flipkart. Last week, my best friend told she'll be leaving for London and I wanted to send her some books, I ordered them on Flipkart and request them to deliver it within 2 days and to my surprise they delivered it they very next day, wow! Thank you Flipkart.

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Leaves & Dussehra

Yesterday my best friend asked me why I didn't give her leaves on Dusshera, for a moment I thought I heard her wrong, then I asked her, "What leaf? Why?". She told me that there is a custom where people exchange leaves and receiving these leaves was considered to be lucky. Well, I didn't know any of this till now, so I did some research to find out about the custom.

Primarily, there are two tree leaves that are used, one is Apta/Apati & Shammi. Also, there are two legends surrounding the custom, one related to the Ramayana & other to Mahabharata.

Shammi leaves

One legend has it a young man named Kautsa in Ayodhya after attaining his education from his guru Varatantu offered him Gurudakshina (Gurudakshina refers to the tradition of repaying one's teacher or guru after a period of study or the completion of formal education) which he declined to accept, but when Kautsa insisted Guru Varatantu asked for 14 crore gold coins. Kautsa approached Lord Ram for help, and Lord Ram promised to help him and asked him to wait near the Shammi & Apta tree in his village. In 2 days time, Lord Ram with the help of Lord Kuber - Lord of wealth - showered gold coins from the leaves of Shanu and Apati Tree and the leaves of the trees became gold coins. Kautsa collected the coins and gave 140 million gold coins to Guru Varatantu. The rest of coins were distributed to the needy by Kautsa. This happened on a Dussehra day. To commemorate this event people collect leaves of Apta tree and present it as sona or gold.

Apta leaf exchange on Dussehra

Another legend says it is believed that in the Mahabharata, the Pandavas after wandering in the forest for 12 years, hung their weapons on a Shammi tree before entering the court of king Virat to spend the last one year undercover. After the completion on the day of Dussehra, they brought down the weapons from the tree and declared their true identity. Since that time the exchange of Shami leaves on Dussehra day became a symbol of goodwill and victory.

Apta tree, Bauhinia Racemosa, is also known as 'Sonpatta', being considered to be as valuable as gold for its medicinal value. Apta is used as a cure for digestive diseases such as diarrhoea and dysentery & it has anti-tumour qualities and is used to treat the first stages of cancer.

There might be numerous stories associated with the distribution of these leaves, but one thing is that people are always seen to be wishing the good of the other while giving them the leaves.

Newest EditPlus 3.30

EditPlus was released with some amazing features Tortoise SVN integration, support for SFTP authentication using Pagent, virtual space & lot's of new feature. Here's a screenshot.

How To Use The New Rupee Symbol In Your Documents

It's really nice that Indians now have their own currency symbol, but it is still to come up in common fonts available on our PC, so for the time being we need to use an additional font. Here's how you can install the font on your PC and use it.

First download the font Rupee Foradian.

(Windows Users)

Open C:\Windows\Fonts and copy the downloaded file there.

Windows 7 users please check here how to install the font.

(Linux Users)

Copy the downloaded font to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ ; create the directory if required.

Now, start your favourite word processor software and use ` (back-tick) to use rupee symbol by selecting the newly installed font.

Enjoy using the new font.