Poda Podi - Review

The much awaited movie starts with the sensational "Love panlama venama" song followed by Simbu(Arjun) nailing Varu Sarathkumar(Nisha) projecting that he is very rich. Nisha is a salsa dancer working hard to win a dance competion but Arjun is a possessive and a male chauvinistic boyfriend who is irritated to see his girlfriend practicing with her dance partner. Desperate to stop her from dancing, he tricks her into family life. How Nisha wins the favor of her husband for dancing is the rest of the story.

Though Arjun acts like a male chauvinistic maniac in the first half, he becomes a cute father and husband in the second half of the movie. How he overcomes an emotional breakdown and wins Nisha back is touching. The couple's chemistry has worked well. Good to see Shobana again on big screen. Varu Sarathkumar is such a natural- Given that Poda Podi is her first movie, the actress has done a fantastic job deserving an applause. Dialogues in few places get the audience's full attention and acceptance which could be seen from the whistles and claps. But there are places where dialogues were too lousy. Simbu's acting was flawless with his sense of humour soaring up as usual. 

The frequency of songs in first half of the movie is annoying.  Ganesh Janardhanan could have have been utilized well. And Varu's dancing skills could also have been projected well. The funny part is that what Simbu does for a living is not shown till the end of the movie. 

The opposite poles not only attracted but lived through many sorrows and pain and yet with full of love!

On the whole, Poda Podi is worth watching once! 

My Rating: 3/5

Good day!

The Krishna key

As i was sipping my coffee on a Sunday morning, I was lazily flipping through the pages of literary review supplement on The Hindu. Review about "The Krishna key" by Ashwin Sanghi on one of the pages caught my attention and I started reading it briskly.

As Da Vinci Code dealt with symbols, churches, path that leads to The Holy Grail and quest for the living descendant of Jesus Christ, so is The Krishna Key dealing with symbols, temples and Lord Krishna. India as a vast land has gone through innumerable changes through rulers, religions, beliefs from times immemorial. We have come all this way and what is left today is not even half the wealth India had as its own decades earlier. The Krishna Key basically emphasizes the facts which the world has forgotten(or misused) and portrayed it wrong.

The story begins with Anil Varshney handing over four identical seals to four of his friends - Ravi Mohan Saini, Nikhil Bhojaraj,  Rajaram Kurkude and devendra Chhedi. What is the significance of these seals ?What do they represent? What happens when they are united? Who seeks it? This is what The Krishna key is basically about. I do not want to spoil the suspense by writing it here. Some of the other interesting characters are Priya Ratnani, Radhika Singh and Taarak Vakil.

The Krishna key is a story with historical background intertwined with scientific proofs and with suspicious murders. I was spellbound by the facts written in the book and it left me sleepless at night. The story of Mahabharata in snippets before each chapter is really a good touch. The author has obviously worked the hell out in putting all the pieces of facts together in making a sensible plot.

But way too many facts that might sometimes be very heavy to digest.The lengthy conversations are capable of losing the audience. The author could have saved some of it for his future works. Other than this, the work is definitely a masterpiece!

Digging out the past, verifying with the data in hand, cross checking with ancient records and plotting a story is not an easy task though. This is indeed a one of a kind book and it needs to be read by every Indian.
Hats off Ashwin Sanghi!
You have written a remarkable story.

My rating - 7/10

Happy Blogging!

Online Shopping Sites

Shopping has become more fun like it never used to be before. Staying indoors and getting your favourites delivered to your doorstep is what everyone would want in this fast moving world. But beware of the spams too. Double check if the transaction you make is secure or not. I was browsing through a couple of sites and found them interesting with their attractive discount offers and coupons.

Here are some of the online shopping sites worth checking out.

1. Fashionandyou.com

2. Snapdeal.com

 

3. Bagittoday.com

 

4. Jabong.com

 

5. Myntra.com

 

6. Ebay.in

7. Homeshop18.com

8.Freecultr.com

9. donebynone.com

10. flipkart.com

11. bagskart.com

12. Fetise.com

                                           

Buying a share through ICICIDirect

Steps to buy shares through ICICIDirect:

      Assuming you have the demat account, login credentials for ICICIDirect and that you are all set for trading, lets go on:  Goto Equity tab and Click on “Modify Allocation” link. In order for you to trade you should first have 

1. Goto Equity tab and Click on “Modify Allocation” link. In order for you to trade you should first have the fund required in your Demat account. In this page you can see that your ICICI savings account number is linked. Choose your type of investment say, Secondary Market Equity, ETF -> Add the amount you wish to set aside for trading from your savings account. If you give Rs.10000, it means you set Rs.10,000 for trading purpose and the amount will be deducted from your savings account. The gross allocation and Net withdrawal balance will be displayed below.
2. Assuming you wanted to “Cash buy”  10  IOB shares which is around Rs.80 each, you need to    

i)                    Select “Product” as Cash.

ii)                   Select an “Exchange”-> NSE or BSE

iii)                 Enter INDOVE. If you are uncertain of the exact name click on “Find Stock Code” and the select the required stock.

iv)                 Enter 10 in “Quantity”.

v)                  Select “Order Type” as Limit

vi)                 On the right side, Click on “View your limit” and the box will be populated with the amount you allocated. In our case it would be Rs.10000.

vii)               “Limit Price” is when you specify the time when your share can be bought. For eg: You say “Buy this IOB share only when it is Rs.85 or more”.  In that case, you enter 85 against Limit Price. Limited Price should be greater than “Stop Loss Trigger Price”.

viii)              “Stop Loss Trigger Price” is  the least value of amount below which you do not want to trade. In our case SLTP could be 78. Also note that, you can mention SLTP based on ‘previous day’s close’ value only. To know this, click on “Get Quote” and this will show you the rate which you should be giving it as SLTP.

3. Click on Buy now

     

4. Click on Proceed and you can see the stock request being sent to the Exchange.

5. Click on “Order Book” link to see the status. Once the status changes from Ordered to Executed, the stock will get delivered to your demat account in mostly 2 days.

Note: If the performance of the stock for the day does not go beyond the ”Limit price” you specified, your request will get rejected at the end of the day. Not your fault though. You can try the next day accordingly.

6. You can goto “Cash Projections” link to view your accumulated stocks(only the ones in executed status).

Hope this would be useful for newbies.

Do write back for any clarifications and I’d be happy to help you.

Happy Trading :)

Cards versus Payback:

ICICI customers, did you know that your debit cards are capable of helping you in many ways than just getting swiped?  Not only do you buy things for the money you earned, you also get to buy things for the money you spend. This is almost like recycling. Most of the banks offer this facility only for credit cards but ICICI has been providing this for debit cards too for a long time now.

Payback, formerly known as imint is in collaboration with ICICI. The money you spend either by swiping or through net banking is accumulated as points in Payback which has a number of gifts that can be redeemed against your accumulated points. Say you have 4000 points, Payback has a number of gifts categorised for you to choose among them. The categories of gifts in Payback are home & Decor, Electronics, Apparel, Accessories etc. Choose your desired gift and click “Redeem points”. And there, your gift reaches you in about a week well packed and well notified.

You can also plan for a higher price gift and keep aiming for that product by accumulating the points. Or, if you are not interested in the gifts that is listed there or if you think that your accumulated points is not worthy enough for the gifts present, you can go for the vouchers. They offer Fabindia, Addidas, Lifestyle gift vouchers worth Rs.1000 for 4000 points. Certainly these are the best selling ones.

All you need to do this is to check if your payback card is linked with your account. If not do it right away. I recently noticed that ICICI site has included “Reward Points” tab through which you can view the points accumulated in your Payback account till now.

Other banks offer this type of redemption facilities through their credit cards. I have gone through the Citibank redemption catalogue and found it interesting. Most of them are gift vouchers. 

Guess that was useful!

Happy spending, Happy swiping! :)

SCJP 1.6 preparation

I recently took my certification for SCJP (which is now OCJP) and I cleared it 89%. If you are looking forward to get certified in Core Java I would recommend you to study the SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 6 by Kathy Sierra. I found this really helpful to understand the concepts in a better way.

One thing which you should be considering before taking the exam is that dont aim for a 100 % score byhearting the answers from dumps. Because dumps may not always help you and Sun/Oracle can always change the questions set. So please do not rely on dumps alone. Another reason is that if you luckily get a 100% you indirectly tell the recruiter who is viewing your resume that you scored only with the help of the dumps. And you also give him a chance of proving his theory right by cross questioning you. I have seen many of my colleagues who recruit people do this.

So get to know the concepts in the best way possible and try relating each of them to a real time example. I would also recommend to watch some videos of the concepts available in youtube. Because, more than reading, visualization has a stronger effect to let you understand them. But there are instances where you may want to know the pattern of the questions that would be appearing on your exam. After your preparation for the exam, try out some mock tests available in the internet which might give you a fair idea about the pattern. Important : There are many versions of exams available. Make sure you are on the right track.
Here I share a material which I went through post preparation and found it highly useful.
SCJP material.

You need to purchase the voucher from any one of the prometric centres like Everonn, NIIT or Sysadmin in the first place. The validity of the voucher depends on the availability of them. I bought a voucher for Rs.5845 from NIIT, Adyar which had a validity of 6 months.

Rock the exam!

Down Under, Egmore

                                Amazing place to hang out with your friends and have fun playing games. Located underground, this place is a chill out among youngsters. Snooker, Billiards pool, Snow Bowling, Video games and Foosball are the games they have. First reason why most people prefer this place is that it is relatively cheap to afford. It also has a canteen which is mostly like a living room with bean bag, couch and TV. And yeah that makes the atmosphere cool. Relax for a while watching cricket matches and start playing again.

There are people who spend their whole weekend in “Down Under”. It really is a stress buster and a great refreshment after a whole week of tiring work. This is definitely a must visit if you are a fun loving person and who wish to spend a weekend which will relieve you off your work stress.

The Big Bang Theory

I could not wait for the whole of How I met your mother - season 7 to get released so i started downloading file by file. I was disappointed after watching 6 episodes of it. Maybe season 6 made me so curious and made me expect more fun. While rest of the season was downloading I was browsing through my hard disk and found "The Bing Bang theory" Season 1. I started watching it and man, its damn cool and I love it. Very different from those that belong to the typical  "love/ romance/comedy" genre.

This show features four socially awkward characters. Of them, Dr. Sheldon Cooper steals the show. Leonard and Sheldon are theoretical Physicists and they talk mostly not in English but only in Physics.

Sheldon role has been well played - his robotic movements, geeky communications, his pride about his brilliance and his strict rules for himself and others make the audience laugh hard.
Penny lives across the hall of Leonard and Sheldon's apartment and freaks out being around Sheldon. Howard and Rajesh are the co scientists working with Leonard and Sheldon.

The season 1 of  Big Bang Theory kept me hooked up. If Barney Stinson is for HIMYM then it is definitely Sheldon Cooper for Big Bang Theory. Im sure you will love it.:)

Have fun watching it!

An insight into Share market - part4

Whoa !! My 100th  post. Thanks to all my readers for your continuous support.
I promise to keep you posted.

I have been researching more time on fixed outcomes on investments lately and I thought I should pen it down here. We can risk half our money provided the other half is safe. Thus the fixed income come into picture.
Unlike investing in equities and mutual funds which yield returns that is fully dependent on the market value there are a few ways where you can ensure that you get fixed outcome of returns before you start investing.
Say there is a policy which says "You invest Rs.15000 p.a for 7 years and after 15 years we return you get around 4 lakhs though your accumulated amount is around 1 lakh". Hmm, quite a good deal right?
Thats what you call it as fixed outcome of returns on your investment.

Like I said there are several ways of fixed outcome of returns:

1.Public Provident Fund (PPF):
                          Government aided. Can be categorized under Small Savings Scheme.
Below is the screenshot of PPF sheet. Interest rate used to 8% earlier. Now I found that it has increased to 8.6% as on Dec 2011. Minimum investment is Rs.500 p.a and maximum is Rs.1,00,000 p.a Lock in period is 5 years. The policy matures after 15 years.  Very flexible and a rewarding one if you are looking for a long term investment







2. Fixed Deposits:
                Not that this is very unknown to anyone. I have been searching for banks which offer higher interest rates for shorter period of time. Many private banks give interest rates upto 9%. But is there any bank which gives interest above 10%? Yeah I stumbled upon a few.

Tamilnad Mercantile Bank and Bharat Cooperative offers 10.25% of interest rate p.a. for less than 15 lakhs.
Check it out.

3. Company Deposits:
                   Like the way you deposit in banks you could also deposit in companies which gives you higher interest rates. Below screenshot might be useful to you.





4. Bonds:
                 This term is often heard in the investment world. Well, for newbies here goes the definition. The company that issues the bond holds a debt and promises to repay the lender with interest and  principal at maturity. In simpler terms, you lend a company some amount and the company pays you the interest every now and then as specified in the bond. After a period of say 5 years or so, the company has to repay the principal to the lender.
For now I have only started with Bonds. So im leaving this with here.

I have written here what I browsed through. Hope it helps you harvest your money better in future.

Awaiting your comments :)
Happy investing!