A Very Very Strange Guy - R.G.V

I thought few of the best works of Ram Gopal Varma are the movies in his early days. And of them the best were Shiva, Rangeela, Kaun, Satya, Money.

But, he begs to differ. In his blog, RGV claims this:

9. Can you tell us the three biggest mistakes you made w.r.t your films?
Ans: Shiva, Satya and Rangeela because they have created a benchmark and all the time I get bashed up for not living up to them. Boo hoo hoo!

He says those movies are his biggest mistakes. That makes an iota of sense if you think from a perspective such as.. I don't want to be a great director..I just want to create movies just for my sake..i don't care how they turn out. But, I am pretty sure no body would be willing to produce his movies if it weren't for his "Shiva, Satya and Rangeela".

Google not good at Building Communities?

That's what Stan Schroeder over at Mashable concludes in this blog post. What do you think?

A snippet:

Is there a lesson that can be learned from these mistakes? Perhaps it’s still too early to tell, but if you add Orkut - Google’s social network which is arguably doing well, but also hasn’t done anything revolutionary lately - to the mix, it becomes fairly obvious that Google is not good at building communities. One more reason to bet on Facebook one day being bigger than Google, if you’re the betting type.

The Rise of the Rest

A very smart article dissecting and blending the history, present and future of the world's various countries their rise, fall and a lot more...by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. The article consists a lot of little factoids I've never heard or read.

A few choice snippets:

A young Chinese diplomat told me in 2006, "When you tell us that we support a dictatorship in Sudan to have access to its oil, what I want to say is, 'And how is that different from your support of a medieval monarchy in Saudi Arabia?' We see the hypocrisy, we just don't say anything—yet."
:
:
U.S. carmakers now employ more people in Ontario, Canada, than Michigan because in Canada their health care costs are lower. Twenty years ago, the United States had the lowest corporate taxes in the world. Today they are the second-highest. It's not that ours went up. Those of others went down.
:
:
So far, America has been able to have it both ways. It is the global rule-maker but doesn't always play by the rules. And forget about standards created by others. Only three countries in the world don't use the metric system—Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States. For America to continue to lead the world, we will have to first join it.

Read the whole thing. Don't miss.