Off Topic- Thai Airways Espnstar.com Wimbledon Contest

You know, sometimes I do things on a whim, without any rhyme or reason! I watch Tennis a lot, at least I try to catch up all the grand slams. No, no watching Tennis is not what I am calling doing things without a rhyme or reason.

I tried to predict the winners for Wimbledon 2008 at Thai Airways ESPNStar.com Contest. Now that clearly belongs to 'doing things without rhyme or reason.'

But it got curiouser from there. I am using Mozilla Firefox and I tried filling out the form. Jeez it would not let me pick 'female' as my gender. And I must say that is mighty irritating. I mean in this age and time? Could be a bug? That is a stupid bug if it is.

Could be a malware/virus on my computer. But then if you have sometime to spare and if you use firefox would you please try this and let me know if it is a virus or not?

PS. I picked Roger Federer and Svetlana Kuznetsova as my winners. I am bored with Federer winning Wimbledon so many times but then he has not won anything this year and I am sure he is going to try hard. Kuznetsova I picked up on a whim! She also seems to be in form.

PPS. I am mailing to the good folks at contest@espnstar.com too. Let us see if there is something in this or if it is just my computer.

Update 1- Asked a friend who was online to try this out for me. She says she too can't pick 'female' as her gender in Firefox but can do so in IE. Now I have no idea what percent of the market is with Firefox but it is a mighty decent browser. Were the ESPN Star guys rushing when they did the site?

Off Topic- Specimen of Brilliance

I thought I have come a long way in ignoring a typical IIT UG rant (let me state at the outset that at IIT I belonged really to the scum of the earth category 'HSS Ph.D.' That is doing a Ph.D. in Humanities and Social Sciences). Most of the times I don't even bat an eyelid when some of them come and leave comments on posts written long back and tell me-

"Btw its a classic case of UG's not giving two hoots about the PG's whom they consider inferior. I guess some of the blame lies with PGs too. They dont participate in anyway in the institue activities and are generally aloof and tend to keep to themselves thereby promoting stereotypification.

In case you are curious, I am a second year UG." (Emphasis mine)

I mean I have grown such a thick skin that I don't even reply to such comments anymore.

But yesterday was different. I read an article by one of the specimens of brilliance, a Mr. Aditya Jha in Indian Express. For most of the time I was reading what has been said before, if you open too many IITs (as the HRD minister is said to be planning) brand IIT gets diluted. Then Mr. Jha really demonstrates his brilliance when he says-

"Brand IIT is not about IITs; it’s about IIT-ians. And, mostly, it is about undergraduate IIT-ians at that. People who have done M-Tech from IITs always feel discriminated against. Since they never cracked the JEE, there’s no way they will be accepted into the tribe."

Will someone go and remind Mr. Jha that the company he works for (Infosys) was co-founded by an IIT Kanpur PG. Yes, Mr. Narayan Murthi undoubtedly did a PG course from IITK and still founded a company like Infosys that employs the likes of Mr. Jha. But this could be a little too much for the brilliance of Mr. Jha to comprehend.

Mr. Murthi has said in his speeches (I have attended one such speech at IITK myself long back) that he got through JEE but could not study at IIT because of the high costs. Now one also wonders if Mr. Jha thinks just clearing the JEE is the sign of brilliance or actually doing an UG course would also do something to a person? Whatever the likes of Mr Jha think, I think Mr. Murthi did fine for himself even if he just did a PG course from IITK.

Update- After reading Sidhu's comment on this post, I went back to the article and checked the comment section of the article on IITs. Left a comment of my own too. The comments are much more balanced, I have to say.