Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Almost everything that an average person does, is based on the cool factor... " People do various things for various reasons - money, fame, goodness of their hearts... but there is one thing that drives most people - perception, what others have about them... This is something that I like to call the cool factor and you may already have other names for it. Coolness is the generally perceived notion of a certain activity or quality, and if more people think it is cool, the stronger will it stick and harder it is to remove. Stereotypes Now, let's start off by taking a simple example. In the picture on the left, Actor (Guest Character) from Artistick is standing in one of the most typical poses that is normally shown in movies - As you can see, there is a quality in him that makes him look really cool. One, the "cooling" glasses, two, the slightly bent head, three, no smile and four, the cigarette. Whether you think of it as cool or

Swami Nikhilaananda said: "Sometimes, little stories are really funny... and have a certain amount of truth hidden in them " The following is an email forward that I got... I found it quite witty and worth of sharing. So, here goes. An Indian tourist walks into a curio shop in San Francisco. Looking around at the exotica, he notices a very life-like, life-sized bronze statue of a rat. It has no price tag, but is so striking he decides he must have it. He takes it to the owner: "How much for the bronze rat?" "Twelve dollars for the rat, one hundred dollars for the story," says the owner. The tourist gives the man twelve dollars. "I'll just take the rat, you can keep the story." As he walks down the street carrying his bronze rat, he notices that a few real rats crawl out of the alleys and sewers and begin following him down the street. This is disconcerting; he begins walking faster. But within a couple blocks, the herd of rats behind him grow

Baba Gyani Triviani said: " Entanglement is one of the best games I have played " Gopherwood Studios have come up with a brilliant game - Entanglement . The beauty of the game lies in the simplicity of design and the fact that you will never stop playing it! Objective You have a hexagonal board (by default) and have hexagonal tiles that you have to place within. The tiles have small paths etched on them, and you can rotate the tiles clockwise or anti-clockwise. The objective of the game is to create a path out of the tiles. Each time you place a tile, a little red streak goes through the path. You have to try to make the path as long as possible... But don't be deceived into thinking that it's trivial. The game is quite hard, for pretty soon you will run into all kinds of dead ends. Every time you place a tile, you should not only be thinking of your way ahead at that instant, but also should try to create multiple paths in parallel that can be used some time later.

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Nothing works better than economic strangleholds... Whether it is a game or a country " Economic stranglehold is a simple concept... Stop the money supply, and people will start acting like fish out of water, gasping, suffocating... Money, from ages together, has been an extremely vital component. You need money to do almost anything - Starting from buying basic amenities like food and clothing, till items of luxury. Economic strangulation technique in a game Red Alert 2 is a superb Command and Conquer game (akin to Age Of Empires, except that it has modern weapons and tanks instead of sword wielding horsemen) and when I used to play it in the beginning, I used to fight head-on, by continuously engaging in periodic skirmishes with the enemy, destroying their units, while I also lost a lot of mine. In the beginning, my techniques involved bloodshed, involved a lot of losses on both sides. And at times, I found that when I needed a lot of units as s