GoodBye Harry Potter! The Boy who Lived!

It has been 10 years, since this ordinary looking boy with only a lightening scar to differentiate him, was introduced to us. A mere 7 years of his school life was enough to take us all through a roller coaster ride of happiness, sorrows & of course, endless debates.

Not by his skills, but by his magic he brought a frenzy among the kids & adults of today that has never been seen before. A magic that made kids & adults alike to wait for hours before the shops to get their first copy. A magic that had no counter curse not only in the Western World but all through the world. As an ultimate mark of his magic, today he has spawned an industry in the muggle world. A phenomenon with a minuscule chances of repeating itself. A Phenomenon that i am happy that it happened during my days of growing up.

A boy whom i am going to talk about, even during my grand old age(to my grand children!) - "Of how this boy took the world by storm". "Of how we waited for his books to be released". "Of the hundred forums we participated discussing his life". "Of the joy he gave us when we reach the final page of his books". "Of how he single-handedly showed the wizards & witches are also human". "Of how we all wanted to be a wizard, if not Harry Potter".

The boy who by his life @ Hogwarts made kids to look for their boarding school life that they hated until then. Finally the boy who showed that "Love transcends all magic". A boy who showed friendship, trust & loyalty are not just the values of a bygone era. A boy who got all the stardom(that all of us desire) but still desired a normal life. Good Bye! The Boy who lived! You lived not only in the books but also in our hearts!

Harry Potter - Questions (Un)answered

Most of us were left with a huge number of unanswered questions, even after finishing the book - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. A few questions i had were:-

• Where are Harry Potter& Ginny living - Grimmauld Place or Godric's Hollow?
• What are Harry Potter, Ginny, Ron & Hermione doing for living?
  
• Anything important happened in the intermediate nineteen years? Was there any more dark lords?
• Who is the Present Headmaster at Hogwarts?
• Are Neville & Luna married?
• How did George Weasley coped with the loss of his twin-brother Fred Weasley? What happened to their shop?
  
• ...................

Some of us would have even started forming our own answers to this question. Personally, I was really worried that i would never get (official) answers to these questions. Thanks to Rowling, an encyclopaedia that goes beyond the short epilogue of the book is due in a short time. Even in the recent interview to NBC, she revealed answers to a few of the questions of hard core 'Harry Potter' fans. Read the entire transcript of the interview @ Harry Potter - Final Chapter.

Some information we came to know through the programme...
Harry, along with Ron, is working at the Auror Department at the Ministry of Magic, and after all these years, Harry is now the department head. And Hermione is pretty 'high up' in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement(No surprises there!). Yeah! Contradicting the scene with Scrimgeour in Deathly Hallows.
Hogwars Head Master - A New Person.
Neville & Luna are not a pair.

After the long wait for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" got over, another wait for the Harry Potter Encyclopaedia begins... J K Rowling! Surely u r a great marketing ***** :(


Related Posts: 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Spoiler + Book Review'

Talent Nite @ IIM Indore

Talent Nite '07 took place on July 15, 2007. A rocking performance by PGP-1(No surprises there). Read about it at IIM Indore Group Blog. [Yeah! IIM Indore Students' Blog is alive and back]. Add the feed-Life at IIM-I to your feed reader for continuous updates on Planet-I.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Leaked

Surpassing all my expectations, Harry Potter(e-book) is out 3 days before the official release. The only disappointment about the book is that it never betrays the expectations and predictions of die hard fans. Was really pleased to see that most of the predictions of mine coming true. [Read my predictions - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows].


Spoilers follow:

• Snape is not evil. In fact Snape lived near to Lily Potter and loved her dearly.[Snape was the one who informed Lily Potter, a muggle born that she is a wizard. Until the day Snape called her 'Mudblood', there existed a very warm friendship between two of them.]
  
• As predicted, R.A.B. is Regulus Black
• No 'Gandolf' Business. Dumbledore & Sirius Black are dead.[The book portrays death as not a very bad thing. Rowling heavily borrows from the Christian notion of resurrection and the wisdom of accepting our own inevitable disintegration and decay.]
  
• Dumbledore's Biography is given the maximum coverage.
  
• Harry is infact a Horocrux i.e. He carries a part of soul of Lord Voldermort making him the senventh horocrux. Though Voldermort never realizes that.
• Deathly Hallows - Elder Wand + Resurrection Stone + Invisibility Cloak
• Elder Wand - A Wand nobody could defeat(Incidentally Dumbledore possessed it]
  
• Resurrection Stone - Gaunt's Ring
• Invisibility Cloak - We all know who has it
• The final battle between Order of the Phoenix & Death Eaters take place at Hogwarts. Harry Potter did not kill Voldermort. Voldermort's killing curse rebounds killing him this time... for ever.
• Neville LongBottom becomes the Professor at Hogwarts from Harry Potter's Batch... [Hope the subject he would be teaching is not hard to guess]
  
• Lots of killings in the book that u would lose count who dies and who lives at the end
• Epilogue ends with Harry-Ginny, Ron-Hermione and Malfoy's children going to Hogwarts[The one chapter that J.K. Rowling said that she has wrote in the beginning itself]

Best of the Book:
The first half is too good. Especially J.K. Rowling using nuggets of information that she has mentioned long before in other books to carry the story along.. [e.g. the wand maker of Krum - Gregorovitch]

Worst of the Book:
The second half is pretty ordinary and goes along the expected lines. As I went near the climax, i start even doubting that J.K. Rowling could have written that. For all we know, J.K. Rowling could have visited a few fansites and wrote the second half of the book. [Yeah.. knowing the most of the stuff before we read the book, kills the fun... ]

But thinking back, there is no better way that Rowling could have ended the book. Realized it on reading - "An inevitable ending to Harry Potter Series - Baltimore Sun".

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Movie Review

Ah! My first movie review in this blog... :)

Being an avid fan of the 'Harry Potter books', the only reason I went to the movie is to check - how much of my imagination of the story matches with the director's version. Thankfully the director has done a very good job - by not missing most of the important scenes in the novel and by not providing a word-by-word rendition of the novels.

Except for the scenes(in the novel) of tension between the members of the Order of the Phoenix - especially the one in which Mrs. Weasley would protest against saying the important matters happening at Headquarters - 12 Grimmauld Place to children, most of the other important scenes were there in the movie.

Few Important Observations

• On seeing Harry Potter teaching the other students of D.A. reinforced my doubts that Harry Potter would finally end up as "Defense Against Dark Arts" teacher at Hogwarts.
• Interestingly, no mention about Sirius Black's Brother - Regulus Black. J.K. Rowling, who was adamant that Kreacher should appear in this movie, has not given similar attention to Regulus. This could mean only one thing for me. We have to start looking at other places for R.A.B. Also no mention about the locket in 12 Grimmauld Place

Waiting to see the movie once again to really see the "movie"...

And with the movie looking good, my expectation for the book has also sky-rocketed.. July 21! Plz. come fast....

Sambhar Night @ IIM Indore

To explain Sambhar Night, I have to travel back a year down in my memory lanes...

Flashback. zhig..

It was the first time that I have been outside TamilNadu for such a long time. That too, Indore being a God forsaken place, did not offer much to a foodie. And one month into IIM Indore, my mouth has started watering on just hearing the names of the South Indian Dishes i grew up with - Idli, Dosa, sambhar, rasam, etc. Then one fine day, PGP2 guys got the wisdom and decided to take us-PGP1 to a Tamil Mess - SICA around 20kms from IIM Indore... They said it is a tradition at IIM Indore among tamils..

That day I understood, how simple & common food that u grew up with can become the 'Amirtham'[Elixir in tamil] of your life. I still remember the fulfilment i had after the meals that made me look double my size.

Flashback Over.. Back to Colour Screen..

And the tradition continues... Sambhar Night 07' took place on July 7. And another batch of IIM Indorians got to savour the taste of amazing Tamil Food at SICA, Indore.

Blogging Addiction???

65%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Yeah! Ofcourse! I dont trust this result from a survey of 14 questions... But still liked the innovative idea(of using a survey to utilize the humans' attraction to flaunt his addictions) to drive traffic to his 3 month old online dating website. Not only that, but also hoping that this would eventually help in the site's increase in the search page rankings) :-)

Hmm..

Hiding Navbar in New Blogger

As I promised in the post - "Tinkering with my Blog", here is a first of the posts under the category - 'how i did it?'

For removing the navbar just add the following lines anywhere in your Blogger template[Dashboard-->Layout/Template-->Edit Html] and the blogger banner will be gone forever.

<style>
#navbar-iframe {

height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none;
}
</style>

Just make sure that this code is pasted somewhere inside <body> and </body> tags.

For more hacks to remove the navbar in the New Blogger, please visit "How to hide Navbar in New Blogger" by Amit Agarwal.

Tinkering with My Blog

For the last few days, I have started tinkering with this blog's code a little bit.

For the people who have earlier visited this blog, you can notice the following things
1. Blogger Navbar at the top is gone for the good
2. There is a new sidebar sprouting at the left hand side of the blog
3. Google Adsense Ads are right inside the blog posts

Will try to explain 'How I did it?" in the next one or two posts...

P.S: It was very easy and there are enough step-by-step guidelines available in the internet for each of them.

.

'Blogs I Never Miss' in My Feed Reader

First to all greenhorns, A feed reader, is a client software or a Web Service which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing. For more about feed reader, can read it in Wikipedia - Web Feed Aggregrator. I came to know about them when one of my friends - Sreeram introduced me to Google reader and thereafter it has always been a love-love relationship between me and Google reader. It helped me to follow up a lot of blogs, even leading me to be the first commenter in most of the blogs. :) Slowly, It established itself as the first thing that i would open in my computer in the morning.

Now to the five Blogs I would never miss in Google Reader[Not in any particular order. Left out all the friends' blog since i do not want to bring my personal prejudice into this]

1. "How to change the World" by Guy Kawasiki - With the network he has developed, Kawasiki just brings so much value to each of his posts.

2. "Balaji's Thots" by Balaji Balasubramaniam, a California-resident Tamil Indian - His narrative style of writing is great and that too writing about a matter close to my hearts - Tamil Movies - this means i lap up each of his posts. But it is a 'No-Entry' Zone for Non-Tamils.

3. "Kiruba"by Kiruba Shankar - The first person i have come to admire just from reading his posts. As someone who has established himself in the Indian Blogging community, you can learn a lot about blogging & internet from his posts. Regular unconferences and various meetings arranged by him is one of the key reasons "I want to be there" in Chennai.

4. "Digital Inspiration" by Amit Agarwal - Though not all the posts are useful, u get to use atleast a few of them.

5. "Chennaiist - It's all about your city" - Again something I read because of the connections I have with this wonderful city. Thanks to this blog, I get to know more about it than its city dwellers.

As some one who is just six months old into the blogging community, I know i am still missing a lot of other interesting blogs. If u know any, ur suggestions are welcome..

I have a new hero and her name is Mika Brzezinski

We always love to see the movies in which the hero stands his ground against the might of the villian[since we never had the guts to do so]... But if something like that happens in real life, I believe it is the duty of the cowards like me to salute these rare heroes. Mika Brzezinski, an experienced newscaster and journalist - is one such person who stood up against the Mighty.

What did she do?
She stood her ground and refused to read her segment's lead news item on Paris Hilton on live citing that it does not deserve to be the leading news item. Clips of her shredding the script were the lead item on the Technorati search, while the blogosphere is alight with praise of her. (FYI - Paris Hilton is one of the most searched terms in Google).

Read the whole news here - 'I have a new hero and her name is Mika Brzezinski'. Waiting to see Mika Brzezinski of 'Times of India'...

P.S - Thanks Govar for the news.