My Brain Waves Are Broken: A Hilarious Tour of Capitalé,

A Hilarious Tour of Capitalé, The Game That Makes You Feel Like a Geography Genius (Or a Complete Doofus)

Alright, geography nerds and aspiring know-it-alls, gather ‘round. Have you ever been confidently told that the capital of Australia is Sydney, only to be met with the pitying stare of someone who knows it’s actually Canberra? (Don't worry, your secret is safe with me.)

Well, the brilliant—and slightly sadistic—minds over at Triviaah.com have created a game that preys on these exact gaps in our knowledge. It’s called Capitalé (a way fancier name than "Capital Guesser," I might add), and it’s the Wordle-like game for map lovers that is equal parts addictive and humbling.

Let's break down the five glorious features that make this game a daily ritual for me, and why it might just have you questioning your entire education.

1. The "Helpful" Hint That Narrows It Down to, Oh, You Know, ONLY A THIRD OF THE PLANET.

You start your first guess. You type in "Tokyo." You feel good. You feel smart.

The game immediately pats you on the head and says, "Good job, kiddo! The mystery capital is... on the continent of Africa."

Cue the record scratch. Tokyo is not in Africa. My entire sense of global positioning is shattered. This first hint is a masterclass in making you feel both informed and utterly foolish at the same time. It’s the game’s way of saying, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single, wildly incorrect guess."

2. The Brutally Honest Distance Meter: "You're Getting Colder... Much, Much Colder."

After your humbling continent reveal, you guess "Cairo." Surely, this is it!

The game responds with a cheerful: "4,321 km away!"

Four thousand kilometers?! What is the mystery capital, on the moon?! This feature is less of a hint and more of a public shaming. It’s like your GPS is actively mocking you. "Recalculating... recalculating your life choices."

3. The Map Silhouette: For When You Need to Draw the Line Literally.

Stumped? The game throws you a lifeline: a sleek, black silhouette of the country. You squint. You turn your head. Is that... is that a boot? No, that's Italy, you already guessed Rome. Is it a wonky-looking fish? Maybe a lopsided mitten?

This is the moment you realize you can't recognize countries by their shape nearly as well as you thought you could. It’s a beautifully simple feature that separates the cartographers from the casuals.

4. The "Useless" Fun Fact That Becomes Your Hero.

This is my absolute favorite part. Just when you're ready to throw your phone across the room, the game offers a bizarre, less-known fact.

• For Paris: "There's a 'Zero Point' located in this city from which all distances are measured in this country."

• For Ottawa: "This city is home to a 7.77 km long skateway, the largest naturally frozen ice rink in the world."

• For Ulaanbaatar: "It is the coldest capital city in the world." (Okay, that one might actually help.)

These facts are the equivalent of a trivia-obsessed friend whispering the answer in your ear during a pub quiz, but in the most cryptic way possible. It’s genius.

5. The Tease of a Skyline: A Slow-Motion Victory Lap

And the pièce de résistance? As you get closer with your guesses, a stunning photo of the city's skyline begins to slowly reveal itself. Pixel by pixel, your correct guess is rewarded not with a fanfare, but with a beautiful, slow-motion strip tease of architecture and city planning.

It’s the ultimate "Aha!" moment. The blurry shapes sharpen into famous landmarks, and all your wrong guesses are forgiven in a wave of satisfaction. It’s the game's way of saying, "See? I knew you could do it. You big, beautiful nerd."

So, why should you play Capitalé?

Because it’s more than a game; it’s a six-guess adventure around the world. It’s a daily dose of learning disguised as a fun, frustrating, and incredibly rewarding puzzle. You’ll walk away with weird facts you can annoy your friends with and a slightly better grasp on this big, beautiful rock we live on.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go guess a capital. The silhouette looks like a slightly melted ice cream cone, and I'm putting my money on Reykjavik.

Ready to have your ego gently bruised? Go give it a shot at triviaah.com/brainwave/capitale!

ITIL Framework and Corp Ladder

A conversation on a typical cloudy day in the life of an IT engineer.Replace this with your own IT platform (we the IT engineers and railway beggars are very terretorial when it comes to his/her platform) and your techno-jargons.

IT Engineer : We have a problem with our system...the Websphere connection pool...it's reaching the maximum number of cursors that can be opened for the CRM database that we just upgraded to the latest version supplied by the vendor. Users are complaining on slowness of the system and some are unable to login.

IT Boss : Oh ok...so the pool issue ummm...ummm...get someone to look into it. I gotta rush for the problem management meeting. Get me the ETA in mail (waving his blackberry ) ...say in the next 30 mins. And make sure you raise the problem ticket.


Chances are in the next 30 mins, the IT engineer will be surfing his surf-board across the treachorous waves of IBM Manual, IT Toolbox groups, blogpages rendered via google.Then at the magical moment he will hit upon some page written by someone who had banged his/her head on the wall in a similar fashion. The dimaag-ki-batti will shine with the glory of a thousand sun. The websphere connection pool settings optimum parameter values will present themselves as if leggy female models strutting across the fashion ramp.

Chances are in the next 30 mins,the IT boss will be blabbering his higher management on the 33 point structured approach methodology. In all comming meeting this methodology will be used to measure the data quality and availability. That very data which will be collected across 43 non-structured approach of calculating something that need not be calculated at all.

Chances are in the next 30 mins,the IT Managment feel very bored and ask the manager to add 44-th,45-th and 46-th data trend and decide the date for the next meeting.

The funny part is higher you climb,the more detached you get from the real world and the real problems.Sitting below the alter of the great board-president and his cohorts, the high priests religously track excel sheets hoping the issues get sorted out themselves.

Long live the ITIL framework and its holy practioners. Jai ho.

Sankat City : Almost there

Immediate first reactions first
-------------------------------------
1."Ekdum bheja-fry...paar fultu solid boss", that's how the Mumbaiya lingo would describe this phillum.
2. After a long long time,there's a Hindi movie( Rajashri pics not counted in ) that got hordes of characters. And every one of them is relevant to the plot.
3. Situational comedy that gets surreal at times. And oh boy, what a level of never seen before surreality.
4. The sincerity of the entire team is captured in frame to frame.
Not a single character is extra soft or extra loud than the scripts demands.
Chunkey Pandey excluded, but then again since when did you watch Chunkey Pandey for his acting skills.

But...but...but...after so many decades we could have had a worthy successor to Jane Bhi Do Yaroon ...sadly we didn't.

Handling so many characters with so much details is the biggest strength and weakness of this movie. Trying to establish each and every character's traits in the shortest possible time, as the story unfolds, the director seemed to have lost it midway.

To prove the point ask a simple question : Which of the characters do you feel for across the reels ?

Personally I didn't feel for anyone in the movie. Neither love, nor hatred. And it's either one of the two emotions that pulls you for the second viewing. As for me there was no attachment or connection to the characters, so not sure whether there will be a planned second viewing.

Having said all these, let me repeat again and again there are scenes and dialogues in this movie that'll be treasured in my grey cells for a long time to come.

Like the mermaid dream sequence,
like the moon and the bubblegum scene,
like the Manoj Pawa's description of Sikandar Khan's body,
like the Ash without Abhishek request

And for these gems, Pankaj Advani aap ke liye A VERY BIG SALUTE. Saar next time there's no escape...it's got to be even crazier than this.

Flogging the dead blog

From now on this blog will try to rise out of the ashes successfully like the Phoneix or as unsucessfully as Mr. Ricky Ponting.

Any thing blog-worthy like

1. The U,V,W,X,Y or Z turns of the econonic downturn which is as cyclical as Yahoo Shammi Kapoor's pelvic thrusts while gyrating to "Aao Twist Kaare". Seriously yaar ! I keep on hearing that there's been the biggest recession since 1920s but no banker yet to committed suicide by jumping from the Wall Street sky-scrapers. Is something fishy-fishy going under the water. Somebody needs to do a deep-dive.

2. Slippery oil prices slipping up and down as if a monkey climbing an oiled bamboo. Up it goes three centimeters and down it comes two centimeters, so Bablu tell me how long will it be till the bandaar stops the pole dancing and be content eating the banana.

3. Manmohona UPA goberment and Pranab-babu's bujet which was even less colorful than Mannu-ji "you can have it in any color so long as it is buloo" paagdi. On a related note I cannot think of any Kangress politician with a colorful wardrobe. Sonia-ji's favorite color is white,Rahul like it white... and take others A.K. Anthony,S.M.Krishna,Pranab Mukherji it's a "Kyun chaunk gaaye Tide" ad. Now realising what a pivotal role Shivraaj Patil played in the last ministry.

4. Budhdo-babu whose only difference with his Russian counterpart Gorbachev would be that after the left are left no-where,the poor guy won't get a teaching job at the Kolkata University Bangla Dept. Sooner or later Momota didi who is her unique way is a Lady Yell-It-Queen would take over the reigns. As Nokur-mama would've said with a disapproving nod "Ghor Koli..Ghor Koli !!"

5. Brain dead Hollywood flicks where New York will be ravaged one more time by
A)Aliens
B)Natural Disaster
C)Robots
D)Zombies
or a combination of two or more of the above mentioned forces.
While the Bollywood director saab will watch and rewatch these flicks and cut-copy-paste with
A) Heavy dosage Kiron Kher as the loud Punjaabi Maa
B) A Fibreless zero calorie heroine
C) Heavy Moral Fibre ( Compensating on the fibre department where the hero won't sleep or kiss the heroine without the saat-phere)
D) lil bit of SRK hamming + Bachchan Sr voiceover
= Lo kaar lo baat baan gaya nah hit phillum formula

will be followed like a paparazzi, stripped like a LA lap-dancer and then blogged like umm whatelse a worthless blogger.

In short nothing will be spared, including reader's sanity. So keep on following at your own peril.

Basically Blah

From the BBC article "Who knows why oil prices are high"

So what is it that moves oil prices up and down?
"It's the fundamentals, stupid," says Mark Lewis from Energy Market Consultants.
The fundamentals are factors that influence the supply of, and demand for, oil.

"We really don't know what the fundamentals are doing at any point in time," Mr Lewis says.
"The markets are looking for signals from the fundamentals. Some of them are irrelevant, some of them are wrong, some of them are meaningless, but they affect prices nevertheless."

Believe me this two paragraphs are from the same article which finally says no body has any clue why the oil-prices have gone high. Another case of a confidently confused analyst. Wish I got a job like Mr. Lewis that pays me for uttering gibberish.

Olympia : Gods' Abode

Oly beef steak --- Just ask any true-blue Kolkatan about it and if he/she doesn't get misty eyed with nostalgia there's definitely a problem with that bugger's lineage.

Did you know Ritwik Ghatak had his last drink with Uttam Kumar in this pub discussing about their next film. Ghatak had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital where he took his last breath. There are so many such stories associated with the stalwarts of Bong-heartland and this pub. I wish someone comes up with a book on the known and unknown stories of this legendary pub on the Park Street.

Long live Oly pub and its steaks -- HIC

[ pic courtesy : Oly pub group on Facebook ]

It's all becoz of the software bug

If you've seen the movie Office Space, you must remember the priceless expression on the faces of the 3 software programmers, when they found out that their money swindling virus that was supposed to deduct a few pennies only, has amassed a whooping $305,326.13 only a day after it was introduced. And this was followed by the declaration from Micheal Bolton with a dead-pan humor that it must've been a bug in the code that he overlooked.

Phew...sometimes real life follows the reel life!!!

The estimated 500+ billion dollar losses in sub-prime will now be attributed to a software glitch that apparently caused wrong AAA+ ratings for these stinky investments.

Somewhere in some corner of this zaleem IT world, entrapped in a cubicle, a computer programmer is scanning through lines and lines of if-else loops and is sweating a lot. Don't worry bro, pretty soon to save their own skin and regain the investor's faith in this "your guess is as good or as bad as mine" type silly economics, they'll implement another mandatory auditing like SOX or BASEL2.

So wipe those beads of sweat and hang on there.... you'll be back in action in no time adding more else-s to the ifs.

The Outsider

The Outsider has always been my favourite novel. My admiration started in the early pages where the main character Meursault informs his boss about his mother's death and adds "I am sorry", before realising he needn't have said that. Since opposite attracts, that was the moment the hypocrite in me feel in love with the urtmost honest Meursault -- an outsider to anything and everything surrounding him.

As they say, life really moves in circles. Last Friday morning I got a SMS from a colleague saying that he has to fly back home as his dad has passed away and he sincerely apologizes for any inconviniences caused. In my ideal deja-vu WTF moment I realised we all have become the Outsider from our own surroundings. And then I typed in "Take care...sorry to hear abt ur father.."