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Written by Pradeep
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Monday, 25 May 2009 21:01 |
I am not a investor in the US stock market(so far, I have just invested in Indian stock market), but every time I go into WalStreet in downtown Manhattan, I get very excited just thinking about how much control this street has on the world economy. I am also quite happy now a days as ever since the general elections in India are over, the stock market has jumped more than 20% taking out lot of my losses.
This long weekend, I had my cousin visiting me from Florida and I was kind of a guide to him, taking around the Manhattan.We went to downtown, Statue of liberty, Wall street, Empire State building and Time square. Covering all these places in a day was quite hectic and it took us almost 12 hours (including our commute to NYC from Edison, NJ) - We had to go to Washington DC/Maryland on Sunday.
Just thought about posting some pictures that we had clicked over that trip!
Wall street was quite crowded with lots of visitors/ tourist, we had to wait really a long time to get our chance to pose in front of NYSE!
Recession had not taken out any excitement of the people to take a picture with the Bull. We all also took some pictures with the bull, with the hopes of catching it sometime soon.
Statue of Liberty was crowded as never before, the line for getting the tickets was endless and we had no hopes of making it through.We all decided not to visit this time. Just to get an idea of the people standing in the line, below is the picture.
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Written by Pradeep
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Wednesday, 08 April 2009 17:21 |
2008/2009 has been a bad year for immigrants travelling to and from USA and I dont have to mention the reason for this since it is quite obvious. I have been hearing lots of cases of denial of entry/re-entry to the USA based on your immigration status. Though I don't exactly know how many of those stories are true, I am pretty sure that travelling is not very comfortable these days, especially at the Port of Entry.
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Last evening I heard a case of somebody who works for a big financial company in Manhattan and had travelled to his home country for vacation. He was re-entering USA on a work Visa and it seems the immigration officer questioned him on his job, his status, etc and after a long grilling the officer called up the HR of the company that had hired him. Upon asking if they could find a local replacement for the job immigrant is doing, HR replied neutrally (something like maybe or may not). On getting that answer, the immigration officer denied the entry and gave the I-94 for that guy only for couple of days and asked him to leave the country within that time after settling his things here. Poor guy, had a house, car and who knows what else!! Looking at it, we could argue from both perspective. This guy was well settled here in USA and was living in this country for so many years, now all of a sudden, because of the economy not doing good, it was not fair to send him that way, that too its not that he did not have a job here. If he was rejected a VISA stamping or a VISA approval, its understandable. But rejecting at the Port Of Entry is something that would make that guy's life miserable.USA issues so many Visas when the economy is doing good and when there is so much demand for these immigrants as those jobs cannot be filled up by local people here.Probably this needs to be re-looked!! The other angle to look at it is, is it fair to layoff an American citizen and keep a guy from another country who is here on work Visa hired? Definitely No! No country nor any country citizen would approve it. That way, United States of America is a great country and people here are really kind enough to not make a big issue out of this. But things should not go beyond a certain limit where in locals would get offended as they dont have a house to live, decent life to live in this economy. How do we handle this situation? There is no definite answer for this. Everybody knows that things will cool down once the economy picks up and when there are more jobs here to offer for an outsider. So time is the only answer for this and hopefully we all will see a better Economy atleast by end of this year. I remember same was the case in 2001-2002 and everybody were talking about immigrants replacing local jobs and there was major protests against that.But eventually people forgot that when the economy picked and infact lot of American companies were in front run to request for a increase in the Visa cap. I just advise all immigrants who are travelling outside USA to carry all necessary/un-necessary documents with them when so that they dont miss anything that might be asked by the immigrant officer at the Port of Entry.Better would be to talk to your Immigration Attorney and your company HR so that before you travel you dont face a situation like above at the Port Of Entry. God Bless America! |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 08 April 2009 19:55 )
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Written by Pradeep
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Thursday, 26 February 2009 17:21 |
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I am feeling very guilty these days for my irregularity in writing blogs. Time is the main constraint for this. I have been trying to do multiple things at this point of time and hence I am not finding enough time to fulfill things that I promised on my home page. I was thinking that I should be able to give stock recommendations (I am sure there may not be many takers for that writing in this market though :) ), write about my fitness regime, learn more photography skills and upload some good photos, especially after looking at the photos taken by my manager at work, Anurag Yagnik. His amazing photo collection can be viewed at here. I must confess that this website was my first inspiration in creating praisedlight.com which in turn has opened up so many avenues for me. I now have the expertise in Joomla/PHP/JQUERY and I could use this skill set to start some commercial website pretty soon. I have been telling this to Sannutha from quite some time, hopefully it would materialize soon. I have a huge collection of Hindi songs, about 16 GB and I am planning to upload all of those to the Music section in my website. Though I found something to play songs, I was looking badly for something that would provide me a AJAX powered tree directory so that anybody can browse through the files/categories if they are looking at some particular songs. I am also planning to add a dynamic play list feature, by which user should be able to search for songs from any artist, any year, any actor or any dynamics like that. This feature would take sometime, but I think the first feature should be done pretty soon as I found that using JQuery it should be pretty simple. I also found some useful JQuery tools at ABeautifulSite So using all these, I am pretty confident that I could develop the said feature pretty soon. This technical challenge along with work at my full time job and time for family. especially for my little infant, Pranutha has made me to deviate a bit from the original plan. Sometimes I find it so funny that whenever I sit in front of my laptop to do something, if she is around she just comes to my lap and demands to play some rhymes on you tube. She is so adamant on watching rhymes that I have no other choice. But the joy that I see in her face when I play those rhymes are unmatchable.Simply amazing! By the by when I searched for Twinkle Twinkle for her few days back, I found a extermely funny version of it, sung by a south Indian lady in various Indian styles. Not sure if it posted by some individual or is part of some Telvison program, but trust me it is extremely funny. So if anybody has read my earlier postings, I sincerly apologize for not writing anything recently (except the one on Oscars). I hope I find time and inspiration in writing something worth reading. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 01 April 2009 16:56 )
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Terrorism is not a solution |
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Written by Pradeep
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Friday, 06 February 2009 15:06 |
 I have always been a critic of the LTTE actvities in Srilanka and elsewhere in the world. Nobody has any any moral rights to support to terrorism of any form in any country and especially when we Indians are ourselves the victims of it in hands of Pakistan. I have seen that many Tamilians argue that human rights have been violated in Srilanka and this is a fight against that. But the same argument Pakistan might put citing that its been violated in Kashmir and that is why they are supporting bombings all over India. Now we cant be partial that the argument holds good in one place but not in the other.
Though I am not sure about the human rights violation in Srilanka against Tamilians, I do know that lot of Srilanka based Tamilians have been killed and so have lot of Srilankan soldiers and citizens in the last decade or two. People from Tamil Nadu must understand the first and foremost thing, LTTE is nothing more than a mere terrorist organization, involved in killing innocent people and fighting against a elected government in Srilanka. Unless they stop doing this, nobody can expect the Srilankan forces to stop the killing of LTTE supporting people, because that is a Srilanka's national security issue. No county would like to have terrorist organization within their country. Violence is not a solution for anything, it would just create more violence in future which would result in a chain reaction. And last but not the least, how can any Indian support a organization that once upon a time killed one of the most dynamic, young promising Prime Minister of India. And when Indians are asking the whole world to take strong action against terrorism spread by Pakistan recently in Mumbai, how can we claim that the same kind of activity is the correct thing to do in Srilanka?
My friend, Satya sent me a nice picture of LTTE chief Prabhakaran. I thought about writing this article after seeing that and also after having some hot coffee time discussion with my Tamil friend/colleague Vincent. |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 17 February 2009 16:50 )
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