Yes you all got it right, I am writing here about yesterday's Indian victory in a test match against Australia at Mohali.
I was reading about the scores in the previous practice match vs board XI and was upset to see the performance of our side and decided not to watch any of the tests. On that note I missed the first day of the test match and heard from a friend that Aussies were some 250 odd runs for 5. I was bit happy but then started thinking may be there is a problem with the pitch. A splendid inning by Shane Watson the lone century maker in this test. I am sure he love India as his resuruction from the ruins happened here in IPL season 1 from RR team. After the first day I could catch few glimpses of the postlunch and post tea session. A balance knock from Paine made sure that Aussis could cross 400 mark and Indians were under pressure.
Who can be the man than Mr. Viru for these situations ? The quality I like and hate sometimes in him is the no regards to the pressure. He will try to punish most of the balls. A blazing half century provided a solid foundation to Indian total. Night Watchman Ishant Sharma showed a good defencive technique to last for more than hour to score 10. The great wall of India on the other hand was solid as always. In came the GOD of Cricket Mr. Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar and with his arrival at the crease you could hear crowd going wild generally what is observed when a batsman reaches a ton! That is the persona Sachin has on the Indian well actually global crowd. The partnership between these two veterans made sure that India was back on track. Later Raina, a real finding for Indian cricket managed to score 86. Tendulkar once again perished in the 90's scoring a mamouth 98 runs on mind you a tough wicket by then. With that Indians could score 400 runs and the Aussies could get 20+ run lead. The only missing part was the nemesis of Australian team, VVS Laxman but who knew at that point of time that one can not keep Laxman away from scoring in a match against the Australians !!!
Australian second inning despite a good start from Katich and Watson could only manage 198 runs because of some firy balling from Ishant and support from Indian spinners. This gave a very good opportunity to the hosts to clinch the 1-0 advantage in the series.
I was travelling on the that day and could get only the info from calls from my brother. One such call came telling me India 48/3. I was furious on Indian batting line blaming all the way to them till my destination. Day ended with 50/4 India, requiring 170 or so runs to win with 6 wickets in hand. The fifth and final day saw a good start to Indian batting with Sachin providing some resistance to the attack. Once he got out, it was all over for India, thought almost all of us. Laxman, the superhero against Aussies and Ishant who showed some resistance in 1st innings were the warriors protecting the 10th Indian wicket with 100 runs required. Despite his injury, the weared out pitch, the old spinning ball, confusion of runner and the Australian tactics, the Very Very Special superhuman made sure that the game will not drift away to the aussis. Showing enough confidence over young Ishant where they put a solid 70 run partnership, they proved that its really tough to beat India on the home gound no matter the odds. I liked the efforts Ishant put in his defencive technique and one of his shots the cover drive that he played could have made an opening top order batsman feel proud.
You could see a pin drop silence because of the pressure on the crowd buy as soon as Ojha scored that last 2 runs off his legs, the crowd was on their feet. I have never seen an emotional Sachin but he came running to the batsmen in the centre and hugged them with great passion, respect, pride and joy. All the team was rejoicing with the success they got and in such a close game. This showed the mental toughness of the side along with skillset the posess. With this India took a commading 1-0 lead in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy !!!
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
FACEBOOK and TWITTER – New medium of communications
When I first read this topic, I instantly remembered a lesson in my 6th standard English book named, “A romance of the mailrunner”. It described the adventurous, dangerous and challenging life of a mailrunner in old days when no other means of communication existed. When I start thinking of the evolution in the communication for last 4-5 centuries there are various significant milestones I can never miss out mentioning. In 1627 France introduced first registered mail. Then there was the morse code, telegraphs. The single person who can be give the credit of pioneering the distant communication is Sir Alexander Graham Bell, the patent holder of telephone in 1876 and followed by some groundbreaking work in optical telecommunication. This led the foundation for further research in telecommunication, mobile communication, satellite communication and the internet, the lifeline of everyone of us today.
Evolution of internet and computers in themselves have been rapid and quite thrilling. I used the first internet application when in 10th standard , an email via hotmail and then got introduced or can say addicted to chatting in following years via yahoo. Initially I used to chat with my brother in US and then started to chat with unknown people across the globe. I was very thrilled to chat, share, understand the thoughts, cultures, traditions from various countries. I realized the real meaning of a popular statement “communication has brought world closer”.
But on the other side I started realizing the amount of time I waste on these applications rather than doing some productive stuff. I consciously kept myself away from those for quite a while. After about four to five years a friend introduced me to social networking applications such as orkut, facebook and twitter. Orkut and facebook were found in 2004 while twitter came into existence in 2006. Today facebook is the web application with highest number of user count exceeding 500 million across the world. This number gets me thrilled but at the same time a thought comes to mind as to why people spend so much time on the web rather than doing things like chasing the hobbies and interests, exploring new things or even relaxing.
Entertainment Weekly put facebook on its end-of-the-decade 'best-of' list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" [So is the magic of these networking sites.
If I start recalling my initial phase of using these applications, I can see myself totally addicted with all the games that were there, old friends meeting online and talking about nothing (???) or making new friends, following the activities or twits of some of the celebs and similar activities. There was a facility to find the old out of contact friends (the ones lost in kumbh ka mela). There were also some links you can provide to your personal website and the blogsites. That is how I got whatever small audience to my blogspot. Recently these sites have introduced use of mobiles to connect, twit and chat. This add-on has been so successful that you can now see at least one or two out of ten having mobiles using these web apps. This phase was there for about one or two quarters.
When I see today the flip side of the facebook and twitter coins, there are number of flaws I could find. Let us recall the recent incidence of one of these being attacked by the networms. We have been told to change our passwords. This thing really questioned about the basic security available with these sites. We put our personal information, our friends contacts, a lot of people put their photographs, and many more things. If this goes in wrong hands I dare not imagine the consequences. The other problem I have seen of the sites is your messages are public where in anybody can read those which might be undesirable to few.
On a philosophical note, in day to day life we are not connected that well with even our neighbours, close friends or family members which are right there in the house, we claim these sites to be helpful for building social connections, we really need to sit quietly and think about this approach otherwise we will get a lot of long distant invisible friends and might miss onto the most dear ones seating right beside us !!!
When I first read this topic, I instantly remembered a lesson in my 6th standard English book named, “A romance of the mailrunner”. It described the adventurous, dangerous and challenging life of a mailrunner in old days when no other means of communication existed. When I start thinking of the evolution in the communication for last 4-5 centuries there are various significant milestones I can never miss out mentioning. In 1627 France introduced first registered mail. Then there was the morse code, telegraphs. The single person who can be give the credit of pioneering the distant communication is Sir Alexander Graham Bell, the patent holder of telephone in 1876 and followed by some groundbreaking work in optical telecommunication. This led the foundation for further research in telecommunication, mobile communication, satellite communication and the internet, the lifeline of everyone of us today.
Evolution of internet and computers in themselves have been rapid and quite thrilling. I used the first internet application when in 10th standard , an email via hotmail and then got introduced or can say addicted to chatting in following years via yahoo. Initially I used to chat with my brother in US and then started to chat with unknown people across the globe. I was very thrilled to chat, share, understand the thoughts, cultures, traditions from various countries. I realized the real meaning of a popular statement “communication has brought world closer”.
But on the other side I started realizing the amount of time I waste on these applications rather than doing some productive stuff. I consciously kept myself away from those for quite a while. After about four to five years a friend introduced me to social networking applications such as orkut, facebook and twitter. Orkut and facebook were found in 2004 while twitter came into existence in 2006. Today facebook is the web application with highest number of user count exceeding 500 million across the world. This number gets me thrilled but at the same time a thought comes to mind as to why people spend so much time on the web rather than doing things like chasing the hobbies and interests, exploring new things or even relaxing.
Entertainment Weekly put facebook on its end-of-the-decade 'best-of' list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" [So is the magic of these networking sites.
If I start recalling my initial phase of using these applications, I can see myself totally addicted with all the games that were there, old friends meeting online and talking about nothing (???) or making new friends, following the activities or twits of some of the celebs and similar activities. There was a facility to find the old out of contact friends (the ones lost in kumbh ka mela). There were also some links you can provide to your personal website and the blogsites. That is how I got whatever small audience to my blogspot. Recently these sites have introduced use of mobiles to connect, twit and chat. This add-on has been so successful that you can now see at least one or two out of ten having mobiles using these web apps. This phase was there for about one or two quarters.
When I see today the flip side of the facebook and twitter coins, there are number of flaws I could find. Let us recall the recent incidence of one of these being attacked by the networms. We have been told to change our passwords. This thing really questioned about the basic security available with these sites. We put our personal information, our friends contacts, a lot of people put their photographs, and many more things. If this goes in wrong hands I dare not imagine the consequences. The other problem I have seen of the sites is your messages are public where in anybody can read those which might be undesirable to few.
On a philosophical note, in day to day life we are not connected that well with even our neighbours, close friends or family members which are right there in the house, we claim these sites to be helpful for building social connections, we really need to sit quietly and think about this approach otherwise we will get a lot of long distant invisible friends and might miss onto the most dear ones seating right beside us !!!
Monday, September 20, 2010
Traffic of Pune and our responsibilty as citizen
Traffic in Pune and Our responsibility
I come from a small city named Sangli which is big enough with the infrastructure to support the population. Later, I became a part of life at Bombay and Bangalore each for sizable number of years. I am now here in Pune for past 11 months. All these four places were different in various ways but if I try to rate these in terms of traffic I have to say Pune will not be at least in top two.
According to my understanding a traffic in any city is made up of three aspects, the number of vehicles on road, infrastructure (roads, flyovers, overbridges, tunnels), and the attitude of people towards the traffic rules.
Day by day the number of vehicles on road is increasing and we have a very little control over this but what we can do as responsible citizens is to start thinking of various options such as carpooling, use company transport or public transport (which I know is in a bad shape in Pune). Car pooling is a very good option and can reduce 4 vehicles to 1. The most problematic vehicles in Pune I see are the 2wheelers as they are the ones not following any lane discipline, suddenly take any turns the way they want or come out of any small "gali" and join on to a main road. I cannot say that as the responsible citizens stop using those but can definitely say to improve the way we use them.
The second factor is the infrastructure. Pune as most of Indian cities has seen an unplanned growth in software sector and with it, has seen lots and lots of traffic. We have a very little role to play in the infrastructure development as it supposedly government’s responsibility.
What is left with us is the last and most important aspect of traffic management, i.e. following the traffic rules. This is the point I am going to write about in the rest of this article.
I was walking the other day on Sinhagad Road (foolish to walk on such an extremely dangerous road) and suddenly saw a bike rider falling off his bike. I went to him to see if he was alright. He has some bruises but not a major injury and he was claiming that the vehicle in front suddenly stopped at the red signal (which was a stupid thing to do as per his claim) and he was in no mood to stop at signal. This kept me wondering; did I hear it wrong or was I wrong till that point to consider stopping at red signal to be right. You have cars, buses, bikes, autos, all trying to make their way across to their destination without much regard for rules. If you can reach from one stop to the other without getting hurt or killed, you go for it. It is based on dare and extremely accurate calculation as we miss the dashes by few mm’s not feet. Upon realizing this, I started making a list of the rules which are known to most of us but not sure if follow those. Listing here are some of the rules enforced by the government that one can follow to save few anxious moments, small injuries or a step beyond, a LIFE !
1. Follow the traffic lights - Please do not honk on a vehicle which stops at the red light rather try and stop yourselves at the signals when red. This is especially important for the 2wheelers as they form the majority of the chunk of this rule-breakers.
2. Drive on the roads – Wow! Am I so stupid to write this here? Well, before coming to Pune I was of the opinion that footpaths, are made for pedestrain to walk but, once I was walking on one of these and was abused by a bike rider asking me to get off his way (Really????).
3. Drive from left and overtaking from the right - I can understand that many of the Punekar's have been to the United states or behave like US citizens, but this cant be a reason to follow their right hand drive rule while overtaking. We are driving in India guys, come on!
4. Use the helmets when ride a bike - In Maharashtra a must wear helmet rule was introduced when I was a kid going to college. I remember vividly that, I hated the guys who put this rule in black and white. Helmet used to disturb my hairstyle, ruin my look with shades, was heavy on necks and causing all sorts of problems. I used to make fun of the authorities for this rule claiming that in cities we don’t drive at a phenomenal speed then why this rule. One day, I read in a newspaper about an unfortunate incidence where a person from a known neighbourhood lost his life just because of a big blow on his bear head. Had he been wearing a helmet, the chances of his survival would be quite high. This made introspect about my shallow thinking and that day onwards I decided never to drive a two wheeler without a helmet.
5. Respect zebra crossings - Well the rule here is if you see a pedestrian crossing a road on zebra crossing, your vehicle should stop and let him cross. I heard few US returned people saying that in US the people walking on roads are treated with utmost respect then why can't we or even they who claim this?
6. Seatbelts in car - Lee Iacocca, President and CEO of Chrysler mentioned in his autobiography that for safe drive the front seaters must wear the seat belts and he proved it with enough statistical evidences that in case of accidents seatbelts are much more effective in saving lives compared to your high cost airbags. What he envisioned about 30 years back we are unable to digest today, amusing.
An interesting observation I could make with all these rules being broken that, many of the rule-breakers are from the people who are above the average educational levels (I am saying more than 10th std.). If you do not believe me then do some introspection, how many of us (definitely well educated) have broken either one or more rules from the above list once or more times? I would like to modify the quotes of Anatole France, "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know is right and how can you make that happen". So do we really know what is right and what needs to be done to make it right as the so called educated people?
I have a list of many more such rules and the fuss we made out of these. Still a question makes me think is to why can we not follow the rules ? Is it because of the bad life practise we are following? Is it because we are trying to win a race (a life we have converted into) with time ? Is it because we have lost respect for everyone, compassion with each one, patience in ourselves? Or is it because we just don’t care for our own lives anymore?
Well I know I have raised many questions here and doubts about our behaviour but here are some EXTRA benefits of following the rules; of course apart from the ones already mentioned.
As a first thing already mentioned above, no more bike riding without helmets. As I started thinking about it, really there are a lot of advantages with this. I no more need to worry about the dust, mud, insects entering my ear, nose, mouth or eyes. For girls especially in Pune who use all sorts of clothes to cover their faces from all directions have this simple fixture doing the job for them.
I stop at the red signal no matter what. You must be wondering what is the extra that, I have in it for me. As there will be always people who hate to stop at those signals and if you are in front of them then, you can just enjoy the mental agony they go through because of you and can laugh at them. Who does not like to laugh at others???
I do follow the speed limits in, well, many places. Now this advantage is from an engineer claiming an efficiency of a vehicle. The more you accelerate and decelerate, the lower your performance will be. The more steady speeds you drive at, the higher is the fuel economy. So we can earn some extra.
With all the sarcasm apart, the bottom line is we all know the rules that have been laid by the RTO, the concern is how to follow them. My solution to this is very simple, if we decide on a daily basis to follow one particular rule which others have been seen to break, we will become habituated to follow all of the rules within a months’ time and even can start teaching others from the society to do the same.
Finally with a pinch of patience, a spoonful of regards to others a handful of compassion and a whole lot of care for our own life, we can make a great recipe of descent traffic management.
I come from a small city named Sangli which is big enough with the infrastructure to support the population. Later, I became a part of life at Bombay and Bangalore each for sizable number of years. I am now here in Pune for past 11 months. All these four places were different in various ways but if I try to rate these in terms of traffic I have to say Pune will not be at least in top two.
According to my understanding a traffic in any city is made up of three aspects, the number of vehicles on road, infrastructure (roads, flyovers, overbridges, tunnels), and the attitude of people towards the traffic rules.
Day by day the number of vehicles on road is increasing and we have a very little control over this but what we can do as responsible citizens is to start thinking of various options such as carpooling, use company transport or public transport (which I know is in a bad shape in Pune). Car pooling is a very good option and can reduce 4 vehicles to 1. The most problematic vehicles in Pune I see are the 2wheelers as they are the ones not following any lane discipline, suddenly take any turns the way they want or come out of any small "gali" and join on to a main road. I cannot say that as the responsible citizens stop using those but can definitely say to improve the way we use them.
The second factor is the infrastructure. Pune as most of Indian cities has seen an unplanned growth in software sector and with it, has seen lots and lots of traffic. We have a very little role to play in the infrastructure development as it supposedly government’s responsibility.
What is left with us is the last and most important aspect of traffic management, i.e. following the traffic rules. This is the point I am going to write about in the rest of this article.
I was walking the other day on Sinhagad Road (foolish to walk on such an extremely dangerous road) and suddenly saw a bike rider falling off his bike. I went to him to see if he was alright. He has some bruises but not a major injury and he was claiming that the vehicle in front suddenly stopped at the red signal (which was a stupid thing to do as per his claim) and he was in no mood to stop at signal. This kept me wondering; did I hear it wrong or was I wrong till that point to consider stopping at red signal to be right. You have cars, buses, bikes, autos, all trying to make their way across to their destination without much regard for rules. If you can reach from one stop to the other without getting hurt or killed, you go for it. It is based on dare and extremely accurate calculation as we miss the dashes by few mm’s not feet. Upon realizing this, I started making a list of the rules which are known to most of us but not sure if follow those. Listing here are some of the rules enforced by the government that one can follow to save few anxious moments, small injuries or a step beyond, a LIFE !
1. Follow the traffic lights - Please do not honk on a vehicle which stops at the red light rather try and stop yourselves at the signals when red. This is especially important for the 2wheelers as they form the majority of the chunk of this rule-breakers.
2. Drive on the roads – Wow! Am I so stupid to write this here? Well, before coming to Pune I was of the opinion that footpaths, are made for pedestrain to walk but, once I was walking on one of these and was abused by a bike rider asking me to get off his way (Really????).
3. Drive from left and overtaking from the right - I can understand that many of the Punekar's have been to the United states or behave like US citizens, but this cant be a reason to follow their right hand drive rule while overtaking. We are driving in India guys, come on!
4. Use the helmets when ride a bike - In Maharashtra a must wear helmet rule was introduced when I was a kid going to college. I remember vividly that, I hated the guys who put this rule in black and white. Helmet used to disturb my hairstyle, ruin my look with shades, was heavy on necks and causing all sorts of problems. I used to make fun of the authorities for this rule claiming that in cities we don’t drive at a phenomenal speed then why this rule. One day, I read in a newspaper about an unfortunate incidence where a person from a known neighbourhood lost his life just because of a big blow on his bear head. Had he been wearing a helmet, the chances of his survival would be quite high. This made introspect about my shallow thinking and that day onwards I decided never to drive a two wheeler without a helmet.
5. Respect zebra crossings - Well the rule here is if you see a pedestrian crossing a road on zebra crossing, your vehicle should stop and let him cross. I heard few US returned people saying that in US the people walking on roads are treated with utmost respect then why can't we or even they who claim this?
6. Seatbelts in car - Lee Iacocca, President and CEO of Chrysler mentioned in his autobiography that for safe drive the front seaters must wear the seat belts and he proved it with enough statistical evidences that in case of accidents seatbelts are much more effective in saving lives compared to your high cost airbags. What he envisioned about 30 years back we are unable to digest today, amusing.
An interesting observation I could make with all these rules being broken that, many of the rule-breakers are from the people who are above the average educational levels (I am saying more than 10th std.). If you do not believe me then do some introspection, how many of us (definitely well educated) have broken either one or more rules from the above list once or more times? I would like to modify the quotes of Anatole France, "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know is right and how can you make that happen". So do we really know what is right and what needs to be done to make it right as the so called educated people?
I have a list of many more such rules and the fuss we made out of these. Still a question makes me think is to why can we not follow the rules ? Is it because of the bad life practise we are following? Is it because we are trying to win a race (a life we have converted into) with time ? Is it because we have lost respect for everyone, compassion with each one, patience in ourselves? Or is it because we just don’t care for our own lives anymore?
Well I know I have raised many questions here and doubts about our behaviour but here are some EXTRA benefits of following the rules; of course apart from the ones already mentioned.
As a first thing already mentioned above, no more bike riding without helmets. As I started thinking about it, really there are a lot of advantages with this. I no more need to worry about the dust, mud, insects entering my ear, nose, mouth or eyes. For girls especially in Pune who use all sorts of clothes to cover their faces from all directions have this simple fixture doing the job for them.
I stop at the red signal no matter what. You must be wondering what is the extra that, I have in it for me. As there will be always people who hate to stop at those signals and if you are in front of them then, you can just enjoy the mental agony they go through because of you and can laugh at them. Who does not like to laugh at others???
I do follow the speed limits in, well, many places. Now this advantage is from an engineer claiming an efficiency of a vehicle. The more you accelerate and decelerate, the lower your performance will be. The more steady speeds you drive at, the higher is the fuel economy. So we can earn some extra.
With all the sarcasm apart, the bottom line is we all know the rules that have been laid by the RTO, the concern is how to follow them. My solution to this is very simple, if we decide on a daily basis to follow one particular rule which others have been seen to break, we will become habituated to follow all of the rules within a months’ time and even can start teaching others from the society to do the same.
Finally with a pinch of patience, a spoonful of regards to others a handful of compassion and a whole lot of care for our own life, we can make a great recipe of descent traffic management.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Trip to Malshej Ghat
Here I am searching for the topic of my first blog ! But what the heck, I can as well start with the recent trip I enjoyed with my company buddies at Malshej Ghat on Nasik Road.
Well as usual a lot of planning, prework, suggestions, arguments, dissatisfactions and delights went into the pre-tour days of the trip. Debates were going on about why cant we go on weekdays, why not to some resort, why is the budget this and not that(I cant really write the number here :) ). Well I will need a seperate blog for each of these topics but in total whole of the plan was well chalked out.
Finally the day came of the trip. We had a 50 seater bus for those who wanted to be together in the group and I bet these are the ones who enjoyed the day to the fullest. Few were coming by their cars.
The journey started as planned +1 hour late. Here is a snap of Santosh raising Indian flag in front of
So i boarded the bus from the stop near Viman Nagar at about 7:45PM. After entering the bus to my releaf none of my colleagues or their family members were in businees attire which happen to be a rule in the company premises. The journey went on as we picked up people at various stops.
near Nasik phata, we were joined by the car-riders.
The journey continued through the roads towards Nasik. As a ritual it is a must to have an antakshari in the bus when on a long travel with a group of people and hence it was decided to start the same. The only problem was we were extremely hungry "Papi pet gane nahi de raha tha". So we took a halt at a place dhaba kam nothing and alightned the bus. W
e were carrying the food items with us which we started serving.
A general observation, when there is a group of people with some work to be done ( like idli serving in this case), there are always people ready to take the work on them and there are people like us taking snaps of ourselves. Well everyone has their own meaning of enjoyment afterall ! As you can see the tea wasunbelievable there !
We then continued with our travel and then the GAME of ANTAKSHARI began. Wow were totally unaware that within oursel
ves there were Kishor Kumar, Madan mohan, Sonu Nigam, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha bhosle and many Telgu singers whom I dont know. Antakshari was in full swing for close to 1hour45 minutes and yes our team won. By the time on the left hand we started observing the cloud cover over the ghat's of Malshej, our destination.
We unpacked the bags and were ready to rock and roll unfortuantely there was no rain on that day so an extra pair of clothes was just an overload. The agenda was jam packed, sightseeing followed by some games then the lunch and the DJ.
Poeple dispersed to their favorite spots as there were variety of things to enjoy like a backwater of a dam, waterfalls, green pleatue, steep hills and deep valleys, the forts of Raja Shivaji and last but the most important greenery (You know what I mean!)
After spending time walking around observing the beauty of the god crated nature, we decided to have a much needed lunch. The taste of food was awsome dnt know the reason may be it was the hunger but dont want to take any credit away from the cook. We played the vally volly for sometime till one of our best players stroke the ball on the roof of the building. This made sure we were on schedule for the big DJ. We heard that DJ was the best DJ inPune and recently won some very illustrious award.
The DJ was carrying out the fun games, dance, music, masti and maja. Energy was flowing like a force * distance.
I happen to be the singer of the day with my song
"Sach Keh Raha Hai Diwana" being appreciated by everyone from our crowd as well as those from outside our group. This was the first time I was singing in a literal open forum. I was on cloud 9 that time on hearing the words of praise.
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