The most expensive and the dirtiest city in Europe is London while the most boring city award was given to Brussels, according to a British Survey(By 1100 travellers) which was published two days back. It did not surprise me at all because majority of the people I met from UK have told me how dirty and congested London is. One of my good internet friend who lived in England visited London once and after returning, the first thing he told me was that how dirty and congested London was.

Sources also said that Paris was the most unfriendly city, followed by London and Moscow. However Paris did it’s magic when it came to the Romantic place category. Yes, Paris was chosen as the most romantic destination in Europe and also for shopping and dining.

Also note that though London is dirty and congested, London won as the city with the best nightlife and for having the best public parks in Europe. Zurich was the cleanest city according to them while Prague was the best bargain city in Europe.

According to the Times Of India, here is the rundown of the top 3 places in various categories : -

Best bargain city: 1. Prague 2. Budapest 3. Lisbon.

Most expensive: 1. London 2. Paris 3. Rome, Venice, Oslo, Moscow

Most friendly locals: 1. Dublin 2. Amsterdam 3. London.

Best cuisine: 1. Paris 2. Rome 3. Florence.

Best shopping: 1. Paris 2. London 3. Rome.

Best nightlife: 1. London 2. Amsterdam 3. Paris.

Best parks: 1. London 2. Paris 3. Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen.

Most unfriendly hosts: 1. Paris 2. London 3. Moscow.

Most romantic: 1. Paris 2. Venice 3. Rome.

Most attractive locals: 1. Rome 2. Paris 3. Stockholm.

Cleanest: 1. Zurich 2. Copenhagen 3. Stockholm.

Dirtiest: 1. London 2. Paris 3. Rome, Athens.

Most boring: 1. Brussels 2. Zurich, Oslo, Warsaw, Zagreb.

I have just added a new wordpress skin to my blog. I was browsing nspeaks.com where I found out about this template. I liked the template a lot and added it right away. I have added the first default skin of Studio Press, there are many more colour versions of the skin which I will check out later and choose which suits the best for my blog. For now, this is perfect. Do you like the skin as well?

The most common fruit related myth is that bananas are fattening. Another myth is that fruits need to be eaten on an empty stomach or else they won’t get digested and will putrefy in the intestine. It is true that whoever created these myths have successfully convinced a large number of people into believing them.

It is best to serve a seasonal fruit after a meal, usually after dinner. Majority of the people know that fruits are good for health but not all of them eat fruits regularly. Did you know that nutritionally, the recommended quantity of fruit for consumption per day is 100gm per person.

Good Things About Fruits

• Fruits are 100% natural food

• Fruits provide quick energy and can be used as a snack between meals aswell

• Most Fruits contain a lot of moisture and are also low in fat and calories which makes it useful for weight-watchers.

• None of the fruits contain cholesterol and can be eaten by people who have high cholesterol as well. Only people with high triglycerides need to control their fruits intake.

• They are rich sources of fibre, antioxidants, vitamins and minderals.

• Fruits contain potassium which is useful to control blood pressure.

• Fruits are also used in making deserts as they are quite sweet to taste.

• Dry fruits like raisins, figs, dates are higher in nutrients than their fresh counter parts. Since they give high calories, its best to eat them in small quantities.

Facts About Fruits Comsumption

The most commonly asked question is “The best way to eat fruits”. Fruits have to be consumed fresh and raw as they are. The next best thing to eating a fresh fruit is rinking fresh fruit juice without sugar or salt. However fruit juice contains no fibre. Fruit juices are useful for sports persons when they require fluids and quick energy, or for convalescent who cannot eat or digest whole fruits. If you don’t have access to fresh fruit or fruit juice, go for packaged juices preferable without sugar or natural fruit preserves. Make sure that you wash the fruits in water throughly to remove the surface pesticides (depends, if any).

Always remember that a fruit a day can keep many diseases away.

Do you make a lot of money online or are starting out in this field and spending too much time online these days? Well it’s a natural thing for both categories of people. The ones who are already making a lot of money online spend a lot of time online working for their websites and learning new things to increase their earnings. The rest who have just started to explore this field spend time online reading and gaining more knowledge about it because they also want to make a lot of money online. It is a natural thing isn’t it?

But I cannot understand why those people fail to understand us who don’t make money online. They end up telling me that all my time I spend online is a waste. Creative thing according to them is only studying and reading books. Does this happen with you aswell? I don’t know about other countries but here in India, majority of the people fail to understand the simple fact that “People make a lot of money online”. Many still don’t believe me and say I’m boasting which is the biggest reason that I have stopped telling people that I earn. Only those who have visited my websites and have asked me that how exactly I make money online believe me. Either they are too ignorant or it is the lack of knowledge that makes them to not believe me. The internet infrastructure is really poor in India. Still a lot of people don’t have access to internet here, some places there are no broadband also, and even the broadbands that exist here are so costly that poor people cannot afford it.

To be honest, I really hate when people say that I “waste” my time online. I am proud to say that yes I spend a lot of time online. If I would not be so much interested in browsing, I would not be earning a lot of money like I do today. Apparently, those complainers fail to realise this little fact. I’ve been often targeted by my relatives who keep criticizing me that I just spend a lot of time browsing and chit chatting. They think I only spend my time online chatting to girls and emailing people, reading jokes, watching funny videos and playing games online which is quite stupid actually. I hardly play games these days, ever since I started earning online, the time spent playing games have reduced drastically. Then comes those complaining friends who think that internet is only meant to browse social networking sites like facebook, orkut, hi5 etc where one gets bored very soon. So they are unable to understand what exactly I do online and start thinking that I waste my time online and tell others also that he only wastes his time sitting on the computer. So I just decided to ask them that what exactly should I do rather sitting on the internet? They tell me to go and watch TV or go out with friends everyday, chit chat on phone which is just not my interest. It’s not like I don’t watch TV or go out with friends or never talk on phone. I do, but I cannot do it always. Also did you note that how foolishly they say, do something creative, watch TV or roam around with friends. Yeah why not? Roaming out with friends and watching TV all the time will help me in future. Going out with friends everyday isn’t something I’d love to do ever. I do what pleases me which is surfing online, reading interesting stuff and increasing my knowledge. And it is not necessary to do exactly what all other teenagers do.

I am sure that everyone of you who make a lot of money online or are preparing for that in near future must spend a lot of time online or must have had done the same before. Do you agree with me?

How is it easy to make money from an active forum?

Making money online from an active forum is easy because once your forum gets the exposure and you give are able to call it an “active forum”, then it is upto you to advertise or build links for your forum more or leave it just like that, the forum will continue to grow on it’s own. Your forum members will themselves refer to their friends and bring in more members, you will continue to get visitors from the search engines who will register and increase the member count and also the activity in your forum. The biggest benefit of the forums is the ease in getting content. It is not you who get the content for the forum, but it is the members of your forum who bring content to your forum and that too free. They make posts in your forum, make new threads and add content to your forum which gets indexed in search engines and ultimately bring traffic. You can make money from your forum even without visiting your forum for a month or more. Isn’t it awesome?

Is it really that easy?

Well not at all haha. If it was that easy as it looked above, everybody would be making good sums of money from their forums. It isn’t that easy actually because making your forum active isn’t easy at all. Not everybody knows the right strategies to make a forum active. There are millions and millions of forums on the internet but only a handful of them are active. “Giving Up Easily” is the biggest reason why most of the people fail in making their forum active. Forums cannot become active overnight, it can take upto a year or more to make one active. Ask the people who own an active forum and they will tell you. Making money from a forum becomes easy only when you have worked enough to make it active. It is risky also as there is no guarantee that the forum will become active even after your extra hard work and without making that forum active, it is nearly impossible to earn much money from it. It’s better with a blog that will get traffic easily by adding content on a regular basis and a blog can start generating money even with little traffic because of it’s great ad placements unlike forums. However that is a different issue and will be covered in later posts.

How do I know all these?

I know all these because I own an active teen forum community and I know what it takes to make a forum active. And today I can proudly say that my teen forum is “active” and making money from it is just so easy. However I agree that if my blog would have had that much traffic as my forum, I would be making much more money than what I make right now but blogging wouldn’t be as easy as teenhut forum administrating today. Sometimes I don’t even visit the forum for a week(like gone for a holiday), I still make money. Moderators take care of my forum in my absence which makes my work even easier.

A lot of people tend to confuse and say that my blog is just another “Make Money Online Blog”. It is not correct. My blog doesn’t just share tips on how to make money online. However, it is one of the main categories my blog deals with. The major categories my blog deals in are : -

Make Money Online - google adsense, affiliate marketing, other ad networks, tips on how to make money online etc.

Webmaster Stuff - link popularity, SEO, search engines, bloggings, forum building tips etc.

Business & Finance - Business, Marketing, Finance, Investment, Stocks etc.

World Affairs - Infrastructure, development, world news and other world affairs related categories etc.

So you see, how the main categories can be broken into so many sub categories? So it is pretty ridiculous to think that my blog is just a make money online blog. My main interest out of all of the main categories is World Affairs which I may deal in major. The news about the world, infrastructure, the development interests me much more nowadays.

A survey published by Forbes Magazine lists Mumbai and Delhi among the world’s 25 dirtiest cities. Oh, how unfortunately news for an Indian like me. But does anybody care? Does anyone realise that our cities have turned into massive slums with open sewers and garbage dumps? Often the visitors complain but we argue with them and say that dirt is in their eyes and not in our cities and refuse to admit that our cities stink, but we alone are responsible for this mess.

The city life has improved a lot in most parts of the world but ours have declined instead of progressing. The city has grown in size, area and population but urban planning has failed to match that growth. A city does not become better by showing improvement in infrastructure. Planning is such an elaborate exercise in India with a specialised bureaucracy that it looks great on paper but in reality we are hopeless planners. We, the people of India are consuming more goods than ever and there is also a significant increase in the volumes of waste. Have our urban planners and civic officials worried enough about how to handle the flip side of high economic growth and consumer spending?

European cities were in a similar state in the late 19th century. They choked under industrial pollution, animal waste and sewage. The rivers that flowed past them were devoid of fish and other aquatic life. Urban planners and civil society came together and with the aid of new and clean technologies made a huge turnaround. Look at the Thames river in London today, it sparkles. It is really important for us to have such a turn around in India.

We can begin with improving health and sanitation services in cities. We need the use of latest technology in these services. Most of our sanitation workers work with brooms and bare hands, which explains the high rate of morbidity among them. Basic equipment like gloves and gumboots should be made a must for workers while vacuum cleaners and mechanised dumpers should replace brooms and dump carts. Citizens should be educated methodically on how to lead urban lives. Recycle the waste material, which is a major and innovative industry in India but this huge work force is in the unorganised sector and is hardly given its due. Urban planning is not merely about making grandiose plans, it’s about effective management of available resources, human and material. Start now before our cities turn into complete disasters.

Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan are the least corrupted among the 13 major Asian economies. India ranked 8th, far better than the 10th placed China in a survey conducted by Regional Think-Tank.

On the scale of ‘0 to 10′, Singapore topped with just 1.13, followed by Hong Kong (1.80) and Japan (2.25). India was ranked 8th on the chart with 7.25, far worse than the last year when it scored only 6.67.

China was placed on the 10th position with 7.98, much worse than the previous year when it scored only 6.29.

Philippines was considered as the most corrupt economy with the score of 9, followed by Thailand(8).

More than 400 expatriate business people were asked to rank countries based on issues that could negatively impact their business. These included red tape, policy clarity, financial reforms, transparency and liberalisation, PERC said.

The industry leaders, politicians and socialites are running a campaign that the existing domestic HAL airport and the new Bangalore International Airport should operate concurrently. “You know it would take 2 hours to reach the new airport, when the journey to Chennai takes only 30 minutes which will be quite unfair,” they moan and groan. Well, where were they at the time when the north Bangaloreans were slogging through the traffic to reach the HAL airport to catch a flight? Where were they when Bangalore International Airport Limited(BIAL) and the government were inking the agreement which said that the whole business shall be moved to the new airport because only then it would make business sense for the company? Where where they when the Karnataka government took nearly 15 years to decide the location of the airport? BIAL made a promise and delivered. Did the new airport become a reality overnight? Yet the government woke up in January just two months before the inaugration of the new airport to build its first underpass (to provide signal free route to the new airport).

I am sure that if the HAL airport continues to function, work on the new underpasses and other means to improve the roads and railways will slow down. Let’s not forget that our government responds only to crisis. If that is the reality, let us not help slow down the process. We need to crawl for some months to keep the attention of the government focused on the infrastructure. For every benefit, there is a cost. Let us all collectively pay that cost. You very well know that we are living in a country where the political leaders say that we need to cut down the production of cars because our roads cannot take them. We will strengthen that view if we provide an escape route. If we must work on a compromise, our proposal should be a win-win one. Don’t forget that “a promise is a promise”.

The centre tells high court that having two airports in Bangalore City is not viable. The decision to close the domestic HAL airport was taken because having two operational airports was considered economically not viable. This is a very unfortunate news for everybody living in south Bangalore. The new international airport which will be open from the end of this month is situated in north Bangalore. The biggest reason why everybody wanted HAL airport is that, it takes almost 2-3 hours to come from extreme south Bangalore. Bangalore city has big connectivity issues, too much traffic and very little solution. The metros are under construction, roads are narrow and full of signals, hardly any flyovers or signal free routes over here. The people traveling to short destinations, for example, Bangalore to Chennai, which is a 30 minutes flight would not prefer to travel 2-3 hours to the new airport for a 30 minutes flight. It will be very expensive and time consuming. This problem only concerns the people living in south Bangalore, and not for someone like me who lives in North, quite near to the airport. The north bangaloreans were against all those complainers. They said that where were all these people when people from the north bangalore had to travel south HAL airport which took 2-3 hours? If the government did not do anything that time, then why now?

Anyway the centre does not approve of having two airports in a city. India’s infrastructure cannot hold it and it is economically not viable. The decision to construct a new airport was taken due to the constraint on expansion of the HAL airport and the need for creating additional facilities in tandem with the traffic growth. The HAL airport could not take the increasing traffic and so the agreement for the new airport was signed in July 2004 itself and everybody knew that a Rx 4500 crore project was conceived and was being taken up. The division Bench queried that if the airport was functioning for 40 years, then why can’t the authorities wait for 4 years? Holla replied that it was uneconomical to have two airports functioning in the city and Bangalore International Airport cannot achieve the break even even after 7-8 years. The authorities were given the examples of London, Paris, Bangkok and Kuala Lampur having two airports within 19-15 miles distance.

But PR Ramesh, counsel for B Krishna Bhat said that as per the agreement, in the next 25 years, no airport can come up in 150 km radius which embraces Mysore, Hassan and other towns. However, counsel for RK Misra sought for a technically qualified expert committee to examine the infrastructure that needs to be put in place and the next hearind is slated for March 10, which happens to be tomorrow. Let’s see what happens, would HAL airport close or will retain for sometime more till the connectivity issues improve. My next post will share views on the government relating to the same issues. I cannot believe how ignorant and stupid can the Karnataka government be. Stay tuned.