Monday, May 28, 2007

Big Picture

People in the present day corporate are always told of one thing.. "See the big picture". While it might be a very good thing to do.. not sure how many would have really seen this big a picture :-)

Friday, May 18, 2007

Muscle Power over Electric Power

Heard about this.. Muscle power over electrical power. We have heard that cars or road vehicles need a push sometimes when they are low on battery or some such things... but ever heard that a train had to be pushed. This bizarre incident happened in Bihar.

Apparently a passenger train was stopped by pulling the emergency brakes. When the train came to a halt, it stopped in the neutral zone between two electric poles. When the train was being resumed, the engine would not fire up. Ooops. Irate passengers started making noise.. The driver then instead of facing the wrath of the passengers, requested them to give the train a "push". The train apparently needed a push for 4 meters.


The passengers heaved and hoed to finally move the train by 4 meters in half an hour. This is really hilarious... never heard of something like this.

Now just one thing is left, the captain of a flight comes on air just before take off, while welcoming the passengers on board.. also says "Welcome aboard XXX Airways, Today we are embarking on a flight from A to B. BTW we request passengers to lend us a hand in starting this journey by giving a push" !!LoL!!



Thursday, May 17, 2007

Yellow Fellow

Flowers are great subjects to be photographed. I am fond of flowering plants, and have a small garden though just in pots. How about this yellow hibiscus blooming away?

Monday, May 14, 2007

Missed by a Whisker

Well this is another of those posts which most of Bangalore bloggers would write about.. No cookies for guessing.. Traffic. Actually I will not talk about traffic per se but more on how I was surprised. My drive to work in the morning is, like most of us, in the peak hours that is 9ish. My usual drive time on a normal day (non holidays) is an average of 45-50 minutes. The fastest I have ever driven from work to home or vice versa is in 17 minutes, that was one day in the wee hours of the morning.

The drive time from home is an amazing leveller. It always happens that if I get through some part of my drive relatively jam free and make good progress, that means that I would most probably be caught in a jam in a different part of the drive. So some how or the other, the drive time comes to the 45-50 minute range. I have always wondered, whether there is communication between motorists in one part of the town to the other, where they tell that I have gotten through here, slow me down elsewhere :-).

There have been a few days where I have been slow all through and my drive time has been near the 1 hr time band. These days are not that often neither are they so far in between. Actually the evening drives back home more are less tend to be longish. I always wondered why. People who did come to work in the morning are the ones who are going to go back, then I should see a similar time in the evening too. But that is not the case, the drive takes atleast 20% more time. I presume the evenings also include people who do not venture out in the morning but venture out in the evening for shopping !!

But today was a different day. From the time I started from home today, it just happened that I never got caught in any of the jams. More so, I even did not stop in the signals where I am more than 95% sure to be caught in the red. I could not believe what was happening. Since I passed through the initial part relatively quickly, I was more or less sure that I would be slowed down later during the drive, just as any other day. But voila that did not happen. I was moving from one traffic junction to another in all greens. Yes !!! I thought I will make it this time, the sub 30 minute drive during peak hours. Myself, being a great fan of motor racing, tend to talk a lot of race lingo, so the "sub-30" minute thing. Actually I am so much into racing, that when I am driving behind a slow moving car in front, I increasingly start feeling that I am driving behind a "safety car" just like in the races :-P.

So coming back to my drive, I was like 1 Km from work, just when I thought I had the best peak hour "lap" in my bag, the jinx did set in. The traffic slowed and came to a standstill. It had taken me 27 minutes to reach there. I just needed a 3 minute drive in the last kilometer. The traffic started moving again slowly, but too slow for what I needed. I moved on and I had 30 seconds more to go and another 500 meters. But then the dreaded thing happened. The signal turned red, the second red signal in all of the 16 kilometer drive I had today. There it goes, I will not be able to make it. The count down clock on the signal was ticking by 20, 15, 10, 5 and 0. Then finally I made through the last 500 meters. So the total time I took was 31 minutes.

**Sigh** I missed my "sub-30 minute" lap by a whisker. I am not sure whether I will ever do it again. This was one of those rare occasions where I even came close to it.

Monday, May 07, 2007

Renewed Hobby

After a long time I tried something which I was fond of before - painting. It was something which I was fairly good at during my primary and high school days but never got around to paint anything after that. I has been nearly 17 years. So yesterday I did roll over the inertia and tried my hand at it. It was definitely hard thing to start of with as I was completely out of touch. But then was able to complete the painting. I chose a rather easy subject to start of with.

I made some mistakes on the way and was not happy that I made them. But when I finished the painting it was not the best of my paintings but it was better than I expected it to turn out when I started. I relived my school days when I would paint and try to mix colors to get the right hue. It was enjoyable. The very fact that I could start painting again itself is immensely satisfying. Now that I have crossed the first hurdle, I plan to paint more. So expect more..

Here is the one I painted




Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Spin your web

In one of my earlier posts I had talked about man made and natural, and actually I had talked about birds weaving their nests etc. Today I saw one such act of nature live.

There was a spider which had decided to make its home in my garden. So it had begun its construction activities. Spider Webs comes in different types. So this one in my garden, I guess, belongs to Aranaidae family which spins spiral orb webs.

The striking factor of this whole "construction" activity was the speed. This guy was amazingly fast. He/she spun the web which had a diameter of about a foot and a half in just around 10 mins, that too with amazing precision. It is a pity I did not record it on video.

It was too dark at that time, but I managed to get a good picture of the construction. Looks like he did not take a day off on May Day/Labor Day (Read my earlier post) :-P


May Day

Today is May Day, the first of May. May day is celebrated by many communist and socialist nations as the workers day. But actually it has spread to many countries which are not communist or socialist too and they celebrate it as a Worker's Day.

Today I too have a day off at work on account of May Day. I work in the software industry where there is no such concept as unions or the like. Even we were awarded a day off for the "Worker's Day or Labour Day". But then I found that the actual people who do the more intensive labour were really not given a day off. There was a huge construction going on near my house and the construction continued as any other day. I had an electrician come to my house for some work and he was working too. So did I see many other people working as usual even on "Labour Day".

Should they not be the people who should get the day of first before us?

Sky wars

The sky wars are raging... Indian skies have opened up for the various airlines and now there are many airlines offering services both to the premium customers and low cost customers. Now there are so many airlines to choose from to fly. Now that options are high, so is the marketing to woo the public.

This was one of the set of hoardings seen in Mumbai, depicting the sky wars. Superb.. marketing