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 :-)

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!!

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?

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.

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

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

India's world cup cricket debacle

India exited out of the Cricket World Cup 2007 early.. too early than the whole world expected. Anyway.. I am an ardent cricket fan and a great supporter of the Indian team, so naturally I am too upset about the whole episode. I was so upset the next day after the debacle that I hardly found anything interesting to do. So I don't want to ramble on further about this.

But I found something very funny. This piece is making rounds on the radio stations and I found it hilarious, not sure whether the cricketers will, but what the heck.

Enjoy..

The Ubiquitous Airtel Jingle

Way back in 2002 when we first saw this ad on TV, it blew the Indians of their feet. I think no other ad jingle was ever so popular.

It was and is still so popular that various morphs of this basic tune is still making the rounds in the ads.
It is the single most popular downloaded mobile ringtone.
Lots and lots of cars use this tune as their backup alarm.
I have even seen house bell ringers with this tune.. and many more.

A truly amazing piece of music from Rahman as usual. What is more surprising is that this is just an ad jingle, not even a movie OST or an album, and it is so popular.


Also I found so many user reproductions of this tune on the net. Enjoy some of them.

See the original one ad where it all started




Some later versions

airtel blackberry ...

Some user reproductions

Weekend Blues

Another of the long weekends whizzed past me. Every time I come close to a weekend I plan to do some of my long pending, or let me say, long planned activities, but many times they do not materialize. This weekend was a rather hectic sprinkled with some periods of illness.So in effect another weekend which went by without a lot of my "long pending" activities. The weekend had social visits and also some mandatory activities which needed to be done.

But again, I did not do what I had planned to do. Now that it is Sunday night, I am feeling bad that I lost another of the weekend.

Have you guys felt the same?

Gladiator

I have always liked many kinds of music except hard rock and anything harder than that :-) . I like Indian Classical Carnatic music and also many of the other non conventional music which is normally classified as "new age" or "world music" genres. I just wanted to share some of such music which I like. So let me start with one.

Gladiator Main The...

This is the OST of the blockbuster "Gladiator". I like the movie a lot and of course the theme music too. It has varied emotions in it of both pain and calmness. I don't understand the language, not sure what is being sung, but I can just feel the emotions from the music itself. Another of the great pieces from Hans Zimmer.

Listen to it..

Saying the right thing

A forwarded joke..

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A guy woke up at home with a huge hangover. He forced himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he saw is a couple of aspirins and a glass of water on the side table. He sat down and sees his clothing in front of him, all clean and pressed.

Rohit looks around the room and sees that it is in perfect order, spotless, clean. So is the rest of the house. He takes the aspirins and notices a note on the table.
"Honey, breakfast is on the stove, I left early to go shopping. Love You!"

So he goes to the kitchen and sure enough there is a hot breakfast and the morning newspaper. His son is also at the table, eating. Rohit asks, "Son, what happened last night?"

His son says, "Well, you came home around 3 AM, drunk and delirious. Broke some furniture, puked in the hallway, and gave yourself a black eye when you stumbled into the door".

Confused, Rohit asks, "So, why is everything in order and so clean, and breakfast is on the table waiting for me? I should expect a big quarrel with her!"

His son replies, "Oh, that! Mom dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your clothes n shoes off, you said , "hey !!!!!!! leave me alone! I'm married!"

Moral
Breakfast -- Rs. 100.00
Self-induced hangover -- Rs. 2000.00
Broken furniture -- Rs. 20,000.00
Saying The Right Thing While Drunk - "PRICELESS" !!!!!!!!!!!!

Blind Spiders !!

What do you think a spider can do that too a blind one? It has actually stopped the progress of setting up a mine worth $10 Billion. This is in Western Australia where a new iron ore mine was being setup. As part of the excavations they found few species of this spider and they were deemed as endangered species. Hence the mining has been put on hold. So what is so special about this spider?

These species of spider are a form of animals called troglobites. These animals apparently live only in pitch darkness, i.e. total darkness. They live underground in caves mainly. These animals cannot survive the normal sunlight even for minutes as they are affected by the ultra violet rays. They have adapted themselves so much to this kind of environment, that many of such troglobites do not have functioning eyes anymore. Many of them also seem to have lost pigmentation, i.e they do not have colors and are translucent. These animals feed upon few organic material found in the crevices and cracks in the rocks and also from left overs of food of other animals which frequent the caves. So these animals seem to be very much dependent on their local ecosystem that any kind of tampering with it could cause them to be killed.

This fragile ecosystem of these creatures has led to the holding of mining as it would destroy their ecosystem and hence the species itself.

What I find very interesting in this itself, is the nature of these creatures. They seem to thrive only in darkness. These guys have developed other senses like strong sense of smell, vibration sensors etc. which are needed in the dark environs over their eyes. Nature has so many different types of creations.

AT & T and Cingular

Cingular, one of the largest Mobile Service provider in USA is going to be renamed as AT & T. In this age of mergers and acquisitions, these name changes have seem to become common. But the history of this is pretty hilarious.

Watch this.. :-)

Cold Water Showers

Another of the trivia I heard the other day on the drive back home,

"Cold Water Showers gives better character to a person"

Wow !!! I am sure this is a joke. :-). But then I did some research on this.

We know that in India, yoga advocates cold water showers (at least normal temperature) showers in warmer climates. Basically it rejuvenates the body and makes the blood circulation better. But then it does not talk about character :-). Also there was a Bavarian monk, Father Sebastian Kniepp, who professed the positive effects of cold water bath. He apparently used to jump into ice water to cure his lung infection.

There was a study/experiment which was conducted in the Hannover Medical School, which tried to find the effect of cold water bath. The results in fact emphasized Father Kniepp's theory.

None of these talk about character. I guess the person on the radio meant that Cold Water Bath gives a person a "kool" character. :-)

Women Talking !!

Today on my drive back from work, I heard a trivia on the radio. The topic was about why women complain that the men do not talk to them as much they want. It has been and I guess will be an universal grouse which women will have against men.

On an average, a woman speaks 20000 words per day while the man speaks 7000 words per day. Ooops thats lot of difference.

But lets face it, it is a scientific fact. According to Dr. Louann Brizendine, in her book "The Female Brain", says that this starts from womb. Apparently the effects of testosterones on the brain to start with plays part in this behaviour of men and women.

So let us not blame it on the men for talking less, it is scientific. :-)

Freakonomics

I am not a great book reader. I somehow "lack the patience", you might say, for reading books. I feel it is a rather slow process. It is not that I read slowly, I read pretty fast. I did quantify it too the other day :-). But then it still seems slow compared to watching visually. The data transfer I feel is much faster in case of video. Even if I read books, I don't go near fiction, movies are better :-).

But offlate I have started reading much to my own surprise. I still read only non-fiction though. One of the recent books I read was "Freakonmics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

As one can guess from the title, it talks about "Freak Economics". But actually it is a real eye opening kind of look at various things which we take for granted and assume the common knowledge about it. The book emphasizes on one thing, "numbers speak more than just plain words". The author(s) say how a look at the data of a certain aspect of life or society can tell a different story than the way we know it. They call what we know generally as "conventional wisdom". It brings out the fact that how this "conventional wisdom" is so wrong when we just get to the bottom of the thing with data and numbers.

The book at the outset is structured more like a blog. And as rightly claimed by the authors it does not have a central theme. I guess, the earlier paragraph in this topic is the closest to the central theme we can get of this book. This might not be liked by some purist readers but then that is how it is. I did not mind. :-0

The authors have asked completely non related questions on different topics and showed how they are actually linked, that too by hard data. The topics range like the similarity between school teachers of the public schooling system in USA and Sumo wrestlers in Japan. It talks about parenting myths etc.

Now then I guess I liked this book simply because I am myself like that. I generally fish for numbers before making decisions. I feel calculated decisions based on data or for that matter analysis of certain event/topic based on data rather than just gut feelings and "conventional wisdom" are more accurate.

I can recall one such incident long back in my career where I felt how the data makes a difference. We had tried to emphasize on our management against a certain decision in our project. We had met the managment umpteen number of times had many meetings and brainstorming sessions in trying to convince the management against the decision which had been taken. We were well into the project cycle and we were still unable to reverse the decision.

Then one fine day I hit upon an idea and made some impressive charts based on hard data from many tests and extrapolations from that. The charts immediately showed that the path we were following is not the right one for the project. That was it. The approach was changed by the end of the meeting. We had prevailed; or was it we or the "data". It was surely the data and its presentation. All our earlier meetings were only talks about feelings and common knowledge. But that was not exactly quantifiable. The moment we were able to put it in numbers it hardly took us time to convince the management.

This exactly is emphasized in Freakonmics too. The fallout of reading this book has reiterated by belief in numbers and its use.

Read the book guys. BTW there is a blog too hosted by the authors.

Perspectives !!

Have you ever thought about how each one of us have different perspectives about the same thing?

One such incident.. some more than 10 years ago, Indian currency notes had Mahatma Gandhi only on rupee notes of denominations Rs 500 and more. And one fine day almost all rupee notes right from Rs 5 to all denominations upto Rs 1000 started to have Mahatma Gandhi on them.

In a casual conversation with my friend, I just pointed out that Mahatma Gandhi has now come down to Rs 5 from his Rs 500. But my friend immediately quipped, "Yeah.. but now Mahatma Gandhi is with more people".


What a different perspective? I was surely stumped by it. A much different thought .. and I must add a much more positive one...

Hats off... man !!

Santa jokes

Posting some forwarded Santa Jokes.. Hilarious... :-)

What is Common between : Krishna, Ram, Gandhiji & Jesus..?
Sardarji Replied : All are Born on Government Holidays.
*****

Sardar bought a new mobile. He called everyone from his Phone Book & said
"My Mobile No. has changed .. Earlier it was Nokia 3310 Now it is 6610"
*****

Santa : I am a Proud Sardar, My son is in Medical College
Banta : Really, what is he studing
Santa : No is not studying, they are Studying him.
******

Santa falls in luv with a nurse... After much thinking, he finally writes a

love letter to her: "I luv u sister."

*****


Pappu, while filling up a form: Dad, what should I write against mother
tongue.?
Santa: Very long!
*****

Santa was caught for speeding and went before the judge.
The judge: What'll you take 30 days or Rs 3000.
Santa: I think I'll take the money.


*****

Q: How do you recognize Santa's son, Pappu, in School?
A: He is the one who erases the books when the teacher erases the board.


*****

Santa & Banta got tired of mobile & decide 2 use pigeons.
1day a pigeon reaches Banta without message.
Angry Banta calls Santa!
Santa: Oye, this was a missed call

*****


Q: Why was Santa writing the exam near the door?
A: Because it was an entrance exam.

*****


Santa: My dad was an extremely brave man. He once entered a lion's cage.
Banta: He probably got a lot of applause when he got out.
Santa: I didn't say he got out.

*****