Category: Opinion

The Smart Phone Addiction/Dependency

Image

pic credit – salon de maria

Remember the time, when the only phone in the house was the black beetel phone that BSNL provided ? And the phone book that lay next to it ? (Some might argue and go back further in time, where phones themselves were not in common, but let us stay in my era).

Then came the cell-phone (mobile phone). And then people rarely were using the land-line phone. The book that lay beside it was also largely unused. The cell-phone had all the numbers stored. You just could not even remember your dad’s phone number, because you just always searched for appa-cell in the contacts of the cell-phone, and hit dial – all this without thinking.

Pan-shot-moving towards the office. Remember the computer ? Desktop or laptop. All your emails arrived there. (Ofcourse, the same proponents of the phone-was-not-even-there theory above would say the same thing about email, but jest me here, and lets stay in my era). All your calendar appointments were in Outlook on the machine. So when you were in office, you checked emails, and outlook reminded you of meetings with the familiar ding-ding reminder.

Then came the smart phone. There were no times when you were away from your email. You had information at your finger tips all the time. This can be good, and this can be bad. I am about to tell you about one bad effect, which I just realized. The meetings. Until the computer was there, I was forced to remember which meetings were when – Group meetings were on Thursday 9-10AM. But now, I forget. My mind, without thinking, pulls out the smartphone, looks at the next calendar app and reads out the next couple of meetings.

Dang.

And why might you ask, that I am being so philosophical about phones and smart phones? My smart phone got stolen a couple of days ago, and I am using the good-old-Nokia Torch phone. And the only thing you can do in it, other than speaking on the phone, is to check the time. And yes, of course use it as a torch light.I have caught myself many a time, in the last couple of days, pulling out the time, to see when the next meeting is, or whether I have any unread time. Oh, the shock, to just see the time in plain black and white on the phone !

The men in Black (Advocates Issue in Karnataka)

As much as I do avoid writing about political issues, I could not resist penning down my current frustration at what is happening in the Karnataka at the moment.

For those who are not in the know of what happened since Friday:

  • Some lawyers attack media persons. Police disperse this issue.
  • Later friday evening, some lawyers attack local people and media folk from upper floors of the court.
  • Police bring in force to control the situation
  • Lawyers threaten not to stop if half the force is not diverted elsewhere
  • Police in an attempt to placate the situation agree and divert some of the police force away from the court premises.
  • Some lawyers take advantage (was this planned?) and set fire multiple vehicles on fire (including police vehicles). Some rooms inside the court premises also ransacked. A magistrate chased.
  • Lawyers flee by changing into plain clothes through the back entrance.

Few things irritate me about this situation. A well known saying is that – “Two people whom one should tell the truth and the whole truth are doctors and lawyers”. Such is the respect that is given to lawyers in society. They are the saviors of law. They are the ones who fight for other people’s rights. It is disgusting to see these folks pelt stones at the common man, and set fire to police vehicles etc. If they had had any sense of moral responsibility towards their profession, they would have handled this situation in a much more dignified way (whatever the original reason for the fight was! Arnt they trained in making well pointed arguments?).

I, for one, lost a lot of faith in the lawyer community after this incident. And it is going to take a while to regain it. Not that the musings of this ordinary man would matter much to them.

 

Random mixed feelings about Indian Railways

This past weekend, my wife, my kid, duly accompanied by yours truly, went to Chennai by train. This was the kid’s first train journey after he has turned two (ie, after he has started really assimilating the world!). We took the Shatabdi for the onward journey. We were blown away by the new coaches. My opinion/observations below:

  • Superior quality coaches – almost felt like European style train compartments – never been on one, but drooled over plenty on Travel and Living.
  • Good leg space. Ergonomic seats.
  • Long span windows. My kid loved these. He could look out the window and take in the scenery (wherever applicable :))
  • Very less rattling. Unfortunately I wanted my kid to experience the ta-tak-ta-tak. (He got plenty of this in the return journey, but I digress here.)
  • Translucent plastic/glass overhead luggage trays – so you could keep an ‘eye’ on your luggage literally 🙂
  • The restrooms were actually clean. And wow, Jaguar fittings. And no one had flicked them (yet!). Bidet style ‘bum wash’. No mug chained to the pipe 🙂
  • Three pin plug in every seating bay. One of our co-passengers was working on an excel sheet the entire way to Chennai.

So we thought, all was fine and dandy. Landed in Chennai without a tired muscle. We could not get tickets for the Shatabdi for the return journey. In fact we could not get an AC ticket at all. So we had settled for the Non-AC 2S seating in Lal Bagh. We had chosen the Lal Bagh for its convenient time – it reaches Bangalore at a comfortable 9PM. Observations (and mostly dissatistified comments below):

  • Ultra crowded compartment.
  • Old rickety coach.
  • The seating itself is not planned well. It is very cramped, but then on hindsight, it is probably the same as an economy ticket on a budget airline. Except, the seats are much harder in the railway compartment. I wanted to say the timings are longer, but then some of the legs in the long-haul flights I have made to the US have been longer.
  • Now comes the worst part. Along with the 104 passengers who had been issued reserved seats, there are about 50 other people standing and sitting in the aisle through-out the journey. These are folks who have just taken the ‘General ticket’ and are ‘supposed’ to be in the Unreserved compartment. Wow. The Ticket-Inspector tried his best for an hour or so (until Ambur to be precise), and then gave-up. Shame on you Indian Railways – for letting this lawless-ness go by. Cant you attach another Unreserved coach !! Or do something ?? You spend Lakhs every year on a Railway Budget and the state from which the Railway Minister hails from, gets a few additional trains, but cant you help the common man get a decent seat ?

The only good thing common about both  the journeys was the dashing Lallaguda WAP7 locomotive – which did more than justice to the journey. Pure power. The locomotives just gobbled up the distance like noboby’s business. My thanks to the loco-pilots. An aside point is that – it was the last day for the locopilot on the return journey,  Mr. S.C.Dass, before he retired. There was a banner on the WAP7 announcing this. Mr. Dass, you did your bit, and made yours, and ours journey memorable. We screamed through the Whitefield station so fast that I could barely read the black-on-yellow lettering. Probably was making the top speed of 110 kmph at that time. Kudos.

Update: Some pictures of the Shatabdi. Did not take pictures on the Lalbagh. Was too busy to retain my calm 🙂

View of the coach. Note the wide aisle. You can also see the much needed legroom.

The area between two coaches. What used to be the rickety vestibule is now this.
Transparent over-head luggage space. (Also note the reading lights)
Nice long windows so you can take panaromic Indian Country side shots like these.

Nanban (Tamil) Review – 2012

  • Overall good remake of 3 Idiots
  • Nothing to comment on the story or picturization – exact ditto.
  • Casting comments:
    • Not a big Vijay fan. He did a decent job, but the role of Aamir, needed some one more bubbly. Not thoongu moonji (sleepy) type like Vijay. Someone like Arya, or Karthi, or even (God Forbid – why am I saying this!) Dhanush.
    • I personally did not like Satyaraj as the principal. It needed someone more commanding, not vazha-vazha-kozha-kozha (no translation for this – closest approximation is wishy-washy). Or maybe it was Boman Irani who makes me biased.
    • I am going to write this one in BOLD. Intentionally. Who, in Gods Name, chose Ileana for the Karisma’s role. Could you not find anyone who knew tamil ? Could you not have atleast done a better dub.  All over the film, the locations are in Tamil Nadu. The professor (Sathyaraj) Is Tamil, yet he has a daughter who speaks in Seth-Tamil ? Really ? Shankar ? Why ?
    • Sathyan – beautiful choice for the ‘padips’ role.
    • Loved Srikanth and Jeeva. Beautiful picks. And beautiful execution. Totally loved the scene where Jeeva wakes up drunk in the middle of a lecture. And Srikanth’s look, when Vijay messes up the answer scripts order after they turn in their papers late. I loved this scene in the original 3 Idiots. It was Madhavan who had that look – quizzical look turning to amazement to overjoyed.

I dream of an India …

I dream of an India where …

  • the streets are clean
  • the Police is respected, responsive, and is the common man’s friend
  • there is no corruption
  • the public transportation is awesome (enough, on-time, and clean)
  • civic bodies work together and have non-intrusive infrastructure (no more digging up of the roads by one body after the other)
  • Government offices work per clock-work (if the appropriate paper work is there, your work will get done)
  • there is fair competition in the industry
  • education is first-class, and world-oriented
  • industrial infrastructure is world-class
  • there is no pollution
  • there is no hypocricy
  • there are no reservations
  • there is equal educational opportunity for all to succeed in any endeavour

*Sigh* I can dream, can’t I ? Yet, I am confident some of this (and maybe even all) will happen.

Samsung Galaxy S and Tab not to get Ice Cream Sandwich

I have been thinking for quite a while about getting myself a tablet (and I will think for some more time though ..). And this sort of news is exactly what is making twice (thrice … n times) about Android. If the handset maker is  an OEM who has the power to choose an upgrade or not, the end user suffers.

Apple scores a point here.

CLOO – a ridiculous idea !

I half-balked at AirBnB, but it looks like it took off. On hind-sight, maybe that was a good idea. You have a couple of rooms with a separate entrance. Rather than finding a rental tenant, you could probably make more money running it as a “hotel room”.

But, CLOO takes the ‘cake’. It is a similar idea for renting your bathroom. Really? You would let a stranger come and use your bathroom? The webpage paints a picture of a harried person in the middle of the city, desperately looking for a loo. I can understand the desperation in a country like India, where it is difficult to find a clean loo in some areas (this is improving big time by the way!). But, in American cities, atleast in a few that I have been to, I have not had this ‘desperation problem’. I would either find public toilets, or find a 7-11 or a gas station, and most are half decent – atleast for a desperate run !

Oh well, whatever.

Mumbai blasts (again!)

Felt very sad when I read the news night before last (online) about another series of blasts in Mumbai.

Felt sadder when I read this piece of news in BBC –

“Attacks of this magnitude do not deter foreign investors or have any lasting economic impact,” said Seema Desai, an analyst with the New York-based risk consultant Eurasia Group. “Most investors know that terror attacks can and do happen but these do not impact the functioning of the economy.”

While I do agree with the practicality of the statement – and maybe the statement was backed by data – I did feel an inner pain. Have we started accepting this as normal ? This is not normal. *Sigh* Never had much faith in the Congress Govt to bring in any change to this situation. And this just reinforced it.

Mumbaikars – our hearts are with you. Be strong and have hope. Some day there will be a government, which do will a massive pest control exercise of this country and get rid of all these fundamentalists (be it of any caste/creed/religion) who believe in casting violence on innocent people.

 

100% cutoff is just absurd

100% cut-off is just absurd

This is one of those occasional rant posts that I write. If you do not want to know my opinion on stuff, please stop reading here.

I just read in the headlines of the Times of India that, with the “brilliance” of students going higher and higher, and the CBSE results becoming better and better, the cut-off marks (min bar for admission, if you are a non-Indian reader) for some colleges in Delhi is apparently 100%. Ok. Take a deep breath. What this means is that, if you get a score of anything less than a 100%, you are automatically disqualified from even applying to that college.

I just find that super absurd. I have always found that absurd about CBSE. Grading standards, when I did my XII boards (in 1998) were pretty bad – not that I thought of it that way, then. You will get an idea when I told you that I got a 98% in Chemistry, which was my weak spot. I did not get comparable marks in other subjects (where I was not very strong in, either). Couple of years later, I heard from someone, that they had gotten 98% in English. That blew my brains out. Mortal human beings cannot get a 98% in English. The subject itself is one, where you evaluate the command over a language and is subjective. It is not mathematics, where if you solve your problems right, you CAN get a 100%. Or for that matter, the sciences as well.

Fast forward to today (2011), it looks like that this absurdity has either continued, or has worsened. When I read the papers today, and it said cut-off marks were a 100%, I was blown away.

Board examinations are competitive examinations in my opinion. These examinations decide admissions into a whole plethora of colleges. And this means that you cannot continue having template questions for which you can provide template answers and have a half a million people score 100%, and hence result in such a thing as a 100% cutoff.

In general, I have always ranted (probably not in this blog), about how the education system needs to change. I believe, the education system should cultivate and grow on an induvidual level (from a very young age), on what the individual is interested in. If a child is interested in music (and is super gifted), he should not be stuffed with the same math and science curriculum that everyone else has to endure. Note that I did not say that the child does not need to study math and science. It is a pre-req for anyone in this world to know some basic math and science – lest he not know how to count how much money is in his purse, or not know that putting his hand into an electrical socket can give him an electrical shock. The only alternative for a super gifted child these days, is to drop out of school and concentrate on his music – excellent example being AR Rehman. Interestngly, legendary Mandolin player U Shrinivas, did drop out of school, since he could not cope with the pressure, but his wise parents arranged for home tutoring, and he cleared is schooling from home.

One other change that I would love to see, is to get more practicality into the syllabus. Are we really going to benefit from learning complex calculus. Let me rephrase that – Are we “All” going to benefit from learning complex calculus? Probably not. Algebra is something that all of us need, but not calculus. Integration by parts still gives me bad dreams. Have I used differentiation and integration in the last 17 years, after I cleared school. Nope. And yep, I have a PhD to boot too :).

Another big grouse that I had, when I was growing up, but is changing slowly, was the lack of alternatives. Now, you can choose to do Industrial Design as a coarse – learn icon design, web page design, cognitive sciences, UX principles, the works. You can study animation. You can study film production. Why, you can even study packaging technology, if that is what interests you. Not long ago, either there were no alternatives, or even if they did, they had social stigmas. I am glad that both are improving. I know of guys, who go and do their degree in tourism or hotel management.

When there is so much advances that are happening in the undergraduate and graduate area – why is our schooling system still stuck up.

Anyways, I think my rant is over now. I will breathe easy. My son is just about to wake up. The sun is rising, and I will get back to reality ….

US finds mineral deposits in Afghanistan

The NewYork Times has an article which says that the US has discovered huge amounts of mineral deposits in Afghanistan. Nice try. And we all have to believe that, only now that the US found it. I am reminded of the Avatar movie. the US has (atleast till now) invaded and fought war only in countries, where it has had some amount of financial interests (the various middle east wars). It has always claimed that, the wars have been fought for installing peace in these areas. And then what? Establish American companies there and reap the financial benefits. Very ironical is the fact that, the movie Avatar also had the exact same theme – precious mineral contents. I am pretty sure that the US would have found all of this using sophisticated remote sensing satellite technologies.

An excerpt:

U.S. Discovers Nearly $1 Trillion in Afghan Mineral Deposits

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in
untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any
previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter
the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself,
according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of
iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals
like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that
are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could
eventually be transformed into one of the most important
mining centers in the world, the United States officials
believe.

Read the NYTimes article here.