The Low Suger problem

Yes. Most Indians like sugar in their caffeinated drink. I am no exception. Though I have stopped taking sweet coffees, I still completely enjoy my tea with a lot of milk and a little-bit of sugar.

We had non-sweetened coffee machines in our campus before. That meant that we had a self-serve container for sugar kept beside the dispenser for people to add sugar to their own tastes. But as a part of cost cutting measures, a big bad vendor managed to win our contract this time around and in one single day, all the coffee machines were replaced by this big-bad vendor’s new slender machines.

Now I am a caffeine junky. On an average I drink 3-4 cups of coffee everyday. The new coffee machines are designed to dispense sweetened coffee only. The vendor’s default setting makes the drink so sweet that it actually tastes like coffee flavoured kheer.

Desperate to get my daily dose of caffeine I actually toured our entire facility to find a place where I could get decent coffee. I finally chanced upon a machine labelled “Low Suger” coffee. Happy to find coffee of the non-kheer variety I poured myself a cup of hot vending machine coffee only to find that it was as sweet as the other “High Suger” machines.

Now along with the cups that need to be washed, the high sugar coffee has actually forced me to cut down on my coffee drinking habits. And I am sure there will be more people on the campus who must have faced the same dilemma. So, not only are we collectively cutting down on our coffee expenses, but also we are unknowingly caring for the environment (lesser use of vending machines means lesser use of electricity and lesser washing of cups!).

If you think hard enough there is a positive side to everything in life!

My advice to Bollywood

I have always believed that my expectation from cinema is really low. I just want the movie to keep me engaged the entire duration. I don’t care about the plot, the acting, the set, the locations, songs or anything else you can think of. I completely enjoy senseless movies, nerve wracking action as well as movies that make me question my existence.

But, I still come across so many movies that can’t stand up to it. I went for a blockbuster Hindi movie yesterday. The first half till the intermission went quite okay. Then I bought my popcorn and the ordeal started. I am sure I showered my neighbours with quite a bit of popcorn while I went all “Nahi! Nahi!” in my seat, Hindi movie style! Fully knowing not a single director worth his name is ever going to read this blog post, I am still writing my advice to them. So if you are a menial like me, read on:

1. Not all Hindi movies have to beat the 2 hours 30 minutes time. If there is no storyline left, please don't stretch the movie using item numbers, twists that add nothing to the storyline, weddings, emotions and other useless stuff (If I were the director, I could have ended some of our movies in 15 minutes flat).
2. The helpless mom, the abused sister, and the best friend who is killed by the bad guy plots have been overdone. Please think about something different to make us feel bad about the good guy’s plight next time around.
3. If the bad guy is 6 times the good guy’s size and the good guy has got a gun, make him use it on the giant first. Once the good guy is sure the bullet has done its job, then he can try being a man and beating up the giant with his bare hands. I don’t get the obsession of Bollywood of making the petite good guy drop all his weapons and fight a giant when he could have easily had him in a shot (and saved the viewers 30 minutes of a useless fight in which both get beaten to pulp)
4. I know your dialogue writer is really good. But sometimes, its better to kill the bad guy first and then explain to us why the lead actor is so pissed off with him.
   

   When you have to shoot, shoot – don’t talk!
5. We are completely okay with senseless movies and stupid screenplay. But then make sure your entire movie is that way. We will happily watch it with popcorn. Please don’t make the cardinal mistake of having a serious movie with senseless screenplay, that just makes our popcorn taste bad and we writhe in our seats waiting for the movie to get over. 
   

   Yeah! – Andaz Apna Apna

The problem with experience

Most people, confuse “experience” with “number of years employed”. Wikitionary's definition of experience goes something like this - “Collection of events and/or activities from which an individual or group may gather knowledge, opinions, and skills”. The key is – experience contributes to knowledge, opinion or skills. Nowhere does experience indicate the number of years spent on job.

We can plot number of years employed against knowledge on a graph. As long as you are “employed” (even on bench, vacation or surfing) you continuously progress along the  X time axis. When one insists on experience, it is somehow assumed that experience = time spent on job (x=y) kind of an equation.

But is that really true? Did you learn or gain more knowledge in your last year than the year before? If you have been working for a long time already now, just sit back and think about the increase in your knowledge that happened in the first year of your job. Thereafter think about the increments every year.

If you have been doing the same job (but growing in time and consequently in positions) chances are, your knowledge level has more or less stabilised. What you are essential gaining on is the time axis.

Its funny when customers insist on having “experienced” consultants with an arbitrary number like 10+ years of industry experience without getting into the details of “what” that experience really is. I could have been doing a menial job in an “industry” for 10 years without gaining any incremental knowledge whatsoever.

The only way that you might be gaining knowledge out of your experience is if you have been profile hopping. This phenomenon occurs when you completely change your job profile every 2-3 years so that you have to actually learn completely new things to do your job. Most companies don’t encourage such kind of hopping, and if you have been lucky enough to do it, then you have “experience” in the true sense of the word!

So as recruiters or customers going forward, please don’t insist on experience in terms of number of years spent on job, but please look at what the person has done and “experienced”!

School buses

School buses in India have been getting a lot of media attention lately. Maybe because of the recent spurt in the increase in accidents involving those buses or maybe life has become that much more valuable in India now. So the Supreme Court came up with a few well intentioned directives. Some of them should have been in place a long time ago. Things like – safe seat layouts, storage racks, emergency exits, speed governors and stopping signals.

Everything great so far. But the school bus operators interpreted those directives in their own sweet ways and now we have some funny results. To start with, most school buses in India are on contract. What that means is – the same buses that ferry people to their offices in the morning double up as school buses during the day. They then are hired for company picnics and other events for the weekend. What that essentially means is – every private bus on the roads in Mumbai is essentially a school bus.

Now one of the directives says that – school buses should identify themselves as one! So now almost all buses on the roads of Mumbai have a sticker on their back indicating that they are “On School and Comp Duty”. I presume Comp is a shortened – company. So that sticker doesn’t indicate anything. It just says that if there are kids inside we are ferrying them to school (India doesn’t allow child labour with exceptions) and if there are grown-ups these people are off to work.

One of the other directives is about proper graphics. The rule says that there must be a readily identifiable graphic on the bus to indicate that it carries children. The proposed symbol I believe was the one shown below.

But some of our bus operators probably found it to be too boring and then they came up with this one. its colourful, shows happy faces and indicates that its a school bus.

Now the person who made that graphic, probably downloaded a stock photo off the internet. The irony of that image is – there is no Indian child in that picture. Its a politically correct image representing a child from each continent. So the first gal can pass off as a representative of the South American continent. The second can represent North America, Europe and Australia. The third gal is there to represent all of us Asians and the fourth kid is an African. The fifth guy probably is there to represent Antarctica as a continent (I can’t seem to place him in Asia and Africa and the gal already represents the other continents).

Finally, some innovative operators thought they would sound important by putting a warning “Drive slowly, school kids on-board” behind. What they failed to realize is that some of the craziest drivers on the road are none other than these people themselves! So the buses go fast and wild all the while warning slower people behind them to drive slower! If anything, these warnings should have been put in front of the bus driver’s own face.

Complete service!

This is a post about restrooms again. Not disgusting like my earlier ones. But yeah, toilet post none the less.

Have been trying out elite eating places in Mumbai these days. With India’s inflation shooting up like crazy, prices every where keep going up everyday. Combined with service charges and all types of other creative taxes our Government keeps coming up with, eating out at decent places is a luxury in Mumbai already.

Now for those of you who don’t know, Indians prefer eating food with their bare hands, which means we do not rely on cutlery like spoons, fork and chopsticks while having our famed breads (The naan!). Which also means that we have to wash our hands before eating requiring us to visit washrooms in every restaurant we go.

An interesting phenomenon I have noticed is – most restaurants in India completely neglect the cleanliness of restrooms. Now, considering that almost all of us visit these places, and since elite places are elite because they are expected to maintain a certain level of internal decor and hygiene, I am baffled by the fact that such restaurant’s management chooses to ignore washrooms.

If I ever become a food critic in my life, I am gonna rate these guys on the basis of their cleanliness as well. You can’t charge me a bomb just because you “pose” to be elite! (Yeah I am a disgruntled customer ranting online!)

Flower power

Some smart-pant MBAs in the detergent manufacturing companies in India figured out (quite obviously) that women decide (dictate would be a better word) detergent purchases in India. So to further appeal their target customers they decided to make their detergents have a flowery fragrance. Now every detergent powder in India has fragrances like – Jasmine, Rose and Water lily.

First they made us have room fresheners of flowery fragrances, then they captured our hand washes, and finally our clothes! My mom happily bought a huge pack of jasmine scented detergent, and now everything in our house (I am talking besides the room fresheners and the hand washes!) smells of jasmine. Not only my bed sheets and curtains but even my shirts and trousers. Imagine a macho guy like me (yeah, pun intended!) walking into the big bad world smelling like some flowers. Not only does it hurt my image, but also it makes me smell like a sissy.

Luckily for me, since all purchasing decisions in India are done by the women of the house, I have realized that all my guy colleagues these days smell of – (you guessed it right!) Jasmine, Lily and Roses.

Anyways, I decided to take things into my own hands, and I went to a departmental store, and picked up a “premium” non-scented detergent fricking powder! Yeah the scene looked like a Clint Eastwood movie, especially the – me opening the door and walking into the mall part. Beyond that I meekly paid the cashier and walked off with my prized detergent. So much for a male dominated society! Huh!

Go ahead, make my day!

Butt-ID

So some scientists have found out that people can be identified by the butt prints that they leave on their seats. If we aren’t already being tracked enough by the social networks, location tracking mobile phones and cookies planted graciously in our browsers here and there, now the places where we park our butts will also start recognizing us. And life as we know it will change forever.

Imagine going to a restaurant with these butt identifying seats. By then, I am sure the Facebook Graph API will be available to be used everywhere. The moment I park my butt into a seat, the restaurant will automatically post on my wall saying – “Girish is sitting in this restaurant and eating blah blah”. If I am unlucky enough it would also know what I order all the time, order the same and update my fitness tracking app with the calories that I consumed.

People around me will also be Butt-IDed so Facebook will remind me – “The guy on the table besides you is your friend’s friend”. (After all we are separated by 3.74 degrees of separation from anyone in the entire world!)

Every club I go to will have bouncers with Butt-ID scanners. these will be simple devices on which you will be asked to sit to identify yourselves. So a burly looking gentleman twice my size would politely say, “Sir, may I see your butt please?”

Celebrity seats – seats that have been seated on years before by a celebrity, would become tourist attractions. You would have random seats all over the world saying “Lady Gaga Butt-IDed here” or “Do you wanna park your butt on the seat that Justin Bieber sat on?”. Then we would have celebrity-crazy tweens shelling out bucks to sit and take pictures to eventually put them back again on Facebook. Wow life is gonna be soo cool!

Endorsements gone wrong

In India, cricket is a religion (luckily without any reservations) and cricketers are Gods (Yeah its polytheistic). So these Gods of ours, other than controlling our destinies, sorrows and happiness also make us buy stuff. Cricketing endorsements make a major chunk of the advertising budget in India.

My marketing professor always said that if nothing else works in advertising – sex can sell anything. So our cricketing legends are the Indian equivalent of the legendary naked women. They can sell anything. Period.

The funniest endorsements that some of them have done are – fairness creams, inverters, engine oil, clothes whiteners, Mysore Sandal Soap, Toothpastes, Biscuits etc. !! For people who have forgotten, there was this legendary advertisement about a cricketer’s mom calling him up while he was on the field!

Sehwaag ki maa ka phone!

Anyways, entire of last week I have been hearing this new advertisement of a cricketer trying to sell me anti-virus software. The jingle goes “Trusted by the best”. Now I have no problems in him endorsing software. But its wrong to call a cricketer to be an expert in security software. Its like using Bill Gates to endorse a cricket bat.

Trusted by the best

Caught in an affair

So I have a fairly common Indian name. I didn’t get statistics about number of Girishs in the world, but I am sure we are a considerable number. Now, considering that I started using Gmail while it was still in beta and was open for limited people, I got a prized email handle (Username). My definition of prized email ids are those in which I don't have to put numbers, last names or funny sounding acronyms that make no sense. I am sure years later I will be able to sell it to a rich Girish who will pay me handsomely to get this handle. Then I can retire from my day time job and write here all day and all night long.

A quick ego search about other Girishs did reveal to me an interesting Girish. I have been listening to his music all of yesterday and he is real good. Anyway, I think I am straying away from my core topic – the prized email handle.

Having this rare email address entitles me to get some misdirected emails. Other than a lot of interesting spam, I do get legitimate sounding emails which are continued conversations of other Girishs (which always start with “As discussed with you on phone…” and then an attachment which I dare not open). So I am Girish bhai, Girish dada, Girish bhaiya, Girish sahab, Girish sir, Girish uncle and a whole lot of other objectives. I have learnt to ignore most of the emails. I guess only twice I have replied to the senders – once when it was a bank statement (but they STILL continue to send me this legendary Girish’s credit card statement) and the second time was when some unsuspecting Girish gave my email address as his on his PAN card.

Anyways, these days a lovelorn and rather weird Girish has bitterly quarrelled with his girlfriend. This girlfriend of his has now retorted to sending him emails (apparently because he is not logging into the messenger). Now the problem is – this lover boy never bothered to give her his true email address. So she is spewing abuse all over the emails that she sends to me. Imagine my dilemma – if I reply saying I am not the right guy she is spewing venom at, I might end up embarrassing her and also, my mom told me to never talk to strangers. If I don’t reply, she thinks her Girish is ignoring her and her abuse is intensifying day by day. Anyway, God has given me the unique gift of being ultra patient (and lazy), and I will wait out her abuse till she gets a new boyfriend and dumps this Girish.

Sometimes it makes me wonder – life can be so interesting even if you just login to the internet everyday!

Scientific understanding

As a school going kid, I did understand my elementary physics quite well. But during my time, in school, physics barely touched upon particle physics. With the recent invasion of The Big Bang Theory and the Large Hadron Collider, I felt woefully inadequate with my understanding of particle physics in general, and the Higgs Boson particles and Theory of relativity in particular.

The Big Bang Theory

While browsing through books at a bookstore, I chanced upon a book titled – “Why does E=mc2?”. Now, I generally don’t do any book reviews, but to set context I would like to say that it is a perfect book for a guy like me who wishes to know a bit about particle physics without getting into the gory details of the mathematics behind it.

With my complete disconnect from physics lately, it took me quite a while and effort to get through this book. Though the authors have gone to a great extent to simplify things, my peanut sized brain still had issues with understanding the concepts. I literally had to read each and everything over and over again, many a times highlighting stuff and looking for it on the internet to really understand what each theory stands for. After 4 long months of arduous study, I kinda got what the book says, mostly about – space-time, theory of relativity, nuclear fusion and fission, standard model of particle physics, properties of fundamental particles, Feynman diagrams etc . (Well, before I go any further, I think I need to clarify my degree of understanding. If you are a particle physicist reading this blog, then I understand nothing, nada, zilch. I am a complete noob. I can just shake my head and say “I have heard those terms”. If you are my grandma reading my blog, then well, I can actually sit and talk about those terms for hours together and try to confuse you while I get confused at the same time.)

Most of the book (and if I mistake not – the theory of relativity as well) however is based on the assumption that no particle can travel faster than the cosmic speed limit, which incidentally also happens to be the speed of light. So finally, when I reached the last page of the book, I was ecstatic to have figured out at least a bit of particle physics. However the day I finished reading the book I read in our newspapers that scientists have discovered that neutrinos can travel faster than light.

Now, I know its still open for scientific scrutiny and the results of the experiment might be proven to be wrong later someday. But imagine if its not. Imagine – 4 months of efforts wasted trying to understand a theory which was going to be disproved the day I finished reading it. I am already dejected, not because a huge discovery of far reaching implications has been made, but because the lazy me had to spend so much time to read something which was ultimately going to be cast in a shadow of doubt! I should have waited till the experiments at the LHC were all done and we came up with a final theory which explains everything for lazy bums like me. Sigh!