Phone calling etiquette

We have reached a point in human evolution where the phone has become an integral part of our life (or may I say body?!!) and the primary function of the phone is no longer calling. It's web messaging (Whatsapp, Viber, Skype, WeChat or whatever you fancy!)

We have reached a stage where even calling a friend up, requires you to first check their availability on their favorite web messenger and then scheduling and re-scheduling multiple number of times - the innocuously simple act of voice chatting with your best buddy.

I have been wanting to call this very close set of my friends for a while (6 months!) and we just can't seem to make time. Never in my life has this happened before. In the beginning of the 21st century, you just randomly called your friends and see if they are free (It sounded like - "Ring, ring" "Hey! Wassup? How's life? You free to gossip?" - and then we went on and on and on!). If not, you just call them again. So simple! Now the more connected we are virtually, the less we talk to each other.

Sigh! Technology, you were supposed to be an enabler not a dis-abler!

Being Nice

You are nice because you can't be evil.

Being nice is thus more of an intrinsic thing. So, when the people who you are nice to, do not acknowledge your being nice, then don't blame them. Being nice is a completely selfish intention. However altruistic it may be. You are either nice because you can't be bad, or you are just too bothered about what the society thinks of you. Either way, the recipient of your nicety has no business returning your favor.

So next time if you are unhappy with a person because he or she didn't bother to be nice back to you because you were nice to them - remember this advice.

Fixing the forward head posture

So by now most of us are in the 15th year of carrying a cellphone around and some of us have used smart phones for more than 5 years. This means we have sent 100K+ SMS/ Whatsapp and other forms of messages on the small screen and have spent days (literally) peering down on our screens. All this by now has caused some of us to have forward head postures depending on how bad our posture was to begin with.

I am a victim of this posture problem and have been actively seeking out information to correct it. I will say, I am better off now than I was a few months ago, but well, I still have a long way to go. Now there are hundreds of exercises that you can do for improving your posture. And each one of them has their own benefits. I found this one particular set of exercises very useful to add to your repertoire of stretching exercises to do everyday to fix your forward head posture. This by means, may not be the only exercise, and be very cautious of taking medical advice from me (standard disclaimers apply!).

2016 Simplified

Hello people. Sorry for the extremely long disappearance. I was hiding under a rock. Procrastinating and waiting for things to happen. Which, they never do. And living your life fully requires "not waiting".

So, I am back again to blogging. Here is wishing all of you a very happy 2016. And my resolution this year is a rather short and terse one. It is to:

Simplify

Yup. I have decided to focus my energies on simplifying my life and de-cluttering it (further). If things go as planned, you shall get to read a lot of stuff about simplifying from me this year. If not, we still keep in touch.

Different perspectives

One of the coolest things with my current Television channel subscription is – I get access to news channels from various countries. Besides the local news channel (CNA – Channel News Asia), I have access to the following:

1. Sky News – UK
2. CCTV News – China
3. NHK World TV – Japan
4. France 24 – France
5. Deutsche Welle – Germany
6. Russia Today – Russia
7. FOX News Channel – USA
8. CNN International
9. HLN – USA
10. Bloomberg Television
11. CNBC Asia
12. Times Now – India

The cool part of having such access is – for contentious international topics, I get to see the viewpoint of multiple parties. And that’s where it really changes your perspective about international news. I have learnt to be more sceptical, and I tend to no longer take news at its face value.

For e.g. – The way the disputes in Ukraine or the conflict in the Middle-east are covered by American news channels are far different than the way they are covered by Russia Today. Or the Asian border disputes as covered by CCTV as compared to NHK are vastly different. You get to really listen to everyone’s point of view and makes you more tolerant.

I think for everyone to have a peaceful co-existence it is important that news from different regions (or from neighbouring countries) is broadcast.

Meeting room names

In my profession, I get to visit and meet a lot of customers. And most of these meetings happen in “Meeting rooms”. I have noticed that meeting rooms have a character which somehow reflects the culture of the organization.

If they are flowers, fruits, trees, plants, rivers etc. the organization turns out to be (or at least pretends to be environmentally friendly). If they got names like – MR1, 2, 3 etc then you can be rest assured that it’s an engineering firm run by a strict Engineer.

My company has the names of the islands around Singapore as it’s meeting room names – Pedra Branca, St John’s island etc. And that’s because my CEO is an avid sailor.

Anyway, the funniest place that I ever went to was an organization that had famous movie names as their meeting rooms – “Sound of Music”, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” etc. I attended a huge argument laden, animated meeting in which I was a mute spectator while my sales guys defended our stance against a very rude and nasty customer. After I came out of the meeting room, I casually glanced at the meeting room name which said – “The good the bad and the ugly”.

The good, the bad and the ugly theme

I’m back

Yeah. If there is one thing I have learned from Arnold Swaziland (sorry, can’t ever spell or say his last name without making him sound like a Maharashtrian) is to say “I’ll be back” in style.

I’ll be back

So yeah, I disappeared for more than 1.5 months. What was I doing? Well, besides being generally lethargic, wasting my time on the internet and procrastinating I did 1 big thing. I went through a part-time course in “Statistical Analysis for Business”. TL;DR – I did a crash course in data analysis.

So what did I learn? Well, I learnt enough to know that – I still have a long way to go to use statistics in business analytics and to not trust all those predictive stats and analysis that are blatantly thrown in my face.

If you have been checking my blog often, thank you for your patience. I shall be back to my old routine.

Stupid Walk

Cars in Singapore are prohibitively expensive. To control traffic congestion on the tiny island, the Government runs a Certificate of Entitlement (COE) scheme which effectively discourages poor people (like me) from owning cars on the island. The rational is to control pollution and traffic. The COE is auctioned monthly and let’s you own a car for 10 years with that certificate. To give you an idea, as of this blog post writing the value of COE is $67,601 for cars below 1600cc. The irony now is – people who can afford to buy the COE are so rich that the most commonly bought cars in Singapore are – Lexus, Mercedes and BMW. To be precise – the best-selling car in 2014 was the Mercedes Benz E-Class.

Fast & Furious stars react to car prices in Singapore

The public transport however is extremely well developed (amongst the best in the world) and walking is highly encouraged. There are pedestrian walkways everywhere. You got travellators, escalators and covered walkways to shelter you from the extreme weather. You can practically walk from one end of the island to another (because there are pavements and pedestrian walkways absolutely everywhere!).

My Fitbit says that I have walked a little over a 4700 km in the last 1.8 years that I have had it. Considering that I never ever run, that’s a feat in itself. I can partially credit it to the lack of private transport and mostly to my love for walking aimlessly.

Over the period of my lifetime I have done some extremely stupid walks. Places where I should have taken some means of transport, but I misjudged the distance and ended up walking a lot! Anyway, the height of stupidity is that – I have accidentally walked the entire length of 2 airports in Singapore looking for a bus stop where there was none.

I always thought that airport runways are just over a km long. But once after I walked the entire length of Changi airport in the dead of a night, I checked that the pure runway is 4.0 km and with the airport and it’s premises, my walk was over 6 km (and mind you, that area is pretty deserted – no body expects people to walk near an airport unless you are into plane spotting). And like I discovered there are no buses in the dead of the night servicing insane people walking near an airport.

Anyway, even after having learnt my lesson from my Changi walking incident, I ended up walking the length of another airport accidentally last week. This time luckily though, it was a private aircraft runway – Seletar Airport (so much shorter!). I ended up doing just over 3km.

I have decided never to start walking when I see big planes landing or taking off over my head. That just means that their is an airport somewhere near and there is no chance that I can get public transport!

Shaving

74.3% of Singapore’s population is of Chinese origin. My observation in general with the Chinese race has been that – the men are blessed with minimal to no facial hair (Obviously I am generalizing).

Which means, most men look clean shaven and probably spend no time grooming facial hair (known as shaving). No wonder they are so productive. These men save an average of 15 minutes everyday! During my Movember challenge, I implored some of my colleagues to join me. But they argued that to get a moustache, they would need a year or more. A month was an impossible target to get anything on their upper lips.

Now, if there are not many consumers for shaving products then naturally, you hardly find any good products on the super-market aisle. Every time I run out of my shaving cream, I dearly miss Indian malls. Out here all I see is one brand and one type of cream. And that too looks like it has been lying around on the aisle for ages desperately waiting for an owner!

With the amazing hair growing capacity of the average Indian male, we have a plethora of options for shaving foams and creams back home. Besides the magical properties, we have creams for every conceivable skin type – sensitive, oily, rough, dry and the list goes on. Then there are moisturisers, skin-softeners, whiteners and what not. Oh I so dearly miss my shaving creams!

Chewing Gum

Singapore gets a lot of flak in international media for its draconian ban on chewing gums. Chewing Gums in Singapore have been banned since 1992. There is an interesting Wikipedia article about the ban. The gist being – Gums are expensive to clean and they cause a lot of nuisance if they are stuck in public properties – like train door sensors, public-transport seats or even on elevator buttons. The logical thing the Government did back then was – just ban the gums.

Any big metropolitan city that I have been to, one thing I have distinctly noticed on the pavements always is – stuck chewing gums. These are remarkably absent in Singapore. The cost of cleaning one such stuck gum is approximated to around 3 SGD. And then in the public restrooms in these cities, I have occasionally seen a lone chewing gum happily dancing away in a urinal for what might seem like ages. And the gum is not biodegradable. So the freedom of having chewing gums is associated with a big cost for the city to clean the gum.

Since I had nothing much to do on the weekend, I actually spent sometime surfing YouTube for “chewing gum cleaning machines”, and the internet sure didn’t disappoint me. That does look like a lot of effort (and $$)

High-pressure Dry-ice blasting of Chewing Gums

Anyway, to conclude, if you eat chewing gums, please be extra careful to dispose them off in the right places (rubbish chutes) and prevent causing litter that is expensive and unsightly. That’s my community service message for the day.