Need for Bangalore Daylight Savings Time??

I had never really gathered a complete picture of the Daylight Savings Time(DST) till I got to read this post by SG at : http://sowmyagopal.blogspot.com/2009/10/around-clock.html
Thanks, SG.

I had this email that American clock is 13.5 hours behind IST and our official meeting hours with our US counterparts will change accordingly. I did not bother much. Such messages are common twice a year in all IT companies.

Day before yesterday, when I stepped out of office, it was a cloudy sky, but never thought that it will be pitch dark at 6:00P.M. I have waited for three days to see if I have to make this patentable proposition of having a DST declared for Bangalore and call it " The Bangalore Daylight Savings Time (BDST)".

I don't wake up very early, so I do not know if it dawns early these days, but I must say night sky sets in very early these days - as early as 6:00P.M. Complimenting the dark skies is the heavy November downpour. I don't know what's with rains and traffic jam in Bangalore; the traffic jam is too heavy even by Bangalore standards. So, if you start off from work as usual, say around 5:00P.M or 5:30P.M, you are bound to get netted in the painfully slow moving traffic or worse still, deadlocked traffic. You just cannot move. It is raining and you are on a bike and you are locked in the traffic. When you reach home, it is invariably 7:00P.M; at the earliest, so to say.

I got caught in rain day before and with no auto to take me back home, I had to walk up to the nearest sunshade of a shop to shelter my head from getting wet. ( Don't blame me for not carrying an umbrella!! I heard it at least ten times from five people that day!!!) With nothing better to do, I watched the interesting scene in front of me:
My shelter was close to a cross road facing the main road.. Water is gushing one cross road to the main road's walkway. It looked like a river to me. That is my usual route, so I knew how many trenches are open on that walk way. With water gushing like an overflowing river, walkers need to know what they are walking into.

Attention shift: A biker stops his vehicle and rushes to take shelter with the other three of us waiting there. There was a deadlock in traffic. No one could move. All cars and bikes were honking and no one can move an inch because of the gushing water and haphazardly organized vehicular traffic. It was like a race on cross roads where vehicles from four sides of the roads were trying to hit the finish line which was the center of the road in this case!! Sure shot accidents!!!..

Headlights beaming, persistent honking conveying the urgency of each one to get past the other, confused pedestrians, over flowing rain water, all made the scene seem hopeless. As far as I could see on all sides, there were only vehicles... No sight of a moving vehicle.

I thought about the cause for this situation. Everyone starts from work at about the same time, plus or minus a few minutes though. Then,mid way it gets dark, rainy and all of them want to get home before they catch a cold or fever.

The only way, it seemed to me, to avoid this hassle is to start from work early evening ( say 4:00 P.M), for which people have to be in at 8:00 A.M. That is what I meant by BDST. We need to make the best use of the early morning hours till November and through the winter days in Bangalore, which is early February. It will help a lot of traffic issues.

Also, the metro work and electrical conduits and anything else I have no clue about, seems to have some trench dug up on the pavements, almost always. With less or no light at all, imagine the plight of old pedestrians. On a particularly busy junction on the 80 Ft Road, there is some work going on. It was 6:00P.M. No street light. Rainy evening. The dug up land has turned into a marshy area. Imagine an old man walking his way from the church nearby..... Who is going to tell the concerned people, that there are some falls when Sorry does not help repair the effects?

Can't avoid the early dusk, Can't stop the rainfall, Can't stop constructions, Can't stop digging roads and pavements, Can't do anything about proper rain water routing and harvest or drain, but the one thing that must work is we finish our business outside early and get home before the night fall/rain fall/traffic peak.

You are in the right place!!!!!

This was the opening statement in one of the presentations I happened to attend yesterday.
So, what's the big deal about it and why would I even notice it??

Honestly, I was not too well to attend a presentation at that time of the day, but I still decided to be there because I believe that some postponed appointments never happen later.So, with that said, I must say I galloped my way in a city bus amidst all the Bangalore Metro construction work sites and rushed in only to see that I was exactly fifteen minutes early. [I hate my late entry anywhere - coffee, meeting, wedding, or any appointment for that matter - and so for the first time I smiled...] I am in!!! I am in, on time and when I walk in, the first thing I notice is I am in the right place... That's what the slide being projected said.

And I took a good notice of the words.. I read it over and over again, to let the message sink in.

The feel-good factor in me was soaring up to sky-rocketing heights and I was very glad that I came after all the roller-coaster rides, changing three buses on the Complex old madras road, as one of the shop's banner put it.[ It said, No. X, Trinity Church Complex Old Madras Road... and the writer in me, punctuated this at an incorrect place and read it as Trinity Church, Complex Old Madras Road.. and trust me, the present situation is totally complex on Old Madras Road!!! Hail Bangalore Metro Constructions!!!!]

My mind had a comfortable ten minutes to ponder about the line.. You are in the right place.
Well, what else do you expect to do when all you get to see is "You are in the right place" flashing every minute in front of you? Of course, I have dutifully turned my mobile to silent mode and blocked all my attention towards the presentation.

Isn't this statement eternally ( or should I say perennially) true? Okay, cutting all the flowery words, Isn't this statement true all the time??

To book a train ticket you must be at the ticket counter.
If you wait at the entrance to the railway station and want to book a ticket, you are again at the right place.... to realize that you should queue up at the reservation counter to reserve a railway ticket.

To cross a road, you must be at the pedestrian crossing.
If you try crossing the road from a fair distance away from the pedestrian crossing and you just missed a hit and run accident, you are still in the right place...to remember to follow road rules.

If you fall down and break a bone, I am sorry to say, you are still in the right place ...to learn to watch your step on a rainy day when you walk on a muddy, marshy road.....[only if you had stood at that slippery spot, you could fall, the way you did... so even for a fall, you must be at the right place.]

Antonyms are prevalent in this world...So, my mind went ahead to think about where does the question of being in the wrong place come from??

When you aim to book a train ticket and expect only that result....
And did not expect to be in the right place, to welcome someone arriving at the station...
When you want to cross the road and expect only that result....
And did not expect to be in the right place, to realize the hazards of crossing the road from a non-designated zone...
When you want to go for a walk on a rainy day and expect only that result....
And did not expect to be in the right place, to realize that a slippery road can cause a fall...

In all these cases and others that we know of or can think of, there are no wrong places...What you did not expect always ends up in your mind as the Wrong side of the story..We do not say I got a different result, but always say I got a wrong result. At any given point in time, we don't want to understand or believe that what happened is something that is right - although not expected, it is right for us at the moment.

There is no such thing as Wrong in its absolute sense, only in relative sense...Something may be wrong relative to the results we expect, but absolutely correct with reference to what we are supposed to know/receive. We get it all wrong, while almost always, everything happens for the correct reasons, at the correct places, with the correct people and at the correct time only.

Philosophical?? I have no idea, but if this is philosophy, then I believe it must have some truth to it, is worth giving a thought, and is the first step to positive thinking... Wonder if that is why in the writer's world we do not use the word 'Wrong'. We always say 'incorrect', which can mean 'not the expected result'.

Coming to think of it, should we consider doing away with the term Wrong from our diction?

I was convinced that I was at the right place at the end of that session to realize something.... I wish to keep my understanding to myself for a while. It will be out on this blog at the right time.

I am at the right place and so are you. Do not think about the could, should and would aspects of your life. Just believe that you are and have always been at the right place..

What you can gather from what is happening around you is what defines who you are.

You dont have to wait......

until the next accident to repair a collapsed railing....
This is the address of the railing I am talking about:
Krishnarajapuram Cable bridge,
Near K.R Puram Railway Station,
Bangalore.

One day, sometime early this year, on my way to office, the usually over-crowded Old Madras Road beat its own records of the highest peak-hour traffic and lowest speed. I called up my manager and informed that I might be indefinitely late for work, due to a reason I have no clue about, and all I knew was that my bus stood still on the Old Madras Road.

When the traffic finally started moving at a snail's pace ( of course, we were glad and thankful) I looked out of the window to see a huge container truck toppled over. Thanks to the crane that moved the toppled truck to one side of the road, so a narrow one-lane passage was clear for the vehicles to inch their way through. From the bus, some eyes were transfixed on an angle just above eye level towards the railing of the cable over-bridge that we were just crossing. Our road was adjacent to the bridge, at a lower level and ran below the bridge. That is to explain the height difference between the bridge and the road. This way, you might be able to visualize the catastrophic fall of the truck from the over-bridge to the road on the lower level.

God knows whatever happened to the driver, helper and whoever else might have been in the truck that day. I silently hoped it was a movie shoot and everyone inside the vehicle were alive outside the movie screen, but the papers confirmed that it was a bad accident. The truck driver had rammed on to the side railing in the wee hours of morning and the toppled truck scene was too real to ignore. And here I was, with complaints about reaching office late when so much was toppling over in the world!!!!!

The next day, the peak hour in Old Madras Road was in the usual pace. When I crossed the same spot, I noticed that there was a thin caution ribbon tied on the broken railing. For another three months or so, whenever I remembered to give that angled-look towards the broken railing, I saw the caution satin ribbon.[ I like the confidence that the old neon signal, in a tattered caution ribbon, would continue to show Red in the head light of an approaching truck at midnight!!! Read carefully.. so many parameters here !!!].

Over the next few months I saw the ribbon missing. Made me wonder, what if another bicycle/ bike accident happens just because of the gap in the bridge's railing? Till today, this railing has not been fixed. I can say its been like this for about eight months now. Wonder if we are waiting for the next major accident at the same spot, to come back to senses and do something about this broken railing of the ever-populated, forever busy, over-bridge in the most-crowded road in the city.

Hair loss, Mobile alerts and facts

It was a slow afternoon at work. I was trying to make some sense out of all the information that I had on a specific subject. My phone was not even in my thoughts. I was jotting down points, scrolling window panes on my desktop computer, switching between emails and applications, when there was a "Beep Beep".... once...[ Cant be my phone!!! Don't know why I was so confident!!!, but I had forgotten to silence my phone in the morning].. the second time, the same Beep seemed louder and then I looked around for my phone... The third Beep was too loud and I had to look at the most important message of the day:

No more hair fall & Dandruff!! Get New Hair!! Buy XYZ oil Rs.1750, Free Head Massage, Guaranteed Result. No side effects. Call 121212121.

And I was tempted to write back, " Yeah, right, No Results and Guaranteed side effects!!!!". I was irritated for a second and then immediately laughed out loud.

Who is going to tell these people that any amount of hair oil or hair care cannot help people working in ever-lit, air-conditioned, closed work spaces. The pollution, the work stress, the change in weather by the second, the salty water add to the hair loss.

What makes people think that sending blastogram type of sms to every number available in a mobile phone directory is going to get business?? The first response is irritation when such messages come in at mid-day during work, when your hair loss is of least priority [ Aaammam, Romba mukyam!!! was my first reaction ]. I thought, if I set a Do not Disturb against my number with my service provider, I wont get unsolicited marketing alerts at an unexpected hour. I guess, I am all wrong... We do have to specify our numbers in different forms and sites and courier envelopes. Wonder if people pick up contact numbers from there or are sending out messages to any random number!!!

That said, I'll tell you what my doctor said for the hair loss question that I asked him once: Stay home most of the time , Do not work, Do not travel much, Do not worry, and Cover your head when you go out on a sunny day, rainy day, or winter day. Then he said, if you can follow all of these ( Can you??) , then your hair oil, shampoo, fruit intake and health fundas would help your hair look like you see in one of the shampoo advertisements you admire!!!! Anything else anyone says is just to make you feel that you are doing something towards improving the lustre of your long hair.

'Food' and food for thought

This article has been picked up by Bangalore mirror on November 2nd 2009.
http://www.bangaloremirror.com/index.aspx?page=others&do=/blogs/post/Food-and-food-for-thought.aspx

I recently had to change two planes of the same airline company to reach Bangalore. On board the first plane, the flight attendant came over with a tray full of snacks. I did not want all of them and so told her I'd take only the Chat and Sweet. I told her to put away the vegetable burger.
She said, "Take it ma'am, we will not be using it anytime again."
So, I tried to explain "See, I don't want to eat a veg burger and I am telling you even before I take the tray from you. Just wanted to make sure that I don't want to waste it."
She said," That's okay ma'am. You can just let it be and enjoy whatever you like to eat.".

Of course, I knew that, but just wanted to be sure that we don't waste food because, just because it was a complimentary snack. I still do not understand the idea behind trashing everything that is not used at a given flight travel. When there are so many without food to eat, it is just okay for the airline to consider giving it out to someone in need. I am not saying that the sealed food stuff from a used tray should be given away, but in cases like mine, where the food is untouched and I have told them upfront to take it off from my tray, it is just okay to give it off to someone in need.

A co-passenger from plane 1 was my neighbour in plane 2. Plane 2 also had the same snack. I promptly said 'No, thank you'. I did not feel like eating the same snack again.
My neighbour took the plate and said, 'Its the same thing'.
I said, " Yeah, same airline, and how come you took it again? Are you hungry?.
She said, " No, I am not, took it just like that...". I didn't understand.
When she was done, I saw that the chat and the veg burger were left untouched and of course, tossed straight into the trash can.

Food!!! and very good food goes to nobody!!!!. Could not take it.

A little later is when I noticed the flooded areas in Karnataka. You can read about it here. Like, I've said in that article, we just wont get it - how difficult it is for a lot of people to get something to eat, each day, when we are here, wasting food in an airplane. I don't say you have to eat whatever is given whether you like it or not, but there must be an option for people to pick what they would like to have. When you are half way through eating, and you don't want the rest of it, its still okay. You are not under any force here.

But then, if you don't even want something, and the whole thing goes to the trash can for nobody's consumption, it is colossal waste of the now under-valued food, that is otherwise a luxury for a lot of people out on the roads. Just because our airfare includes the in-flight snacks, it doesn't mean that we should nibble on food and send the rest to trash. Why is this happening?? May be this has been thought out, but I told you what happened and don't you see it is a solid waste of money? Whose money is not important here.

Airline companies are implementing plans that ensure that their guests are treated well. They don't have to reuse food items that are untouched, but can surely give it away to some one in need. Made me think.. How much of food must get wasted in such big airline businesses each day? Do they all hit the trash can? Or do they get sent to people in need?

Either we change or the Airline companies change the way they serve food.

I was dining out with a friend last evening. We thought we ordered very smartly, smart enough not to waste food. I didn't think that the quantities would be too much for us to finish. When we were done, we still found a lot of food left. They were not touched and we decided to pack it off to be given away to someone in need. I realized the value for food, when I finally gave the food packet away and got a whole-hearted thank you in return.