Chennai marriage

Went to Chennai for LN's marriage reception. After having dinner and wishing the couples, just relaxed in the hall and looked around. I thought of speaking to LN's mom as I happened to talk to her whenever I visited their house.

I saw her in green saree, coming out of the dinning hall. Started a conversation with her.
Me: Hello aunty, how are you doing?
She: Fine. Who are you?
(Surprised that she didnt recognize me).
Me: I am friend of L and worked with him.
She: Who is L?
(hmm .. does she has some kind of memory prob?)
Me : LN
She: oh .. maapillai paiyanna?
She: ok, nice to see you.

I felt strange about the way she was talking and walking away in a relaxed manner.

After 30mins, I saw her again in red saree. She was quite active and energetic. Just to check her reaction, I walked in front of her. She recognized me and started talking. I introduced my wife to her. She enquired about our travel, dinner and usual queries. I mentioned about the strange green sareed lady. She laughed and mentioned she is her sister. What a resemblance!

However, I still carry a pinch of suspicion. My wife and myself were curiously observing certain odd things. We never saw LN's mom and the green saree lady together. When we spot green saree, LN's mom would have vanished from the stage. When LN's mom comes back, the green saree would be out of vision. We had fun trying to put forth difference theories. Recollecting various Indian movies where the same person swaps into different roles by simple attire change ... It was quite interesting evening.

Sales skills

PG narrated his experiences with Multi-network marketing companies. These companies train the members in sales and marketing skills. They shed away their inhibition in meeting strangers and socializing with them. PG mentioned couple of incidents at the shopping malls when he went with his wife. The sales couples used to approach PG and his wife on some context. For example, the lady would start a conversation stating the girl looks beautiful. With such pleasantries, the ladies would start discussing. Obviously the guy would be left with nothing but to talk to the other guy (the sales guy who would be waiting for a talk or start one himself). At the end of the discussion, they would exchange the contact numbers. In a day or two, the sales couple would call and propose a business opportunity. The rest is the usual talk and conversion rituals.

The other ice breaking openings range from "I have met you somewhere" to "you resemble like my cousin" ...

In the first meeting itself, they would extract enough details about a person and use this detail to assess the suitability of the person into their gang.

Thou these kind of marketing skills improve the communication of people, unfortunately there is a chance of becoming socially out casted. After attending couple of sales seminars and trainings conducted by the company, the members are too obsessed with success and money. Their thoughts, mind, soul, house, car and whatever they have are filled with the company's motto, logo, posters, articles and other junks. They speak about the same to all the known circles they have. After a while, their friends and relatives would start avoiding them. Once their known circles are exhausted, they venture into unknown territories and circles.

Not sure how they come out and what happens further down. I guess these people's behaviour and social interactions are worth doing a research.

btw, I happen to buy (was led into buying) a small bottle of some super-powered medical capsules for super-duper amount. I am trying to resale that bottle to some bakra like me and never did that in this one year of attempts. I guess I need to attend one of those trainings.

Tips for health

My wife forwarded few articles related to health. She thinks I need to gain few good habits to maintain my well being.

sleepfoundation.org talks about myths and truth behind sleeping. Very interesting to know about new info and burst few old thoughts.

This article lists out 13 tips for overall healthy life. Topics like morning breakfast, planned food nutrition, exercise, social well being, dental hygiene, skin care, balanced mental composure, fruits, water, milk intake etc are discussed in detail.

If you suspect depression, here are few tips.

Land cost

Today VY, MsAD and myself went to Adigas. Good food.

VY was mentioning a piece of land in the city. Also, we were discussing about the appreciation of land price. Over the past five years, the rate had increased 10 fold in most part of the city. Not sure if such sudden raise was realized in any part of the country in the past.

Recently we happen to know of two BHK renting out for 21k. This is not aimed at hi-society ppl but for the upper-middle class (whatever that means; when we are at it, why is the middle class broken into three? Are there more divisions?). In the same area, a single BHK was shown to a bachelor for 14k.

A year back, there was lots of demand for rental houses. Never we could see a 'To let' board as people would occupy when there is a vacant portion. However, these days we see lots of boards of vacant houses. Many are not occupied for a long time. May be the rent had shooted too high and owners are rigid in spite of no takers. Even with such trend, there are umpteen building constructed all over the city and beyond.

Let us observe the progress and see how things move. Most probably we might have to put up with this raise as the money generators like IT industries are still growing with more activities. We can expect a saturation in IT sector once the cost of living raises in par with western countries. In such case, outsourcing might become costlier than inland development/service.

cost of music

Today we went to the shopping mall. Had lunch and then went to the bookstall. I wanted to buy refill for the diary. Quiet lazy! Each year while buying the refill, I use to resolute that for the next year I will buy during December. Never happened so, always it was by end of Jan.

Before getting the diary stuff, I was browsing through the cd racks and picked few music. While comparing the prices, I got the following idea.

• Old classical film songs are quite cheap. If it is 40s and 50s era, then you get those vcd for Rs 40 or so.
• Then comes the devotional section. Starts from Rs 60 and keeps going up. Most of the cds are for 125. This depends on the time people are invested to prepare the audio collection and how popular that theme is. Celebrity singers' work fetch above 200.
• Also looked at the drama section. The comedy drama collections are above 200
• The dvd prices usually starts at 350 to 400.

Most of the above are available in our street video parlour in mp3 format. Price? Rs 25 for each burn!

Bangalore riot

In a far, far land there lived a tyrannic king (as per Western view). Once his government was toppled, the people in that land held him guilty of genocide and other crimes any normal dictator would do. He was hanged.

A month later of that court ruling and execution, Muslims in Bangalore gathered to protest that act. Fine, their choice. However, what does that execution got to do with the peaceful people who were walking in the streets of Bangalore? Highly unlikely if anyone in Bangalore had any remote connection with hanging of that leader. (None of the Indian media held a sms polling for the hanging).

Anyway, why should our buses, shops, people be attacked when some activity happens half a globe away? If some pope guy comments negative about a particular community, why should my way to office be blocked?

Does such mobic riots happen in other parts of the world; particularly curious to know how the Islamic developing countries like Malaysia handle such world events.

Interaction in a website

GA and myself had discussion about the technology. We were going through the advantage and disadvantage of a website allowing users to interact to a contribution level. User participation may be through wiki kind of editable page, blogs or forums.

Advantage

• The site comes alive with lots of interaction, awareness and many useful activities
• An integrated website may provide multiple facilities like forum, catalog, customization, wish list etc (depending upon what the website is aiming to do and the audience)

Disadvantage

• Need for continuous monitoring of the posted articles for maintaining healthy quality of the website
• Required resources for addressing the queries raised by users
• Able to take ownership and responsibility of the website content

I tried convincing GA by the fact that a team of staff would evolve out of the user community. They would monitor the content and such team would be a strong resource. This will avoid burdening the site owners. The staff can answer the queries pasted by the users and if the queries require the owners' attention, the staff can raise a prioritized attention grabber.

Let us see what GA decides.

zaika!!

Today we went to the restarant, Zaika, in Raheja Arcade. Earlier this place went with the name Annambrahma. Now the same management had renovated the place.

Ambience is fine. Tasty North Indian food. Price as you can expect in any such posh restarant; around 150 to 200 per head.

Try it out.

T-Shirt slogans

Like to read t-shirt wordings? I am with you. Some people feel that it is not a good habit. If that is so, why do we have those wordings?

I wish there are few facility available in such t-shirts. To start with, we need a comment column just like this blog has. When someone feel like posting a comment on the wordings, the t-shirt should open-up a section for it ... okay, before we get carried away with further imagination, let us get into work.

Here are few wordings I had noticed, and wished to comment in this line.

No job, No girlfriend, No Problems
No life!

I like you, will kill you last
A killer with conscience

Virginity is curable
Guess the treatment involves some injection.

I am rich. Marry me.
Thanks for the invitation. Let us wait for the gay marriage clearance from the legal dept.

MBA - Master of Bad Activities
I guessed it after interacting with our HR


If you have any, post in the comments.

Bookmarks

The bookmarks I use are of wide variety. Off late, KPN bus provides a counter ticket while boarding. It is a good one for bookmarking. That too it helps a lot as I would start reading a book in the bus (their TV system is too loud while playing some stupid movie). When I go to bookshops, they give complimentary bookmarks with their advertisements. I get couple of more from them. Another favourite bookmarks are visiting cards!, either mine or whoever passes to me. If nothing is reachable, I tear a small portion of newspaper or waste paper for the purpose. As I don't like spoiling the books, I don't fold pages to mark them. I like the books which comes with a small thread to use as bookmark.

Now I am planning to design few bookmarks for myself. I want to distinguish the books I am currently reading, books I am yet to start and those which I have read. Want to place different colored bookmarks to separate these three categories. Hence I am planning to cut bookmarks out of red, orange and green thin cardboard. Red is for books yet to read, orange for ongoing books and green for completed one. Actually I don't need green marks, I could assume books without marks are completed one; but to match with fancy traffic colors, I can have green too.

If you have better suggestions, please pass on to me.

Thiruvasagam

Happen to hear Thiruvasagam as composed by Illaiyaraaja. A feast to ears and mind. It is a music blended with Eastern and Western instruments. The foreground goes with the classical Tamil lyrics, and mixed with English translated verses. The CD came with a booklet containing the lyrics. It is easy to listen the songs while reading them. My wife and myself used to pause at the end of each song and go through the meaning of the song. Overall nice experience and worth trying. Planning to play it frequently.

Breathability

Interesting to know something about breathing. My wife is submitting a thesis on breathing. She had done some experiments on how deep breathing helps in improving the coupling of heart and lungs. She explained some fundas like amount of air we intake per minute, how it is related to respiratory rate and intake capacity. There is a cool formula.

TV * RR = MV

Here TV is tidal volume, RR -> respiratory rate and MV is minute volume. TV is how much air we inspire in one breath. RR mentions how many times we inspire per minute. Multiplying these two numbers, we get the total volume of air we intake per minute; this MV is required for our body. The breathing system works efficiently when the TV is increased and RR is reduced; in other words, we should fetch maximum air during each breath and also reduce the number of intake. That way the organs involved in these operations will be used less and effectively.

While understanding this, I was able to relate to a familiar concepts in computer networking. When we have a greater than 2 tier architecture, typically we have clients and server. The clients keep pinging the server to retrieve data. The network efficiency is achieved by reducing the number of round trip to the server and by increasing the data transfer in each trip.

Awesome similarities.

Reading classics

So far I had seen two classifications in Indian classical literature. The first category narrates some event, person or a story. Either events and person are explicitly named to identify or portrayed as generic characters like hero, heroin, mother etc.

The second category deals with morality/code of conduct/mannerism of people, social norms and ethics. There are many such books. Other day, one such book was lying in my desk. Friend of mine picked the same and glanced through it. He wasn't very happy about what he was reading. He felt those do s and donts were impractical; also a waste of time to go through such materials.

That was an interesting remark. Are all our ancient wisdom a waste of time? I was thinking in this line. Here are few thoughts came out.

In our modern age, we have hundreds of authors writing self-help, personality development books. In a sense, these books are the continuous progeny of the ancient moral texts. Most of the do s and donts of a by gone era may not be applicable today. However, we cannot throw away all of them as useless ideas.

If they are not applicable today, why should someone read them? I read to gain an insight into the ancient world. What was their social practices? Which are the pressing issues they had to address? Reading history itself has lots of advantage. A good reason for human being to go through history pages is not to commit the same mistake again.

Apart from these mundane reasons, there are recorded facts and findings which stands good in spite of the deadly factor called TIME. For example, recently I was reading a newspaper article about harmful effects of hot water bath. Due to regular usage of hot water for head bath leads to headache, memory loss and other brain related issues. This is due to sudden raise in the temperature during bath. Mainly this affects the brain. Since this info was new to me, I was surprised to read this; also worried because I am take hot water head bath on a daily basis. Found a remedy for the above situation in an ancient literature. Different protocols are suggested for cold water and hot water bath. Following that could reduce the effect of the above brain attack.

Suggestion to my friend is, to read books of wide range and variety. One need not follow everything written in the books. However, it is essential to expand our horizons by exposing to different ideas.

Strange practices in funerals

Loud beat of drums, merry dance by drunkards, bursting crackers ... these are common in Chennai funerals. Somehow I don't understand this custom. Why are people happy about the death. Are they feeling happy for the person to pass away from this sorrow filled world or are they relieved from the pain created by that person? :-)

Upon googling, I found that such funeral dances are practiced at different parts of the world like South Africa, China, Ancient Rome and Egypt. hmm, we have/had company.

Anyway, a recent news in the paper related to funeral was amusing. Villages of Eastern China have a belief that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured. In order to achieve this target, the relatives try ingenious practices. They hired stripteasers!! Here is the video. Also, news at BBC News.

Later the parties were arrested and such practices are banned in that area.

Wondering how people interpret believes and twist the original thinking into drastic practice. If there had not been any law enforcement on this new approach, soon people would have assumed this as a local customs.

Elephants

Read a small book on elephants. Amazing facts about them.

When we think about capturing elephant, we recollect the familiar method of digging a pit and camouflage it by leaves and branches; and capture the elephant that falls into it without knowing the same. This book illustrates another method to capture an elephant herd. This involves thousands of men working as a team. They dig a massive excavation which can hold may be 100s of elephants. Thick teak stems are placed inside the pit. Imagine a big circular well which is planted with teak close to the inner wall. A heavy door is available in a portion of the wall. A slope is raised from this door up to to the ground level.

Once the construction of this trap is readied, they locate the herd. Start making loud noise with instruments (hmm .. it would have been awesome to listen to hundreds of instruments). They direct the elephants towards the slope and finally into the well. After getting them in, they lock the door.

Elephants are starved, so that they don't have enough energy to fight back. People walk in through the teak columns with spear. They check the elephants, if found not suitable, they release them in the wilderness. Each elephant is assigned to a mahout. The wild elephant is approached with 2 tamed elephants until it is tamed.

This looks like old method. Modern hunters use darts to capture animals as a faster and easier means.