In the wild

Got the possession of the farm. On the first day evening, I moved in with my wife. The sun was setting slowly and so we were settling down. The electrical work ought to be worked out. Hence we had to pour kerosene in the newly bought kerosene lamp and lit it before the sunset. With the lights up, we found a clean spot (as clean as possible) for making our bed. It was inside a small room. We closed the window so that creatures from outside dont join us. As we didnt have anything to do around 6.30pm, we had our dinner. It was a nice candle light dinner, tasted like bread with jam. We promised to have lots of singing, playing jokes and talking everything under the sun (beyond as well). After talking about everything, at 7.30pm we felt sleepy. After putting off the lights, the room was pitch dark. It was so dark that closing the eyes or opening them didnt matter. Once in a while my wife switched on the torch and scanned the walls, roof to check any unwanted visitors.

Insurance policy and the functionings

ok, after chasing for the real Insurance policy benefitors , I found a clue. When we have some work to be done and we reach out a government employee or a distant relative or anyone, they help us out of the request. After that, they start with, "sir, my wife is a policy agent, why dont you buy an insurance policy". It is quite difficult to out right refuse the offer as we just got a free service through them. We will have to find an escape route like saying that we got policy previous month or so.

Anyway, I think these kind of social pressures are making the policy industry to thrive. And obviously the immediate benefitors are the agents.

The old bachelor

A friend of mine is in his late thirties. Had been going through all channels to find a life partner. Still no luck in settling with someone. The initial criteria were too many and beyond market supply. His family fancied getting a girl half his age and from a rich background. Slowly they kept relaxing their requirements. The recent one relaxed is the origin of the desired family. Earlier condition was to choose someone from the same community and also their family should have originated from the same town as theirs. The origination has been dropped for now.

I used to wonder why they are finding it difficult in the bride hunt, in spite of dropping many criteria. May be the rate at which they drop particular criteria is very slow compared to the brides moving out of the market for that age group. Wish he access the situation properly and moves fast.

Thunder, wind and rain

It was a quite afternoon, calm and bright. All of a sudden heavy wind was flowing in the area. Followed were thunder, lighting and rain. The rain was thrashing around with fury and wind fueled the beatings. It was a dramatic scene to watch from the balcony. It was as though waves of water was cleansing the landscape.

Chain of thoughts

When my wife was about to enter the house, I thought of playing a childish prank - to hold the door tightly from inside that she will be puzzled with the door not opening in spite of unlocking. When such thought came in, suddenly something flashed from my young age. Of someone holding my bicycle from behind and I was surprised that my pedaling was vain. Now I tried recollecting the face of that person. Oh, I remembered. I used to go to a public garden at early morning. In those days, gents went to different gardens on a daily basis. That were our bath points. We had well in the center of the garden. Drawing water from well require good muscle and stamina. Bigger men can do themselves and fill their tub with water they need. A boy like me would have to depend on a gardener. He would fill the tub, which would need 3 buckets of drawings from the well. For a day, I will have to give 10paise, on a monthly basis to was decided to be Rs 2.

Ok, that is the man who found be on the road, someday and held my bicycle.
Interesting to note the thoughts we keep jumping from somewhere to anywhere. To think about the money value, the good old social life style, the equipments we used, etc etc.

Oh, I didn't trick my wife by jamming the door; partially got lost in my own world and other partial was due to the insight into after effects when my wife successfully opens the doors and find me the culprit.

Green peas masala

Couple of days before, we finally made up of our mind to prepare green peas masala at home. Here are the steps we followed.

• Peel and chop onions, small one are tastier. I assume the onion amount should be as much as the vegetable we add.
• Fry onion in oil. Make it to golden yellow.
• Add ginger garlic paste, garam masala, pepper or chilli powder. Keep stirring.
• With the brownish paste in the pan, add green peas.
  Let the peas be fried in oil first.
• For richness, grind some cashews in water. Add this paste to the peas mixture. Add some more water.
• Instead of cashew paste, tomato or coconut milk will also be good. None of the above is also an alternate option.
• With added water, close the pan for few minutues. Make sure all ingridents mix up well.
• Serve hot with chappathi or parota or dosa or lemon rice etc.
  
  

Handling old laptop battery

If I disconnect the power from my laptop, the laptop shuts abruptly in 5 to 10 seconds. Looks like the battery is gone. However, I suspect some kind of firmware involvement also in this problem. When windows desktop is put under some prompt, then the laptop doesn't die even after removing the plug. So, if I wanted to move the laptop around while still working, I click on shutdown and leave the shutdown prompt as it is. After shifting, I cancel the prompt. So for this method helped in retaining for power for 15 minutes. Let to try beyond.

Ideal expense writer

We tried maintaining personal expense using different tools and techniques. Started with a fancy spreadsheet, then a website, moved on to traditional paper book, a pocket sized one etc. Nope, none helped us to stay on track. After couple of days, laziness pulled us away from these equipments.

While thinking about an ideal expense maintainer, here is what I wish to have. A box kept inside the house, close to the entrance. I can drop any receipt of different shape and texture. The box equipped with ocr will grab those pieces of papers, analyze them and find the expense to be entered. A calculator size panel in the side of the box would beep out the number it found. I can alter the number within 15 seconds, or else that number will be entered in a registered. The receipt will be filled neatly inside the box.

Blue toothed box will sync up with my computer on a daily basis. QED.

catalyst

The purchase did happen, along with some kind of drama which happens in these kind of deals. At one stage, the seller and the buyer slightly withdrew from the interest of making the transaction happen. When the two parties were about retire, the middlemen swung into action. They rescued the spirit. Brought in required parameters and convinced the parties to move ahead. Quite interesting experience. Till the last moment we didn't know if we will be buying!

To buy or not to buy

A purchaser's dilemma. Particularly when the stake is high and the buy is ornamental. Many comments, speculations to digest from different walks of people. Is the price high? Are clean hands involved in the deal? How much to rely on the seller? Will the ROI be satisfactory, whatever may be the expected returns be?

Guess we will have to keep moving with timely decision. Just enjoy the positive effects and correct any mistakes.

first last Vs last, first names

Most occasions we use the format, first name last name. There are few places, particularly while writing, that the structure last name, first name is adapted. In good old days, most often the last name reflected the occupation of the person. We see many family names with Baker, Clerk, Smith etc. So, while entering names in the record, last name sorted list would list out folks as per the jobs they work on. That would be easy for some one to keep track of the records and call the right set of folks for duty.
Not sure about the above theory. This occurred at me while using the address book in my mobile. I try to store the occupation of the person first before his/her name, eg Elec Sekar, Taxi Gopal, Law Ganesh, CA Manikam etc.

Back to yoga

After almost an year, I am restarted yoga practice. It is quite difficult and muscle flexibility ought to be regained. Quite good to do and body feels light.

Reflected on the reason for dropping out of a regular practice. Guess it is lack of concentration while doing alone. Mind gets drifted away into its own world of thoughts. Getting back to exercise, that too in the early hours of the day, is difficult. I used to convince myself that if I had some company for yoga or I joined any yoga institute, then I would be able to do better.

This time I had decided to keep doing on my own and focus on the task at hand.

Tactics of the leaves

While watering the plants, a cool insight of the plants came upon. The leaves starts from the stem and raises up in a slanting manner. They form v shaped pattern through out the stem. Having a flat structure, instead of v shape, might be more efficient to capture sun light. The advantage of v shape showed up while watering the plant. Water falling on the leaves rushed towards the stem and finally close to the root. Had it been a flat arrangement, water from the leaves might have splashed away from the root to the ground instead of towards the stem.

May be the plants have to form a strategic positioning for maximizing sunlight as well as rain water.

Freedom to mind

While going through the strange world, I got a light all of a sudden. What a freedom and relief we get once we are out of an issue. The issue may be minor, but we feel our mind relaxed and calm.

The problems and issues we face need not be a real challenge. They can be just a lack of knowledge about that particular system or situation. If we put some effort to understand the functionality of the system and behaviour, we may be through the difficult moments.

Strange world

When we reach an ideal point in life, we settle down happily. And then creeps bunch of issues here and there. That leads to the yearning of cleaning off such negative factors. We want those issues to vanish so that we can relish in our imaginative conditions we fantasized on the first place. Slowly the goodness of this experience drops off and only the bad thingy stick to our mind. If more and more such issues pile up, the particular point reached will itself be a burden. We start fantasizing for something else. Back to square one.

transparent editor

What if the text editors we use are transparent? Or transparentable? This occurred to be when I had to switch between different window, refer info at various source and come back to the editor to continue composing. Instead, if I have transparency, I will have focus on very few lines close to the current line I am editing. This patch of visible lines should be draggable/movable. Remaining area of the screen will be displaying the windows that are at the background. I can refer or even cut n paste from any of the available screen. With a snap of key or click, I should switch from transparent mode to opaque. Would be cool.

Follow British or American

While interacting with American colleagues, one of the confusing factor is the date format. Desis are used with dd/mm/yy and Americans insist on mm/dd/yy. Upon pondering on this conflict, interesting things surfaced. It is not only date format, there are many things Americans wanted to move off from British traditions. Here is a short list.

road side

Brits ride to the left side. Anyone following that convention will find it tough on American roads that drive on the right hand side. Car steering is also position in appropriate side of the car.

switch on/off

Simple light bulb switch. Do we pull the knob bottom to top or top to bottom for turning it on? Depends on the country.

Culture

Britons and I guess most of the European countries adhered strict hierarchical order in the society. The working place too followed such bureaucratic structure. Americans bent such rigid model and practice somewhat loose hierarchy.

Language

The formal British English had to give way to American slangish language.

Considering these factors, looks like such drastic change were taken upon themselves to symbolize their freedom from a former colony. They want to show their difference.
May be top to bottom writings of Chinese, right to left of Arabs could have originated out of similar identity establishment.

The power game

Recently Manipal University was derecognized as a quality medical college. The reason given by the government inspecting body is that the univ is lacking resources. Considering the recent past, where the institute is considered one among the best (to be precise, fourth best medical college in the country), such a lack of resource is a surprising findings. Are our institute adhere such a low standard?

Clearly the corrupt hands of the inspecting body wants to tamper into a resourceful setup.

A thought occurred to me. The state government is somewhat friendly towards MU. If a state government inspecting body could be floated, that would ease out the issue for now. Slowly the authenticity of such inspecting board can be popularized among other states.

This will bring down the power of the Central inspectors. However, the new setup will introduce few more flangs of its own.

Travel updater

Recently I happen to be on road and rails for four days. Just kept on moving from one city after another. Apart from the hackers, beggars, loud video player .. a new annoyer had joined .. it is the co passenger yelling at his/her mobile. Observed a pattern in this mobile usage. These people HAVE TO inform the other party about their exact longitude, latitude coordinates. Even if they don't know, they would wake the co passenger from sleep and question them with, "where r we now?" .. followed by ... "Aaang, I have crossed so-n-so place." As thou the listener is going to open up their GPS box and start monitoring the movement of this guy.

Wondering if we can have a personal mobile phone jammer.

rattled mind

In a volunteer mailing group, a small ripple will create a big wave of mails and an ultimate splash. One definite rocker is 'switch off lights' and 'save tissue papers'. What creative suggestions come out of these simple topics .. people get very unconventional and emotional about their ideas.

Recently such mail thread started with simple suggestions like:

Put some posters about power saving.

Encourage taking stairs as opposed to elevators.

Turn off lights in huddle rooms/conference rooms.

An engineer's response:

We are the engineers, we need to think of some innovative power saving
measures !

/What if there is sensing device at the entry of pantry as in one enters,
lights ON... and /

/as soon as one exists, lights OFF !! ( depending on the total number of
heads entered MINUS/

/total number of heads exited ) = 0 Implementation of this would cost intial
investment but would/

/save lots of power & power bills later.../

Someone started cribbing :

I do not see this poster idea is working, there are
posters just near the tissue paper in the toilets but people still use the
tissue paper. To my surprise even people stand and read this poster and use the
tissue paper as if the content is in French.

If we dont want people to use tissue, dont keep there! simple.

Followup ideas ...

On a related note, the quality of the tissue paper can be
improved.

Can someone tell this environmentalist that quality paper => cutting more trees

There were other suggestions like volunteers calling employees and advising them on tissue usage. People were going further to trace the origin of tissue, wondered if great grandfather and beyond used tissues etc.

What idle brain can do!