Bunion Vs Banian

I was looking at the wart in my toe this morning , resulting in a flashback to my podiatrist... and dyuuuuu.....( can you see the rings..) , who introduced me to something called Bunions. Bunion is a common forefoot deformity where a displacement of the bone under the 1st toe occurs.Many a times have I teased my sister for that. As soon as I saw the pamphlet describing it, I called my sis and introduced her to the word Bunion .It always feels good when you know that the slightly protruding bone has a name , though ofcourse we had named it Betsy already.

dyuuuu....(flashback over)
The flashback prompted me to ask Suresh the spelling of Bunion and he said "Banian" .Ofcourse, he meant the banians that we wear in India. This interested me all the more and I started searching for the word Banian. Mariam Webster didn't have a clue and gave me some other suggestions. There was some thesaurus which proclaimed banian as a loose fitting jacket, orginally worn in India. Bingo ! The interesting factor is their prononciation are the same. Atleast Banyan will have a different pronounciation though it is called Banian by most.

This got me thinking how a conversation would be if I meet someone with a Bunion..
" Acchucho, adhu enna Bunion a.."
" Idhula ennanga acchucho, veyiluku banian dhane nalladhu"
" Illanga, unga kalula"
" Amanga, veyiluku verum sandals dhan podradhu..no shoes"
" Ennaku idha pathi US ponadhuku apparam dhan therinjudhu"
" Enga, Sandals ngarudhu oru rickshaw karanuku kooda theriyume"
" Ayyo, na Bunion..a sonnen"
" Enga, Banian porandha kolandhaiku kooda theriyume"
" Na andha Banian..a sollalala"
" Oh! Neenga kai vacha banian..a pathi sollreengala"
" Illa, elumbu theriyudhe, andha Bunion..a pathi sonnen"
" Aama, idhu kai vaikadha banian, naa irukura size..ku,anganga elumbu theiryama irrukuma"
" Ayyo, kalula elumbu theriyudhe..adha sonnen"
" Adhuva, adhu poranandhulendhe irrukudhu, adhu peru "adhirshtaman Betsy" "
" Adhu peru dhan Bunion"
" Banian..a? Edho Socksian..nu vaccha paravala..Kalula podradhuku peru Banian..nu yaravdhu vaipangala.. Idhukundha US ku pasangala anupa koodadhu..kettu poidaranga"
" Saringa..Neenga Socksian..ne koopidunga..Enna vittrunga"

OK..Its tough to write in Tanglish...I think this is enough..

DayLight Savings

I was having an argument with my beloved wife on when the daylight saving starts. As usual, she was right..:)..(Okay Shoba, keezha irangu)... Anyway, I found that the Daylight Savings Time (DST) begins at 2 a.m on the first Sunday of April and reverts back at 2 a.m on the last Sunday of October. I also found that, beginning 2007, DST is extended by one month and begins at 2 a.m on the second Sunday in March to 2 a.m on the first Sunday of November. One might ask, whats the big deal about DST. For a long time, I never understood the theory behind it. Some told me that we will get more day light during summer in the evenings for various activities. But, is that the reason?

During the start of DST, time is shifted to the right by one hour. This would mean that, the sunrise and sunset will seem to happen one-hour later than usual. During winter, the time is reverted back by shifting time left by an hour from DST (which is the actual time according to international standards). One of the reasons cited behind this is conservation of energy. If sunrise is shifted a little late, especially during the time when most people are asleep, there is very little impact in the morning. In the evening, since the daylight stays for a longer period of time, people dont use electricity for lighting till late at night. Multiply that savings for the entire nation. Another observation states that, during DST, people tend to drive more during daylight and that causes lesser accidents when compared to night time. Also, since the night time starts a little late, the window from crime which typically happens early on in the night is reduced as well. DST helps you lead a better life at a lower cost..:)

Coming to lighter side of things, when daylight saving happens, any overnight bar should make sure that they close at 1:59AM instead of 2:00AM since that would add one more hour. Also, employees working overnight shifts will end up working 1 hour more than normal and 1 hour lesser than normal during the reversal. One more interesting thing is that, if you want to re-live a moment, the DST start day would be a fine day. You get 1 hour worth of time again. Isnt that interesting? The reversal is interesting as well. You lose an hour worth of stuff in a second. If you plot the time on the x-axis, suddenly you will see a discontinuity of an hour, which in absolute sense is just infinitesimally small... Anyway, I like DST because I can sleep for one more hour and I dont like reversals because I get less sleep. One interesting study would be to find the money lost due to the confusion before and after DST changes and see if the savings are justified...:)

A guide to late night TV

As some of you know, I am a night owl (is that redundant?). I prefer to work, browse with TV on at night. In course of my “work”, I become a self proclaimed expert in late night TV watching. So, here is your guide to late night TV. When I said late night, I was not talking about 11.30PM or 12 but 12.30AM to 3AM.

Night time TV can be classified as the following

1) Paid programming – Interesting or addictive advertisements

You will be amazed to find out how addictive they can get. I watched that stupid “Magic Bullet” 100 times by now. Well, they all start in “very boring” mode. If you are careful enough you can get out of them at this stage. If not, you will be lured into “not-so boring” phase. In this specific example (Magic bullet – an all purpose mixie/blender which is shaped like a bullet), a couple with Australian accent (you would wonder why?) started chatting with their friends who join them at Kitchen counter. In a sane morning mind, I would have flipped the channel. But night mind is simply more tolerant. 2 more minutes I told myself. They promised that everything can be done under 10 seconds. Well, I don’t care, I told myself. But let us see whether they walk the talk.

He prepared omelet in 8 seconds and she prepares 2 kinds of muffin in 10 seconds. Hmm..they are keeping up till now, but again it is just breakfast, how about lunch or dinner? Fettuccini Alferdo was done in 8 seconds and 7 seconds is all it took to convert left-over chicken into sandwich. By now, I stopped working and started following seriously. They made nacho-cheese, dips and frozen drinks in one digit seconds. And topped it with sub-5 seconds completion of chocolate mousse and fruit sorbet (the word I wouldn’t have known otherwise).

The show is really exciting by now. Right when you want more, they want to sell the product. :) Pricing is whole other thing. It starts with reasonable yet too-much-for-unknown-product range. 250$ says the announcer. Then comes the real offer “50% off”. And boom comes another one, “another magic bullet free”. I lost interest with the dry marketing talk. It won’t dry grind for sambhar/rasam I told myself before flipping to next paid advertisement showing “Miracle Blade”.

2) Movies – did I mention crappy

I always wondered how they don’t pick good movies even by mistake in Tamil TV channels. And late night movie watching will prove this talent is not local to Sun TVs but it is very universal. They hand-pick bad movies and show them till the tape calls timeout.

Then there is re-run of famous movies. Channels prefer some actors and movies and don’t want to change them for ever. Tom hanks top the actor list and Shawshank redemption tops the movie list.

There are few more categories like "Paid programming - selling the book or concept", "Talk show" etc. But I am too sleepy at 3.35AM typing this mail so good night and good luck.

MailOrder Prescription - 1

I use mailorder prescription for some of my medicines..A clip of my recent conversation with them...

Tuesday:
"Oh dear, I am running out of my prednisone !!" .
.Frantic searching in the medical cabinet..
"Thank God, 2 more left ..Got to order for refills online"
Logging in , found the website ....oops!! NO MORE REFILLS ...PRESCRIPTION EXPIRED..
" Let me call their number and get a prescription .."
Dial 1-800-XXXXXX . Listen to the machine , following all the prompts ( that can be a different blog) ,keep on pressing 0 till you hear "Transferring to an operator".
" Hmmm...Ok, I can hold...."
After 15 minutes of scratching, massaging my hands, staring at the ceiling, talking to Suresh in my mobile phone...
"Hello..this is Mandy, How can I help you today?"
"Hi..My name is Shoba. I wanted to order some refills and found that it has expired.Can you please send a prescription request to my doc and get it"
"Sure....which medicines do you need?"
"Prednisone..Actually, I have only 2 left. It would really help if I can get it in the next few days. Maybe, you can send a request for my other drugs too to make things easier ..."
"I cant do much Ma'm . If we get the prescription by tomorrow, we can deliver it to you on thursday. "
"Can you send the request ASAP. I will talk to the doc's office and get it going".
"Sure..Give it 5 minutes"
"Thanks for your help".
Feeling euphoric inspite of the long wait to get to my precious Mandy..called the doc's office after half an hour..
"Hello..I am Dr.X's patient.blah blah blah...Just wanted to check if you got the prescription request from my pharmacy"
"No Shoba....I dont see anything here"
"Hmm..They said they will fax it to you by today.I have medicine just for 2 more days"
"We will send it to them as soon as we get it".
"Thanks"

Wednesday:
7:00AM :" Got to call the doc's office today...Should not forget"
9:30AM: "Hi..this is Shoba.I am Dr.X's patient...blah blah blah..So, did you get the prescription request.."
" I dont see anything here. Let me check with Laura"
"Shoba, No, we didn't get the request yet"
"Can you give me your fax number"
"Sure..It is 1-XXX-XXX . We will send the prescription as soon as the request comes in."
"thank you"
Dial 1-800-XXXXXX . Hold for 20 minutes..(Murphy's law---the more urgent the task is, the more time it takes to reach the operator)
Multitasking by writing my test routine while holding the phone...
"Damn it..why cant we have cordless phones at work..."
20 minutes later..
"Hi this is Cindy..How may I help you today?"
"Blah.blah blah...so, did u guys send the request"
"Let me see...sorry, my computer is very slow today..."
"Yes lady! I can understand..please give me a yes or no"
"OK..here it is! Yes, we did send a prescription request ..We are yet to receive the prescription.
"Did you send it to this fax number 1-xxx-xxx "
"No..I think we sent it to 1-yyy-xxxx..Ok, I will send one more request right now.
"Can I fax you the prescription. I can go and get it from my doc's office"
"No..I am sorry.It has to come from the doctor's office".
"Ok..thank you"
5:00PM: Reached home after a gruelling day at work..Voicemail from the doctor's office...
"Hi Shoba, this is Dr.Y . Dr.X is out of town. I need to talk to you regarding your prescription. Please give a call "
Ofcourse, they close at 5:00PM.SIGH!!

More to follow later...

Diamond Water Paradox

WHY is diamond expensive than water? Called the diamond-water paradox, this is a classic problem posed to students of economics. This issue is considered important because water is more useful to mankind than diamonds, and yet the latter is expensive. Why?

The answer has to do with utility and scarcity. Suppose you are in the middle of a desert, and dying of thirst. What if you are offered diamonds and a bottle of water and asked to pick one? You will surely choose the bottle of water to quench your thirst. This is because you find water more useful than diamonds. In economics, your utility for water is higher than that of diamonds. Suppose you are offered more bottles of water. Having quenched your thirst, your demand for water decreases. In economic parlance, your marginal utility for water diminishes. Now, suppose you are offered diamonds instead. You may hoard them in your bank locker. But what if you are offered more diamonds? Will your marginal utility for diamonds also diminish? Yes, but at a lower speed than that of water. Why? The reason has to do with the demand and supply for diamonds. Being a natural resource, its supply is limited. The demand is, however, high because people buy diamonds as a way to tell the world that they have money (termed as conspicuous consumption in economics). The high demand and limited supply is the reason why the marginal utility for diamonds decreases at a lower rate than that of water. Hence, diamonds carry higher monetary value than water, even though we find more use for water.

Group Lunch

I dont know what is it about group lunches, especially if the group size is more than 6-7 people, I dont know what it achieves apart from the fact that one gets a free lunch. Usually, the confinement is between the 2-4 people around you and if I get to pick the choice, I usually pick folks whom I know. So, why is there a group lunch. I can sort of understand the deal about birthdays and farewell lunches. Am I the only one to have such a cynical view?... I dont know..

In most of the group lunches, mainly the ones that have a very long table with people facing each other and you get trapped between a couple of people whom you dont know. Dont you feel that there is usually an interesting piece of conversation going on at the other end of the table where people seem all happy and laughing out loud, and people from the non-laughing end try to focus and look at the crowd on the other side with a sorry look on their faces. Especially, for a person like me whose ears are a little "goyyan", even under normal conditions of temperature and pressure, I dont hear things properly, even if shouted at close proximities. To top that, the wave of laughter from the conversation sort of propagates to some extent along the table, deteriorating in its content along the way. Have you had cases when the person next to you looks at you and laughs and you dont know whether to laugh back without knowing the context. I sometimes laugh and be a roman in italy. There are times when I end up asking them what the conversation was about. In most cases, the reply will be "I dont know, I think it is something about blah blah blah"... I ask myself, "Why did you laugh then?"... and then I laugh at them pretending to laugh at what they were laughing about. May be my neighbor was laughing for the same reason as mine about his neighbour, I just dont know.

Feedbacks...

I've been looking at mirror lately for longer periods of time. I was wondering what the reason could be. The mirror is just a feedback mechanism that reflects who you truly are (in a physical context). When you smile, you get the smile back and when you frown, the reflection frowns as well. Imagine the case when we smile and the reflection frowns and so on, we definitely wouldnt want to look at the mirror. Not so much because it doesnt do what we intend it to do, but, I think it may have to do something about running the risk that the mirror might reflect something that we dont intend to see.

When we face the risk of not being able to deterministically predict what is going to happen next,we try to shy away from it, especially if "others" are involved. I was thinking about exams, performance appraisals, races, etc., The more you tend to take up new things, the more feedbacks you are going to get from reality. As the saying suggests, Ignorance could be a real bliss sometimes. If you dont take an exam, you will never feel bad about being the last percentile student. The same works the other way too. More than the question about facing reality, the real question is, are we ready to take feedbacks. Apart from the stereotypes about who is giving the feedback and how it can influence you, let us just ponder for a moment and think really hard on the last feedback that we got, the one that we "really" felt was an eye opener.

I think feedback is a great mind conditioner (no shampoo..). If one is able to consume feedbacks and respond to them solely based on their true merits, I think nothing can stop them from attaining greatness. As kids, I remember the times when we were attuned to receive feedbacks and act on it (presumably the good ones..). After we attain a threshold, I think we forget the fact there are still things that need improvement. The more I think about it, I feel that our improvement potential is just a factor of the baseline using which we rate ourselves. We always have the choice of picking our baselines. Irrespective of what we pick, if our baseline has to improve, feedback is the key.

Different wavelengths

I have said this many times before and heard this even more times. You bond better with people of the same "wavelength". The saying "Birds of the same feather flock together" attests to that. Now that I have grown in age and hopefully wisdom, I don't any longer subscribe to this.

The idea behind the thinking was that if the wavelengths did not match, then this would result in conflicts and aggravate the relationship which will gradually dwindle. An open mind, mutual respect and conflict resolution skills can make relationships work even if priorities are different. If you are averse to conflicts, then you naturally stand to lose a lot more than just the relationship.

It takes all kinds of people to make this world. People's behavior is dictated by their priorities in life. No two people are created alike and we all have our differences. What makes most of us live in harmony, despite these differences is the tolerance of each other's priorities. In fact at a macro level, I'll go further to say that there are more advantages in diversity. Think of a world where everybody ate only spinach, where everybody went hang gliding or everybody in the city sauntered in the park, or everybody in town went to the hair salon on Saturday afternoons. There will be a severe resource crunch. Different priorities drive the economy if you compare the priorities of savers versus that of borrowers. One person's treasure is another person's trash.

Personally, I am averse to confrontation and conflicts, this makes my conversation with other "wavelengths" superficial at best. I can have meaningful and deep dialogues with only people that I know are open enough to receive my words. If I could overcome this inherent nature in some way, I can connect with more number of people. I might even meet more "open" and "tolerant" people. Well, I may even have the capability to open up people's monds that were formerly closed!

Blogger's Freedom

One of the things that disturbed me in the past week is the news about bloggers being sued under libel laws. By publishing your thoughts to mass audience, a blog is considered in par with publications in news papers and other medias which supposedly abide by the libel laws. Libel is a legal term that describes a written form of defamation, which the dictionary defines as a "false or unjustified injury to someone's good reputation". Though I agree that one should refrain from publishing malicious or unfounded content, I also tend to think that expanding the scope of libel laws to bloggers is a little far fetched.

I think everyone should have the "freedom" to express themselves. If you look back at history, the definition of freedom has been changing constantly. I think freedom of an individual has been compromised time to time for the supposedly greater benefit of the wholesomeness of a community/nation. Though I partly agree with that notion, I think there are certain fundamental things where such compromises should not be made, especially, freedom of expression. My point is that, if someone is stupid and the whole world is listening to them, why should the stupid person be considered gullible. Bloggers are not trying to advertise their thoughts, they just express them and I am not sure why that is wrong. An individual could be irrational from time to time. Even the biggest nations with tons of information and knowledge make irrational decisions resulting in loss of billions and billions of dollars. So, trying to go behind an individual for his/her (ir)rationality is plain absurdity. I feel that, going behind bloggers is just a strategy to restrict information flow, and hence freedom of expression and I strongly condemn that. Wondering what you guys think...

Karma

I was reading intent blog this morning and hit upon a blog by MallikaChopra talking about soul mates. One of the commentators had mentioned about past karma relating to our present family relationships. I always used to think that we dont have a choice in choosing our parents, siblings etc ...all we can choose are our friends and spouses. But, reflecting on these thoughts and what he said, maybe we do choose our family after all. Maybe we do decide where to be born depending on our past karma. And ofcourse, maybe we choose our soul-mates also based on our karma.
Related to this, we were watching the movie "Final Destination" the other day. It talks about death's pattern and how it takes life right on time. You can never disrupt the design. If its your time to die, you do. If not, how much every you try, you wont. ..Kinda' an hair-raising thriller . It does make sense . There are people who have had close call with death and escape just in time. And numerous others, who die without knowing what hit them.
Bottom line is karma decides all. Atleast, for people who suffer, it is better to accept the suffering as karma and fight over it than wondering why they have to suffer.

Lighter side of events...

I got this problem from a friend of mine and I found it quite interesting. See if you guys can find the correct solution...

Karen lives in a new neighbourhood near Philadelphia. She has an adorable kid by name Cathy. Cathy is 21 years younger to Karen. Six years from now, Karen will be 5 times as old as Cathy. If all the above were true, what is the whereabouts of Cathy's father now?