Taking a hit at Technology is not the solution!

If you are part of any social networking group then you probably know what this is about. Either you received such a post or sent one :), Which post you ask? The one about the benefits if using a bucket of water to wash Vs. Using a washing machine, or a shower vs bucket bathing and the usage of machinery vs. manual labor for agriculture. Well you get the picture.
Now what is wrong with such posts? We all know what is right in them though :). It is a negative propaganda about "Technology". Like many things technology evolves and there is a generation gap in accepting this technology. I will explain it a little more. We did everything by hand the hard way, only then we discovered the stone tools.. evolved to iron age and then to the industrial revolution. This took eons not 2-3 generations... more like 2000 or more generations. There is no agriculture if not for tools, which was the new technology for its time. Technology made things cheaper and easier. What was once a luxury was made available for the masses.
But it does come at a price. Any new technology needs moulding, like a baby. It takes time but making it better will yield a greater good than avoiding it.  You want an example... instead of avoiding cars, make battery cars cheaper. Instead of blaming manmade plastic make organic plastic that is environmentally friendly. Use nature to build the technology and make it better.
The forwards themselves are not bad, but in addition to awareness it spreads negativeness. Instead we should be forwarding messages on the success stories..like coffee cups that are fully paper and how CA cities curbed plastic from its shops etc.  Happy networking!!

Kids Snacks! Ofcourse Fried !!

I recently saw an add for a new snack parlour near a school in Chennai. Their advertisement prompted me to write this. I wish they change their menu to have some good food instead of what I feel as 'junk' food. When the world is screaming to be organic, use less water, plastic and fertilizers and grow own plants on roof garden, conserve water and not to use plastic, the norm seems to be different. Other than the crazy few who seem to have a ton of time on their hands to clean up beaches and talk about saving the planet and the harmful nature of using refined oil and frying food in it twice, some parents seem to turn a blind eye to all this and let their kids consume food that's really unfit.

When you were young do you remember, when you had the luxury of eating sweets or savories? I remember eating them for Diwali mainly and may be for one or two other minor ethnic festivals like 'Krishna Jayanthi', 'New Year' and 'Pongal' if you really press it. So 4-5 times a year. And what were they? Home made ghee and sugar or jaggery based sweets which was done in limited quantity per person, shared with friends and neighbors and I got to taste a little bit of everything. It will not last longer than 2-3 days. If anything is left for after school I will have it but otherwise mostly after school snack was limited to idlis, boost, bonda, dosas, upma and all kinds of fruits, sathu maavu kanji etc., Sweets from shops was even rare 2-3 times a year, when someone comes to visit or you go to a new place.

A few generations back this was even different. My parents tell me the 'muruku' their parents made was from solam and kambu. Since 'refining' was not all that famous, most of the oil used was unrefined and home made. For sometime in my young age too I remember making coconut oil from the few coconut trees in our house. That was used in food and for hair mixed with herbs. They have had puttu and appam again made at home for their snacks.

Now to the present - What do kids have today? Let me guess kurkure, chips, potato wedges, cutlet, somosa, fried pakora, aloo bonda, pani poori and to top it all Maggie!!??!!. It is not wrong to indulge in invigorating the taste buds, but if we say using technology is not bad, lets use it to make our food even healthier and better than before. Make 'Kuzhi paniyaram with grated veggies' - grate the veggies before hand and freeze it. How about a little whole grain burger patties toasted in oven or on stove top. Chopped up fruits with honey on top and grated dark chocolate. If your kid just loves fried why not bake some veggies in the oven, the basic counter top ones are not very expensive. It is the crispiness they prefer not the oil. Homemade granola bars, nuts and dried fruit laddu, sesame seed balls, even some of those old time groundnut balls pack in lot of energy and health.

Yogurt parfait, soy milk mixed in with dark chocolate, mixed nuts, sundal are other possibilities that do not need a lot of preparation. For drinks definitely try the good old lemonade with a dash of mint/sabja, throw in some sabja seeds in their tender coconut water, watermelon juice with lemon/orange squeezed in, buttermilk (my favourite), chilled milk with some kumkum, Gulkand in milk, dates/apple milk shake, chilled green tea with lemon with tulsi leaves made at home,  You can even pack some for the next trip for the whole family!!!

The Time and Date Conundrum

A few days back when I had to face a mysterious problem at work. For some reason a birthday was shifting by 1 when it was getting printed. Now if you are jumping up and down with your hands up in the air screaming I know! I know!, wait and hold that thought.

I was looking for all possible rational explanations of which day light savings seemed most reasonable. A coworker suggested difference in server times due to day light savings. Well guess what? the servers are in that one state AZ where there is no day light savings. So what else... What seems to be a simple issue in time became complex. After much pondering it happened in a single machine with the same date. No it is not an issue with leap year. It is 11th Oct 1942. What happened on that day you ask, well the world was at war. It was world war II period and for a few years in US they had only a 'war time' throughout the year. This was not the only occurrence of such meddling, there were others before and after this as well. And the software was brilliantly telling that the time component associated with the date was forcing it to believe it was 10th Oct and not 11th.

I was curious after this discovery and went to research more. It appears not just once but many times through out history man has changed the clocks and dates by months to align with calendars and religious dates. He has moved time around as if it were a pawn on the chess board. 

We think we understand Time and we have a feeling it is this one single continuous flow since the big bang. Turns out that is not true. For the way man has meddled with it, who knows we may very well be in 2018 already.

Food and Delivery Bikes

Do you remember the gas man pedaling down the street delivering gas cylinders to every house down the road ? It takes about 10 minutes per house, he delivers them, checks them and takes back the empty cylinder. You sign and pay him with a tip and sometimes tea or coffee or a diwali bonus.

If you grew in South India, you would have heard this every morning when you woke up in the  native language of the place " thakkali, vengayam, ara keerai, mulai keerai..." a repeated poetic sound of the vegetable monger. So many other street vendors also do the same for fruits, candies, ice cream, and any more.. driven in a tri cycle or a four wheeled push cart or some workable version of it.

In the many cities of India you would have seen street carts filled with vendors selling pani puri, dosa, selective foods, fruits, juices and even cosmetics. These are also a modified push cart with 4 wheels. Most of them will be pushed back or driven back (if it is tricycle) home in the night and brought back to the same or different location in the morning for sales once again.

If you have not read the news here it is  NPR Food Bikes News

Reading the news, all of the above came to my mind and it occurred to me, a concept that was there forever in India and many other Asian countries seems to start flourishing in US now. And when it did they write a huge post analyzing the benefits. These carts and bicycles have been saving so much of energy and pollution all these years. They have made it possible for the vendors to door-deliver goods to their customers. Looks like Asia has been having a sophisticated life style by these standards :).

A Walk (on the Water) to Remember!

On a spring weekend I was driving past a lake right along the freeway. Pictures flashed in front of my eyes on how the lake looked a couple of weeks back. The unbelievable transformation surprised me and the memories of the day came rushing to me.

Past: It was a warm day (around 40 degree F) close to the end of winter. We were driving on the familiar freeway to get to the restaurant for lunch. Seeing the frozen lake and all those people who were fishing we got excited to have a closer look. So after lunch we took a detour and went to the lake. It was a small beautiful lake, 95% frozen with small puddle of water starting to show up and for the fish in that small patch hundreds of sea gulls were flying above. Some of the brave men were ice fishing on it.

After a few skeptical withholds, we let go of the fear and stepped on to the ice sheet. The imaginary ice movement scared us, but we walked forward. We reached a few hundred feet from the shore seeing holes in the ice, trying to judge the depth of the ice, noticing the pecked fish and capturing the sea gulls in the camera.

There we met one of the sporty fishermen. He was all so excited to see us and showed us the ice fishing tactics. Of course he ridiculed the unfit clothing and shoes we had on and warned us to get back to the shore before we freeze. After learning to make a ice fishing hole and sharing his strange adventures which included horror filled ice fishing stories we came back to the shore all safe!

Back to Present, those moments though one might consider as stupidity I still would call it one of my life time experiences. I would have never dared to walk on the water otherwise. Inspite of the sheet of ice that was holding me up I was worried deep in my heart what if it gave way :) Now, I drove past the lake that is brightly shining as a vast blue stretch!

To all you Mac Lovers there...

I am sorry if it upsets you in any way, but just could not stop myself from enjoying this nicely written story on the IPad. I already have one other person pour out his feelings in where's my slate. But this is really nice, it’s true and genuine. If you still have not bought it or thinking about buying it you might want to check out this post in msnbc first :)

Well my personal take on this, Jobs is pretty good with Marketing and Sales. He has carefully suppressed or avoided some features in the initial versions of his products and later introduced them as new versions of the same product, increasing the temptation for people to buy it. But in this case he released iPhone which even non-Mac fans loved & appreciated and then released a simpler, clumsier IPad which even Mac fans hate now. I am not a Mac lover, but I went and had a demo in one of the apple stores on this device. The obvious killers for me were

    1. Lack of proper Bluetooth - the one that is in the device does not support everything.
    2. Lack of inbuilt Camera - come on this is silly, the main use is for browsing and chatting, why would they make it without a camera?
    3. No media card readers - Like SD cards etc.,
    4. Too pricy  for what it offers.
In short I decided against buying it atleast for now, because I get most of the capabilities in my Nokia Smart Phone and HP laptop :), I might consider the next version of iPhone though.

Has the Technology really Advanced?

Today I was contemplating on this. With so much of scientific advancement and technology innovations still only a pocket of the business really uses them all. May be it is still expensive for most businesses or may be they are happy and accustomed to the old way of doing things. Sometimes it could just be the worry on ROI. The following incident is what made me think about it.

I called the customer service of UPS to hold a package. The Customer Service Representative (CSR) tells me that it’s done and someone from the location that holds the package will call me on the pick up timing with in the hour. After waiting for over an hour I called them back. This time a new CSR picks up, she reads out a note for this package "Unable to contact or leave a message to the pick up location". Then she tells me that she will try to leave a message and they will contact me again and I should be able to pick it up by that day. It was 8:00 pm, I got skeptical and asked her what is the closing time of the location, she tells me 7:00 pm (Ah!!! please commonsense people). After trying every possible way to make her understand that it is not humanly possible that I can pick it up that day because of the timings I gave up! I had to hang the phone and stop myself from screaming at her.

The next day I decided to stick the info notice to my door and on my way to work gave them a call around 8:30 am. Again a new CSR picks up and after listening to the situation for 2 mins she agrees to remove the hold and have it delivered, but tells me it will be delivered only the following day. I was like "What the heck?” Surprisingly she tells me there is no way she could directly contact the location or can give me a phone number and has to leave a message. Also she says in this case they will take one day to process at the minimum. I was like "WOW!!!” no use just told her the whole process totally sucks and she says "Have a nice day!" and hangs up. Would I? Now I have to go to this location and pick up anyways.

This is when I started wondering. UPS is one of the established companies in US, but even they do not communicate properly and do not use the technology in any useful way. So what could have been done... 

1. The CSR who handled it first could have called me back (ofcourse I gave the number) and explained the situation and removed the hold.  
2. The communication between the CSRs and the Location that handles the packages could have been much better - using e-mails, internal messages, even a phone would have worked.
3. More options like canceling the hold would make the package go back into the delivery queue immediately etc.,
4. Each time a new CSR picks up its hard to explain the whole thing again, wouldn't it be easier if the previous person leaves a note? 

Ironically, in my case a company that delivers posts (also a form of communication) has a bad communication network within. Hope they realize it before diminishing in the competitive market!