Crowded lifts are fun. Notice how ten people in a lift will stay perfectly silent; they’ll look up at the display counting the floors, look at their shoes, and look at the walls of the lift. There’s a cold silence and something tells you that everyone inside prefers it that way. Isn’t it funny how people can stand next to each other and go up 23 floors without making an eye contact? And that sight when the floor has ‘arrived’. I’ve noticed how men and women will literally rush out of the lift as soon as it lands, almost like a Ferrari in a pit stop whose crew took a second too much to refuel. Men will steal glances, searching around for the best assets and women will punch away into their cell phones like that’s the last hope for survival.
How do I know this? I ride up and down five floors each day looking at assets. We are men, and that’s how we are wired.
* * *
“I think she should start hanging out with single men more often”, I thought to myself, as I stood in the lift.
Her hands were folded, shoulders slightly stooped and the hair tucked behind the ears suggested that the she had been complimented on her ear rings earlier in the day. Her glance was fixed to the floor and the corner of my eyes was fixed on her.
“But you know girls. They like committed men.” my alter ego said.
“Yeah, but what good is that? If she gave single guys a chance, it would be good for all 4 of us.”, I couldn’t help but think to myself.
“Who four?”
“Herself, that guy, his wife and the single men. It’s such a win-win-win-win situation if she only decides”
The lift reached the ground floor and we all moved out.
* * *
I like Mel Gibson’s movie What Women Want. In the movie, by a stroke of circumstance, he gets the ability to hear what a woman is thinking. I visualize a device that can give each of us the power to do this; and I don’t mean masculine and feminine. I mean everybody can hear what every other person is thinking.
Here’s the catch: This device will work only inside lifts.
I wonder what she must have thought had she heard what I was thinking inside that lift. Probably something like, “Jerk!”
But the device is still an idea. Until lifts are equipped with this ‘thought hearing device’, I still maintain that she needs to give single men a chance.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
WEF kicks off
The 5-day World Economic Forum (WEF) kicks off this evening in Davos, Switzerland. The event is expected to draw 2,500 participants from 96 countries. Participants from around the world include:
• 250 public figures, including 41 heads of state or government, 60 ministers, 30 heads or senior officials of international organizations and 10 ambassadors
• More than 510 participants from civil society, including 50 heads or representatives of non-governmental organizations, 225 media leaders, 215 leaders from academic institutions and think tanks, 10 religious leaders of different faiths and 10 trade union leaders. [Source: www.weforum.org]
The co-chairs of this year’s meet, as in every other year, is a handful of some of the world’s most influential names: Kofi Annan, Stephen Green of HSBC Holdings, Anand Mahindra of Mahindra and Mahindra, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, Maria Ramos (Transnet Ltd., South Africa), Jeroen van der Veer (Chief o Royal Dutch Shell) and Werner Wenning of Bayer, Germany.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is expected to pitch Russia’s Economic Vision at the opening address (00:15, IST) that is expected to set the tone of the debate over the course of the forum. Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath is leading the Indian congregation.
It will be interesting to note how Klaus Schwab’s stage will shape up discussions (and solutions, hopefully). With all the doom and gloom expected for much of 2009, this could very well be a place for the top brass to put matters into perspective. As it is already being said, this is the most important edition of the WEF in forty years.
A familiar face at WEF, Bill Gates, seems absent. The Obama administration is sending only one senior adviser. Another section to watch out this WEF: The Young Global Leaders.
• 250 public figures, including 41 heads of state or government, 60 ministers, 30 heads or senior officials of international organizations and 10 ambassadors
• More than 510 participants from civil society, including 50 heads or representatives of non-governmental organizations, 225 media leaders, 215 leaders from academic institutions and think tanks, 10 religious leaders of different faiths and 10 trade union leaders. [Source: www.weforum.org]
The co-chairs of this year’s meet, as in every other year, is a handful of some of the world’s most influential names: Kofi Annan, Stephen Green of HSBC Holdings, Anand Mahindra of Mahindra and Mahindra, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, Maria Ramos (Transnet Ltd., South Africa), Jeroen van der Veer (Chief o Royal Dutch Shell) and Werner Wenning of Bayer, Germany.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is expected to pitch Russia’s Economic Vision at the opening address (00:15, IST) that is expected to set the tone of the debate over the course of the forum. Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath is leading the Indian congregation.
It will be interesting to note how Klaus Schwab’s stage will shape up discussions (and solutions, hopefully). With all the doom and gloom expected for much of 2009, this could very well be a place for the top brass to put matters into perspective. As it is already being said, this is the most important edition of the WEF in forty years.
A familiar face at WEF, Bill Gates, seems absent. The Obama administration is sending only one senior adviser. Another section to watch out this WEF: The Young Global Leaders.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Scroll Up
[Blog credit: Sweta Ramachandran of ERA for sparking the discussion on Kane and Abel]
Speech detection is hot and happening. Microsoft is hard at work getting their speech identification tools right. While all the work is going around in getting voice, ink and electronics to meet at a point, I think it would be worthwhile extending this to our everyday human-human interaction.
Losing your train of thoughts and getting distracted is easy. Often times, we find ourselves talking about a certain something only to be pulled away from it due to a hundred and one reasons. When we finally decide to get back to the main theme of discussion, it is not surprising to find that we can’t exactly remember where we left off.“I’m sorry, where was I?” Teachers, doctors, directors, politicians, engineers, mothers and zoo keepers: we’ve said that line at some point of time.
It must be evident to you by now that we’re relying less and less on our memories for remembering things. There’s Wiki and there’s Google and there’ll be several other morphs of these in years to come. Our minds are increasingly migrating towards activities such as strategizing, designing etc. that require more of lateral thinking. In a nutshell, the human mind will begin to do what all attempts at getting a machine to do has proved unsuccessful. I’ll give you a few examples:
1) Wine Tasters or coffee tasters. (A machine could never tell the fine difference between 30 varieties of coffee as precisely as a connoisseur of coffee could).
2) The human nose. (Getting a machine to differentiate between various odors is a difficult task, though nanotechnology is beginning to make replacements for the human olfactory systems possible).
3) Human stupidity. (Think of Albert Einstein’s famous quote: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Now, think of ICC’s recent ’20 Greatest’ list.)
But while researchers are hard at work, here’s my pathetic hypothesis. It’s the kind of forward looking stuff that a million others are hypothesizing as I write this. But I come in a minority since I took the pain to write it. And a handful of us will go onto making a prototype and test it. There’ll be a rare one or two will give up their social life to commercialize this kind of stuff. And that’s when, I’ll tell my kids, “Your Dad thought about this when he was 22. Imagine how rich we’d be now if I had sucked up to my idea.” (Well, not exactly in those words).
Here's the technology, folks. Every human mouth will have implanted in it a small little micro speech-to-text converter device with a built in projector. This device may be turned off and on with a button that will be placed in ‘another’ part of the body. Assuming that the little converter device is on as you speak, what you say will appear in text form on a 3” X 5” black display screen (the kinds that appears to be suspended in thin air), Johnny Quest style. Green robotic font. As you keep rambling on, real time transcription will occur and the scroll bar will keep moving down. In case you get distracted and lose your train of thoughts, all you’d need to do is the scroll up using your index finger and continue from you left off.
That's tomorrow’s technology, by the way.
Speech detection is hot and happening. Microsoft is hard at work getting their speech identification tools right. While all the work is going around in getting voice, ink and electronics to meet at a point, I think it would be worthwhile extending this to our everyday human-human interaction.
Losing your train of thoughts and getting distracted is easy. Often times, we find ourselves talking about a certain something only to be pulled away from it due to a hundred and one reasons. When we finally decide to get back to the main theme of discussion, it is not surprising to find that we can’t exactly remember where we left off.“I’m sorry, where was I?” Teachers, doctors, directors, politicians, engineers, mothers and zoo keepers: we’ve said that line at some point of time.
It must be evident to you by now that we’re relying less and less on our memories for remembering things. There’s Wiki and there’s Google and there’ll be several other morphs of these in years to come. Our minds are increasingly migrating towards activities such as strategizing, designing etc. that require more of lateral thinking. In a nutshell, the human mind will begin to do what all attempts at getting a machine to do has proved unsuccessful. I’ll give you a few examples:
1) Wine Tasters or coffee tasters. (A machine could never tell the fine difference between 30 varieties of coffee as precisely as a connoisseur of coffee could).
2) The human nose. (Getting a machine to differentiate between various odors is a difficult task, though nanotechnology is beginning to make replacements for the human olfactory systems possible).
3) Human stupidity. (Think of Albert Einstein’s famous quote: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Now, think of ICC’s recent ’20 Greatest’ list.)
But while researchers are hard at work, here’s my pathetic hypothesis. It’s the kind of forward looking stuff that a million others are hypothesizing as I write this. But I come in a minority since I took the pain to write it. And a handful of us will go onto making a prototype and test it. There’ll be a rare one or two will give up their social life to commercialize this kind of stuff. And that’s when, I’ll tell my kids, “Your Dad thought about this when he was 22. Imagine how rich we’d be now if I had sucked up to my idea.” (Well, not exactly in those words).
Here's the technology, folks. Every human mouth will have implanted in it a small little micro speech-to-text converter device with a built in projector. This device may be turned off and on with a button that will be placed in ‘another’ part of the body. Assuming that the little converter device is on as you speak, what you say will appear in text form on a 3” X 5” black display screen (the kinds that appears to be suspended in thin air), Johnny Quest style. Green robotic font. As you keep rambling on, real time transcription will occur and the scroll bar will keep moving down. In case you get distracted and lose your train of thoughts, all you’d need to do is the scroll up using your index finger and continue from you left off.
That's tomorrow’s technology, by the way.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
For better or for worse
My stay in Chennai is getting more interesting with every passing day.
I came here in August last year, quite by choice and my ongoing stint at Frost and Sullivan (www.frost.com; these guys are good) is keeping things where they should be.
Some of my friends might know this – I spent the first six months living in a room so small that calling it a ‘match box’ would be an overstatement. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this previously in my blog, but I was forced to skip certain positions in my morning yoga because the walls wouldn’t permit. I hope you get the picture.
Almost as a New Year resolution (to live in less claustrophobic places), I moved in with the Logica boys into an apartment in Srinagar Colony. I’m better off here in most ways: I have the best of roomies in the entire eastern hemisphere. Kashe and Nire are the guys you want to live around to get an appreciation of little things- like the importance of having a minimum of three eggs a day, or waking up early; or snoring at night.
But as we collectively acknowledge, our move into this house has proved worse off on two grounds. And these are like the national problems of Chennai: water and mosquitoes. Brushing every morning and night gives me a feeling that I’m taking water straight from the Bay of Bengal into my mouth. Gosh, the amount of salt can put Captain Cook to shame. And those sonovabitch mosquitoes. Every night is a fight for survival. We tried everything: Mortein, Good Knight, Palm Oil, Agarbathis. But these f!@#$%^ keeps coming back. A blood donation camp would have been richer by a couple of units of blood by now.
Last night, Nire came up with the mother of all solutions – a mosquito net. I’m talking about those netted screens that insulate your bed from the blood suckers. We had a hard time getting the net up on to the hooks. But once it went up, I tell you with no shame that we had a night like few others can ever imagine.
Here’s the fun thing about the mosquito net: you get to see the little bastards valiantly trying to get in. But you know that there’s not a chance in hell that can happen. All the fun lies in counting them from inside using your torch; there’s no better way to tease them. It’s truly the joy of laughing at the misery of these guys that makes it all the more worth it. Here’s the sad part: these guys ain’t gonna spare you when you walk out of bed in the morning. They’ll prick you and pound you until you wish you had lived in a blood donation camp.
Everyone must get a mosquito net. I’m convinced about that.
I came here in August last year, quite by choice and my ongoing stint at Frost and Sullivan (www.frost.com; these guys are good) is keeping things where they should be.
Some of my friends might know this – I spent the first six months living in a room so small that calling it a ‘match box’ would be an overstatement. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this previously in my blog, but I was forced to skip certain positions in my morning yoga because the walls wouldn’t permit. I hope you get the picture.
Almost as a New Year resolution (to live in less claustrophobic places), I moved in with the Logica boys into an apartment in Srinagar Colony. I’m better off here in most ways: I have the best of roomies in the entire eastern hemisphere. Kashe and Nire are the guys you want to live around to get an appreciation of little things- like the importance of having a minimum of three eggs a day, or waking up early; or snoring at night.
But as we collectively acknowledge, our move into this house has proved worse off on two grounds. And these are like the national problems of Chennai: water and mosquitoes. Brushing every morning and night gives me a feeling that I’m taking water straight from the Bay of Bengal into my mouth. Gosh, the amount of salt can put Captain Cook to shame. And those sonovabitch mosquitoes. Every night is a fight for survival. We tried everything: Mortein, Good Knight, Palm Oil, Agarbathis. But these f!@#$%^ keeps coming back. A blood donation camp would have been richer by a couple of units of blood by now.
Last night, Nire came up with the mother of all solutions – a mosquito net. I’m talking about those netted screens that insulate your bed from the blood suckers. We had a hard time getting the net up on to the hooks. But once it went up, I tell you with no shame that we had a night like few others can ever imagine.
Here’s the fun thing about the mosquito net: you get to see the little bastards valiantly trying to get in. But you know that there’s not a chance in hell that can happen. All the fun lies in counting them from inside using your torch; there’s no better way to tease them. It’s truly the joy of laughing at the misery of these guys that makes it all the more worth it. Here’s the sad part: these guys ain’t gonna spare you when you walk out of bed in the morning. They’ll prick you and pound you until you wish you had lived in a blood donation camp.
Everyone must get a mosquito net. I’m convinced about that.
Monday, January 12, 2009
My Apologies
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading this blog and accepting slash rejecting all the mumble-jumble that comes through it.
I wish to apologise for all the typos that you you might have spotted over the months. It may not necessarily reflect the author's carelessness; it could just mean that English is evolving.
Thanks again!
Happy day.
Arjun
Thank you for reading this blog and accepting slash rejecting all the mumble-jumble that comes through it.
I wish to apologise for all the typos that you you might have spotted over the months. It may not necessarily reflect the author's carelessness; it could just mean that English is evolving.
Thanks again!
Happy day.
Arjun
Friday, January 9, 2009
Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure
Big thanks to Navneet for tipping me off on ‘Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure’.
I believe that the final stretch of road at Ushuia is the only gateway to the next world. I can’t tell you the number of times that I have walked down that road, got into a vessel and stood on the deck only to set sail to the Isle of South Georgia. We’d then wade our way through 800 miles of rough sea to reach the Elephant Island. I’d pose there and get a picture clicked with 2 penguins on either side. The ice bergs were gigantic (an understatement), and it did really feel like end of the earth and the end of all of our understanding. I did this over and over again in my head. And I still do so today; and will keep at it till I can make it in flesh. You know like they say in The Secret: “If you’ve been there in the mind, you’ll go there in there in the body.”
I got a category A recommendation to watch a documentary on Sir Ernest Shackleton, called Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure. I had heard about this brave man’s expeditions to the southern most continent before. My admiration for him and one Hiram Bingham grew by leaps as I read through the literature of places that these men explored. But more on Hiram Bingham in a later post.
Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure retraces the tale of 28 brave men led by the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton on the 1914-1916 British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition aboard the ship Endurance (named after Shackleton’s family motto: by endurance, we conquer). This epic journey has been considered for long as "the greatest survival story of all time." The story is a testimony to what can happen to the human spirit when one does not give up and continues to push for survival against all odds. The film features breathtaking shots on location in Antarctica with near exact recreations of situations that the crew faced nearly a century ago. It also features motion-picture footage of Frank Hurley, the official photographer for the Endurance expedition (“who would go to any lengths to get a shot”, as described in the narration).
The audience is thrust into a feeling of awe, respect, pain and relief for the men who took the journey. But like all great tales, it is that mixture of emotions that makes it worth talking about nearly a century after the event.
I was reminded of the i-see-clearer-because-i-have-stood-on-the-shoulders-of- great-men philosophy.
To the Polar Explorer and his men,
In his shadows, we walk.
For info on the movie: http://main.wgbh.org/imax/shackleton/
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