Travel Trivia from the US!

I didnt create this blog when i'd visited the US in winter of 2006, but I did write an email-travelog to some of my friends, and I thought it only appropriate that those emails should find a home here on the blog. This was more of a "Amazing Facts about the US" kind of thing..so here goes...
Dec 30, 2006:
Hello all!Am currently in Charlotte, NC and its a great place.Was on the road from New Orleans to Atlanta to Charlotte - with ample time to reflect!Dont have a personal blog, so I'm writing to you folks abt the lessons learned here till now.

• On a clear day, look up. You're bound to see atleast two jets leaving their trail in the sky.
• Dont get excited if you see piping hot black coffee in the caraffe - the milk is NEVER warm - so your coffee WILL end up lukewarm.
• There's no point adding more sugar to american coffee - it has inbuilt anti-sweetening properties
• You will rarely ever take the same road to come back. So no point remembering how you went from A to B, since B to A will be a different route altogether.
• Christmas REALLY means a holiday - its like a "shiv sena bandh" in Mumbai
• After Christmas is NOT the best shopping season(Always thought so). Weekend after Thanksgiving is the best time for shopping.
• Learnt how to pronounce "Ya'all" (a substitute for 'You folks')
• Anything can be turned into a tourist attraction if you make jazzy pamphlets, and have a restroom, ample parking, a coffee shop, and a souvenier shop at the site.
• If you think ice-creams and soft drinks sell more in warm/hot places, think again. Its about 30deg Farhenhiet (i think thats minus something deg C) and people are freaking out on Coke and ice cream!
• Even numbered 2digit interstate roads go East-West and odd numbers go North-South (how simple is that). If you see a 3 digit number, its a city bypass!
• Hence, dont' think of compass directions when you're on the road - sometimes, you need to take the interstate North to go to a city thats actually directionally on your south!

well..just completed the first third of my travels here...will keep posting any new Amazing Facts as I discover them!

02 January 2007

Hellew folks!As promised, here is the second set of Amazing Facts of American Life:

• If you ask an american "how far is this?" - the time he will tell you will be calculated at 20mph speed in a city area and 60mph on expressway.
• A corollary to that is, Nothing is at walking distance from your house
• When you see a "Do not Pass" sign on the road, dont stop; That sign means "Don't overtake"!!!
• When an American points and says "Look how crowded that place is!" - dont expect to see people. He's just referring to the number of cars in the parking lot.
• A corollary to that is - thou shalt not see people on the sidewalks - they're all at home, in office,in a mall or in their car.
• When shopping for girl stuff, thou shalt be confused by two adjacent sections marked - "Ladies" and "Women". Dont panic - 'Women' is just an euphemism for older ladies!!!

8th January 2007

I'm back again with possibly the penultimate edition.Went up to New Jersey and New York last week and had an amazing time.Most people think of New Jersey as the Indian hub and its only claim to fame is its proximity to New York. However, I suggest anyone going to there take time off to see New Jersey's forests...they've done a swell job of preserving them!Coming back to Amazing Facts -here are some more!

• Its possible to stay in a hotel that charges your 150 USD per night but does not have any room service/restaurant/minibar of its own!
• There is little difference between night and day at Times Square in New York - the area is always lit up by neon anyway
• The Statue of Liberty is a UNIQUE place - because only HERE will you see mothers encouraging their sons to look under a Lady's skirt...(there is a tour to look inside the statue from underneath!)
• Some states require cars to have only a rear number plate! so, if u want to run away from a crowd, drive in reverse to hide your number!
• Dont EVER take your own car to drive around in New York.
• Better have a strong bladder if you plan to visit NY - there are no public restrooms! (Actually later I found that you can use one in the tourist center or the one in Hard Rock Cafe - both in Times Square)
• State capitals are almost always NEVER have the highest population, neither are they the commercial capital of the state And the killer Fact-
• The statue of Liberty is NOT in New York! Its actually in the state of New Jersey!!

Well...I hope some of that was new information for you!!

How would you like to pay for your Pizza?

Now, I know that the folks at Dominos Pizza have readymade tele-scripts for taking your orders, so all outlets give you a 'consistent experience' - but I wonder how often they update their lines.
The last time I called up Dominos, heres how the conversation went-
Lady-on-phone:"How would you like to pay for your pizzas?"
Me: "Sodexho vouchers"
Lady-on-phone: "Sorry, we dont accept vouchers anymore"
Me: "Well then , what other option do I have besides cash?"
Lady-on-phone: "We accept only cash!"
Me:"Err..then why are you asking me how I'd like to pay???!"

I guess someone at Dominos forgot to alter the script after they stopped taking vouchers, and the people taking the orders are just plain used to following the script rather than using their brains!!

Object-Orientation and Bollywood

I just had the most amazing realisation yesterday when watching this movie called Race.
Our Bollywood directors definitely understand Object-orientation concepts of programming.
Anyone who knows about OOAD knows that its key benefit is the ability to abstract functionality inside an object, and just provide 'interfaces' or 'plug-points' for other objects to use them.
Now, take the case of this movie Race. It had many songs. NONE of them had anything to do with the story, but they had been created in such a way, that they could have been used just about anywhere the movie!! I'm sure the music director and the song director were given a brief to make completely story-agnostic songs. The director/editor would have then decided the story as they went along, and just plugged in the songs whereever they liked- and voila there's your movie!!
Btw, the placement of the songs also suggests that they were mindful of the audience's bladder breaks......and hence had spaced them out conveniently.....
hehehe..Bollywood never ceases to amaze me!!!

Surviving a pilgrimage

One fine day last month I got the urge to visit Shirdi and Shani Shingnapur. As luck would have it, one of my colleagues was planning a visit to Shirdi too, so we joined 'forces' and me, my wife, my colleague and his siblings set out together in an SUV.
Trust me, you dont want to do more than 700Kms in 2 days in an SUV! The driver was a close relative of some F1 racing hero, and we were all planning our wills and last prayers. Luckily we reached in one piece.
As far as the pilgrim cities go, I'm now convinced that God left these places long ago. You look at all the commercialisation around the temples - the persistent selling, the crazy crowds of people trying to sell you all kinds of merchandise only serves to slam one fact hard into you-you're here to talk to God, and there are hundreds trying to play on your fears/wishes/dreams/aspirations/beliefs/ and make a fast buck. "Want to get an up-close darshan? Pay 2000" . Want to skip the 2hour waiting in line? Pay 1500".
At Shingnapur, you can take a darshan for free up close, but there will be innumerable touts telling you that you cannot go inside in your usual clothes, you need to take a dip first, buy oil and other assorted stuff. I stubbornly refused to indulge, and realised at the temple, that you can infact go upclose inside. All the rigmarole is required if you want to touch the diety (personified by a stone).
An incident at the Chisti tomb in Fatehpur Sikhri comes to mind....we listened patiently to the guy telling us that if you want to make a wish at the tomb, you should give a 'cloth' offering.
We said ok, we'll take one peice of cloth. Guess what that cloth cost? 1500 bucks!!!
I completely lost my mind. Here is a guy at a holy place, ripping people off. Why do we allow this?
You really think God would hang around such places?
At Shirdi, though I was at the temple at 4:45am, it was only around 6:45am that I was shoved and pushed in a line that passed in front the statue- thats the kind of following the place has. You get just half a minute of 'darshan' before you're unceremoniously asked to move move out!!
Why do we tolerate all this?
I think somehow we've decided that without pain there is no gain in a pilgrimage. The harder it is, the better the 'returns'.
I'd rather go to a quiet place where I can really communicate with the One, than go through something like this again.
Vivekanand's temple and Ramkrishna Mission in Kolkatta, Shri Akkalkot temple in Konkan come to mind as places I really liked for just letting me be.
I'm not sure If i will ever go to a commercial pilgrim center again. Its traumatic for me....and at the end of it, I ask myself - did I have to suffer this to earn my wish?

Holi...

Spring time!
In Mumbai, that just means summer.
I gave up playing long ago..after it had degenerated into using grease, metallic paints..stone filled balloons...and other generally unhealthy practices...
always loved the free 'thandai' handed out by gujaratis..and of course the 'bhang'!
will probably go out looking for it this time..;-)

In other news, my apartment has a holi program for the residents, featuring beer.....
whoever heard of beer for holi??? what happened to tradition? (there was no holi fire either...)
I suppose its a sign of the times....the next generation will probably have nano-tech colour bombs!!

Travails of a DVD creator!

Making a DVD isnt as easy as it sounds. I had a few AVI files from which I wanted to create a DVD that could be played on my DVD player and viewed on a standard TV. Sounds simple, doesnt it?

Turns out it *is* easy, if you're not trying too much customization.I'm using Vista currently, and it has a cool program called Windows DVD Maker. Just point it to the AVI file, choose the DVD menu template, and it will transcode the AVI to the DVD format, and burn the result to your DVD.

However, if you want to do things like

a) Put multiple movies on one DVD

b) Adjust the height/width of the movie to look better on your TV

Then you need to look at other tools.

The Basic process is this:

1) Look at what kind of file you have AVI,WMV,DivX etc. These are not supported by some DVD players(your computer can play them). You need to convert them to the DVD format. This is called transcoding. I found WinAVI Video Converter and and ConvertXtoDVD useful here.

2) The DVD format basically has a AUDIO_TS and a VIDEO_TS folder with VOB files in the video_TS folder. This can now be burned onto a DVD as a DVD movie (NOT as a data DVD) using special software. Windows DVD Maker cannot write a readymade DVD folder.to a DVD disc, you need software like ConvertXtoDVD, or Nero or Roxio to do this. Some people convert the DVD folder to an ISO image that can be written by any burning software, but I havent tried it.

3) The conversion process is slow, and you may not like the result, so first try out your menu and other settings on a DVD-RW, which you can resuse in case you want to make changes.

I spent the better part of the weekend figuring all this out...and there are other things to take care of, like - what is the aspect ratio you want (4:3 for standard TV and 16:9 for widescren TVs) , whether you want PAL or NTSC (PAL for India), and what speed do you burn with (depends on the type of DVD), etc etc..so I hope this proves useful to someone!

Searching nuggets in budgets...

The word budget originates from the french 'bougette' which means a 'little bag'.
Every year, India eagerly waits for the Finance Minister to open his 'little bag' of carrots and sticks. I'm not aware of any other country where the budget is so eagerly expected, monitored, dissected, and generally analysed to death - why can't the Indian economic policy be largely decoupled from this yearly jamboree?
Speaking of deaths, the FM announced the loan waiver for farmers. I admit to not knowing much of agriculture, but it strikes me as strange that:
a) the scheme is tied to the size of the farm holding and not the size of the loan/ability to prepay and other more relevant parameters.
b) the scheme will encourage fiscal indiscipline and more 'scams' in future. If you know the government is benevolent in such matters, why would you repay?
c) Couldnt the FM come out with a scheme to bring more farmers into the institutional lending fold by giving relief to those in the net of unscrupulous moneylenders? Maybe he could have helped them transfer those loans to banks? Its the 25-40% interest on informal loans which is really killing the farmers. This way he could have acheived two objectives with one program.
d) Just wondering - If enough middle class salaried people with defaulting home loans had committed suicide, would the FM have given similar relief?
On the other hand, I'm quite amused at the critics - they're saying most of the measures are to ensure early elections. Fine. So when there is something in the budget for the common man, its called populist and election-focussed. When there is nothing, its denounced by the same people as having ignored the common man...!!

Overall.I think the FM was conservative. He could have taken bolder decisions in power,telecom, income tax, GST, but he seems to be having the US recession in mind.
I was disappointed to see nothing in it for Mumbai's infrastructure, but then thats more the rule than the exception.
Well. Thankfully we're past one more budget, and next time the 'little bag' opening will not be so important....