Ole! The 7 signs of aging

I love plagiarism, the title says it doesn't it? Well, if you don't see it then you haven't been following advertisements enough!

The 7 classic signs of aging...

1. You meet a friend. The conversation starts off like this... "Hey, wassup? How's work?"
I'm guessing that "wassup" is the modern equivalent of the Anglo Saxon "How do you do". The most appropriate response to "How do you do" is "How do you do" itself. I feel that people who use the word "wassup" as a greeting should get accustomed to receiving that as the reply.
Either that or stop using it!

2. Alternately, all your thoughts can be mapped (directly or indirectly) to 2 of the universe's most-asked questions - "What am I doing in my life?", and "What am I going to do?". An amazing insight into our myopic view in the infinite universe...

3. If you have the habit of writing a daily diary and you happen to go through the "dear diary" moments. That by itself is a sign.

4. You see those moments passing before your eyes as if it were eons ago that you had read them to even recall them. The worst is when you feel like you were back in school in History class!

5. Its at least once in a month, when the weekend is dedicated to "cleaning" or at least the thought sways into your mind. I love loops, loopholes. The effect of writing the ocassional piece of code at work is seen here, perhaps. These bouts of cleaning lead you to finding the diary. Loop to point 3 and 4, just dont form an infinite loop!

6. You listen to a song, a not-so-recent song. You remember the year that song released. You remember almost dreamily all the people around you when you listened to that song back then. You try to imagine how different you looked back then (The Time Machine, where's my time machine....Oh yes, somebody stole mine to answer this question - "If the universe were to start over from scratch, and all the conditions that created life were to happen again, would life spring up?").

7. This last one came up just as I had my lunch. Every third topic you discuss over lunch involves crazy bosses or politics. This one's like the last nail on the coffin. I recall about (No, I don't want to put in a number here) years ago, I hated it when the elders at home would want to watch a redundant, cyclic (alliteration?) news programme and would not want me to watch the cartoon. I cant recall how many years it has been since I watched cartoons...(Thank god for sports channels).

Last week, I was watching over my 6 year old nephew and his friend. The friend came up to me asking me to resolve the little situation they had there. He addressed me as uncle. I can't deny that I was a bit taken aback by that. My nephew immediately came to my rescue or I thought. He corrected his friend, saying, "he's anna not uncle! Uncle is only after marriage!!!".

Well indeed, even if Einstien's theory of relativity were to be false or proved wrong, I see all the time, that time is relative....

Let's just print some more money!

The US is facing the worst ever economic crisis since the Great Depression in 1929. The sub primes, bankruptcy, people losing their jobs etc leads to one term - credit crunch. Well, if there's no money, then why can't they just print some?

I looked up on the internet as to why this can/cannot be done. To put it in a nutshell, the answer I got was "It might work, but the cure would be far worse than the disease. If you create more currency without raising the value of the whatever backs that currency, the value of the currency drops. That’s called inflation — you'll need more and more dollars to buy the same loaf of bread."

Currency, apparently is just a piece of paper (Tell that to the guy who does not have it). This paper is a representation of something. That something is the value backing this currency, which is the strength of the economy of that country, GDP or the reserves of gold, silver etc. Now, if the paper were to be just printed without actually increasing the value of what it represents, then the value of the paper would decrease.

Lets take a simple example. Lets say I have 200 grams of chocolate cake (Its my blog and I love chocolate cake!). I have 2 coupons to share this cake. Then the value of each coupon is 100 grams. If I photocopy the coupons each 49 times, I now have a 100 coupons. Thus making the effective value of one coupon just 2 grams. This should put the more dollars per loaf of bread in perspective.

Well, the verdict, I don't think its worth just printing.

The Railway Sandwich

The sandwich is the railway they say mighty fine,
They give you bread and stale cheese, almost every other time...

That's just an improvisation of a song I learned at school which went something like
The shoe shop in the army, they say mighty fine,
You ask for number seven, they give you number nine...

Well, this one is not a piece on the catering in the Indian Railways. Personally, I think they are awesome and they make the best Masala Dosa's after MTR. The coffee though has enough room for improvement. In any case kudos to Railway catering, you guys are awesome!

But, I seem to have a problem when it comes to the actual train itself. In my very first blog, or virgin blog if I may say so, I had done a bit on the railways and how chaotic and insane travel can be. Well, I guess it happens to me, only to create an opportunity to be amazed at how crazy the railways could be despite being one of the many wonders.

Taking Murphy's laws into consideration, I booked for a train that leaves for Chennai at close to midnight from Bangalore, to buy me enough time to reach the station in time. But its Murphy's law and I managed to get off work early, get a bus in time to station and ended up reaching the station an hour prior to scheduled arrival of the train, let alone departure.

Laloo and his group of people in the Railway ministry have done an awesome job in the last few years to make the Indian Railways a spectacle. With all due respect to their past innovations, one of their more recent innovations, I feel, went overboard.

What's the innovation? Voila! Its a side middle berth. In a hasty move to generate revenue, the Indian Railways implemented this. The person who gets the lower middle berth has to sit on the larger side of the coach segment. In other words, the side that previously accommodated 3 persons, would now accommodate 4.

Its an idea. But it has certain flaws. Firstly, the berth seating 4 was originally designed to seat 3 person. I haven't taken into account the size of the persons, still it is horribly uncomfortable. Secondly, the persons sitting in the "four seat-er" pay just as much (In some cases more,if booked in tatkal; Don't get me started on that) as the persons sitting as 3 persons in the 3 seat-er. Unfair? Mr. Yadav, If you plan such crappy innovations, see to it that there's going to be differential pricing for these seats.

Next, the ridiculously insane side middle berth - The Railway Sandwich. It completely reminds me of an open coffin. I never thought I'd see the day when I had a chance to be in one and know how it feels. Open it out and you will realize that you either need to be an acrobat or an amoeba to fit in.

But, thankfully, this "innovation" by the Railways has been done away with it because of I cannot guess why. If ever there was a fine line between between cost cutting and being outright cheap, this move certainly erased it. The TTR that day on the train should be thanking his stars that the innovation was done away with and he did not have to face the ire of a passenger who booked in tatkal paying extra only to get the Railway Sandwich, which thankfully he did not.