Friday, March 30, 2012

Day light saving

Back in India, people most of the time are not aware of the concept of Day light saving. In general, the span of the day having sunlight does not vary significantly over the year. So, this concept was never a requirement.

When an Indian move to other parts of the world like say European countries or America, they come across this concept.
The idea is to make maximum use of daylight. During the summer, the day could be as long as 16 hrs to 22 hrs depending on how close you are to the North pole while the winters have very short days.
So, in winter days, if your office timing is say 9 AM to 5PM, by the time you start from home to office and while you are leaving office back to home, its mostly dark outside. You only get to see daylight while you are in office and there is no time for doing external extra curricular activities.
In contrast during summer, if the timings of winters are followed, the day light is available say since 5.00 AM till 10.00 PM. If your office timing is still 9-5, you have 4hrs of daylight in the morning which is pretty much of no use leaving around 5 hrs in the evening for extracurricular activities.
So, instead if the clock is forwarded in summer by 1 hr, you start receiving daylight by around 6.00 AM while in the evening it lasts till 11.00PM.
By implementing daylight saving we shift one hour of daylight from morning to evening and so we have around 6 hrs of daylight in the evening instead of 5.

Another advantage of daylight saving as pointed out is, since people spend most of the time of evening either outside home or without the use of electricity for lights, there is less consumption of electricity.

In Europe, the daylight saving is implemented on the last sunday of March which this year happened on 25th of March. It will last for next 6 months till the last Sunday of October when it returns to the regular time.

Although Day light saving has its advantages, people don't like initial few days after it is implemented. The problem is the last sunday of March is reduced to 23 hrs. To quickly get used to the changed timing, one tries to sleep early. But the body is normally not used to sleep early so one ends up wasting time waiting for sleep. Next day, you are already late by 1 hour. Fortunately or say considering the inconvenience, next day is Sunday, you are pretty much relaxed with no rush to reach the office. But the day ends quickly and although you don't feel sleepy its already your bed time. Your body takes some to get used to this change.

Monday onwards another peculiar change you start observing is the lengthy evening. First few initial days it feels odd when you reach home,relaxed, already had a cup of tea and evening breakfast and still find proper daylight outside your window. Over the days,although, it changes to the point where you need to pull down the curtains to go to bed, your body gets used to it.

  In contrast in the other half of year when daylight saving is stopped on the last sunday of October, things are pretty relaxed. This time you have an extra hour to adjust to the changes. The last sunday of October is 25 hrs long. So whatever time you go to sleep, you always wake up one hour earlier than expected. You feel like day is going is passing very slow. You have more time in hand to take care of that day's business and still you have time to relax and enjoy.
In following days whereas days seems short when you go out of home for office and come back only in dark.

Some body put this picture on net that nicely  depicts the differences while waking up on two mornings.


Thursday, March 22, 2012

Tackling Terrorism - France Vs India

I don't need to mention the incidences of terrorism in India.There are so many of those that we can't count them on fingures. How such incidences are handled, how long it takes to get a verdict on any of the terrorist act and then how long it finally takes to actually impliment the punishment to the culprits (the answer to which is - probably never).

What I want to talk today is about a similar incidence that recently shocked a city called Toulouse in France.

It probably started on March 11. Some guy killed a soldier. After 4 days he killed another 2 soldiers.After another 4 days, he attacked a school and killed a guy and 3 innocent kids.

These incidences took whole of France by surprise. France is not used to such incidences. Various theories were putforth to initially understand the motivation behind individual incidences and then connecting these 3 incidences.

It was heard that some theories were actually rumoured to make the culprit ignorant by convincing that he is not on the radar. The culprit was otherwise wise enough not to leave any proof of involvement. In such cases it would have been difficult to spot the culprit and arrest him.

But the seriousness showed by the French government towards these attacks is evident from the fact that as close as 120 different detective cells were set up with in a short period to find out the identity of the culprit. Their efforts showed success and with 10 days they were not only able to find out the identity but were also able to track him down.

The police first made all the attempts to make a clean arrest of the culprit but after negotiating for over a day, nothing happened when they tried to attack and capture him. In the attempt the culprit tried to jump down from 5th floor of the buildig where he was hiding. In this hum-drum the sniper got him and he was in the end found dead on the ground.

The cause behind the terrorist attack is not the reason behind this post. The point is to show how such acts are treated here. With a period of 11 days, the Government caught hold of the culprit. They wanted to bring him to justice but he unfortunately ended up dead.

People around can now take a sigh of relief and their belief in the efficiency of their government has increased.

Can we Indians give out such sigh of relief and can our Government build such a belief that will allow us to live with feeling of safe and secure.
I leave it all to think with just an added information that in a place near our capital, women are now not allowed to work beyond 8.00 pm because the government can not fulfill the responsibility of their safety.

So do we really need to talk about safety from terrorists then?

Monday, March 12, 2012

Agneepath watched



So, as  mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I wanted to watch new version of Agneepath.

Overall the movie is disppointing but it has few interesting moments in it.

Interesting moments:

I liked the background of Mandwa picturised in the movie. It not only attracted eyes but it also had a grey shade. The spot with "Bargad ka Ped" was the icing on the cake.

The get up of the two villians Rauf Lala and Kancha was awesome. While Kancha was known scary right from the time he appeared in Agneepath trailors, Rauf Lala was a surprise package. It totally changed the way one would normally imagine Rishi kapoor.

The song "Deva Shri Ganesha" was exciting.

I totally liked some of the dialogues delievered by Sanjay Dutt aka Kancha. Take this one towards the end of movie for example: "Are are, thodi sans baki rakh, abhi to Bargad ke Ped pe jana hai" (I had a good laugh at it instead of feeling pity for Hrithik's character).

Disappointments:
Movie begins very well and keeps its grip on the viewer, till the point where Hrithik Roshan is introduced. Then it starts loosing slowly.

Did Master Dinanath had no relatives where his wife (Zarina Wahab) and son could have taken shelter in such tragic situation? Instead they end up in a red light area in Mumbai.

It was difficult to understand why Om puri was so supportive to Vijay all the time in the movie.(Being in such a high position,why was he so much desperate to save  Vijay's sister when Rauf Lala abducted her?)

Priyanka Chopra is totally wasted. I guess there was no need of that character in the  movie.

Director spent too much time trying to develop emotional attachments of Vijay with his mother and sister.That was one main reason where it lost the grip.

Vijay at no point appeared a master player in getting his enemies down.All I remember is he getting beaten up every now and then and surrendering to either Rauf Lala or Kancha.

Why did Vijay decided to use that famous dialogue of Amitabh about his name during the Ganesh procession? The dying guy in addition to dying must be having hard time trying to understand what Hrithik was muttering  while getting stabbed, which by the way nobody around realised. Vijay actually should have used it to tell Kancha his identity, but yes I forgot, he was all the time busy getting beaten up from Kancha in different styles.

I remember Kancha stabbed Vijay atleast 3-4 times in stomach. But in the end when near the "Bargad Ka Ped", Vijay's shirt is torn, all I could see was clean 6 or 8 pack abs and slight cut on his chest which was not bleeding.

In the end I was all worried whether the rope has enough strength to bear the weight of Mighty Sanjay Dutt.

Finally Vijay did not suceeded in his mission. He wanted Mandwa back. But that was a very short time success while he died too immediately after Kancha.
So was it all worth to spend all his life time planning( if at all!!) the revenge.

I earlier had planned to compare the two versions of Agneepath, but looking at the number of disappointments compared to interesting moments, I guess making that comparison is not worth enough.