Precious!

I have been meaning to write this for at least a week now. It is about the power of 'a single drop' and is with respect to pollution. It is difficult to explain but some analogies could help.

What is common between 'A thousand drops of water', 'A hundred ants', 'A colony of bees' and 'Waves rolling together'? Of course, the commonality is that these are multiple entities of same type. But if you look at these examples a little more carefully, it becomes clear that though a single entity in these groups is not very significant, when they get into these groups, their effectiveness increases multifold!

All that is fine but what has that got to do with pollution - you ask? Think of yourself (an individual man / woman) as that single entity, an ant or a bee or a single wave, and the analogy becomes apparent now. If not now, it will be once you reach the end - so read on.

I have been traveling almost constantly this week, to various places in Chennai on my 2-wheeler or in my car. At every opportunity where I had a little over 30 seconds stop at a traffic signal, I switched off my vehicle engine thereby saving some precious time & money. One might laugh now reading about the 'precious' phrase ... but I really mean it.

From my home to office, there are at least 3 traffic signals where I stop for over 30 seconds each. So, that is approximately 1.5 minutes one way and a total of 3 minutes during a regular working day. Added to that, I was out visiting the dentist and to my bank this week, going via Anna Salai (anybody in Chennai knows how crazy that drive would be), giving me an extra whopping 15 minutes during the total 4 hour driving time!!

So, my total savings on petrol usage last week alone has been 30 full minutes!

Now imagine about 1 million vehicle users in Chennai city [let's talk small numbers now :)] and if even 1/3rd of them stop their vehicle engines like I did, we have about 1 million minutes per day & 5 million minutes for a regular 5-day working week!! Now do you see how tiny drops add up?

We humans have been burdening Mother Earth too much with so much of our own non-sense. Let's at least save some burden for the trees we are chopping off so non-chalantly. If not for the green cover on Earth, we would have wiped ourselves out much earlier I think.

For people really who want to do something about eco-friendly stuff, the start has to be with themselves. Some guidelines are in these sites:

http://motorinsurancesingapore.com/articles/129/7-ways-to-reduce-petrol-consumption/
http://ezinearticles.com/?Saving-Money-by-Eco-Friendly-Driving-Techniques:-Not-Such-a-Bad-Idea!&id=215122

Hope to see you join the drive soon :-)

I Paid it, at last!

People who have not seen me in the last 1 year might not know, but all others should have by now been vexed with my indulgence in chess.

I have had a personal chess trainer for almost an year now. No, no, I am not talking about the flesh-and-blood one. It is my chess.com web account. So far, I have been using the free account and it would be a surprise to Abi if I did not spend at least 10 hours per week on this site learning / playing chess.

For me, the learning has been through all the features of this site - the daily puzzles, tactics training, discussion forums, blogs, online games, tournament games, analysis of the 'game-of-the-week', analysis of grandmaster games, etc.. especially the last. My rating on the site has increased from 1000+ to 1500+ in a little over 8 months - mostly due to all this learning.

There have been periodic alerts (between my game alerts) to take a membership on this web site. But so far, I had not - partly due to laziness but also due to my current economic situation. I guess a lot of people do that, at least those I know. Last Friday however, after logging in, I was immediately taken to the 'Buy membership' page. :-) I guess for once the site owners lost their patience with me using their features for free. ;-)

This is an amazing website and being an information technology professional myself, I know how difficult it is to create such a web site and maintain it. It should be taking a lot from the web masters. I discussed with Abi and we both felt that if I really saw value in taking the membership, I should take it and I paid for it that night itself.

May be there was some guilt lurking somewhere in the mind about using the site for free and not heeding to the membership requests. All that was gone in the instant I paid for it and got the membership. The first feeling was that of relief! And then I headed on to the tactics trainer, a feature not available for free users, and got my online rating going to 1550+ from 1360+. So, here starts the second phase of my journey in learning chess. Let's hope it is better than the first one or atleast as fruitful.

Finally, am a platinum membership holder for chess.com and it feels nice to be in good terms with my trainer again :-)

Brilliant! And Cruel!

It is just amazing how technology turns what we call as 'dirt' ;-) into something we use so much in our daily lives that some cannot think living without it!!

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/processors/how-sand-is-transformed-into-silicon-chips-599785

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/processors/how-sand-is-transformed-into-silicon-chips-599785?artc_pg=2

It took me sometime though to realize that there are some unwanted byproducts too to this process - the core silicon production involves a lot of CO2 release into the atmosphere. And I am not even considering the acidic products used in this procedure and what it takes to create them in the first place and what effects their byproducts have.

Sigh ... after all it is a human engineered product and one we take for granted without thinking much about what we are doing to the environment!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090517-pollution-changes-dna.html

Unless we do something right and fast, we will end up annihiliating the human race (and possibly all organic life) from planet Earth which has nurtured life for billions of years, that is till now.

A tiresome, disturbing weekend

Kicked around, Beaten, Battered and Bruised! That's exactly how I felt on Sunday evening after two seemingly gruelling days (phew .. all this on a weekend!).

Visit from a friend and a causal roam-around plan turned tiresome due to the heavy (more like crazy) traffic. Add to that handling my kid when my wife is down with cold & illness was not an easy task at all. Since it has been almost 6 months since my wrist accident & I had stopped doing hatha yoga, I resumed the 'Surya Namaskar' from Thursday. My body did not take it easy though I have kept the count low to 3 only! Hmm .. that is some perspective on how physically 'fit' I have 'not' been :))

BTW I almost completed seeing 'The dark knight' movie yesterday and found it quite ... disturbing. Yes, the special effects are awesome, the human element has been very clear, the action is superb. But what with all the negativity? I could not take it beyond a level! Mind you, I am not an eternal optimist myself - am still subject to all human emotions. When threatened and pushed to a corner, not everyone can be expected to behave rationally and not always!!

Some might say 'that is exactly the point being proven by the film'. But my retort is 'why make it so explicit'. When people do not think about these things in their day-to-day life, why 'inject' it unnecessarily? If you are thinking 'well...the movie does prove at the end that people could behave rationally after an initial outburst' and 'people might not think about it in their normal lives but should they not be?', my answer is a plain 'no'! No, they should not be thinking about how to deal with some freaks like these and rather focus on how to take positive steps forward in life. That is the only way we as a humanity can progress rather than keep licking the wounds. Hate has never won anything else but hate. But love has won over hate many a time.

Ask any of the family members who have lost their lives in the Mumbai terror attacks and you will see the outrage in their eyes & speech as to the political and to a certain extent the civilian ineptness that led to it. If someone thinks 'it has been injected to them' now, they are damn right! There are even so many articles and blogs on the internet dealing with this subject. But what is the point of it all? What good has come out of it?

One sentence that keeps recurring to my mind from the movie 'the bulletproof monk' is 'tell me dear, would you like to be in the position of one who shoots the bullet or the one who is kneeling down to take the bullet?' I have been wondering for a very long time now - why even create a situation where one has to shoot and one take the bullet? Why not make an environment, a situation where one shoots out love and the other receives it? Shouldn't that be the goal of humanity? I don't know, but would love to think so :)

The White Tiger

I finished reading the book "The White Tiger" by Arvind Adiga a couple of days back. I picked the book up from a road side shop while walking home from office one day (that is an altogether different story by itself).

The author is an Indian, born in Chennai and now in Mumbai. I have been contemplating since then as to what my real opinion about the book is and have not reached a conclusion yet! I am ...

1) Impressed with the frankness of the author
2) Aghast with the way people are treated (especially servants) in some places, referred to as 'the darkness' in the book
3) Surprised by the opening and the style of the book - addressing the Chinese premier
4) Finding the language in some places funny and in some places downright disgusting (mind you - am not a purist myself when it comes to language and still found it so)
5) Unable to digest the brutality of exploitation and murderous acts depicted

So what do I really feel about the book? I can't really put it out in a couple of words or even sentences :) One thing is sure, it kind of left a bad taste in mouth and I will hesitate to read his books henceforth unless it comes very highly recommended. Oh BTW literary prizes have been checked off from my list of recommended items now :)

SSL Mindmap

A simple mindmap primer for SSL:

Why am I stuck?

I read something in Andrew Martin's chess column on my favorite chess website (www.chess.com) today and boom ... it struck me why I am still probably the 1400+ player and not the 1600+ or 1700+ player I wish to be.

"Not every move in a game has the same weight. We play 95% of our games like Anand, but it's what happens the other 5% of the time that matters. I look for CRITICAL MOMENTS in a game and try to anlayse at those points. Critical moments might incude:
1) Before the game, how do you feel?
2) The end of your theoretical knowledge.
3) Exchanges
4) Turning points, obvious mistakes, blunders
5) The very end of the game;
a summary of why the game was won, lost or drawn. You build your chess instinct with this work; it's the quickest way."

Of course, all of this and the fact that I started playing chess seriously only about 5 to 6 months back :)

Hehehe .. the truth is, I am not even a 1400s player, because I have never even played a FIDE tournament to get that rating!! :) But I have played against some chess engines on my computer and have beat the system rated at 1400+ and so just assumed myself at that level.

BTW if you are still lost as to what the numbers 1400 and 1600 mean, they are the ELO ratings of a chess player. And if anybody reading this is wondering what ELO and FIDE mean, one piece of advice - 'grow up and learn chess seriously' ;)