Performance Pressure

Punjab Airlines - a glimpse

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen:

This is your Captain Santa Singh welcoming you to Punjab Airways. We
apologize for the two-day delay in taking off, owing to bad weather
and some overtime I had put in at the highway dhaba. This is flight
no. 9211(Nau Do Gyaraah) to Ludhiana. Landing in Ludhiana is not
guaranteed, but with luck we may even be landing directly on your
village.

Punjab Airways has a unique record for safety. In fact our safety
standards are so well known that even fully trained terrorists and
hijackers are afraid to fly
with us. It is with pleasure I announce that starting this year over
90% of our passengers have reached their destination. For the ones
that don't quite make
it, Punjab Airways staff has all the requisite experience for
consoling the next-of-kin.

Our Hostess Bubbly Kaur will be happy to brief you on our out-of-court
settlement policies. If our engines are too noisy for you, on
passenger
request, we can turn them off for your convenience. To make your free
fall to earth pleasant and memorable, we serve complimentary tea and
biscuits.For our
religious passengers, we are the only airline who can help you quickly
find out whether God really exists.

We regret to inform you that today's in-flight movie will not be shown
as we forgot to record it from the television. But we will be flying
right next to Air
India, where their movie will be visible from the right side cabin
windows. These windows have been removed for your viewing convenience.
For passengers
with sight problems, we have also put a pair of binoculars under your seat.

As per the rules, smoking is not allowed on all Punjab Airways flights
over Punjab. Any smoke you see in the cabin is only the early warning
system on the engines telling us to slow down.

Life jackets are placed under your seats and free bathing costumes are
made available for the aunties and swimming trunks for the uncles, for
emergency
water landings on any of our five rivers.

Kindly be seated, keep your seat in an upright position for take off
and fasten your belts. For those of you who can't find a seat belt,
kindly fasten your own belt to the arm of your seat.

And for those of you who can't find a seat, do not hesitate to get in
touch with Bubbly Kaur for your arrangement to sit on the bathroom
seat. If you do sit
there,please do not flush frequently because it may result in shortage
of water we require for your tea.

I won't be flying with you today because I have to attend to my
nephew's wedding. But co-pilot Kaptan Singh will have wireless access
to me in case he needs
flying instructions from time to time.

For an extra 500 rupees or two tandoori chickens, our attendant Bubbly
Kaur will allow you to come forward and occupy the captain's seat in
the cockpit for 5 minutes each, for an extraordinary view.

Thank you once again for choosing to fly with Punjab Airways.

Funny

Bandipur

Bandipur...naam bade aur darshan khote !!!

Me and two of my colleagues went to this place called Bandipur, 80 kms from Mysore, that makes it almost 220 odd kms from Bangalore.
Logistics -
Route :: Drive down from Bangalore, road upto Mysore is a part of SH and so is good. From Mysore one needs to take the route to Ooty, 80 kms down the road is our Bandipur, a stretch of around 20 odd kms is very bad on this road.

Accomodation :: There are few private resorts around the Sanctuary and a one Govt. one on this side of KA-TN border and similar facility on the other side.
As expected, Govt. ones are quite reasonable but requires prior booking, and are generally full house over weekends.
Private ones have vivid range availabe, and the standard is okayish.

Food :: One can survive

Safari ::
There are two options available here, Govt. one or the Provate, timings for both are ealry morning and evening (suits animals)...
Privates resorts generally make is a package deal of food, lodging, safari...( I prefer otherwise).

So howz the Sanctuary :: A question I would be answering to few people for couple of day. Its a good outing place, but when you go there with high hopes of finding some wild animals there..you get nothing but disappointment. I mean the only animals I could spot were, monkeys, deers, cows, buffalos, elephants, mangoose, peacock...need to say more. Will put some snaps here and on FB soon.

Otherwise trip was good, it was kind of first and last one with Abhishek before he moves to Delhi !!! and ya I found out that Giri drives well, even if someone is sleeping beside the driver's seat :P....

On the whole, its a nice place to explore, depends on your luck, we were unlucky to not to find Tiger there :-(...others might be lucky :-)

Cycling

Keeping the promise, I cycled once this week also :-)...
I have realised that we Indians are totally give up, I mean there is no respect for people. These 'big' guys who have psued bikes and cars to flaunt and for that matter even the cab driver, they care for no one, and look down to pedestrian and bikers like in-animate 'things' and don't even give a second thought while zooming near them.

First of all no one will follow the lane discipline, then will overtake from both sides, and on top of everything they just push the poor guys like me (bikers/pedestrians) out of the road. I mean when on the earth we learn the most basic thing which makes us human, Respect. It feels odd to call this genre Human, maybe we are just like animals.

Its high time that a couple of more initiatives on the lines of 'jaagore' are designed. For e.g. all of us should try to atleast cycle a day in a week to office, this will help in reducing traffic, pollution, keeping fit and what not. And more importantly, I do not know how will this be done, there needs a strict compliance to Traffic rules. Not sure how easy it will be to teach the adults, but for schools, it should be just a try away. It has to begin from there.

Before I end this post, which actaully meant nothing, but I just got to crib and vent out frustation about what happened with me in the morning. There was this guy on the motorbike and I was on Cycle, he wanted to take a left turn. This smart man neither bothered to give indicator nor any hand signal, I was just about to hit by him, missed it somehow, and just to make my case stronger, he wasn't wearing helmet. And now after doing this, he gets angry on me, shouted on me and was looking at me like I was some crap guy on bike, bloddy #&*#@(....I mean how rude and illogical can one be.
Had I got time and courage in the morning, I would have definitely stopped and confronted him, not physically (would never do that), but definitely created a scene.

Time to sign off...

I am just loving this Biking stuff and I am sure more and more people will take biking as a mean to travel in near future :-)....

Tea !!!

You Are Tea

You are mellow and reflective. You don't allow yourself to feel in a rush and frenzied. You're likely to appreciated the ideas or connections that come up over a warm cup of tea. While you do enjoy the energy of a caffeine boost, you love that it allows you to take a break. You're not in a rush to do anything. You're content with your life, and in no rush to change it.

Are You Coffee or Tea?

Internet Slang...

You Are LOL

The internet is always cracking you up. You could waste the day away finding things to laugh at. You're usually the first one to find a new funny video, picture, or website. You're always up for wasting time online, even if (especially if) you're at work. You also tend to spend a lot of time chatting, especially with people who make you laugh out loud.

What Internet Slang Are You?

Freedom

Cycling down

It was a not less than reaching a milestone today, as I rode down to office on a cycle :-).... Ya cycling !!!.

It was good adventure, cycling with semi-formals and a laptop bag and a stylish helmet :-). I personally feel that its the Helmet that gets you attention both ways, from the crowd you need to show-off and more importantly from the polluters driving without lane discipline and respect to pedestrians and cyclers :-), and why you get attention is because the Helmet shows your concern for the safety and its a fact that for everything you want in life, you have to take the first step. So here, you wear the helmet and the next thing is that people will show some respect to you.

Coming back to statistics, it was 12 kms one way ride, with 6 signals on the way, good lenght of the road had footpath where I could climb up and walk the way to get beat the traffic jams :-). I took exactly 35 mins to reach office, the ride wasn't that tiring but it left me sweating big time, not a good way to reach office, especially if there's a meeting to be attended.

Also its a bit risky affair given the rash drivers we have in Bangalore.

So like any other thing around, there are few deltas when it comes to cycling, but it can always to fixed. May be when more and more people realise the need of cycling for Health, Environment and Sustainability reasons, we will have safe roads for cyclers.

So what am I doing next, as a beginning, I will be cycling atleast one day in a week, will be buying a new cycle at earliest, try and talk to more and more people about cycling and its benefits.

P.S.- Coming from Oil industry, this might sound strange that I am campaigning for 'Cycling' on the outset, but on second thought, its very much required from Oil professionals, as this is the need of hour if we want to Sustain in the bigger race :-)

Turn

Hi,

Here comes another turn in my professional life, I am not sure where I am going to end up finally, ofcourse definition of "end" is dicy. When you say 'end up', you some how sound fed up with the current job and are looking forward to switch and also what you look forward to looks fancy from outset, because at then end of the day every job is same. Its kind of tough to explain here what people or here I want to do.
Anywhich ways, I made another decision of my life, and will honour it (atleast for couple of years).
Ya, so I started my Career with Teaching, yes for JEE, then moved to Exploration & Production of Oil Industry, aka Upstream with Schlumberger, after serving them for close to 1.5 yrs in Africa moved back to India to work in another segment of this dirsty Industry, Retail, Downstream, with Shell, again served them for 1.5 yrs and now moving on to yet another segment. Here I will working as Technical Consultant, providing my services for Construction projects across the Oilfields, still with Shell and the Clients could internal or external.
For a non-Oil or non-technical person, all this might seem blah blah blah, and believe me, its nothing more than that :-)

So now am all set to venture out in this particular business of Shell, will post my experience here as when I come across worth sharing ones :-)

Giga Pan

Image

Here is a photo taken using a panorama image capturing device called gigapan created by the carnegie mellon university and a canon g10 camera.
The photographer had to click 220 snaps from that camera to get this complete view of the Obama's inaugural address. It took a macbook pro around 7hrs to process the complete image. The final size of the image is over 2GB.
click the link to look at the image. zoom in and see, you can easily kill several hours checking out all the faces there.

One site to feed them all :-)

"When you are hungry, want to dine-out/party-out get in touch with Evening Flavors because we know for sure your every evening is special . India's first lifestyle portal dedicated to food services industry provides online users with exhaustive information and reviews of restaurants/pubs, parties and offers and thus giving the best fit for their hangout. You still plan a party out, we provide you with the best vendors you need it to do it right. The EveningFlavors.com intends to become one stop site for people looking to spend their quality time outside at the best price."