Do helmet laws save life?

Helmet laws rumors are doing rounds in Bangalore now. My friend and I were debating over the topic in lunch today. His logic is simple: Helmet saves your life by reducing the chance of head injuries in accidents. So why not the government is implementing compulsory helmet laws in place? Yep, there is no doubt that helmet reduces the risk of head injury in two-wheelers accidents. But I won’t vote for compulsory helmet laws for two reasons.

• There are no worldwide statistics saying that number of deaths in accidents came down in any city by implementing helmet rule. Every city lays their hand on the helmet laws once in a while and sees them reversing the rules after court verdict.
• There is a commercial aspect of making helmets compulsory. Assume there are two crore (2, 00, 00,000) people in Bangalore. And lets take a quarter of them (which is fifty lakhs 50, 00,000) commute by two-wheelers. And we can safely assume three fourth of them don’t wear helmets and hence the estimate of helmets sale in Bangalore city alone is 37, 50,000 helmets. If we take a helmet cost as Rs.300, then the business potential involved here is about Rs.112, 50, 00,000. The overnight huge potential business deal makes the helmet manufacturers to woo or lobby the government to bring in the helmet laws. It’s back door business for them.

So the best way forward will be to create awareness of helmets among the city dwellers, rather than forcing it as a helmet rule. What’s your take on this issue?

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I'm A Country Boy...So?

This post is inspired by ‘so-what’ series written by Ammu. The earlier one is I’m depressed…so what?

I was born and brought up in a small-time town. I am proud to be country boy who see value in life.

 

My town had no big shopping malls, no big multiplexes, no discos, and no coffee-bars. But it had a lively set of people. It is a no nonsense town. It had enough wealth to sustain agriculture based economy. It had enough schools to bring the best talented kids to forefront. Besides it had plenty of natural entertainment spots like lake, beaches, lush-green paddy field and lovely people.

 

Our thoughts on people, friendship and relationships are more towards commitments. We, small town people, never know how to hang out on bars with friends forever and also run off from his problem.

We will never learn to live in same neighborhood and still live like the neighbor is non-existent living being. We don’t treat anyone as our enemies. We will never learn to see bad character in others. We are country boys for whom all will think good and all deeds will be good.

We will never learn to run off from the place when someone needs help. We learn to live as a big society and we will never learn to go to cosmopolitan style clubs in cities.

We will never learn how to go behind a girl, flirtings are strictly no-no. But we know how to be sensible in relationships and how to be polite to girls.

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Happy Birthday Ghost!

1. September 28th is Ghost Particle's Birthday. Many more happy returns of the day bro. Wish you a lovely day and wonderful birthday bash! What's there in your wish list? Hope you get all of them on your day
   
2. While talking about the gifts, I am remembering my unfulfilled promise cum gift to my brother. My brother is in his early teens, generation-X guy. He lays his hands on all hot fashion gizmos. The latest in his wish list in the game box- Play station 3. I am not a game freak, so never liked these PS boxes. But I loved the kind of reality and fast action sequences produced by them. The main problem of playing PS with teen experts is "whatever you try to do, you will finally definitely end up with failures". The conventional wisdom of elders beating young can never hold good for play station and computer games. Watch few of those actions on Play station 3 in its advertisement here.
   
   

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Are girl's really weaker sex?

After spending a weekend with Freakonomics, I started asking questions on so-called conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is a false fact but that got wide popularity among the masses. Just because everyone of yester world told us that girls are emotionally dependent, don’t take those statements for granted. I wish to quote some statistics to put forward this argument, but I didn’t get one good case study. I will try to get one. I am taking cues from my life. My friends who are girls impressed me a lot in terms of emotional maturity. All are very much independent and with right mix of social nature. My first impression about them is all are running with clear direction in their life. I couldn’t resist quoting this dialogue from a Tamil film “Ah Aah” a.k.a “Best friend”. The dialogue as said by heroine’s alter ego is:
 

Heroine: “Pasanga marathuten solluvanga, ana onnumey maraka mattanga. And ponnunga marathuten sonna, avalothan”
Translation: Guys will keep on saying that they forgot her from his life, but he never forgets anything. But when girls say they forget him from his life, that’s the end of it.

In this ever changing world, do you think this old adage (that girls are weaker sex) still holds true?

Courtesy: The picture in the left is of photograph of a sculpture called "Cupid and Psyche". It is a grand work on artist Grayden.

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Freakonomics- Review

True to its title, Freakonomics searches answers for freaky questions. The answers provided by Stephen B. Levitt sound plausible, but very odd reasoning. For example,
 

1. The crime rate fell drastically in US of A in late 1990’s and 2000. This had been most discussed case study ever, yet Levitt answer was pointing to a girl in some distant place who won a case against government for legalizing abortions. He argues that this reduces the birth of lot of kids in economically disadvantaged background, those termed as would-be criminals birth were avoided permanently by legalizing abortion. Logic goes similar to example quoted in Chaos. A butterfly fluttering its wings in Cuba caused the cyclone in the Indian ocean
2. How can we prove that people naturally trained to cheat others? Levitt took the case study of school teacher’s attitude in Chicago public school and sumo wrestlers in Japan. Interesting and racy read. But I doubt whether it will add any value to your knowledge
3. How money plays role in shaping politician victory? Why do drug peddlers always live with their mom? Why real estate agents don’t act in your favor? Interesting questions are strewn plenty in this book

The book is definitely an interesting read. But I doubt whether it will add any value to us or not. New York Times magazine goes a long way in finding out and publishing best seller books. Freakonomics is one among them with an attempt to build a hero worship around Stephen B Levitt.

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What's this attitude problem really means?

Attitude problem- this is one of overused phrase in HR parlance and software industry these days. It becomes a cliché to refer anyone who are introvert or with self centered ego. Other day, my friends were grudging about another colleague of mine. His nature is to push the work around others’ table. He tries to say what others have to do in their work, rather than concentrating on his work. Nobody wants to take advices from peers, and this attitude of this guy had got this coveted label. Quickly before going to the analysis, let me quote one more friend of mine, he says “all my appraisals have same feedback – please work on your attitude problem”.

 

It’s natural for people to be independent when they enter their career. As aptly said by Steven covey, people will move into interdependent paradigm only if they achieve success in their independent paradigm. Till you feel that you achieved a lot in your personal career, you will not think about working for betterment of team. It’s not at all issue of that guy/girl trying to be independent, give them their time. We don’t abandon our kids just because they don’t listen to us. Similarly treat those people with parental affection. Industry works in a fine fusion of people with different mindsets. People with different perspective can form the best team. And team’s success is what gets counted ultimately at the end of the day.

 

If you are one of those who got bugged up to work with those guys, try to list what’s positive in those guys and work on to improve them. Having said this, I never really mastered this art. But I wish to. These days I am getting enough maturity to deal with all kind of people. I am very independent, never become really close with lot of friends but always felt the friendship with everyone whomever I met. Feel free to share your best/worst experiences regarding this. Have you ever noticed such a stuff going around you?

 

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My angel

This photo is quite famous in my family. To quote my cousin "world famous - sithappa and ponnu photo". The photo features me and my niece Harini. I love her and I love spending my whole day with her. She is an absolute angel. I miss her very much in bangalore, I always felt that it's a stupid decision of mine to shift to bangalore for my career.

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How to teach Email to kids?

I am working on planning of teaching email to kids. This is for computer workshop which we conduct for kids from Ananya. This activity is part of Dream A Dream computer program. The intended audiences are kids with ages ranging from 10 to 16. The topic of the workshop is "Email- Basics". The session also includes creation of email address for all kids. The basic aim is to impart the basics of email to kids in an interesting way. The secondary aim is to make them realize the importance and advantages of emails. The session is for one and half hours and each volunteer has to teach for two kids personally. As a team, we had a discussion before on this. I prepared a PowerPoint presentation on the topic, which basically aimed to help volunteers in taking the concept further. Now baton is over to you folks. Feel free to post your feedback, comment and advices.Pls.

I have tried to embed the powerpoint file in this post. If i'ts not working in other browser, try opening the blog in IE.

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Random rambles

1. How many of you felt these kinds of SMS are utter bull shit, yet still forwarded it.
   “Tomorrow is international ‘I LOVE YOU' day. If you get this it means that you are loved....Send this to at least 5 people in the next 600mins and tomorrow will be your best day ever. Tonight at mid-night ur true love will realize that they love u. Something good will happen to u between 1-4 pm tomorrow, it could be”
   
2. Lot of pop and rock songs sounds lovely, as long as you don’t care about what’s there in the lyrics. I felt odd on hearing these two songs. It’s basically those guys hatred towards their girl. Those lyrics sound really yucky.
   ”My gal..” Nirvana.
   ”Runaround sue .. by Dion”
   

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Teach your kid what is Rhythm

Rhythm in music is much more than the beats occurring at regular interval in songs.  The beat in the music determines its tempo. Beats vary from slow to fast, comparable to the pace of slow walk and fast run. The slow beats are relaxing, and the faster beats add excitation. Even if you are musically dumb, did you notice that your tap your feet rhythmically when you hear good fast paced songs. Human can identify the beats in songs involuntarily. Scientist advises to teach kids on how to differentiate rhythm in music from early age to avoid their embarrassment in dance floor in later years. J Why did I say this? Because I always felt I am dancing offbeat on the dance floor.

I am adding two songs with different beats, listen to them.

 

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How many of you guys can dance with beats properly? Who want to do Hawaiian Hula dance for me?

 

Did you know?

Indian Tala is source of cyclical rhythms present ubiquitous in world music. It symbolises the human life cycle, a man born in this world, live his life, dies and reborn again. So the story continues. Isn't it interesting to see Indian gurus embed life's philosphy in music too :)

 

PopKorner:

Inspirational quote of Shashank (Dream A Dream). Nice!

'devta banna tou door .. is umra mein insaan ban jaaye yahi bahut hai'
translates to: Leave aside becoming a saint, in this life if one becomes a human that will be sufficient.

 

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