Public’s First Servant

Pratibha Patil, our newly sworn-in president, calls herself public’s first servant. The signs are clear; by public’s first servant she of course means that she is seeking to become Sonia Gandhi’s first servant; and Manmohan Singh, who so far had occupied the coveted position, should start seeing red.

The question is whether she will be able to cross the sycophantic standards set by Zail Singh, he said that he will mop the floor if Indira Gandhi asks him to do so. I wonder what Pratibha Patil will do? I think Sonia Gandhi will ask her to cook some food, and probably may even reward her by asking Madam President to accompany her for her next trip to beauty parlour – after all, presidents do make good companions for trips to beauty parlour.

And yes, now Madam Gandhi will not need to nag our defence minister to request for Indian Air Force planes to carry her, she will simply ask Mrs Patil to take her to different locations in presidential luxuries.

Good move Mrs. Gandhi – I suggest you even try teaching her Italian so that you can give instructions to her in public without degrading the dignity and sovereignty of the highest office of the country.

Electricity through Gymnasiums

I started going to gym around 2 weeks back, which is pretty cool. It has everything including power backup but I am particularly intrigued by those self-powered machines. They get powered on after someone starts doing exercises on for few seconds. They convert mechanical energy to electricity and these machines gave me this idea…

Most of the power generation converts mechanical energy to electric energy, if we could harness the mechanical energy wasted during exercises then some energy problems of India could be solved. I am not talking about them at large scale, though the solution is very much scalable.
For example, my own gymnasium must be consuming around a hundred units of power daily, with 5 AC to run and 3 high power amplified speakers, not to speak of the electricity consumed by light bulbs and treadmills. The cross-trainers and the bicycles we work on are self powered, cycle them once or twice and the display on them comes to life. I am sure the display consumes far less power than is generated at the time of exercising, if that extra power could be fed into a system for charging batteries and that power could be used when batteries are charged fully then a considerable amount could be saved on electricity and hence greenhouse emission.

Talking about electricity, in my housing society there are 300 flats, on an average one person per two household goes to gym which makes for around 150 persons. Each of them burn around 1000 calories per day which comes to around 150,000 calories which is 150,000 X 4.184= 627,600 joules (1 calorie = 4.184 joules) and 627,600 joules = 627,600/3,600,000 units of electricity = 0.174 units of electricity. This amount may look like too little but here is how to look at it, we have a power backup through a 0.5MW generator which translates to 0.138 units of power generation, get the picture now? We are talking of considerably higher power generation for free and all that while people improve their health!
If my own society had gym, which was free for its society members, which could harness this power, we would never need that generator! And the picture gets even better; because the gym will be free more people will join the facility which means more power generation. It does mean using humans as rats on wheels, but who cares, people will do it willingly.
Is anyone listening?!!

Does Senior Management Ever Use Rest Rooms?

It is more than 2 months since I joined my new company, it’s an amazing place. Of all the amazing things I have noticed so far the most amazing one is that I have not seen any of the senior management ever in any toilet so far. Even though my seat is very near to our COO’s seat and I see him going in and coming out of his cabin so many times, I have never ever seen him going to toilet even once, which has kept me wondering for a long time now. There could be many possibilities for this:
a. They have separate toilets, which are probably camouflaged as meeting rooms or restricted areas and can be opened only by special access cards or finger print scanning.
b. They take some sort of medicines to control their bladders or have got them removed altogether.
c. Possibly they do go the toilets meant for lesser mortals but at the right time, when no one is able to see them. Having toilets under camera surveillance is a preposterous thought, having toilet gates is not. There could be someone monitoring the people going in and coming out and then letting the COO or others in senior management know (by turning-on the 'all clear' light in their cabin) the precise movement at which coast is clear.
d. Another possibility is that they have done some trend analysis based on the peak traffic and avoid those rush hours. In the unlikely event of being seen by a lowly employee it is very easy for them to pretend that they are on inspection and checking if everything is all right because they belong to, well…senior management.
e. Another advantage of being in the echelon of management is that you can go anywhere you wish and you need not answer anyone. A sentence like ‘oh, I’m entertaining a client’, when you are actually answering nature’s call at your home, would mean that people should not dare call you for next hour – enough time to go back to your home (which is again hardly a kilometre away, another advantage) do your ‘client entertainment’ and to come back. And frankly, who will dare question them even if they are late by 15-20 minutes?

Ciao!

A new blog

I had been giving serious thoughts about the focus of my blog, on one part I wanted to write about defence technology, military strategy, and weapon systems and on the other hand I also wanted to write about lighter aspects of life. Having both the types of writing on a single page would mean losing the focus of the blog and letting the visitors essentially scrape through the entire contents to find relevant posts. Hence, I have decided to start another blog for military strategy.

Visit http://manandwar.blogspot.com