Quality improved due to dependence on machines

Today morning while heading to office, I noticed the garbage truck in front of my house machine handling the recycle bin. It is a fairly sophisticated piece of machine which has sort of 2 claws which picks up big bin and dumps it into the truck storage bin without almost anything outside the truck. The way the machine handled the bin made me realize, that the bin must be made of some high grade plastics.

Then the thought further extrapolated into the daily house hold items like kitchen utensils and clothes. We need the kitchen utensils to be good quality to survive a few years of loading into the  dish washer, we need clothes to be colorfast and strong to sustain the abuse in the washer/dryer. Granted the machines have something called a delicate cycle and can be used for delicate clothes and dishes but in a typical house hold who does not employ any domestic help at all the delicate cycles are usually a rarity. In my personal experience if a daily utility stuff cannot sustain the dishwasher, we tend to shelve it away or try not to buy the same brand next time.   

So, my conclusion the quality of the daily utility stuff is among other factors driven by our dependence on machines over humans for cleaning and sanitizing them. 

Does the name India itself brings out the “take it easy” attitude

My daughters tourist visa to India expired and had to be renewed for the upcoming trip. After my first experience of sending by post, I decided to personally go and drop it off at the office in Houston. This time around Travisa is no longer the company it has been transferred to a different one called BLS international.

The new company is pretty professional and their website is pretty detailed. After due diligence and processes, I made an appointment for a particular day at 11:00AM. I showed up at the office at 10:45AM and here is how the conversation went

BLS: Hello, may I help you

me: Hi, I have a visa appointment for my daughter at 11:00, should I come back as it is not 11:00 yet

BLS: No you are fine, can I see your appointment letter

me: Sure, here you go

The lady looked at it once and started looking for my daughters name in her list of appointments sheet. She had a total of 3 sheets of paper and going by the font size I would guess a total of 50 odd names. She glanced through the whole list once and couldn’t find it and meanwhile I was getting slightly worried.

BLS: the appointment is in this name right? (pointing at my daughters name on a sheet)

me: yes

She handed me the first sheet and asked me to look through if I can find it while she looked through others. I took the sheet and looked at the appointment times it was sheet for appointments from 9:00-10:00

me: Maam, these are for appointments from 9:00-10:00 but mine is at 11:00

BLS: Oh yeah, found it

She marked my daughters name with a yellow marker and asked me to take a seat.

Assuming the BLS lady marks up all the names that has showed up for the appointment, there were only a couple of marked up names on the sheet I was looking at and couple more on the sheet the lady from BLS was looking at. So, does this mean people made appointments and never showed up during their appointment time? I think that is the obvious conclusion. If they haven’t shown up during their time then will they show up at some arbitrary time as they please?

Taking a guess here,since it is a visa for India and looking at all the people present there it will most likely be people like me who have booked their appointments and have not shown up. My thoughts on this incident,

1. If one cannot keep the appointment that too for a visa then why make it in the first place?
2. Would we do the same thing if we were applying for visa for any other country like Europe or while applying for USA visa from India?
3. I am fairly certain the people who booked these appointments are fairly educated and in some sort of white collar job. So, why this don’t care attitude for the Indian visa? 
4. Does the name India itself brings out the “take it easy” attitude in people?
5. For BLS, If you can make an appointment and can still show up anytime then why keep these slots for appointments?
6. For the BLS folks, since you know this is the case then why not just organize the appointment names in alphabetical order and be done or why not do the TRAVISA way and do on first come first serve basis. 

To be fair, I didn’t pay attention to the names to guess the origins of the people who did not show up for their appointment nor did I talk to the BLS folks to know how this business work and my post is based solely on my singular experience in that office.         

iOS 7 first impressions

Over the weekend I updated my Iphone 4s to iOS 7 and here is my take on it

• I think the colors and hues are done to impress teenage girls. The more neutral look that the previous OS used to have is gone. At the first look I hated it but now its been a few days and I am getting used to it.
• The control center is pretty nice and slickly done, The OS now has a built in app to enable the flash led and use it as a flash light. Finally I could get rid of the ad driven app that I was using to do the same.
• The notes app used to have a selection of fonts and now we have to be satisfied with only default no choices.
• The camera app is re done nicely, it has a ton of live filters built in.
• Safari web browser is also redone, I like that it has the options on screen to make browsing private. I must warn you it will take a few minutes of getting used to as the default mode is full screen.
• The timer, safari apps are aiming for a 3D feel. 
• Finally any icon can be moved anywhere and can be grouped with any other one, for ex: in ios6 I couldn’t move the passbook or Newsstand from the main screen and keep them with other unused apps.
• The introduction of itunes radio is cool but I think it has a long way to catch up with apps like Pandora. At the first launch the radio had trouble finding my Wifi.
• The weather app has onscreen animations like the Android OS
• The maps on Apple still have long long way to go, on 1 instance it couldn’t find a location I was looking for while Google maps had no trouble finding the place on the second instance the app was predicting my arrival time ~20mins later than my GPS and Google maps. The error is not a big deal if it were for a 3-4 hr journey but in my case it was little over an hour long journey. 
• The battery drain is slightly faster with iOS7 than with the previous version, not a big deal and not a big concern.
• The background app killing reminds me of the old Palm OS and Android (instead of holding down on the app till we get a red bar at the end like we did in the previous OS, now just flick them up)
• The i-message interface also reminds me of Android. I hope the i-messaging works better with this OS as I had a lot of trouble using the i-message  in iOS 6 and had switched over to Google voice and whatsapp.
• Sorry no SWYPE keyboard yet.

On the whole the OS seems to be doing a catching up with Android, not too happy about that.

D-Day Hindi Movie

Spoiler Alert: I may have disclosed part or parts of the plot of the movie. 

Last night me and Sandhya managed to catch the movie D-Day, an extremely well done Hindi fictional movie on nabbing Mr.D from Pakistan and bringing him to India. So far I have seen quite a few so called thriller movies in Hindi some original and some pirated either from Hollywood or from other languages in India itself, this sits almost at the top.

To be fair, In the past Bollywood has taken up good story lines and manage to goof it up pretty badly, few movies at top of my head are Zameen which was based on Indian airlines flight hijack to Afghanistan and the movie Qayamat which is supposedly a rip off of Rock and many more like that if I think hard. Both the movies made me twitch and turn in my seat, I couldn’t take them for more than 15 mins.   

Watching the movie it appeared that Rishi Kapoor has thoroughly enjoyed playing the role of the gangster. The roles of vulnerable Wali Khan played by Irfaan Khan is very well portrayed. Of course Arjun Rampal as the silent assassin is also well played. Sad that Huma Quareshi and Shruti Hassan does not have much role to play. I must appreciate the casting director for doing such an excellent job. Most movies will either have a good first half or good second half but this movie will keep you at the edge of the seat till the very end. 

The thing that stood out for me in the movie is its boldness in terms of its dialogues. I felt the story line stayed pretty close to reality, the cat and mouse game is very well shown. Of course there is a love angle also which is some what short and does not hamper the narration.

I am not saying it is a perfect movie as I was able to find quite a few loop holes that I failed to explain to myself. One will fail to understand how the character of Irfaan Khan sitting in Pakistan is openly communicating using an old Nokia phone with his handler who is the head of R&AW sitting in India. One would expect needs to be a highly secure line. 

But if you are in for a good thriller and a Hindi movie, then I would definitely recommend D-Day.

As I said before, it is a fiction and one of those things that we Indians keep thinking to ourselves “if only it can happen like this”.