Reflections …

The final scene in the Guru Dutt film “Kaagaz ke Phool” shows a film director, Suresh Sinha, sitting in semi-darkness in an empty movie studio, his mind reflecting on successes and, ultimately, failures.

His past counted for nothing. He was all alone, a completely broken man. All that remained were memories.

And, his life ebbs away as he sits on a chair in the studio.

This image flashed loudly through the mind, as I reflected on life.

 

The Buck stops here !!!

“Don’t mess around on my home turf,” seemed to be the message from this antelope in the savannah of the KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa.

I am not sure whether to be amused by it all, or feel sorry for the man, the beast, or both.

A 17 year old mountain biker, Evan van der Spuy, was competing in a bike race, and was ambushed by Red Hartebeest buck that charged across the plain right into him. The animal crashed into the unsuspecting biker, knocking him over, and what saved the young man from more serious injuries was his helmet that was badly dented – this will, perhaps, earn the helmet’s manufacturer enormous bragging rights (antelope-proof helmets???)!!!

The Red Hartebeest is a large, reddish-fawn antelope that possesses an excellent sense of smell and hearing, but has very poor eyesight. It can reach speeds of around 50 km miles per hour and males weigh around 150kg. What made this particular animal bring down the hapless biker will never be known.

The incident was captured on video by a fellow cyclist following close behind, who, on spotting the beast, had actually yelled, “”watch the buck”.

The biker escaped with minor concussion and whiplash, while the antelope got up, brushed itself off, and galloped nonchalantly away into the savannah.

I guess this yet another example of the old adage of “The Buck stops here”.

Watch the video of the antelope’s charge here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2oymHHyV1M

I understand this video has received over two million hits on YouTube.

 

Of various hues …

Watching sports can be fun, be it cricket, football, tennis or athletics. And, apart from the action on the playing field, there are other aspects that add charm and entertainment value – the crowds, the fans, the side-shows, and the atmosphere.

Speaking of fans, there are some who add their unique style and personality, in their own colourful way, that contributes to enhancing the enjoyment.

There are two faces that regular cricket watchers would surely recognize – Chaudhry Abdul Jalil (affectionately known as Chacha Cricket) and Percy Abeysekera.

Chacha Cricket, with his distinctive white beard and green shalwar kameez, can be seen waving the flag at cricket stadia all around the world. He has been following the Pakistan team from the days when matches were held at Sharjah, and is now a regular presence wherever the team plays. Having given up his job, he has now been hired, I understand, by the Pakistan Cricket Board that sponsors his travels all over the world following the national team.

Percy Abeysekera, who is a one-man cheering squad for the Sri Lankan cricketers, has been following the team for sixty years. He has always been known for his distinctive way of holding the national flag above a batsman as he walks to or back from the wicket.

There is another familiar body/face I have noticed on television over the past couple of years – one who has his entire torso, face and head painted in the colours of the Indian flag, and also has the name “Sachin Tendulkar” painted on his chest.

His name is Sudhir Kumar Chaudhary, he hails from Muzaffarpur in Bihar State, and is an ardent fan of Sachin Tendulkar and the Indian team.

Chaudhary does not have a job, I understand, but regularly receives match tickets from his idol Tendulkar, which ensures that he is able to watch matches everywhere in India. He has been a regular feature in the IPL, as well.

I was amused to learn that this die-hard fan has been travelling to Bombay each year since 2004 to present 1,000 litchis to Tendulkar. “Sachin has promised me that he would provide me with the tickets of all international matches played in the country, and he is living up to his words. He is like a god to me,” says Chaudhary.

He has now begun presenting the fruit to some other cricketers like Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh and Yuvraj Singh.

Considering the state of Indian cricket at the moment, the team needs more fans like Sudhir Kumar Chaudhary.

 

Writing a will

“You must write a will,” I have often been told, the logic being that it will make things smooth when I make my final departure, and there will be no ambiguities. Makes sense.

On the surface, legal aspects apart, it should not be too much of an issue, especially when what you leave behind is not worth so much as to cause problems for those who will be the recipients.

“Alright, let me understand how a will is written,” I told myself and started doing some research on the net. That’s when I came across some interesting and, sometimes wacky, wills.

I read about a childless Canadian lawyer and investor named Charles Vance Millar who willed the residue of his estate to the Toronto, Ontario woman who bore most babies in the decade after his death. In what appeared to be a closely fought contest that got known as the Great Stork Derby, there emerged four women who bore nine children apiece, each pocketing $125,000. Not bad at all, since his riches gave at least 36 children a head start in life.

Not all people have been as philanthropic, however.

The poet Heinrich Heine married Eugenie Mirat, a lady who was uneducated, boorish, and vain. While affectionately leaving his entire estate to his wife, he placed one condition – she had to remarry once he was gone, to be able to claim her inheritance. The reason? “Because then there will be at least one man,” he explained, “who will regret my death.”

And, after being banned by his wife from smoking his favourite cigars, a gentleman named Samuel Bratt got even with her later. He left behind a princely sum of £330,000 for his wife. There was one condition, though – she had to smoke five cigars a day.

The search for tips on how to frame a will goes on.

 

A Fantasy rolling out …

A Lego set is a child’s plaything, but I have observed adults, too, patiently spending hours, and enjoying putting together the little, precisely moulded, bricks to form various shapes – houses, cars, animals, bridges, etc.

Which is why I was fascinated when I read that Lego bricks have been used to put together to form a replica of a full size Ford Explorer SUV that will be transported to Orlando, Florida in time for the opening of the new Legoland.

The red Lego-Explorer took 22 designers 2,500 hours to build, weighs about 1,200 kg (more than half of the real car), and is supported by a 350 kg interior aluminum base.

It took 380,000 bricks to build the Lego-Explorer which would, at current cost of Lego sets, work out to almost US$ 40,000, more than the price one would, perhaps, pay for an actual Ford Explorer.

As it travels in a trailer with transparent sides from Ford’s Chicago assembly plant to Orlando in tme for the park’s opening on 15th October 2011 , there will be thousands of curious eyes following this amazing creation.

Child’s play? Perhaps, not. But, it is certainly something that brings out the child in an adult.

 

Home-made barista coffee

“Would you like to have a coffee?” asked my host at a company that I was visiting.

We were standing beside a small table that had a coffee machine and a box that contained several small foil packages that came in different colours, each denoting a different taste variant.

He then took one of these, popped it into a small receptacle in the machine, pressed a switch and a few seconds later, I saw steaming hot coffee dispensed into a cup.

I have heard of, seen and tasted various barista style coffees, but this was something new.

It was a capsule or pod system of coffee making. The concept appears simple enough. The aluminium foil capsule contains a precise amount of ground coffee. When this is inserted into a compatible capsule system machines, the top is pierced to allow water to flow through. Hot water is forced through the capsule at high pressure, and the final beverage is extracted to the cup.

Specialty coffee shops such as Starbucks popularized and standardized coffee house culture, and offered gourmet-style variants to clientele across the world. It was Nestle, through its brand Nespresso that brought premium coffee into the workplace and into homes. With huge margins for themselves, needless to say.

The whole idea of bringing gourmet coffee into the home is based on aspiration – buy the product, taste the lifestyle (George Clooney is the brand spokesman), and with global sales in excess of US$ 3 billion, Nestle haven’t done too badly with this.

Nestle is not a monopoly – there are others such Sara Lee with their Senso brand who are selling large numbers in the U.S. What differentiates Nestle, however, is that the Nespresso pods can only be used on Nespresso machines unlike many other brands that work on “universal” machines.

There are several varieties to choose from and they carry exotic names such as Ristretto, Arpeggio, Livanto, Capriccio, Volluto and Vivalto Lungo, amongst others. Caters to individual taste, and comes handy when guests who drop in have different preferences, since all one has to do is drop in a different variety of pod into the machine.

The pod comes with a hefty price tag, though. The machine itself costs upwards of US$ 150 for the basic model, going up to US$ 600+. And, each pod costs approx. 55 cents, which is steep.

However, if one does not wish to stand in line at a barista, and wants to have different varieties of one’s choices at call, within the convenience of the home, the coffee pod is a must-have.

As for my first experience with this concept? Well, the coffee tasted good.

And, I asked for a second cup.

For the Record …

I read recently that a 46 year old Brazilian-born lady got married to a 60 year old, balding, retired civil servant in Edinburgh. Nothing unusual about the alliance except that Elaine Davidson holds the Guinness record of being the world’s most pierced woman with 6,925 piercings (with 192 on her face alone).

Speaking of which, one has read about the various records that are certified by Guinness. There are records for the tallest, shortest, fastest, slowest, fattest, thinnest, and what have you.

For instance, a huge pumpkin, all of approx. 822 kg, grown in Wisconsin, U.S.A., weighed in as the world’s heaviest. Fair enough. What’s next? The largest melon (current record – approx 122 kg)?

There is the record for the family with the largest number of living generations (7). And a dog with the longest ears (left ear – 31 cm, right ear – 34 cm)

However, some of the “records” defy logic, and makes me wonder why they should appear at all, and if people do things just to gain their moment of fame.

A Japanese man, Kenichi Ito, holds the record for the fastest 100 metres race, running on all fours (a man is supposed to run on two legs, by the way). An American named Ashrita Furman holds the record for the fastest mile running in swimming fins (why would anyone want to do that on terra firma?).

Krunoslav Budiseli, a Croatian, holds the record for wearing 245 T-shirts at the same time – the T-shirts weighed 68 kg (why didn’t anyone offer him a sweater if he was feeling so cold?). Italy’s Vittorio Innocente set a world record in underwater cycling, pedaling to a depth of 66.5 meters (maybe the cycling tracks in his home town were too choked).

Setting records and breaking them are all fine. But, some of them surely test one’s reasoning. And, verge on the absurd, to put it mildly.

As for the happy 60 year old groom on his wedding day, he said, “Elaine looked astonishing. People see the piercings but I see the amazing personality underneath.”

Indeed. That’s what love is all about, I suppose.

Is that a record, too?

The Oktoberfest in Munich

I could hear loud conversations and boisterous laughter last night, and on looking out of the window of my Munich hotel room, the source became clear. These were youngsters who were returning after a long session of serious drinking at one of the tents in the Theresienwiese area of the city.

“Must go there and see for myself,” I decided.

The Oktoberfest is an annual event in Munich – while the name suggests that it is held in October, it actually commences in the second half of September. Over seven million people visit the city for this 200-year old event, including from outside of Munich and even Germany.

Having taken a S-Bahn train to the Hauptbahnhof station with the view to connect by the U-Bahn to Theresienwiese, I was staggered by the sheer numbers of people headed in the same direction. Young and old, families, children in strollers, they were all there, and one could tell that the beer drinking had begun prior to getting to the venue.

And, once in Theresienwiese itself, it was a different world. The streets were packed with people, there were the traditional rides and other attractions normally associated with fairs, and, finally, there were the huge beer tents set up all over the place.

I was informed that a table for 12 at one of the beer tents can cost as much as a thousand Euros, and bookings have to be made as much as a year in advance. Walk-in visitors might find room to walk, but forget about sitting down.

Beer brewed within the city limits of Munich is the only variety permitted to be sold at this festival, and the beverage does not come cheap. A one-litre tankard costs approximately 9 Euros, but that does nothing to dampen the “spirits” of the revelers. This beer has an alcohol content of 5.8 to 6.3% compared to the normal 5.2% in German beer.

The consumption numbers are staggering – 7 million litres of beer were consumed in the 2010 Oktoberfest. This was apart from 125,000 litres of wines. As compared to this, 245,000 litres of coffee and 1 million litres of water & lemonade were consumed.

It was interesting to see people dressed in the traditional Bavarian clothes, too.

Amazing event, and it was with some regret that I walked away to catch a train back to the airport.

 

So, the sky did not fall on our heads …

So, the dead NASA satellite has finally reached earth, though, when I last checked, no one knows where it came down, though there is speculation that it splashed down into the Pacific..

Well, the sky did not fall on our heads, something that Asterix’s Gauls always feared.

It was interesting to read, during recent days, about this coming down, and there was the usual speculation about its likely destination, and the potential risk of damage and injury. Of course, there was always the reassurance, if one can term it such, that chances of it hitting oneself was infinitesimal.

At least 26 pieces, the largest at about 130 kg, had been expected to survive the plunge and land along a path 500 miles long. NASA had forecast a 1-in-3,200 risk that debris from the satellite could injure someone, and the risk for any individual was one in several trillion.

People love the hype, though, and I recall what happened when the Skylab space station crashed into earth in 1979 – the buzz then was even greater. Of course, Skylab was much larger, and people threw parties, and bought Skylab helmets that had antennas that would warn you about a piece of the station landing on your head a few microseconds before it happened. All in good fun.

And, then, when a piece of the debris fell in Western Australia, local authorities fined NASA $ 400 for littering.

This time, of course, it was not same, though some, particularly in North America were concerned. The chances of a piece of the satellite falling on you were greater than winning the lottery, they reasoned.

Viewed that way, it makes sense. But, nothing noteworthy finally happened.

Anticlimactic? Perhaps, so. But, it gave the media something to speculate about, and viewers and readers something to chat about.

Now that it has all ended as a damp (literally, in all probability) squib, life returns to normal.

For, there are other more pressing matters to attend to.

 

Pricking the balloon

 

The flight was full and it took quite a while for the cabin crew to get the passengers sorted out – no mean feat considering that several had oversize cabin baggage, refused to let other travelers pass by, and some even wanted to have their seats changed.

One particular passenger, seated three rows ahead of me across the aisle, caught my attention. There was a deliberate swagger in his gait as he walked in, he grumbled about the co-travelers who blocked his way, and loudly demanded that the cabin crew bring him some water.

I heard him announce loudly to the person seated beside him that he was a senior manager with a large multinational and was traveling economy only because someone in the travel desk had goofed.

The loud-voiced diatribe went on well past take-off, and I could sense that other passengers were getting a bit sick of it. No one said anything though.

Twenty minutes prior to landing when the aircraft had begun its descent and the seatbelt sign was on, the inevitable happened. A member of the crew, laden with used trays, walked past this person and accidentally dropped a partially full glass of juice onto his lap.

The guy leapt out of his seat like a scalded cat, berated the hapless air hostess for messing up his trousers, and bolted for the lavatory. It didn’t end there. When the purser, who observed the man disappear into the loo, waited outside and enquired about what happened when he finally emerged, the gent let fly yet again about the carelessness of the crew, the apparent lack of service, and more.

The purser, perhaps a veteran of many such episodes, put on a patently fake smile, placed a friendly but firm hand on the guy’s shoulder, spoke a few words of apology, directed him back to his seat, and told him to stay put.

Did the story end there? No, not quite.

Our flight arrived late, and this guy missed his connection. The next flight was eighteen hours later and he would have to cool his heels in the airport.

I think most observers rejoiced at this. And the traveler beside him who had endured patiently for close on two hours told him, “My friend, make as much noise as you want, but no one here cares who you are. Enjoy your walk around the airport for the next few hours, it will do you some good.”

The guy exited the aircraft with the look of a deflated balloon, and those who had watched his pantomime couldn’t hide the grin on their faces.

It takes all types, I suppose.