It's showtime, folks!

Recently, I was in one of those movie moods, where I watch lots of movies.

First one I watched was Das Vidaniya- this is a pretty simple story of a man (Vinay Pathak) discovering that he's about to die, and makes a list of things to do, and sets about doing them. The acting was really good, and Vinay Pathak carries the movie single-handedly. He portrays the role so well, that it's very easy for the viewer to feel the joy and sadness of every moment of the movie. In short, a must-watch movie.

The second one was not too good, but still sort of watchable. This was Dostana- a movie about two straight men pretending to be gay in order to share a flat with a beautiful straight woman, who they both happen to fall for. This could have been a very thoughtful, and well-made movie. Instead, it just succeeded in annoying me, for the way it stereotypes gay men. The movie was a bit over-the-top on that front, so I'd recommend watching it only if you're willing to accept the prejudiced Bollywood-tinted look at sexuality.

Then, I attempted to watch Yuvvraaj. This was an absolutely disastrous movie, and after about 15 minutes, wanted to stop the pain. I bravely continued on for another 15 minutes hoping that somehow magically, Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif would learn to act. But no, that didn't happen. So, that was that. I dont know if the rest of the movie was any good- I decided to end the torture and move on to the next movie.

The next one was Welcome- this is a must-watch entertaining movie, about a gangster who wants a nice, decent, good-family kind of guy to marry his sister to. Concept is good, acting is really good, quite funny too. Nana Patekar and Akshay Kumar should stick to such roles rather than action movies.

My next was National Treasure-part 2. Treasure movies, I like. Action movies, yes! Not exactly Oscar-winning material, and it's a bit silly. But, it kept me interested, and I watched the whole thing. That is a big deal in itself. So, this one gets a thumbs-up.

Latest one I've seen is Slumdog Millionaire. It's got a couple of rather gross scenes, quite unnecessary I think. But, the movie has a nice concept, and the actors are nice enough. The kids who play the younger versions of the main pair have done a really good job. The movie's definitely worth watching.

I've decided I do have a green thumb.

Here are two little onions that I plucked today from my little mud basket in the spare bedroom. They'd probably become bigger, but I felt a bit like the monkey in my brother's favorite story of 'the owl and the raja', and like a very impatient Noni the garden gnome in the Enid Blyton fairy tale.

I remembered to take a pic only after I had got rid of the outer muddy layer. I used the onions in my vegetable fried rice today. And on the subject of bragging, I have to say, the veg/egg fried rice that I make is one of the best I've ever eaten.

'Tis the season...

It's Christmas season, and there's a nippy festive spirit in the air.

I'm seeing carolers all over the place. Even the buskers are now singing 'Jingle bells', even if one of them did insist that it was fun to ride a 'horsey open sleigh'! On one of the little gardens near where I live, I spotted these inflatable snowman and Santa coming down the chimey. The Santa was inflating and deflating by itself, so I was able to capture it at an angle that looks like an over-stuffed Santa has got caught in the chimney and has decided to settle back and relax while the elves get their gear to free him :-)

Ship ahoy!

Spotted at Greenwich a couple of weeks back:

We know the Thames is still used as a major waterway, but seeing is believing.

Baksheesh?

Diwali season in India invariably means the doorbell ringing umpteen times, with each new arrival staking a claim in the Diwali baksheesh sweepstakes. Almost a trick-or-treat season, since we wouldn't to offend any of the visitors by giving them less than some other baksheesh-taker- after all, they controlled our connection to basic services- telephone line maintenance, postman, telepgram man, doodhwala, kachra-wala, maali, gas-wala, and so on.

Living here, I'd almost forgotten about the baksheesh culture, and was pleasantly surprised to see the reverse here.

Checking the mailbox today, I found a greeting card from the Royal /mail, promising good service inspite of the extra holiday burden! Here's the card....

Calculator

Never thought I'd need a manual to learn to use a calculator, but turns out that using a financial calculator can be as easy as 1-2-3, provided you know what buttons to push.

I've recently bought myself a Texas Instruments BA-II Plus Professional financial calculator.

I preferred this over the HP-12C, which uses reverse Polish notation, and I'd rather do things in English, even if the HP-12C is more popular. The HP-12C is only fir serious users and for show-offs. Anybody else who picks up a HP-12C is first going to try a basic 1+2= calculation, which does not work since 1+2= is normal English notation! And of course, nobody will be willing to admit they can't add 2 numbers on a calculator especially when the people around turn around to watch you scratching your head to figure out why the function didn't work. It's also a great calculator to take into an interview, ask an over-confident candidate to calculate NPV, and then give him the calculator and watch the confidence fizzle away.

Anyway, back to my TI BA-II Plus Professional financial calculator (quite a mouthful!)- I like it. I'm using the manual to figure out how to calculate NPV, IRR etc, and big formulae are immediately condensed into a few clicks of the calculator's keypad.

Banana chips

I decided to make yet another attempt to find a nice bag of banana chips last weekend, and bought a bag from Asda. Not as good as the freshly fried ones at Matunga, but a good enough substitute. But definitely better than the ones in the Indian stores here, where I had made my previous failed attempts.

And that made my day!

Asda, here I come again.... This store is turning out to be quite a good resource- I also bought lauki and arbi (called eddoes here), so I was 'very happy in my heart, dil dance maare re'.

License raj

Corporate law and economics textbooks in India invariably have a lengthy discussion on why licensing was required and why it was subsequently abolished except for a few very specific industries of national security importance. India of course, got the licensing idea from UK, and zealously intially applied it to as many products as it could. My grandparents and even parents can remember the days when television sets and radio sets were licensed to residential users. Now, the consumer is king in India, and there is really no question of licensing TV sets.

Therefore, in the UK, I was quite surprised to discover that the license raj continues even today, and that people continue to pay TV Licence fees without demur. License applies to any TV receiving equipment- including freeview boxes connected to the laptop, and TV cards on the PC, not just the actual TV set. The license fee involved is not a very large amount- £140 for a color TV license. But, it's the principle of the thing. Why should I pay for a license, about as much as what it would cost to buy a basic TV? If I buy a TV set worth £700, the license fees that I pay effectively double the price of the TV over the average useful life of the TV (not considering th time value of money, or the salvage value of the TV). Also, the license fees are directed to the BBC, which does not have any advertising revenue at all. However, the recent controversies that the BBC has been involved in highlighted the huge paychecks that some of their star presenters are getting- who is Jonathan Ross and why should he get so many millions? And how does Russell Brand deserve his paycheck? Why should my money go towards financing the lifestyles of bratty people who are famous just for being famous?

In any case, I have never been a huge fan of watching TV- even when faced with over a 100 channels to watch, I'd ending up exercising my fingers, going through the whole range of channels forwards and backwards for atleast an hour before giving up saying "There's nothing to watch on TV". Other people can't believe I can exist without a TV- I've seen some really shocked faces when they find out, but I've got enough things on my plate that I probably need a few more plates. So, at the moment, I don't miss a TV, but when I finally get around to feeling bored on a weekend, maybe, then I'll just have to forget 'the principle of the thing'!

But, I digress. What I was originally planning to write about, was that the TV licensing bureau actually implements its rules. So, when I moved into my current apartment, I got about three letters from the TV Licensing Board (addressed to the previous resident), asking for the license to be renewed. I naturally ignored the letters. Yesterday, I got a visit from the board, to check whether I indeed didn't have a TV. But, they've made their note on the records- "recently moved in, no TV"

Top 10 most irritating phrases in English

Today's Telegraph had an interesting article about the top 10 most irritating phrases used in English, as compiled by Oxford. It's an interesting question- why are the researchers at Oxford not using their time better, maybe looking for a solution to create world peace. But that's a question for another day.

My list of annoying phrases:

• At the end of the day, we need to deliver...
• We own this project
• It's a nightmare; it's scary
• 24/7
• What is the ETA?
• It's not rocket science
• youallrightthere? (said in a Brit accent)
• cheers
• heyhowzitgoin?
• does that make sense?
• to be honest
• bad spellings- 'loose' v 'lose'
• look at it this way
• let's take a step back and think about this
• leave that one with me
• we need to push back if we don't have the resources
• carbon footprint; going green
• let's take that one offline
• give me a heads-up when the report is ready to go
• LOL and other text speak without vowels (ok, that one's personal- just takes too much effort to figure out the text msg)
• re-inventing the wheel
• good to go

Translation, please

Now I know that even the Brits don't understand each other, and it really is multiple countries under the same flag.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5058853.ece

"Council workers in Swansea erected a road sign informing motorists in Welsh: “I am out of the office at the moment”.
Swansea council staff were designing a bilingual road sign barring heavy goods vehicles from a street in the city and had consulted an in-house translation service.

As the translator was not available, an automatatic e-mail response was triggered in Welsh which read: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

Staff mistakenly thought that it was the correct translation and had it printed on the sign beneath the message in English, which read: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”.

The council has taken down the sign at the junction of Clase Road and Pant-y-Blawd Road after Welsh speakers spotted the mistake."

And here I was thinking 'It happens only in India'!

Jolts of static

It's that time of the year again, when the weather starts to act up again. I don't mean the cold and wind- that, I can handle by bundling up in lots of layers and turning on the heating. What I can't handle is static electricity. I get quite a jolt when I touch absolutely anything. The phone when I try to turn off the morning alarm, the washbasin tap, the towel rod, the kitchen sink, the stove top, the saucepan to make my morning tea, the keyboard of my PC, and the list goes on and on. How do I get all these things to work for me without touching a thing?

Time and date

There are some things which I simply refuse to understand- one of them is the concept of daylight savings time.

I knew that last night, the clocks were turned back an hour, to take us back into winter time. But still, today, I was quite surprised to find that the clock on my laptop said 10:30, while the regular clock said 11:30, and it took me a brief second to remind myself to set the wall-clock correctly.

I've heard explanations about the need to save energy being the driving force to convince whole nations to adopt this timely exercise (trying to make a PJ there, in case you didn't get it!). But I'm not buying it. Most people here end up working long hours anyway, so how are we saving any energy? All the offices in Canary Wharf are lit up all night, when nobody's working; so where's the energy saving? In the US, Mountain time follows daylight savings, except the Navajo nation (excluding the Hopis in Navajo nation who do follow daylight savings). Confusing? Good, that was the objective.

Just leave the clocks be!

Where is the free-market?

OPEC countries today agreed to cut oil production to keep oil prices from falling further. Where is the capitalism, the free-market that is supposed to create the efficiency. Oil producing countries ganging up to decide how much to produce to keep prices at a higher level than the market demand is, to my mind, nothing but price-fixing.

How is it correct that price-fixing is fair when it comes to oil, but in a normal trade context, it is seen as an unfair, restrictive trade practice. Why should we as consumers pay a higher price than necessary for transport, heating etc the prices of all of which are heavily affected by the oil prices.

Who's paying for it?

It's been such a crazy time, that wherever I turn, people are talking about which firm's losing money. Today, I read 2 articles on Bloomberg News- one about the IMF helping out Pakistan to avoid it defaulting, and another about a potential default by Argentina for the second time in a decade. Makes one wonder about country risk. If in this global economy, there is relatively freer flow of capital, then eveyry country across the world is invested either directly or indirectly in the sub-prime/ credit crisis. So, while the carry trade was at the peak of being lucrative, firms were borrowing in Japan to invest in high-rish, high-return assets. So, there's a whole lot of money that Japan has lent to non-Japanese debtors. At what point will Japan get up and say, 'okay, party's over; time to repay those pesky borrowings'? Or will Japan have to keep throwing good money after bad to keep firms/countries afloat so that they'll make enough money elsewhere to repay the yen borrowings? What about China- I had heard enough about how China is squeezing the world economy and can potentially bring it to its knees imply by selling some ABS. As I heard it, all these CDOs and CDO^2s were being bought by Chinese investors, who now had leveraged so much that its was in their best interests to keep the markets afloat, until such time as the government decided to squeeze the Western governments. This certainly makes for a lively conspiracy theory, which a lot of people would probably wager on considering the current state of the world economy and how it's the Chinese, Japanese and Singaporean banks that are keeping the market afloat. Conspiracy theory anyone?

Banking humor turning into gallows humor

Last week, with the problems in Iceland, I thought CNBC and Bloomberg TV had gone into overdrive talking about "meltdown in Iceland".

But, reading 'thelondonpaper' on the DLR on the way home, I realised that the wry gallows humor is all around:


Some examples, from thelondonpaper:
How many commodity traders do you need to change a lightbulb?
None- they won't do it. But, the price of darkness will shoot up due to over-supply.

What is the definition of optimism?
A banker ironing five shirts on a Sunday.

Uncertainty in the banking markets in Japan- the Origami bank has folded up, Sumo bank has gone belly up and shares in Kamikaze bank have nosedived.

The Isle of Dogs banking society has gone bust. They're calling in the retrievers.

Masked man holding a gun to a cashier in a bank: "I don't want any money. Just start lending to each other."

On a fresh note...

So here goes....a brand-new effort to start up my blog. I had 2 versions of my old blog, first on Wordpress and then on blogger. Wordpress decided to delete my blog for becoming dormant. I deleted the Blogger blog. So, I was talking to my brother yesterday and decided to restart my blog.


While I figure out what to write, go read my brother's blog- http://www.silentyak.com/