I did the cardinal sin of taking a small ride on an auto-rickshaw in Greater Noida earlier this week. The auto driver coolly took on the wrong side of the 6 lane expressway and my protests had no effect on him. Few cars, obviously used to these antics came to screeching halts and I reached the destination only 1.5 kms away safely. The Auto driver proudly told me – “Indians are brave people”; obviously, assuming me to be an African, given my complexion.

 

Truly we are brave people. But all the bravado is limited to playing with lives on the roads; not to mention the bravery of fighting the Giant government by breaking its rules. When did I last hear Indians indulging in any adventure sports? Bungee jumping, windsurfing, skateboarding, para-trooping etc are for the chicken-hearted Europeans who drive so carefully like cowards. We are brave Indians. Truly brave!

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Ø Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair
Ø The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
Ø Our eyes remain the same size from birth onward, but our noses and ears
never stop growing.
Ø You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV.
Ø A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation.
Ø Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a
few weeks.
Ø The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

Ø Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never telephoned
his Wife or mother because they were both deaf.

Ø “I am.” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language
Ø Colgate faced big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking
countries because Colgate translates into the command “go hang yourself.”
Ø The smallest unit of time is the yoctosecond
Ø Like fingerprints, everyone’s tongue print is different
Ø “Bookkeeper” is the only word in English language with three consecutive
double letters

Ø Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left handed
people do
Ø The sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every
letter in the English language
Ø China has more English speakers than the United States
Ø Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
Ø Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
Ø If you leave Tokyo by plane at 7:00am, you will arrive in Honolulu (US)
at approximately 4:30pm the previous day.

Credits: MK Goyal, Mumbai

 

In between the travails of travels, I love to take some time off and put my air trips in a lovely web portal called www.flightmemory.com . Thanks to my friend John Wilkinson in the UK that I learnt about it, so I could enter only from the beginning of 2008. The statistics generated can be interesting, as I discovered that I circumnavigated the earth almost 5 times in one year, in distance travelled terms. The following was my flight statistics today:

Flight Distances:

  

In Miles   121,635

In Kilometer   195,752

Earth Circumnavigation 4.88 x

Distance to the Moon  0.509 x

 

Other interesting statistics have also been designed quite nicely.

NDTV surprised me with their Greenathon. An unprecendented concept, most definitely conceived by Nobel Laureate Dr. R.K.Pachauri. A 24-hour live telecast for environment awareness, and exceptionally fine-tuned in such an entertaining way with the who’s who of Bollywoood thrown, that it had the country glued to their TV sets. I did my personal campaign by sending SMSs urging friends to watch the program; and most of them were already watching.

 

Hope this big bang would create some much-needed environment consciousness.  

 

So innocuously, from December 12, 2008, Switzerland would accept people with Schengen Visas. Behind the scenes was Indian pressure, the largest depositors in Swiss banks, $1436 billion!! The Swiss are not contended with the loot from India and other highly corrupt countries, where the poor can’t eat two square meals while bureaucrats, generals, and politicians fill in the Swiss coffers. Its these people who were getting greatly inconvenienced to put on formal records their visit to Switzerland. Out of the 90,000 Indians who visit Switzerland every year, more than 1/3^rd visit every year. All the Indian government could have done easily is to find the purpose for which these 30000 people were going every year, keeping in my that India’s bilateral trade with the landlocked Switzerland is negligible.

 

No chance anymore to do anything. The looters do not need a Swiss visa anymore. They would simply enter via land routes into the “most honest” country, and there would be no records. Bravo!