You break it, you buy the farm

Breaking these rules have a high probability of death or serious injury to self or car

1/ Stop at a red light, especially when there is cross traffic.

Dangerous, but it will never happen to me

Breaking these rules can cause death or serious injury but the event carries a low probability

2/ Wearing a seat belt in the front seat
3/ Not driving on the wrong side of a divided highway even if the U turn is more than 20 m. away

Dangerous to others (but not to self, although a car wash may be necessary)

4/ Stopping at Stop signs
5/ Stopping at pedestrian crossings (instead of speeding up) even when some pedestrians start sprinting across

Who’s going to catch me?

Pesky rules that are unnecessary. Break them if you can get away with it.

6/ Not using your cellphone without handsfree, especially when a cop is present.

These rules are a nuisance! (thank God there is no enforcement!)

7/ Using your horn only when necessary

Much of Driver Behaviour is not governed by Traffic Rules. But even there there is behavior that is rational, and behavior that is not.

8/ Praying to the gods to keep you safe before (or while) breaking rules 2 to 6.
9/ Leaning on your horn a few seconds before the light turns green.

- Wall socket
- UPS
- Power strip
- Second wall socket (because the power strip doesn’t have enough outlets)
- Computer
- Monitor

Yesterday I was being brave at my parents’ house and decided to try turning on the computer myself. I went down the checklist and turned on the computer, but the broadband modem wouldn’t turn on. After many minutes of jiggling wires and testing for loose connections I finally discovered this small button on the back panel of the modem – another switch – and of course it had been switched off.

Its almost as if we revel in taking something simple like switching on the TV and and making a sacred ritual out of it – a complicated series of actions which cannot be executed without rigorous training and is designed to obfuscate outsiders.

I used to find this exasperating until I got interested in clean tech last year. It turns out that the Indian approach to turning off power to appliances that are idle actually does save electricity. It probably also extends the life of the appliances, though I haven’t read any research on that.

In the US on the other hand, there is almost no attention paid to what is called “standby power” – the power consumption by appliances, especially modern, intelligent electronic appliances, when they are idle but not turned off. Standby power is a big source of lost energy. Lawrence Berkeley Labs has a website dedicated to educating the public about standby power. According to them, a typical American home spends as much as 10% of its power consumption on standby power.

Typical American attitudes to switching off stuff are that they a) don’t want to be bothered about it and b) find it funny when someone does it. As far back as 1933, James Thurber, in one of my favorite funny books, My Life and Hard Times, describes his mother’s paranoia

… mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

because of which she would go around turning switches off all over the house even if there was nothing plugged into them.

I suspect most Indians won’t find this funny. Switching off stuff comes naturally to them. And if a good percentage of them don’t know that electric current doesn’t flow unless the circuit is completed, that’s natural. The other thing that is “piped” into the home is water and that drips all the time.

On the other hand, I don’t know if too many Americans find this funny either. If two thirds of them believe that Obama is a Muslim and a whole bunch of others hold these kooky beliefs I think there must be a lot of people like Thurber’s mother out there.

A naming convention designed for a planet with 100 million people (as on 500 BCE) is hopelessly useless in the world where the number of people to be named has expanded 70-fold. What was designed to be a unique identifier (viz. “Gaurav”, son of the “Rastogi” family) is no longer unique now. By my reckoning, there must be another 5-600 people called “Gaurav Rastogi”, and another 5-10,000 people called “Amit Garg”. Living. Today. Waiting for their unique names.

I completely concur that this is a problem that needs a modern day solution. Many an email has been sent to the wrong Gaurav Rastogi or S. Raghavan. Sometimes, said Raghavan may not even be in the company. When said Raghavan got my second email meant for the internal Raghavan, he said something like “You think I left the company just to keep getting your stinking emails?!”

In a way he was kind. Most recipients of email not intended for them just keep quiet. They hope that no one will notice and they’ll keep getting copied on an entertaining battle for supremacy between two people who wouldn’t be quibbling if they’d just meet and talk. But where’s the fun in that.

The funny thing is that the very person who sends out an email screaming “Stop copying me on this s***. It doesn’t concern me.” will silently read every single email from some email chain in another company where he’s been copied inadvertently.

As far as misdirected email is concerned, MS Outlook is the culprit – specifically, the way it handles display names. If the name of the recipient is recognized by the type ahead, you press return. You never even see the email address. (I haven’t used Outlook in years now. They may have changed their design.)

Back to names. Gaurav is on the money – the two name convention no longer works. Inserting numbers is a good idea. Kind of like IPv6 – increase the number of digits and you have enough room for every man made object to have an IP address. The only problem is, people (unlike routers) might prefer not to have digits in their names. Unless of course Oprah (she of the one name only) goes for it.

Americans use the middle name to overcome this problem which would have been particularly acute because of the low diversity in first names in America (Jack, Bob, Joe…). But then they rarely use their middle names or initials and so the disambiguation problem remains.

Most North Indians have two names – first and last. Kumar and Singh can be common middle names in the North. But since as middle names they are so common they don’t go too far on disambiguation. In Maharashtra, your father’s name is generally your middle name. This is a good system and expands the namespace considerably.

But the best naming convention comes from Telegu land. The Gults have always had it right. A common naming convention is a name, or sometimes two, prefixed by a series of letters – T.S.P.S. Prasad, for instance. While they may get joshed about their names (Hey Prasad, what’s your full name, yaar? Come on tell, no!) their names are designed for the modern, Malthusian world.

The Gult name disambiguates very well. With three or four near random letters, there is ample scope for disambiguation. But it does another thing well. The name is typically a common name like Prasad. Which makes it easy for the people around Prasad to remember and pronounce his name correctly. Unlike say a name like Basab which disambiguates well, but nobody knows how to pronounce. Meanwhile, the preceding initials allow for unique identification by email and other systems.

In the short term Gults may face some trouble in countries like the US where they will want you to neatly fit into the first-name-last-name box. But they should take solace from the fact that theirs is the superior system and one day the whole world will follow it.

By that time, of course, graduates from Osmania university would have taken over the US, so it’ll be easier to mandate a change to naming conventions. I hope they’ll also mandate a change to the metric system.

The President is clearly a fit man with great reflexes. During the election campaign he sank a three pointer on demand for the camera which earned him my everlasting admiration. This time he swatted a fly that was bothering him during an interview in the White House. Nailing a fly is never easy, however, I am somewhat skeptical about the bona fides of the White House fly. Was it a house fly? If so, is it possible that the North American house fly is an entirely different species from the flies that I grew up with in India? They do look somewhat fat and happy over here, compared to the lean, mean third world variety. I don’t believe – and I say this from considerable experience – that a human being can swat one of those Indian flies with their hands. With a fly swatter, maybe, but not your bare hands. I mean no disrespect to the Prez, but that fly was not the real thing.

The science behind fly swatting was revealed to me in an article in Cosmos, a science magazine.

Long before the fly leaps, its tiny ‘brain’ calculates the location of the impending threat, comes up with an escape plan, and places its legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way in the opposite direction. All of this action takes place within about 100 milliseconds after the fly first spots the swatter.

In other words, the fly flies away from the threat and is quite quick about it. Now, flying away from a threat is not exactly great insight (although watching it on high-speed video must have been fun). For example, if I encounter a family of dangerous Canadian Geese on my running trail, I come up with an escape plan and place my legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way in the opposite direction, exactly the way Cosmos describes it. So flies aren’t unique in this respect. I guess what makes flies special is the speed with which they make the decision and act upon it.

The physics of the fly swatter are not explained in the article, but if I were to take a stab at it, it must be about two things:

1. The whiplash effect of the swatter creates very high speeds at the business end of the swatter.
2. The holes in the swatter don’t create the envelope of rushing air that a hand or a flicked tail would create. This points to the possibility that it is not just the sight of the impending threat, but also the envelope of rushing air that tips the fly off.

We had lots of flies to contend with in the small town in India that I grew up in. With no TV (we didn’t get a strong enough signal until I left for college), no video games and very hot summers, it became necessary to kill the ennui with something, anything, more interesting than breathing. During one of those hot summers I discovered that while I could not swat flies with a rolled up newspaper or my bare hands there was a better way.

The technique – Scoop and Stun – which was even superior to a fly swatter. The way it works is that you anticipate the fly flying away from your hand and catch it in mid air. You then throw the fly down hard on the floor. The fly dies from the impact without creating a mess and you can just sweep it away. Another advantage of this technique is that you can target flies sitting on stuff that you won’t be able to swat because you don’t want to break it.

While we celebrate the lightning reflexes of the American president, Indians can rest assured that their politicians are unlikely to follow in his footsteps. Swatting flies in Hindi – “makkhiyan marna” – is a colloquial phrase that means sitting around doing nothing. Being shown swatting flies on TV can make a politician look bad. It’s not as bad as having shoes thrown at you in press conferences, but is still avoidable.

The amount of money spent is, of course, a key determinant of electoral victory. We will cover that in a later article on Corruption and Campaign Finance. In this article we will discuss the state of the art in actually getting the bribes into the hands of the voters.

The most important method of delivering voter bribes is cash. Its advantage lies in the fact that it is uncomplicated. Voters understand exactly how much they are getting and can readily compare it with the going rate of a vote. Most will give immediate feedback to the politician on whether it is adequate or not, and how it compares with what the other candidate is giving out. This allows the politician to do another round of bribes, if the need be.

Operationally also it is simple. Party funds are typically warehoused in paper currency itself. In the event that funds have to be retrieved from offshore accounts, havala transactions can readily convert them into rupees. Gunny sacks are then used to transport them to the point of distribution.

There are some disadvantages with using cash as well. The big problem, in one word, is corruption. Leakages – into the pockets of party workers – can be as high as 30 to 40%. Politicians have tried their best to get party workers to run a clean bribe distribution system, but to no avail.

To overcome this problem, many politicians distribute gifts instead of cash. Saris, liquor and when desperate, mixie-grinders are commonly used bribes. While this increases the operational complexity in procurement and managing the supply chain, leakage is considerably reduced. When very large sums of money need to be distributed – for a statewide bribery program or where the bribe per voter needs to be very high, typically for a completely hopeless candidate – using gifts instead of cash is the method of choice.

Several innovations in the business of buying votes have been made in recent times. One such innovation is to use utility bills to pay the bribes. When funds available are limited, politicians prefer to target neighbourhoods where they are weak instead of spreading the money thin across everyone. But the practical problem with this is that when bribes are being distributed, news spreads quickly over cellphones and then in the resulting crowds there is no way to ascertain where the voters come from. Also, many unscrupulous voters will sometimes take advantage of the crowds and present themselves to be bribed multiple times.

Using utility bills is a brilliant solution because they all carry a residential address. And by requiring voters to present original bills for the last month only, multiple bribe collectors are almost eliminated. The bills need to be retained by the bribe distributors for audit purposes, which makes this method unpopular amongst party workers. Politicians’ search for honest party workers to run this process has not yielded much success. Consequently, in spite of its advantages, this method has not spread widely.

Another innovation that has been used very successfully, is to promise a very large bribe to be paid if elected. This works very well for the political party making the promise because a) it is conditional to being elected and b) the bribe is paid out of public funds. This allows them to ratchet up the size of the bribe greatly. In the last state elections in Tamil Nadu, for example, the DMK promised every family a color TV and then made good on their promise after they were elected.

The only downside to this is that voters in the past have tended to be cynical about election promises. However, surveys indicate that a high percentage of voters are able to distinguish an election promise of good governance, which is unlikely to be kept, from the promise of a future, conditional bribe of a tangible product. This is understandable since good governance is ‘in the eye of the beholder’ while a color TV either is or isn’t.

There is a great tradition of voter bribery in India. There are legends about it dating back to the 1950s. Once such legend concerning voter bribery apparently occurred in the 1950s in Orissa. Biju Patnaik, who was the front-runner to be Chief Minister, as expected by voters, had distributed cash to ensure his party’s victory. His opponent Hare Krishna Mahtab, who did not have the resources that Patnaik had, needed to do something to counter. According to legend, Mahtab’s party workers spread the rumour that Biju Patnaik had distributed fake currency notes. Then they generously offered to exchange the fake notes with real notes! Needless to say the Mahtab camp greatly underestimated the sophistication of Oriya voters, and lost the election.

Today, bribing voters has become so common that all serious candidates must spend a good chunk of their election funds on it. Since other issues matter little (fomenting communal hatred being an important exception), candidates must compete with each other on the quantum of bribes per voter. This is good for the economy as it redistributes wealth from industrial houses and foreign corporations to the aam aadmi. Also, almost all the money distributed as voter bribes is spent immediately which gives a boost to local businesses like country liquor distilleries. In total, the voter bribes industry now accounts for an estimated 2 percent of GDP and about 50 basis points of annual GDP growth. At the G-20 summit later this week, as world leaders discuss what each country is doing to restart the global economy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will argue that voter bribes in the runup to the general election should be treated as India’s ‘stimulus package’.

In order to encourage more spending on voter bribery, the election commission recently took the important step of releasing two promotional videos on prime time TV. In these videos, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Jaswant Singh, senior leaders of two important political parties were shown distributing cash to voters. It is hoped that this will accelerate election spending by candidates in the last few weeks before the elections. In the current weak economic environment, the election commission must be commended for this bold, creative step.

I would now like to invite comments from readers on how we can take voter bribery to new heights.

[Disclaimer: From the first couple of comments it appears that my attempt at satire did not quite work. So, for the record, the facts and figures in this post could be grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong. Like Bollywood movies, to enjoy this post, you must suspend your disbelief.]

Photo Credit: Wen-Yan King

The most common word used in the business of giving directions is Seedha (keep going straight). It is very often the only word. “Where is Khar Gymkhana?” Seedha. Since, the person giving you directions is likely to be standing in front of a paan shop, you might just hear a mumbled word and a pointed finger, which you should also interpret as Seedha.

Though I have heard many people make fun of the Indian tendency to boil down complex turn by turn directions to Seedha Jao, I totally get it. What they are really saying is – “Stay on this road for 200 meters and then ask someone else.” Or, it could be that “You don’t look like a person who can tell your left from your right.” It’s one of the two.

In smaller towns and villages there may be something else at work as well. People don’t want to admit that they don’t know where Khar Gymkhana is. In a largely agrarian society I suppose it won’t do if you mixed up where you planted your jowar with your bajra. And given that there is just one road going up and down in most small towns, Seedha Jao has a 50% chance of being correct. Mumbai, in my opinion, has evolved from this state. People will actually say that they don’t know if they don’t know.

The next most common thing said when giving directions is Aage ja ke left. Or right, as the case may be. This should be interpreted as “Stay on this road for 100 meters and then ask someone else.” He (the direction giver is always male) knows where the left turn needs to be made, but there is no good landmark. And street names in Indian cities as everone knows, are only naam ke vaaste. Every road has two names – the official name which could be Desh Ki Neta Indira Gandhi Road – and the unofficial name – Curzon Road or even IG Road. And when the local administration decided to rename the old Curzon Road to Desh Ki… they did not approve new road signs. The old ones were painted over in a font size of 9 pixels.

The last dimension to direction giving is the landmark. “Left at the water tank” – is something I can deal with. A water tank is typically very big and doesn’t cluster with other water tanks. However, over reliance on landmarks can get suboptimal. Like yesterday.

The directions my friend gave me yesterday were “Come down SV Road and make a left at the Color Plus store.” Given that Malad is an hour away, this seemed inadequate and even ambiguous to me. I would have to keep a watch for Color Plus stores all the way from Bandra (in case I missed the boundary between Bandra and Khar). Given that I was taking a Kail Peeli taxi which as most Indians know was designed for midgets wearing protective headgear, I may not have a clear view of the stores on the side of the road. I may have complained a little to my friend, to which his response was – “then just ask for Khar Gymkhana, everyone knows where that is”. I guess I got lucky that my destination was a landmark itself for after only six stops for directions I found it.

Landmarks are so important that even postal addresses use them. Put an “opp. Regal Cinema” in your address and you can’t go wrong. Although with the landmarks and the c/o (care of) lines in the postal addresses, they do get somewhat long. I have seen some that, in the absence of proper space planning, end up with very little room for the city and state at the bottom of the envelope. Given the wear and tear on mail in the Indian Postal Service, it is possible that there are many postal items that lie in the dead letter office that have triangulated coordinates between multiple landmarks for their address, but the city and state are washed out.

There is a problem with landmarks though, which is somewhat similar to the road names problem. While most buildings are private and so don’t have to go through patriotic renamings, there could be local takes on a building’s name. Our company guest house in Mumbai is in an apartment complex called Palm Court. The auto wallah’s uniformly refer to it as Palam Court. There was this time when our office was in a building called Paradigm. We were looking for a consultant to help our research team with writing better business English. The consultant and her cabbie kept asking for directions to Para-dime and nobody knew where it was. The locals all call it Para-diggum. Which actually is good news. It means they can read English. Correct pronunciation in English is anyway a matter of opinion.

So there you have it. A complete analysis of road-side direction giving in India. You could call it query-by-query directions as opposed to the turn-by-turn directions that Google maps gives you. I liken it to the Agile method of directions which is different from the Waterfall method followed in the West (IT junta will understand this). Either way, we know that it works. (You get there, don’t you?) Plus it has other collateral benefits. If turn-by-turn directions could get you there, sure, you could just stay in your air-conditioned Honda City, listening to Himesh Reshammiya on the car stereo and actually get to your destination on time. But then you’d lose the opportunity to interact with the locals. And that would be a shame.

Wish lists are neat things. Unlike new year resolutions, they involve no effort on your part. And unlike predictions for the new year, you can’t be wrong about them. So I thought I would draw up a wish list and share it with my readers. Perhaps they could then add their own candidates for the wish list and then we could have a reality TV show where people from around India SMS (at premium rates) their wish list candidates and a panel of distinguished judges help us short list ten WLCs (Wish List Candidates) which we then take to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who tells us that he can do nothing about them unless Prakash Karat and Sonia Gandhi agree on each one of them.

Seemed like an exercise in futility so I decided not to do a wish list. Instead here is a “Wish Less”. It is based upon the premise that we already have too much of everything.

So here goes, in alphabetical order. I wish that in 2008 there was less of (or fewer):

If you have your own Wish Less, do share it with us in the comments.

Happy New Year!

Business Standard’s Kishore Singh wrote a review (here) of a book called “Entry From Backside Only” by Binoo John. An excerpt from the review

Now I am growing up in too many small places as Father is on transfer, and so I am not khit-pit in English in weigh these hi-fi people in Bombay and Delhi our, but I am knowing that this Mr John, he is kraking these jokes about small town people who are not so well knowing the language. At first, I am enjoying and laufing and saying, Oh, this Mr John, he is telling good-good jokes. But then he is saying that this is not write way to right English, and that this is Indian-English, which is not true English, and I am thinking perhaps he is CIA foreign hand, he is wishing to disallocate this great country.

Need I say more? If you grew up in India, go read the review, it’ll cheer you up.

I salute Kishore Singh. I wish I could write like that!

An Indian mother expresses her love by feeding her child till he groans “bus mummy”. In the sport of offspring feeding, she is unparelleled. It is not just the quantity of food, it is also the kind of food. She gives herself high points for feeding her “ladla” snacks fried in saturated fat, mithai and lots and lots of carbs. Resistance is futile. If there is ever any research done in this area, my money says that men living in joint families are more likely to be overweight.

The “tricks of the trade” have been passed down from generation to generation. Here is a short list of “tricks” employed by loving mothers all over India:

1. Not putting all the dishes in the menu on the table to begin with. Withholding key information relating to dessert.
2. Putting more rice or rotis onto your plate while you are distracted.
3. “Roti sookhi sookhi kyon kha rahe ho”. (Why are you eating your rotis dry?).
4. If you refuse a third helping of something – “Kyon acchah nahin laga?” – didn’t you like it?
5. “Sab khana tumhari pasand ka hai. Tumhe bachpan mein yeh bahut achcha lagta tha.” These dishes were your favourites when you were growing up.
6. And lest we forget “Beta, bahut duble ho gaye ho.” Son, you’ve lost too much weight.

My advice to you is to have a gameplan for when you go visit your mother. As for me, I gave up long ago. Meal after meal, I loosen my belt and clean my plate. I workout twice as much the week after..but for the few days I am with her I can’t break her heart.

To mothers everywhere…you’re the best.

…the researchers tested three groups of mice, with about 30 old mice and 9 young mice in each group. One group had its light and dark cycle shifted forward by six hours – the equivalent of waking people up six hours early – every week for eight weeks. A second group had its schedule shifted back by six hours, and the third group’s schedule was unaltered.

The results were very interesting:

They found that 83 percent of old mice survived under the normal schedule, 68 percent lived after eight weeks of shifting steadily backward, but fewer than half – 47 percent – survived when the lights regularly came on six hours earlier. When they speeded the schedule up, changing the light schedule every four days, even more mice died.

I do have some issues with how the experiment was set up. If it was supposed to simulate international travel it should have shifted backwards and then forwards instead of shifting it backwards and then backwards again.

But I can’t take exception to using mice for the experiment. My international travel also involves steel cages, small spaces and people in starched coats serving me tasteless food. And also like the mice, what I say is completely ignored by the people in starched coats. So I would say that using mice as a proxy for the international traveler is not too much of a stretch – which of course, you never get to do anyway.

The study was conducted with a six hour shift in daylight. That is equivalent to a gentle New York – Frankfurt trip. Not very interesting to folks like me who do the SFO-BOM trip four times a year or more, which is a 12.5/13.5 hour time shift. But I suspect they tried that and it killed all the mice instantly preventing the experiment to be completed. Or perhaps the mice simply refused to cooperate and drew the curtains tight on their cages. Either way, dead or uncooperative, it didn’t help the cause of the study.

On my trips to India, that is basically how I feel in the afternoon on the first couple of days – dead and uncooperative. On one of these afternoons I had this incident:

It was the end of the quarter and I had gone to Bangalore to participate in Infosys’ quarterly earnings release and other sundry internal meetings. The company had had another blowout quarter (how boring). There had been a few events already in the morning – CNBC, Earnings Call, Press Conference – and I had been my ebullient self at all of them. The afternoon earnings call was for the US investors. It also happened to be at the nadir of my circadian rhythm.

The Q&A was thick and fast about ‘basis points on margin’ and ‘forex cover’ and such like. While interesting to some, I was past caring about it after hearing it a couple of times in the morning. I zoned out. Not asleep, mind you. Just in that twilight zone where caffeine is somehow holding you back from falling over the cliff of consciousness. When suddenly our esteemed CEO turned in my direction and said ‘Basab will take that question.’

Someone had once told me that the sound of ones voice lingers in the air a few minutes after you’ve finished a sentence. I desperately scrabbled in the rocks of these lingering voices but came up with nothing. Even a little hint of something, a couple of words and I would have fibbed my way through. I needed just enough to say something, anything. Even if the response to that had been ‘Actually, that was not my question. My question was…’, I was willing to take that. But no such luck. I mumbled something about the audio being a little muffled and punted the question back to my CEO.

Quite embarrassing as you might imagine. All these calls are recorded and transcribed. I haven’t gone back and looked but I’m pretty sure there is some document on the internet that has the above exchange captured for posterity. After this incident, I started carrying melatonin with me for when I had an important afternoon in the first couple of days in India.

Other rules of mine to manage jetlag that I rarely follow are:

- Don’t partake of alcohol on the first few nights in town. Alcohol dehydrates and that will wake you up for water. Beer is interesting in that if consumed in sufficient quantities, it can wake you up twice. Once to pee and later to drink water.
- Don’t get stressed about the CFO canning your pet project or why your bonus should be twice what your boss gave you. Your mind should be in neutral when you wake up at 2 AM, so that you can count sheep and go back to sleep.
- Don’t watch TV before going to bed. This one is particularly pertinent for shorter trips to say New York. You want to shut down and lull yourself to sleep. I generally carry a book for this. Something slow and boring like Indian fiction (no thrillers please) will do.
- Don’t go to fancy restaurants on the first couple of nights. Lots of spicy food doesn’t sit well with most people if you are trying to get a good night’s sleep.

The other reason to avoid good restaurants early in your trip is to avoid the risk of falling asleep at the table with your face in the dal. The dal on your face could be passed off as a face mask (these NRIs!). But your local hosts might take exception to you nodding off in the midst of their scintillating conversation. This happened to me once at Karavalli an excellent Konkani restaurant in Bangalore. I had gone there with a colleague who shall remain nameless. In my defence he did tend to drone on a bit. After the all important task of ordering (shrimp balchao, chicken ishtew and appam, if you must know) I put my head down on the table and promptly fell asleep. I don’t believe I snored or anything and managed to come away without any egg (or dal) on my face. My colleague, a fellow world traveler, understood and remains a good friend.

Coming back to the main subject of the experiment conducted by the biologists at University of Virginia, I totally believe their conclusion that international travel reduces your life span. The other day I was trying to set up a reminder for my 50th birthday and it wouldn’t allow me to. This also explains why the average age in the Indian IT Services industry is 25 years. The older people keep dying off from too much international travel, effectively lowering the average age. I’m surprised why nobody’s noticed it yet.

But all is not lost. If you are a flatworld warrior, you may still have hope. For there is another study from Harvard Medical School that concludes that red wine may help you live longer. The study, you guessed it, was conducted with mice. Although I would have preferred that the same mice were used (before they died that is) in both experiments. If they had died, at least they would have died happy mice.

Would love to hear your experiences with travel to and from India!