Anish's Blogs

  It’s been a week since the time change and finally I was able to adjust the timings for all the global meetings. Need to do this exercise again in March! The problem gets exacerbated because Australia changes time at a different time and so does most of Europe whereas China and India don’t change their times in Fall or Spring. Meeting times setup during Daylight Savings Time (DST) are inconvenient for the global participants when we fall back to Standard Time. Inconvenience apart, twice a year time change causes confusion, both for the body and the brain, at least for the first few days. Confusion causes stress, sleep disturbances, increased accidents, workplace injuries and cardiovascular diseases ( Effects of Time Change) .  Naturally, many have suggested keeping the same time throughout the year. There are two schools of thought - one group wants to make the DST permanent while the others want permanent Standard Time. Both the proposals have merits on one side of the spec...

Feeling passionate about curbing climate change? Worried about your kids’ and grandkids’ future? Have opinionated views about deforestation and desertification? Anxious about Greenland and Antarctica ice melt? Not happy with the outcome and commitments made by the head of states in the Glasgow COP26 summit? Think more should be done and done soon? If you answered Yes to any of these questions, you are  climate conscious. You don’t have to be Greta Thurnburg to care about climate change! Climate consciousness starts at a personal level. You take stairs instead of using the elevator (it makes you healthier as well), walk or bike to work/school, use LED lights instead of incandescent lights, turn off lights when not in the room, drive an EV, reduce, reuse, and recycle your stuff. You are doing your part as a responsible climate conscious citizen. You may also be participating in protests and marches to put pressure on the elected officials, which puts you in the climate activist categ...

   In Marathi, there is a saying, करावे तसे भरावे! This is quite intuitive and relatable when we consider Newton’s third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you do good to others, you will be rewarded, however if you harm others, you will need to repay. Just wondering, how this old saying stood against the test of time or for that matter even in history, was it fully applicable! Evil dictators in the past have tortured their peoples and still were able to rule and live dignified lives. Aurangzeb, who killed his own brothers to seek power and then tortured Chhatrapati Sambhaji and his friend to death, died peacefully at the age of 88. Yes, he did face a few setbacks, but his suffering was not in any way comparable to the wounds he had inflicted on millions. Hitler experienced a relatively painless death. Hirohito continued to rule Japan after WW2, while 150,000+ innocent civilians died in the atomic bombings. Now, you’ll start to doubt this say...

Last week, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person stepped down as CEO of Amazon, a company he had built grounds up and reaped the benefits for all these years. Was he intrigued by someone else, Elon Musk, now challenging him or eventually getting ahead at the top and hence he wants to focus his energy and passion in something equally jazzy or he is just too bored of being called the richest person? We will never know the answer! Unless you are Musk himself, who saw his net worth increase 7-fold last year or you have struck a multi-million dollar lottery, your net worth would have steadily increased over the past few years (if at all) and will grow gradually over time. Of course this is very relative; some people may call a few thousand dollars as gradual or other ultra rich will weigh it in millions? Regardless, as your net worth creeps up, you will find yourself in a different spot; your colleagues will change, your social structure will change. In order to keep up with these changes,...

  Refer to the hints section below if you need them. We all know the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Which places on the Earth see the Sun rising from/setting in the North (or South) and when? On Dec 21, 2020, Saturn and Jupiter appeared in the sky to have a conjunction. They were in the same sign/rashi. Saturn takes 30 years to go around the Sun, while Jupiter takes 12 years. After how many years will they appear to be in the same sign again (not necessarily as close to have the conjunction we witnessed last December)? There are 2 possible answers although only one of them is possible in reality. What are the answers? On a fine day in June, I travel 10 kms North and then I travel 5 kms South. How far am I from my original location? I am not looking for the obvious answer of 5 kms North? What are the other answers? When a person is watching the lunar eclipse, his friend calls him and says that he is watching the Solar eclipse. How is this possible? Both of them are tell...

A lot of fiction novels, sci-fi movies, and even religious mythologies have predicted End of the World. Variety of causes including a deluge, super volcano, asteroids, devastating natural disasters, pandemics and war could be blamed for this annihilation.  While the Earth went through multiple rounds of destruction of the entire life like the Great Dying and End of the Dinosaur Era, how plausible is a similar situation in the modern world? With the technological power that humankind has now, any natural disaster causing a total destruction, looks a little far fetched! Even a worldwide pandemic as we experienced this year, one of the possible causes of apocalypse, is far from causing the amount of destruction that could be considered apocalyptic.  The pandemic did affect all the countries, but the total number of infections is about 1% of the world population, while only about 0.02% perished in the disease so far. Compare that to the pandemics of the previous centuries, where 1...

“What did you expect about America that wasn’t true?” It was a loaded question; Brian wanted to ask me about the lifestyle, culture and the behavior of the people I met in my first 3-4 weeks of my stay in the USA. Brian was an employee of the client company that TCS deputed me to in Florida. I could not answer the question directly, but gave a political answer, “I expected skyscrapers in the USA, but here in Melbourne, I don't see structures taller than 2-3 stories”. Brian went on to become a good friend of mine. In fact, when my parents visited Niagara Falls, his father, a retired Buffalo city cop showed them around in his big Impala. Brian used to discuss how American history is bloody and how steak is the staple diet for all Americans during dinnertime. He had a couple of complaints about me, one that I can't truly pronounce a “w” and a “v” separately and that my English was more formal than his colloquial language. The day I landed in Melbourne was a cool winter day; yes ev...