From Zurich to New York

When you take 4 flights on a day, you pretty much will have to look at the flight magazine at least once. When I was browsing the Swiss air magazine, I was pleasantly surprised by the article it had - a detailed description of a long distance flight from Zurich to New York right from ground checks and crew briefing to the touchdown at JFK.

Some interesting things I learnt:

The airbus, under consideration, has been flying this route everyday for the last one year, without any issues whatsoever - hmmm..not bad....

It weighs 196 tonnes completely fuelled and with passengers on board - 196 tonnes taking off and flying....vazhga Wright brothers, valarga Science

Flight traffic rules dictate that all flights pass on the right of a straight line on the ground , like a railway track and that's why the pilot sits on the left. - What about in Britain and in India :D ?!

Every seat on flight is put through rigorous stress tests. - does the test include checking if there is enough leg room to cross your legs and read a book while eating :D ?!

Every seat in the business class costs as much as a normal family car. - adangokka makka !

People in first class get their own pyjamas - ahaa.....

Flight attendants are allowed to wear only a maximum of 4 rings in their fingers and nothing on the thumb or the forefinger. Only a max. of 2 bracelets and both together cannot exceed 4 cm in width. - appadi....thavilakara madhri dress panna yaarayum pakka vendam....!

Of the 8 hours flight, the pilot actually flies only a few minutes, the auto pilot takes care of the rest - idhu therinju irundha naan kooda pilot ayirpene...

Inspite of the outside temperature of -76 F, the airbus still has to be conditioned to counter the radiation of the sun and carbondioxide from the passengers - idhuku dhan porvai kudukara !

All flight attendants should be trained to assist in child birth - ada..ada..ada...this is really one kind of a job description...truly multi-faceted

There are passengers who don't eat on board, who don't sleep due to fear of flying, those who sit close to the back where the blackbox is, since they believe that will improve their chances of survival in case of a crash - ada kadavule....

oh...well...thats all I can remember although there were many others. What I also liked was including some pictures of passengers now and then with their purpose for the trip, be it a husband going home to meet his wife or 2 pensioners taking a long awaited vacation; loved the personal touch.

A mixture of Worlds

It is a city with numerous world war memories.

It is a city with skyscrapers, a rarity in Germany.

It is a city of embassies and consulates.

It is a city of politicians.

It is a city for tourists.

It is a city for marathons and triathlons.

It is a capital city with a low the cost of living (as compared to Stuttgart or Munich).

The city is always alive, Berlin is always alive !

I was in Berlin for the 5th time last week and like every other time, I took the bus tour again because I never get tired of Berlin. The tour begins in the Potsdamer platz that I remember vividly (because the Canadian and the American consulates are here) and although I know exactly what the tour guide is going to say, as I take my place in the upper deck of the bus after buying the ticket from one of the students (working part-time), I am not bored.

As the bus drives through the extremely familiar Zoologisher Garten, I know we are going to reach the row of embassies/consulates, after a few minutes. I always grin when I suddenly spot the Ashoka Chakra among them :)

When we get to Checkpoint Charlie (Berlin Wall crossing point), I know I am going to start thinking of the war and how futile and meaningless it seems to lose thousands of lives just to prove a point or ascertain who is right.....and there looms the remnants of the Berlin wall, giving a shape to my thoughts. A portion of the wall is retained and there is a museum with extremely disturbing photos and equally disturbing facts. The entire wall is marked in the city, along the sides of the road, by a dotted line.

While on one the side you get a glimpse of the Nazi Germany with Hitler's Bunker (where he committed suicide), Gestapo headquarters, the memorial church (the tower was bombed and it remains so until today to remind everyone what a war can destroy), on the other side you have a view of the Prussian glory in the form of the Opera house, Schloss (Castle) Charlottenburg, Brandenburg Gate and the goddess of victory (Siegesäule).

Then there are the medieval remnants like the Marienkirche (Church) that one can compare and contrast with the modern Reichstag (German Parliament).

As the twin Churches, the deutscher Dom and the französicher Dom comes into view, I know the guide is going to the explain that although both look alike, the former was purposefully made a few inches taller than the latter.

The tour ends in the Potsdamer platz where the Sony Center looms large and makes one wonder about the changes in Potsdamer platz given that it was reduced to nothing after the heavy bombing during the World War.

As I was standing there trying to make up my mind about a quick visit to the mall (KaDeWe, the largest in Germany) or a meal in the Italian restaurant,.....I was woken up by the air hostess asking me to adjust my seat as we were landing in Munich. Then I ruefully realised that I had been dreaming and I sighed about missing the bus tour (something I always do while in Berlin !) because of my schedule.

If you felt this post was frustrating, then you should stay away from Sillunu oru kadhal where the whole movie turns out to be a dream ! In my defense, I did dream of the bus tour even if it wasn't this vivid, I just used the opportunity to list what I love about Berlin :D

German Student Visa

When I finished this series of articles , I thought I was done but I am afraid this is going to be an ongoing process. I recently have been getting queries about visa experiences and so decided to add one about it to the series.

First of all, the good news is the getting a student visa for Germany is a lot easier and a lot less complicated than that of the US mainly because of the huge difference in tuition fee. To date, I personally do not know anyone who has had their German Student Visa rejected.

Before I go on to my experience, here are a few pointers:

• Be on time: This is so basic that you would expect people should know this but no, there is always someone who comes in saying traffic jam (is this your first day in India ?!). If you are not from the city where the embassy is, try to figure out the day before, where it is located in and how you can get there. Do not let your life depend on an auto-rickshaw driver ! At the same time, there is no reason why you should sleep in front of the embassy; one is usually given an appointment or a time slot.

• Dress normally: Don't be surprised if you hear a whole set of weird stories of how someone's visa got rejected because he was dressed in western clothes (apparently they assumed he will not want to come back to India) and how someone got it immediately just because she had sindoor ! Wear something you are comfortable in - be it a salwar or a formal shirt with slacks. There is no need to be attired in a suit but please avoid wearing faded and torn jeans !

• Pay attention to detail: Take utmost care when you fill in forms. Ask someone to check it for you. Avoid spelling mistakes. Although a person in the VFS centre might check your documents he/she will not take interest in it like YOU will. Any mistakes are only going to affect you. Remember that !

• Take ALL documents: Here is a list of documents you are asked to bring. If you read the document properly, you would have noticed - ''Please note that the German Consulate General reserves the right to ask for additional documents in single cases.'' All consulates have this in bold. This means you should be prepared with additional documents. Some examples could include your school leaving certificates, reference letters, any achievements (like a school or college scholarship), any correspondence with your professor in Germany offering you a research assistant (HiWi) position etc. You need not submit these documents but you can have them handy if they are needed during the interview.

• Be prepared for obvious questions: why Germany, why a particular university or course, plans after studies, career plans, interest in getting settled in Germany etc. It would obviously be wise to know a bit about Germany and the city you are planning on going to. I heard a funny story of how someone said he likes Frankfurt because it is the capital city !

• Learn German: Obviously you have a certificate but only YOU know how you got it. Try and brush up the basic German you have (hopefully) learnt. The interviewer knows you are a beginner, so he/she is not going to ask you questions that Angela Merkel should answer. You should be able to introduce yourself and answer simple questions like what university/city you are going to, where you live etc.

• No electronics: Most consulates have a security check and make a fuss about electronic items, so avoid carrying anything other than what's absolutely required. No laptops, or cameras.

• Don't panic: A visa reject is not going to end your life. Having this kind of attitude (don't push it to the extent of inefficiency though !) will help. Be confident in your approach and stay calm, this will help you think on your feet even when you are confronted with a tricky question.

I applied for my visa in December 2002 (this time limit should warn you of taking the information as-is) through a centre called TTS (I believe) that was officially handling visa applications. They checked my documents and gave me an appointment. My interview lasted 10 minutes. 4 weeks later, I got a letter saying I should come in with a DD of 7700 euro and my passport (this obviously means visa approved but they don't say so in the letter). I went in to submit my passport and DD. I got my passport 3 days later with my visa (valid for 3 months from the date of travel).

My Interview: I will do a Manirathnam style Q&A, from what I remember

Q: Why Germany ?

A: Sound educational system, affordable, love Europe

Q: Why Stuttgart ?

A: Industrial city, famous university - lots of cutting edge research

Q:Why INFOTECH ?

A: interested in electronics (I had'nt chosen a major then)

Q: Financial support ?

A: Bank loan, parents

Q: After Studies?

A: Will work in R&D

Q: Will you come back?

A: Most definitely

Q: How so?

A: My family is here, will work for a few years in Germany and return to my family (this is obviously something everyone says, but say it with conviction and not just because they expect to hear it)

Q: Any relatives in Germany ?

A: No (If you have a sibling in Germany that shares your last name, it will be prudent to tell them the truth. A very simple search will bring up your sibling's visa application)

Q:Have you learnt German?

A: yes

Q: Wo wohnen Sie ?

A: In Mandaveli (that's right, I had a german question :D)

...and that was it, nothing to worry about...! May yours be as simple, if not, you will just have a new visa experience to share :)

Meeting in the mountains

The first thing, well maybe the second, when I check into a hotel on a work trip, is connecting to the WiFi and smiling that it actually works without having to rig my laptop, power supply, firewall, DNS settings and finally calling the ''IT'' in the hotel (which is usually a waiter who has studied networks at some point in his life). So coming back to the first thing I look for, it is a nice comfortable bed. Since both these requirements were amply satisfied at Hotel Kitzhof (shown in the photo - click on it for a better view) in Kitzbühel, my day got off to a good start and made up for my red eyes from waking up at an ungodly hour and traveling in the same.

Kitzbühel is located in the state of Tyrol in Austria and is very famous for both hiking and skiing because of the landscape. I was pleasantly surprised by how uncrowded it was and then it dawned on me that September was not high season. The conference room had a spectacular view and it took me a while to look away from it and concentrate on what was happening. After hours of meeting, an extremely delicious lunch (as a really picky vegetarian, when I say delicious, you should take my word for it !), a few more hours of meeting and several cups of coffee, we got ready for our team activity – hiking (our starting point was this beautiful restaurant next to the hotel - see photo)! I was thinking that hiking after a long work day was going to be a bad idea since the team comprises people who run marathons, people like me in the middle and people who hardly take any exercise.

The weather was extremely kind to us and it remained 16 deg C all along – neither too hot nor too cold for a brisk walk up the mountains. The scenery was stunning and the conversations – both business and private were interesting and I was totally shocked when we stopped for a drink and I realized that we had hiked for nearly 3 hours! Well, I thought my husband was right when he said that I might actually run a marathon if I had someone alongside running and talking with me all the time :D ! By the time we had dinner, everyone was starving and did apt justice to the efforts of the Chef - absolutely no leftovers.

One of the exercises I found extremely interesting was taking a few minutes to think about the question "what would I do to make my company bankrupt ?!''. At the end of the session we had a long list of suggestions and making sure that we were doing exactly the opposite as we went over the suggestions was surprisingly a morale boosting exercise - the positive power of negative thinking.

I was moderating the second day of the meeting that comprised mostly of brainstorming sessions. What I found extremely tricky was interrupting someone to give a chance to another, without breaking the flow of the brainstorming or the thoughts of the individual. In order to make the session successful, one also has to capture all the issues, concerns and more importantly the ideas and solutions to solve them and end the session by coming up with a list of action items. Thanks to some management lectures I took (although I hated attending them during my degree), I like to stick to SMART objectives - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. So instead of creating an objective of being customer oriented, one should have an objective that reads ''Support 2 customers in simplifying their solution using efficient user interface implementation by Q4 2009''.

Standing, talking, listening, concentrating and making notes for hours finally paid off when we concluded the day with a good list of action items all with deadlines and assigned to specific persons, with a request for periodic updates. No wonder I slept for 12 hours the night after the meeting was over !

Coming back to Kitzhof and Kitzbühel, it was too short a time and too tight a schedule to enjoy both the hospitable hotel and the picturesque place. Hmm....well... for all I know, I might go back to the same place in winter for a skiing trip....fingers crossed......

The Learning Curve

I should have been warned when I saw the pink bubbles with a shapely girl on the cover but I was'nt since the title ''The Learning Curve'' intrigued me ! I had picked up an extra book along with the set of books I had chosen in the library and when I realized it at the automatic check-out counter, I was too lazy to go and replace it and too conscientious (:D) to leave it somewhere.

I should have stopped when the author went on for 5 minutes about mascara and eyelashes. I should have stopped at least when I read ''She poured herself into the jeans'' (oh...dear Lord...all right, all right, we get it, she wears tight jeans). I should have definitely stopped when the hero looks at the heroine for the first time and the author chose ''three hundred rockets roared up her'' to describe this ! But I went on....foolishly went on....I think one part of me wanted to know how (badly) it ends and another over optimistic part of me kept hoping that it was going to get better.

The book is about a primary school teacher in London, who is caught in a love triangle between a colleague and a pupil's parent. Needless to say, the pupil, a 10 yr old boy, like in all Yash Chopra movies, tries his best to get his favorite teacher and father together and in the end succeeds, while the colleague turns out to be an evil master mind. The story should actually be done and done in less than a 100 pages but exactly like a Yash Chopra movie, it goes on for hours, sorry, pages and pages, only the songs are replaced by extremely annoying descriptions of what the fairer sex apparently likes to do and lengthy discourses about how to balance career and family !

I have a sneaking suspicion that this was written for teenage girls who squeal with delight when they meet their girl friends (and do it everyday !), wear matching pink clips in their hair, dream of boys that look like the Hulk and can never get a single math problem right !

This is not even a book review, I am just trying to get the book out of my system and improve my learning curve....phew...mudiyala!

Are you ''brand''ed ?!

I recently got a request to a survey link from one of my cousins, who has to do this as a part of her studies. Here is the link - http://commuri.s4inh.sgizmo.com

The survey relates to how much brands are important to you and what experiences affect you as a consumer. To me, it was more like taking an English exam since the same questions are repeated in different forms. But I believe this technique is to establish the consistency and level of understanding of the person taking the survey. It was especially difficult to wrap my head around this since I don't really care about brands. But when I thought about it I realised it was only w.r.t clothes and when it comes to groceries or toiletry, I do stick to certain brands.

Anyway, I took the survey and it took me exactly 9 minutes. If you can spare that amount of time, go ahead and take the survey and help my cousin. I already warned her that if someone sweared in his/her response, she was going to get that forwarded to her too :D

Medical Tourism

I liked ''Foreign Body'' by Robin Cook for 2 reasons - one, it invoked my interest about Medical Tourism and two, the book was set in India.

Medical tourism, in the context of this book, refers to people coming from western countries to developing countries like India, Thailand etc. for treatment mainly because of the weak medicare system in their countries and the out-of-proportion medical inflation causing treatment expenses to sky rocket. While these patients save a few bucks, the private hospitals in India make a lot since treating these patients pay them at least twice as much as the localites. In general, it can be anyone traveling to any country solely for the purpose of medical care. A German going to India for an ayurvedic back massage would also fall in this category, for example. Apparently, Medical tourism is very close to and is expected to even overtake IT by 2010, in bringing foreign exchange into India. A google search brings up many more interesting articles on this subject and thanks to Robin Cook, I was hooked for a couple of days.

The book was set in New Delhi and although I have not been there in 11 years, I still have a lot of memories from visiting Delhi almost every year when I was in school. Added to that is the perspective I got about Delhi from a foreigner. There are so many things that we take for granted, things that totally catch a foreigner by surprise and although I have heard many such stories by now, there is always something new. The one story that always cracks me up is of someone boarding an autorickshaw in India for the first time and in all cases, it inevitably ends with ''I was hanging on to dear life'' :D ! The book dealt with the contrast between the opulence of 5 star hotels and the destitution of slums, the conflict between religious superstitions and technological advancements subtly without losing focus.

In spite of all this, what makes the book less gripping is the fact that the book begins with the plot and ends with the well-expected confirmation instead of the usual Robin Cook style of beginning with a medical mystery which on unraveling reveals a dark plot. It is a series of unexpected deaths of American tourists that on investigation leads to a group funded by a private hospital in the US to sabotage the medical tourism concept since it takes away billions of dollars from the American medical system. As always, there were a rigmarole of medical terms, none of which I knew or had even heard of; there was a time I used to look them up but somewhere along the line I gave up and forensic pathology is not really an inviting topic !

The book is a decent read if you are interested in this subject, but is in no way his best work.