Lots of place to Park, no place to walk :-(

Reclaim your right to walk. An urge to all civic bodies that can make a change. Kindly have a look at the condition of most pedestrian walk ways in and around Chennai. Most of them have been claimed by business to allow their customers to park their two wheelers. Whilst the road in itself is used to park cars, mostly, where will we walk.? For instance, in Annanagar 2nd Avenue, near the HDFC Bank

, the complete pavement has been taken over by the bank, Odyssey, a retail store next to it, Chroma, another retail giant and host other smaller retailers, to allow their customer to park. With a bus stand near by, where can we "walkers" walk safely.? Along with the speeding buses and cars on the road.?

Hospitals Patients Parking

I had gone to Apollo hospital on Mount Road, Teynampet, Chennai, India the other day to see a friend who was admitted there. The hospital boasts of top of the class medical facility and I am sure they do provide enough and more care for patients. There are about 200 rooms I suppose in the ground+4 floor hospital, I am sure. The number of patients that get treated there must be in thousands per day. I am supremely confident that the hospital management staff accordingly. There is never a moment where the patient is lacking in attention. If not the doctor it is the nurse, someone or the other is always around. The management has planned the operations to the T. Or have they. What the hospital lacks big time is parking facility for the people who come to visit the patients or accompany them. A hospital of this size has only around 50 parking slots roughly. And majority of those are reserved for doctors. When cost of care is around 10k for couple of xrays and a ct scan. And room rates at the level of 2 star hotels, why are the facilities substandard? Why can't, in this case Apollo and several other hospitals, malls etc provide sufficient parking facility. Why and how does the government even approve such buildings to come up. Corruption? Callous attitude? Ignorance? I fail to understand. Will our quality of life ever improve?  Let us hope the next generation has better quality of life.

Terrorism and Stupidity

While we all can argue that terrorist activities are well planned and
that terrorists are also intelligent in their own ways, what confounds
me is the very base of their principles.
To achieve a goal of a separate state or independence or whatever it
is that they are fighting for, do they really think that violence is
the way out. Will any govt succumb to violence? Will they (govt)
handover all that you need just because you create chaos and kill
innocent people. If it is right on your part, if you really feel what
you want is by rightfully yours, then should you not be fighting it
out in the open, rather than killing innocent people? Is this not
cowardice?

--
Sent from my mobile device

Thanks

iseeitalk.blogspot.com

ô¿ô "In the end, gentlemen, it is in the mind that the game is played,
and it is in the mind that it is either lost or won"

School Vans, Careless Parents, Drivers, Police

This morning I was shocked beyond belief when I noticed a school van (TN-10-B-9934), a private one, loaded with school children around 9:15am in the nungambakkam (chennai) area. Noticing a school van at that time of the day and location is quite common, so what was shocking? The fact that one of the rear wind shields (1 of the 3, the centre piece actually) was missing. And children were actually waving at the vehicles coming behind them.

How could the driver do this? Did none of the parents notice this or were they just too busy to care.

Think for a moment, when we drive our kids around in our cars we are careful enough to use the child locks, reprimand them if they put their hands, heads outside the windows. While we are well aware that the kid can't just fall "off" the window. But, here we have parents who have boarded their children into a van which has a window missing that is about 3 times the size of the kids inside. All it requires for a child to fall off is for them to stand and the driver to break hard. Both are not so uncommon.

Nonsense prevails!! Believe it.

Please forward to every parent or to be parent.

Two Horn Attitude

Have you ever wondered what a "Two horn" attitude is? It is the callous attitude with which goverment vehicles break all road rules with complete apaty to other road users and safety.
Case in point
Vehicle number - TN-07-G-366*
Make - Bolero
Color - Biege
Other identification marks - Two stars with green background

Location - G.N.Chetty Road
Date - 12 Jul 2008
Time - 10:45 am

Crime - Taking a wide u-turn just to get ahead of others waiting their turn to make the same u-turn. That includes poor me. Driving full speed in the right extreme of the road after the u-turn and then turning left at the end of the road. Driving on the wrong side of the road for most distance in North Boag road and that too at break neck speed.

What else do you call this but "two horn" attitude? Is there no one to take these ppl to task? Does being in the govt. service just earn them the authority to behave like this? Is the police ever going to be in a position to "ENFORCE" rules and regulations after all? Makes me wonder.

Who is to be blamed?

Sometimes the way people around me behave, it makes me wonder. Am I to blame? Have I put up with such totally nonsensical behavior that it has been accepted normal. Am I the only person with such feelings around?

Surprisingly, no.

Think.

How many times have you been in a situation where you were very uncomfortable with certain behavior and put up with it?

How many times has another road user spit on the road and you kept quiet? Plumber, electrician, mechanic charging for a days work, while he did only an hours job? Drunk misbehaving, not necessarily molesting? Have we tried to do anything other than just moving/turning away?

Forget the 3rd person. Have we never been in similar situations with friends, colleagues or relatives? Have we always tried to retaliate or just that once when it got very personal?

The other day I was out with some friends and we ended up drinking in another friends place. With complete knowledge that there are others around us, my friends went on drinking, shouting, dancing. I did not stop them for once. I even took them out to get their stock of drinks replenished. I interfered only when it was getting late for me. Personal again. Why did I not interfere earlier? Who is to be blamed? Them, for indulging in the act? or me, for letting them go on?

RJ's - Radio Jockeys or Radio Jokers

I was listening to the FM on Radio the other day and the other day happens to be a day or two after the last price hike on fuels. Petrol and diesel prices going up was the common talk of the day. Every media was putting out its piece on the common mans take in front of million others. When I say putting in front of million others, that requires a little bit of intelligence, cohesive thought process and sensitivity to people's emotions. All three above mentioned are missing in the new breed of RJ's that we currently have, at least most of them lack this. Intelligence, I would say is not even required for the job, but lack of cohesive thought process and sensitivity to peoples sentiments are most required since you have this common "call in and talk to me" programs running almost all the time.

On this particular day, one of the RJ's was discussing the effect of price increase on a talk show and our common man (CM) calls in.
RJ - What impact does this price increase have on you?
CM - Prices going up and income at the same levels is really biting
RJ - Do you think the govt. has done enough to keep you happy?
CM - I think they are trying really hard? "And he was very sincere about this"
RJ - If you were the Chief Minister/Prime Minister, would you reduce the price.
"now this pissed me off no end. The RJ had no clue on the subsidized price at which she was getting all these fuels till date and how much our state run fuel plants have incurred loss due to that. And with spiraling crude oil prices, there was very little the govt. could do to keep the price low. The worst part is, she had a constant snicker on all through the conversation."
CM - I will
RJ - Started crooning an old film song "naan aanayitaal" ridiculing the caller. The song literally translates to say "if i have the power, i will give out the orders"
"it was the most insensitive act that I witnessed in recent past. Here we have the common man sharing his woes with you and you are ridiculing him. Which one of us would NOT want to set this thing right? Why ask someone a stupid obvious question like that and then make fun of him??"

If this is not clear lack of sensitivity to peoples emotions, nothing else can be. Media and people involved in media should necessarily understand and learn to empathize with the common man.