Fireworks!

Earlier this evening as I was just hanging around reading Pushkin (just trying to sound smarter than I am - in reality, I was just playing Assassin's Creed on my flatmate's Xbox 360), I heard some loud noises. At first I thought my neighbor was using a hammer on the wall, but as the noises persisted and became louder and more frequent, I got up to investigate.

"What's wrong with my building?", I thought as the ground under my feet shook slightly. A flash of light made me look out of my kitchen window. They were having a pyrotechnic display in Trafalgar Square! So I ran, grabbed my camera, and snatched a few pictures before they stopped.

At the time I had no idea what they were celebrating, but a quick Internet search revealed a Simcha on the Square celebration. Incidentally, Simcha simply means "happiness" or "celebration" in Herbrew (again trying to sound smarter than I am - this knowledge comes courtesy of Wikipedia).

Click here to check out my pictures from the fireworks display of 14 Sept 2008.

Carnival!

Billed as a celebration of African, Latin and Carribbean culture in London, the Notting Hill Festival is quite something.

The first day (Sunday) is the "family festival", meaning that many of the floats in the parade comprise largely of schoolchildren. It is loud, colorful, and cheerful.

Of course, all around the area, there several "static sound systems" - make-shift stages for musical performances. Even though it's the kids' day out, booze flows free and the surprisingly heavily deployed police force decide to turn a blind eye just this once.

The atmostphere is festive, which makes sense as this is a festival, and there is a lot of dancing in the streets involved. And, well, there's the booze and drugs, but who's counting?

Click here to check out my pictures from the Notting Hill Festival of 24 Aug 2008.

The closing day (Monday) is the "real carnival". Some floats from yesterday appear again in today's parade. The parade is much, much longer though.

The people are dressed up like trees, animals and insects. It is like a celebration of spring or the mating season....the timing in august seem a little anachronistic though until you remember that large parts of Africa and Latin America are in the southern hemisphere, and the September marks the onset of spring. Then it all fits.

There are bright colors, loud music, large crowds, good cheer, people in costumes, raunch, and alcohol all around.

Many people living by the parade path have put up signs that they'd allow the revelers to use their toilet for the princely sum of £1. With the amount of alcohol flowing around, I'd say they probably are raking in the riches.

As the sun starts going down the crowd gets more and more tighly packed. Soon it gets to the point where I can't move my fingers. The crowd is getting more and more boisterous and the manager of the trailer truck float by my side is getting more and more nervous - he is frantically barking into the megaphone, asking the crowds to stay away from the truck and the group's performers to get on it. Suddenly, a huge wave of backwards motion overtakes the crowd, which is amazing as barely a moment ago there wasn't even room to move. As I find my path out of the way of the stampede, I realize there has been a charge by the police.

As that is sinking in, I see some missiles flying through the sky. Some people at a safe distance are throwing bottles at the police. So the police charge again. And so it goes for 15 mts or so, with intermittent breaks of 30-40 seconds each. Interestingly, while there is a relatively huge deployment of police, none of them seem to have shields.

Anyhow, as I stand there, bemusedly contemplating this surprisingly surprising violent end to the alcohol-fuelled party, I see a guy rushing towards me, with several policemen in hot pursuit. Now, I am in a very narrow alley, and there is not enough room for both of us, and not enough time for me to move out. So I have no choice but to tackle the guy. He gets close, my hand goes up involuntarily, and he crashes to the ground. A split-second later the police is all over him. By some miracle, the police realize the happenstance for what it is, and don't give me so much as a second glance.

A couple of minutes later, there is silence - the calm after the storm. Hopefully. Time to find the closest tube station. As I walk past a policewoman, I can't resist asking, "Does it end like this every year?"

"Oh, usually is it worse."

Hmm...back to my question: if a face-off was anticipated, how is it that the police didn't have riot-shields?

Click here to check out my pictures from the Notting Hill Festival of 25 Aug 2008.

Quirky Queueing

I followed my wandering feet to High Street Kensington today. And there it was: A shiny new Whole Foods store!

In case you are unfamiliar with Whole Foods, it is a US-based retail chain of natural and organic foods. In fact, it is the world's largest such chain and recently acquired its closest competitor Wild Oats.

While a Whole Foods is a relatively familiar sight in US metros, I had never seen a store in London before today. The large display windows were decorated with freshly baked bread, complete with a folksy wooden cart to...well, cart them around.

It was around lunchtime, so I popped in to help myself at the hot bar. I was only slightly surprised that hot bar was even more strongly dominated by Indian recipes than the Whole Foods hot bars in America, with "Indian food" being as popular as it is in this country.

So I got some daal makhani from the hot bar, and some cous cous, asparagus, roasted garlic, beetroot, and chick peas & aubergines from the salad bar and proceeded to the check-out.

That's when I noticed something amiss. The queue seemed way too long. To my pleasant surprise though, it was moving relatively fast. And as I got to the rear-end of the queue, I could see why.

Instead of the parallel tills that one sees in US stores, or even in London groceries, Whole Foods in High Street Kensington has opted for the sequential approach that one would normally run into at London banks, post offices, and underground ticket/information offices.

Here's how it works: customers form a single queue, and a ticker/public-address-system tells the next customer which till/counter they should go to and when. The rationale, I guess, is fairness. The powers that be decided, at some point in time, that customers can not be trusted to maintain equilibrium if separate queues are used for each window. Though the rationale can be challenged using game theory (not to mention the fact that self-selection makes it relatively envy-free), this method works reasonably well where it is used because there are typically between 2 and 4 windows/ tills/ counters. Additionally, in some of these 2-4 counter places, this queueing can be justified due the lack of floor amplitude.

But here at Whole Foods, this makes absolutely no sense. In fact, if they tried to find a worse way of queueing, I doubt that they'd be able to find one. Here's the thing: they have 29 tills. While these are wrapped around the hall, giving an impression of three different banks, it is actually just one large bank of tills catering to a single queue.




Here's the problem with this method: A customer takes (say) 2 seconds to walk to counter 17 (the counter closest to the head of the queue), and (say) 35 seconds to walk to counter 29 (the counter farthest from the head of the queue. Even if the two wraparound legs are not open, the customer would take (say) 20 seconds to walk to counter 1 (the counter farthest from the head of the queue if counters 18-29 are closed). Essentially, there is a difference of at least 18 seconds between counter accessabilities of the first and the last counter.

This can create several problems for employee management. For one, if the employees are being assessed on the number of clients served per day, then the servers at the last counters will (unfairly) appear to be less efficient. If they are not being assessed on this sort of false efficiency, there is the danger that since the end-counters ensure more "downtime", these positions are much envied among servers.

Most importantly, the whole thing is highly inefficient. On a day when all counters are working (a schenario that they no doubt hope for), Whole Foods is wasting 33 seconds per customer at counter 29, 32 seconds per customer at counter 28 and so on. This quickly adds up to a few full-time equivalents.

So one is left wondering - "what were they thinking?"

"Loo"ney Brits

London has arguably the best public transportation system in the world in terms of reach, network and schedules. "The tube" as Londoners lovingly call the London Underground, is just so convenient, especially in conjunction with the feeder buses, that one wonders why one would ever want to own a car in this city.

There is much to be desired, though, in terms of technology, infrastructure, accessability, etc., which is understandable considering that much of the underground railway system is a century or so old.

What shocks one, though, is the conspicuous absence of "rubbish bins" from the station platforms, and in fact entire train stations. Can you really blame the teens that leave empty beer cans on the stairs, tourists that stealthily throw away their empty bags of potato chips on the platforms or the commuters that leave behind scores of tabloids and evening papers in the train compartments?

Also, there are apparently no public restrooms ("loos") at the tube-stations, except at Picadilly Circus. If I were a town-planner, I would consider this unacceptable for a city that boasts of more tourists/visitors every year than Paris, Las Vegas and New York put together.

While it doesn't look like the Mayor of London can be bothered about such trifles as loos and rubbish bins, there certainly seem to be major works underway with regards to the modernization of the infrastructure.



Found among the numerous informative posters about the repairs/ maintenance/ upgrade of the London Underground, at least one station's poster reads, "We will also be installing tactile flooring on platforms and coloured handrails to help visually impaired people when using this station". Now, I am no expert on accessability, so will someone please explain how colored handrails will help people with visual impairments?


The last nugget for the day: In central London, there's a place called, I kid you not, "St. John's Wood"! That's right. Not St. John's woods (which would have meant forest), but wood. I know they perhaps mean a walking stick or something, but it is pretty funny nonetheless.

And for all the cricket enthusiasts among you, this is the area where the mecca of cricket, the Lords stadium, is located.

Ah, the joys of being in London!

"Smoke free" England?

England goes Smoke Free on 1st July. Or so claim the numerous roadside hoardings (billboards) and bus & tube posters (signs).

While I welcome the initiative, I find the whole campaign hilarious. First of all, if you strip-off the spin, England is not going smoke FREE; it is going smoking PROHIBITED. Yes, you guessed right! Factories won't be shut down, and vehicles won't be stopped from running.

Secondly, the ban applies only to enclosed public places and workplaces, meaning that one can still smoke in open public places. Not a bad idea at all, but it does mean that "England goes smoke free" is a bit of hyperbole.

What takes the cake though is the fact that, ironically enough, among the entities exempted from the ban are hospitals (though not all hospitals). I wonder what the thinking behind this policy is...were they thinking, "Well, you can smoke at the hospital, as you can be provided quick treatment in case you faint"?

Another interesting fact is that while the leaflet for individuals is available in many different languages, the "Everything you need" guidance manual for businesses is available only in Arabic, Bengali, Classiscal Chinese (I assume they mean traditional Mandarin), Gujarati, Polish, Punjabi, Turkish and Urdu apart from English. Is that a sign that the Arabs, Chinese, Indians (four of those eight languages are Indian), Poles and Turks own and/ or run most of the pubs/ bars and other establishments that contribute to smoking in enclosed public places?