One Year Of Covid

It's been a year since we have had this pernicious virus in our lives. At the end of the year, since last March when India was locked down, I wanted to see what I had done - a kind of self appraisal. A friend of mine asked me this question: what was I upto. And I couldn't give him any answer, I was blank.

I discussed this with another friend and she helped me put things in perspective. I take care of my elderly mother with a maid and a nurse. Household chores including cooking, getting groceries, getting medical supplies including diapers were difficult in the months of April and May 2000. We were just getting acquainted with "social distancing", shops were open only for a few hours each day, Amazon wasn't delivering.

My friend helped me realise that I had managed my 2 households fairly well never running out of stocks (well I did almost run out of shorts for myself but then another friend helped me in the nick of time), never missing salary payments to my household help.

Then I helped a friend prepare for her MRCS exam - the exam, conducted by UK, tests proficiency in candidate's knowledge of surgery. My friend passed the test in her first attempt. 

My mother had had her wrist fractured last year and I had to figure out whether to go for surgery in the middle of Covid or resort to plaster of paris. Half the orthopaedic surgeons suggested the former, half the latter. I got my mother through this predicament and her fracture is now healed (thanks specially to my surgeon friend and another neighbour who is an orthopaedic surgeon).

I managed these in times when people were getting infected, hospitalized around me and when couple of relatives died. 

And I made some money along the way despite not having a job, despite having plenty of expenditure each month.

Looking back, I see that it wasn't a bad performance. 

India Vs UK

A friend said to me after yesterday's T20 cricket match between India and England:

India is punching its weight in the world.

I am rather struck by seeing how India is dictatating what it does, and punching above its weight in the world. We hear that India is refusing to export AZ vaccine to the UK because of some problems, whatever that is. That has got the government here all in a frenzy about whether it can reach their promised targets by the summer.

Who would have thought some 40 years ago that India would tell the West what it wants and can do to help them?

Gone are the days when India was at the mercy of others for science and technology. Let's not even talk about cricket. As someone said, India is the centre of the cricket universe! England and Australia have just had some bitter medicine.

 

I replied:

Well, India still has miles to go. I would say England punches above its weight consistently. A country (is England really a country in the first place or just a part of UK) of about 5 crore people facing a country of 130 crore in cricket. The results don't seem to indicate a 5 to 130 handicap.

Let's not even get to football. And same in most other spheres. 

UK makes India look like the David (instead of like Goliath).  That's embarrassing.

My friend wrapped it up:

England is a football nation. The irony however is that it has never won the World Cup or even the Euro Cup in football. Aa far as cricket is concerned, it won the World Cup for the first time only in 2019 after a dramatic and controversial finish. In tennis, it produced a British (Scottish) champion after 72 years.

So England or shall I say UK for now (until it splits and becomes England only), it is definitely not punching above its weight in sport. Just trying to, but not quite reached there yet.

EK215

Interesting flight route: Dubai to Los Angeles straight across the North Pole.

Note of caution: 

This post, like it's predecessor, does not talk about any shopping in Dubai nor about actors in Hollywood. Feminine people can skip this post.

The flight below, EK215 from Dubai to Los Angeles, flies straight up from Dubai over Kara sea, Russia (about 70E, 80N) and then over North Pole and then down the other side (about 120W, 80N) and then down Canada to LA. I tracked the flight from about 6PM IST to 7:30PM IST. The lat-long values during that period are given above. In both cases the latitude is about 80N. At the start of tracking, I saw it on this side of the pole in flightradar24. At the end of the period it was on the Canadian side (having crossed the North pole - while I was having my dinner). Amazing. But the more interesting part was that the flightradar24 route tracking isn't good beyond 80N. It's unable to rotate the earth and zoom into 80deg+ latitudes and locate/show polar flights. 

I was irritated. So I googled and figured that Google Earth could do just that and downloaded it. So in the picture below in the 3rd and 4th parts I marked the the starting point and the final destination (which goes over the 2nd lat-long) in Google Earth. Turned out to be a lovely way to track EK215. I wish flightradar24 could do this. The starting point shown in the 3rd picture is Dubai: you can see Saudi Arabia. The point 6395km from Dubai is where the flight was when at 6PM. The points marked off in Google Earth are approximate. In the 4th part of the picture, I have tracked the route on Google Earth till LA. You need to zoom in to the 3rd and 4th parts in the picture to understand better.

The 1st and 2nd parts show the flight route on flightradar24 at 7:30PM IST just after it had crossed the North pole. The 2nd picture is just a zoomed out picture of the first. Unfortunately I don't have the 6PM flightradar24 picture when the flight was near Kara sea on the Russian side.

(You can also click this link to see the same 4part picture.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EsJ02lM20ErH7qOnh56WpuQb-A8uG99O/view?usp=drivesdk)

For the first part of this article on interesting flight routes read https://vbala99.blogspot.com/2015/05/interesting-flight-routes.html

The flight stats for this flight are here: https://www.radarbox.com/data/flights/EK215/1549352072/log

Male And Female Response

A friend of mine teaches art to children. The youngest of her students is 5 years old, a girl - Aadya. Another of her students is a boy, 6 years old - Udit.

My friend told me that Aadya always wears pants or shorts and rarely wears skirts or frocks - the child's reason being that her dresses have become too tight. And Aadya's parents and grandparents affectionately call her Aadu. And my friend also told me that Aadya hates to be called Aadu by anyone else. 

Hearing all this, my hands were itching. I had to do something.

I am a connoisseur of art and a fairly accomplished painter.  So I sat down and made a sketch of Aadu.

She is wearing a skirt and her name is there below the sketch I drew of her. My friend showed Aadu this sketch and said that a friend had drawn this. 

Aadu apparently blushed and smiled cutely and asked her teacher, my friend, to thank me. She didn't seem annoyed that I had referred to her as Aadu.

Next I drew a portrait of 6 year old Udit. My friend showed Udit this picture below.

Udit responded that the picture didn't look like him. His hair and teeth were missing and so were his spectacles, he pointed out to his teacher. He wasn't impressed with my efforts.

I wondered.  How different the two models' responses were.

Aadu's response was feminine. She liked the fact that I took the trouble of drawing her and called her Aadu. She was touched.

Udit judged my drawing the male way. That it was terrible and had no likeness to him.

Female and male responses are so different even at this age. What is relevant here? The quality of the sketch in isolation? Or the fact that someone took the trouble to draw you? 

I can proudly say that I am 100% male. My response would be exactly the same as 6 year old Udit's.

Additional reading:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eDoICtGSWVkmRIKuGc9yJb-k2WUzAPTJ/view?usp=drivesdk