The world is round!

I've been looking at air tickets to India for the last couple of days. Led to a few interesting discoveries. General consensus is that from the West Coast of the US, it is best to travel westward for a couple of reasons
1. Its cheaper coz you travel via one of the many south east asian airlines like malaysian, singapore, korean, thai etc instead of the more reputed european carriers.
2. Its significantly shorter to fly over the pacific. This might partly be due to the way a world map is laid out.

Now while the former is true, the latter infact isn't. The shortest trip travelling west consists of an insanely long first leg - just over 17hrs (LA to anyone of KL, bangkok or singapore) followed by a relatively short flight of 3 1/2 hours, which adds up to just under 21 hrs of flying time. But interestingly through Europe, the trans-atlantic leg (LA to Frankfurt) takes around 11 hrs followed by an 8 1/2 journey to Madras. That amounts to under 20 hrs. Ofcourse you can dock another 4 and 6 hrs from that time if you're travelling from Chicago and New York respectively. And infact, there are now direct flights to India from these two cities.

This ofcourse leads to another question - which would you prefer? Long flights with minimal stops or a trip with shorter flights but more stops. Personally I think I may prefer the former. But I have my limits. Last winter, I had this 17 1/2 hr non-stop flight from DC to Addis Ababa. When you are in a flight for that long you start to get the feeling that you are never going to get out. Sleep, food, fellow passengers and in-flight entertainment can only take you so far!

To go east or west - that is the question!!

Good old news!

Over the last few days I've been following indian news quite intently thanks to this. Thats CNN-IBN's live stream of its news channel. Pretty neat I must say. It serves as a nice trip down memory lane, catching up with journalists that you've grown up watching. But what is most striking is how much of an influnce western, particularly american style television journalism has had on the channel. This might be in part to their tie up with CNN but shows like cyrus broacha's the week that wasn't are a direct copy of jon stewart's daily show. Although you get bored of the repetetive nature of the programming after a while, half an hour of viewing brings you up to date with most of the day's happenings. And its nice to see good old indian advertising for a change, which is far more sensible than its american counterpart.