TRAVAILS OF TOOTHLESSNESS.....contd.

Such embarrassments last only long enough and are limited to the period as long as missing front teeth are only couple or so in number . Once this number increases to four or five , that is almost all the front teeth , you have bigger problems in store . You see it is literally like flood gates are opened and in moments of carelessness you DROOL !!! If you are lucky ,this can be when you are alone and if not so lucky when in company . In those moments you wish the earth to open up and you to vanish in that chasm !Remind one of the infant stage when such drooling could not be controlled and one had to use a bib to protect the clothing and maintain hygiene ! . It is for nothing that old age is compared to and is called "second childhood "!

When all this is happening in the front there are also developments in the rear ! The molars are giving pain and have to be pulled out one by one . this poses problems in chewing during meals or whenever eating . you manoeuvre food to rear for grinding and chewing . Unfortunately grinding and chewing can not take place because , for that both , upper as well as lower molars are required . So taking meals become an exercise in manoeuvring the food to the areas where both the upper and lower teeth are present . As one can imagine this keeps becoming more and more difficult with lesser and lesser number of teeth . When this happened my dentist advised me to get all teeth out in as less a sittings as possible , so that dentures could be fitted , which would solve lot of existing problems , like saliva spray through gap in front teeth , drooling , imperfections of speech , chewing problems etc . Of course he did not say and I did nit ask about the problems with dentures !!

Some more on washing machine .

For the last few days Nokia advisory on BL-5C batteries is in the news . Being an affected party I logged on to their site and checked the advisory .

We are informed that there are more than 300 MILLION BL-5C batteries in use in various Nopkia models . Of these only 46 MILLION batteries may become over heated as there were about 1oo cases reported world wide . So the chances that a battery may give trouble work out to one in four point six lacks . Even with such odds Nokia is providing free replacements !! Good work ethics , one must say .

With this in mind and one of the reasons for self destructive vibrations in the washing machine as told to me ( rotary motion of the machine may make the cloths in a spherical shape and this causes excessive vibrations ) made me think as to the likely number of cases reported . Unfortunately Indian consumer AND Indian Companies are not too aware to bother about such things !!!

Wonder Ken star will ever under take to study this phenomenon and take remedial action ! Here is hoping for the best .

TRAVAILS OF TOOTHLESS NESS .

Some rambling thoughts on the matter of teeth.

I have been thinking of writing this bit for quite a few days now, but somehow could not get my teeth into it to really start, pun intended, as I am a toothless man! 

Some people are good at public speaking and making speeches! To a large extent, their good voice contributes to it, along with that if they, they have good tone, diction, modulation, delivery the public speaking becomes so much more effective. 

When all these, good voice, good tone, diction, modulation, delivery style get together the person becomes a very good orator and the listeners are held spellbound by the very quality of their sound. Of course, you can not talk bunkum and hope to keep the listeners interested or spellbound only because you have a good voice. Good subject and text of the speech are of course important!

It is God's gift. 

 As time passes and the person gets older one of the things that happen is his teeth become weak, they develop cavities and in general ache, ( toothache is something people can do without.) start falling or have gone beyond retrieval and have to be pulled out. 

Only old age may not be wholly responsible for the state of affairs as they may be the wages of very poor oral hygiene and trying to keep away from the toothbrush and the toothpaste, in younger days !!!! If this happens to be front teeth, the first casualty is looks and the second SPEECH. 

The presence of front teeth is very very essential for pronunciations and articulating certain sounds, specifically associated with words having " S " or SH " in them. 

While speaking, when words with this sound are spoken, they do not come out correct sounding and escaping air from the gaps in the front teeth imparts a whistling sort of noise rather than, instead of, the correct sound. 

This whistling sound while speaking is very embarrassing. 

This is nothing, in fact, more embarrassment is in store which is very sudden and takes you totally by surprise. It is the embarrassment of the listener getting some fine saliva spray through the gap left by missing front teeth in his face when get a bit close while you earnestly want to emphasise a very serious point.

Kenstar Washing Machine .

It has been a long long time since I wrote in my blog . It is not because of for any dearth of material, but because I have been thinking furiously for the last so many days the sequence and the manner in which to put it . From the tips given by Anuj and Jayati , to write about what concerns me most , I have put aside all that material and to write about some thing which happened two days back and concerns me the most for the time being .

We got ourselves the " very first top loading tumble top washing machine , model LF 2008 E ,to be introduced in India " by Kestar . I thought now Priti can just load up the machine switch on and forget about it . After an hour and half or so remove fully washed and centrifuged dried cloths and that was that . She can thus enjoy the freedom from the drudgery of washing cloths in our semi automatic machine , where she had to do water filling and transferring the cloths from washer to drier etc etc before the cloths were centrifuged dried !!! It worked fine for couple of times . Priti was happy and because she was happy I was doubly happy !! Then one day Priti had loaded the machine , started the washing cycles and we were having our breakfast . Suddenly we heard tremendous racket and loud knocking noises coming from the direction of the bathroom where the washing machine was running . We saw the machine was in "spin" mode , vibrating like mad and creating the noise we had heard . I immediately hit the power button to turn the power "off" , to my horror nothing happened and it appeared that the machine had gone in "self destruct mode" . It stopped only when I pulled out power plug from the mains supply !
We took out semi wet cloths , manually wrung them and hung them to dry . I had a look at the machine , it appeared OK . Priti and I heaved a sigh of relief as we had spent major portion from our pension savings for the machine .
After that it worked normally for couple of times , then the malfunction/snag was repeated . This misadventure was repeated FEW times !!! After few more cases , I discovered that even though hitting the power button does not stop the machine instantaneously , pressing START/PAUSE button stops/pauses it immediately . Then once , we were late reaching the machine , this time vibrations and self destruct mode was so severe that a corner of the plastic outer drum was broken . I called the Kenstar Service centre . they sent a service engineer I explained every thing to him and emphasised that a "fully automatic machine " was not expected to go in self destruct mode like this as it can cause a major accident if in operation when there was no one around to switch it off , a very likely scenario , with working couples using this machine where both were working and likely to be away from the house .
The service engineer found that there was nothing seriously wrong , how ever he had no satisfactory explanation for or solution to prevent such vibrations in the future . Charged me a hefty amount for the visit and went away .
There after , I always stand guard next to the machine as soon as spinning occurs any time between the cycles with finger on the pause button just in case the vibrations are likely to run away !!

As I had mentioned , Anuj is home . Every time we use the machine and he sees me standing guard he has been making fun saying things like if you had to stand by the machine all the time why did you spend so much in buying a "fully autometic " machine etc" .
So three days back just to make him happy I operated the machine the way a fully autometic machine is supposed to be operated . ie , put dirty clothes inside , put detergent , connect the water and switched it on and left it unattended !!!! It was like tempting fate and before we could reach it , This time the whole thing really did self distruct !!!! The machine had come to a grinding halt . I asked Anuj to take some photos with his digital camera , here they are :

It was back to the service centrer and the service engineer . It was found that , the plastic drum had broken off from the spring moorings !!!! Now it has to be replaced , a costly affair !!! I discussed this machine with the service engineer .The machine has some good design features like wash , rinse and spin with repeated water changes between each cycle . Different cycles for different fabrics etc . Since the first time this had happened I have been thinking as to why the designers have not been able to foresee this type of thing happening . Also by now they must have received feed back of this type of undesirable charectership of the machine and no corrective action seems to have been taken . I think there is a very simple solution to this , it may not stop excessive vibrations as I have not been able to identify the reason for them , it will surely will stop the machine before it self destructs !!! As the drum is mounted on two springs at the back and a shocker on the front , vibration amplitudes will increase and run away only in fore and aft axis and not in lateral axis . So All they have to do is install a limit switch / micro switch at the back of the drum . This will ensure that whenever the vibration amplitude increase to certain limit , this limit switch is operated by the rear wall/ casing and switches off the machine before further damage is caused . The service engineer had no sat solution for its installation .

I checked for web page /e mail address of Kenstar on the instruction guide . Extremely surprised to see it was not given any where . I googled Kenstar and came up with the web pages . Tried to contact them here , and here . The server seems to be having trouble , as till date , I have not been able to get in touch with them on the internet !!!! SURPRISING !!!! A modern company having such poor web page / web site .

Machine is still not repaired . Will keep you posted .

I had come up with the title and the idea for the subject of my blog as a result of my recent visit to Ajeet and Jayati , my son and DIL ( Daughter -In-Law) at Delhi . There I had read an autobiography written by RK Narayan . It was interesting . The way he started off no one would have thought , least of all , R K Narayan himself , that he would achieve such eminence and become a star in the firmament of the literary world . That book gave me the idea that I can start a blog which could be autobiographical in nature because the way and surroundings in which I grew and was brought up no one , least of myself , would have ever thought that I will land up becoming a well qualified officer and a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force ( IAF ) . I thought it was plenty similarity to start ! And so , the title and generally contents , of my blob were decided !!!

So after a big big motivation and with lot of enthusiasm I started my blog . With this , I thought that things will become easy . Sad to say it was not so .

They say that while embarking on a journey , the most difficult thing is to take the first step . I can now say that it is not only the first step which is difficult but the second , the third and all the subsequent steps as well . This is particularly true if you don't know where you are going and are unsure of the destination !! One can ask that if I had already decided the general outlines of my blog how is it that I was not sure of my destination . Well you see when I started thinking about writing my next post , I thought I have decided to make it autobiographical after reading R K N . One was likely to think , as they say in hindi " KAHAN GANGOO TELI AUR KAHAN RAJA BHOJ ." ( the closest equivalent I can think of is " where is chalk and where is cheese " ) . Here is velu sr equating himself with the great RKN . This posed a great dilemma . Days were passing and here I was already at 02 August of the year 2007 of our lord and still not written the second post !!! No way could be found of the impasse !!!

I decided to seek help and wrote to Ajeet and Jayati for a way out of my situation . Jayati , good that she is was prompt to come to my rescue . Her mail was so inspiring that it solved all my problems .

Here I am already posting my new post !!!!!!!!!!!!