A weird dream

I am at a beach resort of some kind. I am with people I don't know. I am carrying my camera. And there's some activity happening on the first floor of an incomplete building structure.

And then, as I am walking towards the beach, I notice a few people playing beach volleyball. And all of a sudden, I notice one of the guys playing there. It's my buddy from Engineering College. I say "Uddhav, what the hell are you doing here, man?" and he says "Hey Mally" recognizing the fact that he was one of the first few people to start calling me Mally. And I say to him "you're supposed to be dead" and then he just smiled.

That's right. Uddhav Jagadale died April of last year while on a business trip to Malaysia.

Wonder what made him pop up in my dream.

Food poisoning, top of the table and terrible strokes

So I dropped the ball the last couple of days. So sue me :)

Had an impromptu evening dinner with a friend. We were supposed to go to a photography exhibition by a friend and since it was close to another friend's house, his wife wanted to join us. So we went, looked at some fairly ordinary pictures (decided I could have an exhibition of my own after seeing this one) and then went back to my friend's place where the evening progressed along just fine.

As the time approached 8:45pm, I was getting queasy as the Manchester United game against Rovers was on and I was missing it. So the TV was switched on and I had the pleasure of watching United thump Rovers 7-1 with Berba hitting 5 goals! What a game! We were level with points against Chelsea, had recovered the entire goal difference we had with them and were temporarily sitting at the top of the table! Now the only thing needed was for Chelsea to draw or lose their match on Sunday to keep us on top and to make this a good weekend.

We had an early morning tee off at KGA on Sunday. I was having a disturbed tummy for a while, but that got aggravated more during the round and I had to go for a "download" after 9 holes. Was definitely off my stroke, was unhappy with the way I played but wasn't entirely unhappy with the score (13 over) for the round. It's a different story that my partner and I lost the match 5&4 and got quite convincingly thumped!

The saving grace was getting back home and watching Chelsea manage a weak draw against Newcastle and ensuring that we are sitting at the top of the table with a 2 point cushion!

All in all, a nice weekend. Could have been better, but then again, could have been a lot worse. So I will take it the way it was.

Lights and roller coasters

Do you ever feel like you are on a roller coaster in life?

One moment, everything is fine and looking like it's on the way up. A steady rhythm clicking under your feet as you shuffle thro the day. And then all of a sudden…BAM! The floor leaves your feet and you find yourself plunging down towards some hell hole drawing you nearer like a magnet whose pull you cannot fight. It could be one call, one meeting or even a chance reading on someone's blog. And just when you thought gravity is going to crush you under the might of it's force, you pull out of that free fall are gliding on your path like the hell hole you just left behind never existed. Once again, the chance call from a friend or a piece of good new or just a funny video someone share on Facebook saves the moment, presenting the necessary distraction.

And then another plunge and another lift…and then another…and then another…and yet another. Until at the end of the day, you are exhausted and just want to sleep. But the ride does not end there.

Even in your dreams, you plunge and you soar and then plunge again, only to wake up covered in sweat to some unthinkable nightmare that you cannot even remember. And then a peaceful slumber in the arms of a beautiful dream…that you could not remember yet again in the morning…only remembering that you had a nice dream and that it made you smile as you woke up.

What has all of this got to do with Lights, you ask?

Absolutely nothing! He he he…

The only reason lights is in the title of the post is because I went out and bought a remote trigger for my speedlight yesterday. Yep, it's one of those cheapy Chinese made stuff that is good only for firing a strobe remotely and nothing else. But I tell myself that I am not even fit to be called a novice in this area and therefore don't deserve a PocketWizard or ElinKrome set of transceivers. So with my wallet a couple of thousand rupees lighter and the spring in my step a couple of inches higher, I tried out the combination last night. And came away with a big grin on my face :)

Just thought I will let you know. After all, I won't have a rant every day to put up here. And so this is my attempt at blogging at least once every day to get back into the habit.

It's what you say later that matters

Yep, this is me trying to get back to regular blogging. I know it's been a couple of days, but I've had a bit of a back ache, so sue me.

So you might recollect that I mentioned my buddy is in town. He is usually the one who carries my stuff from the US and his family is the one I piss off most with all my shopping packages landing on their doorstep :) Anyway, I had bought the Vibram FiveFingers (the most comfortable pair of shoes I have ever worn) online and needed someone to help me carry them back. Enter DC. So I got these guys together so one could pass on my shoes to the other to carry back. Lo and behold, they hit it off and had a lot of fun. So naturally, when this guy from the US lands up, we get DC involved and meet up for a drink…and that was last week.

DC invited us for dinner on friday night and most of the evening was spent ragging each other mercilessly…mostly everyone ganging up against me to try and get the better of me…apparently I am hard to rag…

That got me thinking (yeah, what were the odds) about what we say out openly and what we don't. I mean, when we were all together, we spent most of the time screwing the other guys…all of whom are close friends. How often do we say out loud what these friends mean to us…especially when they are not around?

Which makes me think…ideally, your best friend is someone who stands by you and speaks in your favour when you are NOT around. Anyone can give lip service and support you when you are there to defend yourself, but of all those people, how many of them would give their full throated defense to your case when you were not around. How many such compliments would you get? How many would you give?

Do we really know who our friends are any more?

You can make out from my tone that I have gotten even more cynical than what was earlier believed possible. Meatloaf was right…"Life is a lemon and I want my money back"

The world is your spittoon, the country your trash can

I'm finally back…after 6 month and a few days. Yeah I know…this is becoming my usual theme. I promise to be back and then there's a long silence and then a post.

So here's hoping to an improved attitude towards blogging and trying to be regular. I am immediately reminded of Master Yoda's statement: "Do…Or do not…There is no try". Now you know why I am not a Jedi Master yet. Wish I was tho. Would have loved to do the Jedi mind trick on so many people.

Now to the reason for the irate heading. And here starts the rant…

My buddy and I were walking from UB City to the office (had to do some shopping at the Apple Store) and we had to cross the hellish intersection that is Richmond Circle. In the space of a few minutes that it took us to cross the road, we heard so many car honks that we could not hear each other think, least of all hear each other's voice. And every one of those people who honked somehow had the impression that honking would make them move faster.

On top of that, in the same time span, I counted at least 7 people spitting or throwing trash out of their car. What the hell is wrong with these people? And to top it all, the traffic police constable at the intersection was the model of apathy. Can't really blame him for being apathetic, cause he probably sees what I saw a few hundred times every day. It's easy to get desensitized when you are overexposed to these things.

Now that got me thinking as I was driving back home from office. It was a rare occasion that I was leaving office before peak traffic hit and so made it smoothly home in 20 minutes. As you folks would have read in my earlier posts, I have a very intelligent car that is the Skoda Laura. On it's mainframe display, I get readouts on how many kilometers I have driven since the engine was turned on, what speed I was driving at and most importantly, how much fuel I consumed on my drive. And to my wonder, I had run a mileage of 14.7km/l for my 20 minute drive back from work. Which meant I had consumed less than a liter of diesel to get from office to my home. The worm in my head started chewing on something.

The next day, I hit peak traffic on my way to work and noticed that this trip, I had averaged 9.8km/l and taken 40 minutes of starts and stop traffic to get to office. Hmmmm! That evening, my buddy and I were meeting for a drink at The Beach in Indiranagar and thought it would be best to drive straight from work. Guess what…we covered just 3km from the office in 41 minutes! 41 minutes! That's insane. By the time we got there, we had spent almost an hour in the car (for a short 8km) drive and averaged 8.2km/l.

Now let's do a bit of math.

If I did not hit traffic every day, I would average between 3 km/l and 5 km/l better during every drive. My car has a huge 60l fuel tank. Even if I use the pessimistic number of 3 km/l, that means that my car would have run for a hundred and eighty kilometers more on the same amount of fuel! That's a saving of more than 15 liters of fuel…translating to more than Rs 600 for every tank of fuel I pump into my car! An improvement of 25%!

Here's another interesting figure. I have had my car for the last 3 years and am on the verge of hitting 40,000 kilometers in it. That means I am averaging about 12,500 kilometers every year. Now extending the same calculation as above, considering the same efficiency (that is not completely accurate as I tend to do long drives - I love to drive - and that drives up the fuel efficiency even higher…so we are still pessimistic in our calculations), we would be able to drive the same amount of kilometers every year with 33% less fuel. Let's see how much we save, shall we?

12,500 kilometers x current average of 11 km/l = ~ 1140 liters of fuel = ~Rs 48,000.

12,500 kilometers x efficient average of 14 km/l = ~ 890 liters of fuel = ~Rs 37,000.

A saving of Rs 11,000! Eleven Thousand Rupees saved by one car! Just by improving traffic conditions and therefore fuel efficiency!

Not to mention the implied benefits of lesser smog (from lesser stops and starts), lower noise pollution (hopefully) and time saved for everyone.

And here's the kicker! As per the Petroleum Conservation Research Association, 51% of India's domestic fuel consumption is done by transport vehicles…cars, busses, trucks, rickshaws and all the rusty old things you see on the road that make you want to get a Tetanus shot just from looking at them. From the same PCRA website, India has more than 75 Million registered vehicles. Think about the sucker punch I'm about to throw at you.

If every vehicle saved Rs 10,000 annually due to better fuel efficiency achieved due to better traffic conditions, we would have saved…wait for it…16 BILLION DOLLARS!

16 BILLION DOLLARS!

Say it again after me…

16 BILLION DOLLARS! Savings!

Savings worth 16 BILLION DOLLARS!

Imagine what part of that money can be invested to better the traffic conditions going forward. And as technology improves, we will have better, more fuel efficient cars which will only improve our savings number.

How's that for analysis?

But for sure, there are people already doing this analysis. From the PCRA page again, we learn the New Delhi alone burns more than 990 Crore Rupees due to stopping at traffic lights. Just imagine!

And here I come back to the heading of the post…part of the money that we save can go towards putting trash cans every few feet. I think the current problem is both lack of social decorum as well as lack of opportunity to demonstrate it. To give you my example, I carry litter in my pockets until I see a trash can (which can sometimes be once I reach home). More trash cans and a cleaner city will only shame some people into not spitting everywhere and making this country a better place.

Seoul Curry, lots of Kimchi and people touching my feet

Ok, I'm sure you think I'm getting way ahead of myself when I say that people touched my feet. To be really sure if I'm kidding or not, you'll just have to wait for a bit and read along :-)

I was in Seoul (South Korea for those who don't know) for a few days helping out my counterparts in that part of the world with a customer who needed particular expertise (which we have in India). Naturally, I wanted to see the city and what it had to offer outside of Kimchi, Shoju and, as I had heard a lot about before, the prettiest women in all the Asian countries.

We landed at the Incheon Airport and a good hour later, mainly thanks to the ridiculous traffic in Seoul, we had reached the Intercontinental COEX (the tower you see on the right). After checking in, we decided to check if there was a decent place to eat, mainly because I was famished from not having eaten most of Tuesday and very little on the flight. The last thing I wanted was to be sleep deprived AND hungry during my meetings that were to start the next day.

So we walked around, finding Sushi and seafood places, but nothing that meant wholesome tummy filling food. And we definitely did not want to go and order something we did not know anything about. We did find this tho (apparently everything here is Samsung) :-)

The meetings in the office were very nice, cordial and very halting. A few of the people in office had trouble communicating fluently in English and they would frequently switch into Korean and then someone would translate the same to us. It made the meeting look remarkably long. The local team there was very nice to take us for a traditional Korean dinner where we all sat at low stools and ate what I thought was a hell of a lot of food. Not to mention way too many types of Kimchi to be seen on one table! The conversation was very nice, in a halting sort of a way.

The next day was the most bizarre of them all. We went to meet the customer where, for two and half hours, everyone in the room spoke rapid fire Korean to discuss the problem statement and the possible solution. Every now and then, I would lean over to one of my Korean colleagues to check if I was following the conversation correctly, mainly picking up on the technical terms that were in English. It was the most bizarre meeting I had ever been a part of. After a long time, they distilled the conversation to 5 questions that I was to answer. "Speak very slowly" advised my colleague. Wise woman, that one. So I slowly recited my answers to them, which were ultimately translated in Korean anyways for clarity. And after a bit, the meeting was over. Everyone bowed and said "Kamsahamida" which is Thank You in Korean and that was that.

We had what my Korean colleague termed as 'Military soup' for lunch. It's called Bulgogi and literally means sweet meat. It was cooked right on our table and was DELICIOUS! Absolutely outstanding. I would recommend it to anyone who's going to Korea. It's marinated beef cooked with herbs and vegetables and noodles made from sweet potato (these noodles look transparent

and are a little more difficult to eat as compared to regular noodles). The entire combination is really yummy and I ate till I could not eat any more.

That left a little bit more work and then a trip around the city to check out what it had to offer. So we worked around the schedule and used the subway system to get to the City Hall station. It's quite easy to use the subway system, mainly because signs have English on them as well. Even the ticketing machines have English as an option and they have single journey tickets to every place. City Hall station was closest to Seoul Plaza and the Deoksu Palace. So there we went.

The pins tell you where the pictures are taken.

You can see all my Seoul Pictures here (tho I guess you have to be my friend on Facebook to see them…which I am assuming you already are, since you're reading my blog in the first place).

All thro the subway ride, people kept staring at my Vibram FiveFingers, everyone very curious about these shoes that they had never seen before in their life and this strange dark skinned man who was wearing them. And then they would look up and see my Joby Gorillapod attached to my Nikon D90 and they would have an even more curious look on their face. 'Where did this man come from?' While walking around the Deoksu Palace compound, I had a couple of Chinese gentlemen walk over and ask me (in broken Engrish) where I got my tripod from. Another Korean gentleman asked me how he could get shoes like mine ('They rook so comfortaberr!'). I quickly realized that both these items on me were great conversation starters.

The Seoul Plaza was hosting the Friendship Festival and there were a lot of colorful performance going on. We stayed for a few (the Russian troupe was fantastic), but could not stay long as we had to get on with the itinerary. So we headed down the street from the Plaza to take the Seoul City Tour Bus (we took it mainly because it costs the equivalent of USD10 and that's a great price to roam the city while having the ability to hop on and off the bus at any stop).

From here, we headed out to Namsong market which is supposed to be the place to buy electronics stuff. It was quite a disappointment as it looked more like a Sim Lim Towers from Singapore. We left in a hurry. On the way back to the Seoul City Tour Bus (SCTB) stop, we were treated to a fashion show in the mall. Pretty cool, watching the pretty Korean women waltzing up and down the runway to Vanessa Mae's music.

Next stop: Itaewan (pronounced Eat-A-Won). This is the tourist beat where there's something for every tourist, from shopping to eateries to massages. And you get to see way more foreigners than Koreans here. It's a nice place to while away your time, but nothing spectacular.

A weird thing happened at Itaewan. While the local were used to seeing foreigners be a bit different, but they sure as hell did not expect a brown skinned man walking down the streets in shoes that looked so different and that they had never seen before. At least 20 people asked me to show them my shoes and then launched into several questions (where did you get them, how much are they for, do you get them in more colours, how comfortable are they, do pebbles hurt). One guy actually bent down to touch my foot to feel the texture of the shoe (see I told you someone touched my feet) and then walked away with animated gestures…my guess is that he was planning his next purchase already :-)

After a bit of shopping, and mainly getting tired of that area, we headed to the Namsan Seoul Tower.

This tower is not that fascinating, and not as tall as the Minara Kuala Lumpur (where you can look down at the tallest twin towers in the world…the Petronas Towers), but still this was something that my Korean colleagues had told me I had to see, so I went. The best part of the trip to the tower was the cotton candy on the way up to the tower and the hanging human wire figures which set out nicely against the blue sky of the Korean evening. Even the view from the top of the tower was average. You could however see the traffic jams of Seoul clearly from way up there.

The thing that I wanted to do most was to visit Dongdaemon Gate, Korea's national treasure #1. So it was off to the subway station and a ride to the Dongdaemon Arts and Crafts Museum station. Even in the subway, people kept staring at my footwear. One guy, with a bevy of cameras hanging off him, asked me more about the shoes and then asked me if he could take a picture. Sure, I said. And so he shot off some 5 or 6 shots of the shoes, then politely thanked me and got off the next station.

The walk to the Dongdaemon Gate passed several malls where there were occasional stage performances with locals gyrating wildly to very peppy local music. It would have been fun if we hadn't been running out of time. So to the gate we walked. And it really was a nice place. Old, traditional and traffic running all around it. I tried to capture a long exposure of the gate and here is the result.

And that was the end of the day…and we had one more day to go.

So the next day started off at Namsangol Village, a small area that has been restored to represent the housing of the aristocracy of the olden days.

Needless to day, the houses look like miniatures of the palaces that we had been to yesterday. I soon tired of the curved roofs. But here we got to see the making of tofu (bean curd) the traditional way, saw a traditional Korean wedding taking place (with a hapless White guy and a Korean (I'm presuming) woman) and played some of the sports that the olden day folk would play. It was a nice tour of the living conditions of those times…and these people sure lived well.

From there, a bit of shopping (I finally found my Tag Heuer Track spectacle frames) and then the last thing…the Bongeunsa Buddhist Temple which was conveniently right across from my hotel.

A temple built on the slopes of a mountain, it very nicely follows the curves of the mountain as you climb higher and higher towards the praying hall. And it has a HUGE statue of the great man himself, the Buddha.

Here, people had put up colourful lanterns (my guess is to remember the loved ones they had lost over the years). It was a really pretty site. But the prettiest site for me was this one below…

And all at once, the trip was over. We were heading back to the airport and back to our desh. That did not stop me from doing a bit of perfume and alcohol shopping on the way :-)

All in all, here's to Seoul with it's beautiful women, it million types of Kimchi, it's Shoju, it's polite people with their broken up Engrish and absolutely beautiful weather. I had fun there :-)

A bizarre day

I had known for a while that I had to travel to Seoul, South Korea for
work this week, but I didn't know that the VISA process will take so
long. The consulate here wanted notarized documents in original (thank
the force they did not ask in triplicate) and the office guys in Seoul
forgot to send the documents via express delivery.

Naturally, chaos ensued.

It came down to the fact that if I did not get my VISA by Monday
evening, I would have to call off the trip. Thankfully that came thro
and so I was on for the journey. Here comes the hiccup.

I needed to travel to Chennai for a day today, something that had
business implications and ergo could not be pushed ahead. That meant
that I would have to fly to Mumbai from Chennai (as the passport was
there for the VISA stamping) and collect the passport at the airport.

And here began my day...

A flight to Chennai, a failed attempt (read missed flight...Damn You,
Indian Airlines for closing the counter 5mins early) to get to Mumbai
sooner and eventually taking a flight that took forever to land in
Mumbai.

To top this, I needed to pick up currency in Mumbai, but the ATM
machines in chennai refused to cooperate with me. So the inevitable
mad dash from the airport to the ATM happened and I got my $$$s in my
hand. Now the final hurdle...reaching the airport in time.

Which I did!

Checked in...ate something (been hungry the whole day) and now am
seated in the flight with an almost dead cell phone battery (being
charged by my handy Sanyo USB charger), blogging from the phone and
looking forward to a couple of quick drinks and a direct flight to ZZZ
land.

And thus comes to close my crazy day. Dare I ask how your day was? ;-)

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