Notes

Note: This post is in continuation to an older one, The Eurotrip countdown, where I talked about how I ended up going to Europe. Well, this time I certainly outdid myself. I came back from Europe in May last year, but it wasn’t until today morning that I finished going through all my photos and uploading them to Picasa with captions. True, there more than six hundred of them, but sixteen months is way too much! ...

This post happens to be unique as it is the first I am writing outside India! I have been backpacking alone for a month in Western Europe- a long vacation (not so long in non-Indian SI units, of course) that has been full of many new experiences. While a detailed post and/or photo album will follow, let me first talk about how I ended up planning this trip, the challenges I faced, etc. ...

This post was written sometime last year, but didn’t publish it until now. When I joined my first job out of college, I was one of the youngest members of my team. I then had a gala time teasing my seniors about their “old age” even though none of them had crossed thirty. That, however, was a long time ago and three years since, I can offer more meaningful insights for this discussion. ...

In the closed meeting rooms of offices, we solemnly discuss_ sprint backlogs_ and technological debts. Why not talk similarly about a hobby that you pursue a little more seriously? With the tune of Misty Mountains playing in the back of my head, I search for words to illustrate the kind of debt that I, a serious movie-watcher, owe to myself! This is majorly about The Lord Of The Rings. I first saw the movie and then read the book but I still felt I had just skimmed the surface of an epic which has enthralled so many. I always wanted to revise the trilogy but only got around to start doing it during my current Diwali visit to Ahmedabad. I don’t intend to finish it, something that is no small task given the humongous variety of characters, events and perspectives that constitute the LOTR. Rather, I intend to watch the movies again, paying more attention to details, and also go through the book as time permits. ...

An avid reader during childhood, I have seen a huge shift in my reading habits since long. The detective novels and random non-fiction books have largely been replaced by posts from Facebook, Twitter, Quora and other random places on the internet. So when I began reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, a gift from a close friend who said the book might help me make sense of my entrepreneurial thoughts, I wasn’t too excited. However, now that I have read the entire thing, I have begun to appreciate what the world lost when Jobs died a couple of years ago. ...

If you blog, you too might have faced the question of what blogging platform to use to put up your thoughts in front of the world. In this post, I offer my two cents on the topic, especially for those who are either about to start blogging or looking for alternatives on being fed up with their current blog-hosting website. When I wrote my first blog post, I put it up on Blogger. For a long time, I cared little to promote my blog or get more subscribers. When I later felt that I’d rather connect with the outside world through my blog than via Facebook (which I think is for the people who love showing off) or Twitter (where the 140 character-limit was too restraining sometimes), I decided to first improve the aesthetics of my blog. And thus began my urge to jump ship to some other blogging platform! ...

I would like to point out, in the very beginning itself, that this post is not an attempt to demystify the big maze of social networking or to deplore about how much time mankind (literally) wastes on that! Almost everyone has his views about the topic, as you’d expect one to have about what all is wrong with our country, and so much has already been said about it and every angle explored in such detail that another post doing the same makes little sense! Rather, I’d like to recollect my experiences with social networking. ...

It is a good thing to be bitten by the trekking bug, because it sometimes takes you to places which make you wonder if you are still in India! Let me talk about one such experience I had at Triund in Himachal Pradesh. Ever since I returned from Chadar, I found it difficult to get the prospect of yet another trek out of my mind. I longed to go back. But I was a little apprehensive. While the Chadar trek was on a completely flat terrain, I knew other treks wouldn’t be so. I am not an athlete, even by the most lenient standards, and I wasn’t sure if I would be okay while climbing mountains. And so I decided to do the Triund trek because I was told by Gaurav, a fellow trekker at Chadar, that Triund has all the elements to test one’s perseverance for Himalayan trekking. ...

I met him only once, and that too a long time ago. I don’t remember his name anymore and even the details of his tale are now fuzzy in my head. But I distinctly remember how fascinated I was with what he shared. We have all heard stories about how corrupt the government bodies that run our nation are, but it was the first time I heard an insider’s account of what he’d seen. He was down a couple of beers and I have little reason to believe that his story might’ve been fabricated or exaggerated! ...

Moments of self-realization are rare! You might go blank for a few seconds when a social networking website prompts you to write an About Me, but apart from few such occasions, you are generally confident that you know yourself well. And then something comes up that shows you an entirely new facet of your personality. I can tell this because something similar happened with me recently. I decided to purchase a camera after my Chadar trek. I had a Canon Powershot SX30 there and the pictures it captured came out so good that it made the question of what brand to purchase simple. I could either purchase an advanced point and shoot or a DSLR. I realized that I am good at doing my research: from more than a couple of dozen models on Flipkart and Amazon and given my constraints and preferences, I could come up with the best cameras in both categories in just three or four days. ...