WANDeRiNG MiND!

Just a month after getting into my current job about 6 months back, I was sent to the Pune office to be a part of a new project. Though I wasn’t very willing to travel as the project required me to be there for at least for 6 months, my department head agreed to bring me back in 2 months, finding someone to replace me there. And so I went. My second visit to Pune.

The last time I went, I was in a totally different field of work and the visit was all about job hunting. Those days I had visited all the major industrial area in and around Pune. But this time it was different. I was in a good job, my travel and accommodation was totally taken care of by the company, and I had all the time to myself. Because I was away from my home PC and all stuff mine. For 9 weeks.

Work was extremely boring. However I met a whole lot of new people, made quite a few friends, had quite a few good times, and most importantly, it helped me get myself out of a lot of bad thoughts that’s been running in my head and also in getting out of a bit tight situation I was in for a while.

My office was located 23KM from the city and transportation was bad out there. Weekends I used to take the rare bus or an “over-charging” auto to the city to my cousin’s place and spend time with him and sometimes with his gang of friends. Good guys, all of them. No great guys in fact. I knew each and every one of them had problems, some of them major, but when they were all together it was just fun and laughter. Really helped me clear my mind.

Pune, unlike what I expected is surrounded by the ghats and since I was there during the mansoon and it was drizzling almost the entire day on most days, the place was wet, green and beautiful. So as a part of my agenda to make life more interesting, I decided to try and visit as many good places around the city as I can. With my cousin and his friends. This is about one such trip.

On 29th July 2007, I joined my cousin and a few of his colleagues on their trip to Koregad, a fort in Lonavala and close to the prestigious Amby Valley project from Sahara Group. Koregad is located in the Ambavne village (which I assume is why the Sahara project is so named) which is about 24km from Lonavla.

We left from Pune city in the early hours in a rented Chevrolet Tavera, which comfortably accommodated us, a team of 6. 3 guys and 3 girls. On the road to Lonavla, the scenic beauty that surrounded us just took our breaths away and we couldn’t stop ourselves from pulling over at a few spots and getting shutter-happy, especially since one of the girls turned out to be the “happiest-to-be-in-the-frame” types that I had ever met

We reached the location by around 10AM, and the view was awesome. While most forts are connected by ridges or columns to other hills, Koregad stands alone in majestic solitude. From the base, a broad well trodden trail leads to the foot of the hill. The route is an easy one and it leads to a flight of stone steps to the top. It started raining as we climbed up which made the whole thing more fun, apart from making the whole valley look breath-takingly beautiful.

By the time we reached the top, and into the fort, the rain had stopped but the fog remained, limiting our views. From where we stood, we could hardly make out how far the fort extended. But soon the fog thinned out a little and we were stunned to see lush green land all around us, with 2 big ponds filled with water right in front of us and an old temple structure near by.

After spending a good half an hour splashing around like happy kids in the chilling water (the rain and fog and the cold wind were freezing) we had a quick snack and decided to walk around the fort. We all walked to the ledge we saw across the pond. Once we reached the ledge and climbed up, we once again lost our breath. The view was amazing. We were on a high cliff and it was a straight drop down from where we stood. It took us quite sometime to take in all the beauty of the surrounding valley. It was heavenly. We could also see the Amby Valley, including the private airstrip and am sure we all wished we were rich enough to own at least a small villa in the Valley.

We walked all around the fort for the next hour or so, taking a lot of photographs, before deciding to go back downhill. It started raining again and by the time we reached the car we were as wet as we were in the pond.

We thought of going to a dam nearby, but the huge crowd and the heavy rain there made us decide to carry on instead. But we did walk around in the pouring rain, shivering in the cold wind and having some “vada paav” and a hot cup of tea to warm us up before we left from there.

Our next stop was the Karla Caves which I expected to be something in the lines of the Ajanta caves that I had visited a long long time ago. Well, it was similar in some way, though not as fantastic (not even close), and mostly disappointing due to the bad maintenance.

It’s a 20-minute climb from the car park to the cave, and it was still raining pretty bad. But up we went though with lesser energy this time. We had to buy the entrance tickets at the gate from a small cabin. This of course added to my disappointment later as generally people expect the place to be maintained well, when they charge you for visiting. A tall waterfall greeted us as we entered the gates, thanks to the rains that the region has been getting for a while. The area was fenced and so getting to the falls was ruled out.

They say Karla Cave is the largest Hinayana Buddhist Chaitya in India and was completed in 80 BC. We didn’t spend much time out there, as the cave also had a temple on one side and the number of people waiting to get in through the maze of steel pipes was discouraging after the tiring day we had. However we did check out the chaitya. They say the chaitya is around 40m long and 15m high, carved by monks and artisans from the living rock in imitation of more familiar wooden architecture. A semi-circular window that looks like a rising sun, filters light in towards the cave’s representation of Buddha, a stupa protected by a carved wooden umbrella. There are 37 pillars forming the aisles in the “hall” and they are each topped with teak beams said to be original. carved elephant heads can be seen on the sides of the vestibule. They were damaged and it seems they once had ivory tusks.

[Note: A stambha (pillar) topped by four back-to-back lions, an image usually associated with the great emperor Ashoka, stands outside the cave and is believed to be older than the cave itself. The Buddha images near the entrance are said to be added during the later Mahayana Buddhist period.]

We then squeezed in through the narrow stairway cut into the rock, to go to one of the chambers in the “first floor”. It looked like one of the bedrooms in a modern apartment, complete with balcony. But of course, this was just rock with a neatly cut doorway and window. However a strong stench of urine filled the air which made us wonder if the place was turned into a urinal by the public. We left soon, stumbling down the dark stairway again.

The rain had taken a break and down we all went, back to the parking lot. Soon we were headed back home, tired from all the walking/climbing and soaked to our bones by the hours of rain that we had beein doing it in.

I was back in my room by 7 in the evening, still wet from the rain and real tired, but with a freshness inside thanks to the lush green beauty and the chilling rains of Koregad. It was a real long time since I felt so in life.

[A note: I am thankful to my cousin and his colleagues for letting me be a part of the trip, as it's one of the best days I have had. There is no place I love to be in more, than lush green valleys, mountains, lakes/sea. And the fog and rain to add to it all? Was heaven.]

Just an addition to compliment my previous post. This is an article I happened to come across a while back.

Not withstanding India’s emergence as an IT superpower, a global study has ranked India 10th in Asia-Pacific and 46th worldwide in terms of IT industry competitiveness.

In the study commissioned by software industry association Business Software Alliance (BSA) and conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the US, Japan, South Korea and the UK ranked the highest among 64 countries in terms of IT industry competitiveness. The study evaluated countries on factors like supply of skills, a pro-innovation culture, world-class technology infrastructure, a robust legal infrastructure, government support and a competition-friendly business environment.

China was number 49 globally and 12th in Asia-Pacific. Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan and Singapore were the top five countries in Asia-Pacific.

“India and China have been able to parlay unique factors, such as workforce size, low wages or language attributes, into strong IT sector performance, compensating for glaring weaknesses in the industry environment,” the study noted.

However, the two countries will have to innovate more in terms of products and services to remain competitive, as their cost advantage erodes over a period of time.

“Developing a stronger legal and R&D environment, complemented with appropriate support for the IT industry and a better IT infrastructure, will help make Indian firms more competitive in this sector in the years to come,” said BSA India Committee chairperson Sanjay Gupta.

The study said India and China will see greater competition from Russia, Brazil, Malaysia and Vietnam and even smaller markets like Estonia, Lithuania and Chile in future.

I believe that. India is just a “cheaper” location, and soon that will not hold true with the rising infrastructure costs and the salaries of employees. It’s been just going higher and higher, so steep and at a scary pace. It’s bound to come down. Like the dot com bubble that burst, this too will happen one day. And Indian companies will have to move over to cheaper locations to make money. If US companies could layoff employees in the thousands only to shift their work to India, what’s the guarantee that Indian companies wouldn’t resort to the same to shift to other cheaper locations?

Just a thought!

This is something I wanted to post in August 2006, when India celebrated the 59th year of Independence. I had typed the whole thing back then, but then totally lost track and missed posting it. Around that time I received a forwarded mail about “being proud to be an Indian”… The theme was certainly a good one, and in context, it listed out the many reasons why we should be proud, and that included some facts like :

Rajiv Gupta is the GM of Hewlett Packard
Vinod Dahm is the creator of Pentium chip
Sabeer Bhatia is the founder and creator of Hotmail
38% of doctors in USA are Indians.
12% scientists in USA are Indians.
36% of NASA scientists are Indians.
34% of Microsoft employees are Indians.
28% of IBM employees are Indians.
17% of INTEL scientists are Indians.
13% of XEROX employees are! Indians.
India never invaded any country in her last 1000 years of history.
India invented the Number system. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta.
etc etc..

Am sure many of you would have already seen it many times. Anyways, I just had a few thoughts to share too, because on August 15th, 2006, when the nation was celebrating the Independence Day, NDTV decided to go around asking the “rulers” or our nation, our so called “leaders”, a few basic questions.

The questions were…
1. Who wrote out national song? (Vande mataram)
2. What colour is on top of our national flag? Saffron, white or green?
3. Where was the “wheel” in out flag taken from?
4. What’s the full name of out Bapu?

The shocking news is… NOT A SINGLE ONE COULD ANSWER ANY OF THE QUESTIONS!!!!!!
Some of the answers they got were…
“National song? Which national song?”
“So many people have written national songs…I don’t remember”
“It’s a general knowledge question. I don’t know it”
“Green is on top…on the Indian national flag”
“The ‘chakra’ was not taken from anybody”
“The ‘chakra’ was taken from the different states”
“Bapu? I just know him as Mahatma Gandhi”
“Whatever we call him, he is Mahatma”
And one guy didn’t even know who Bapu was!!!
Another lady leader had to say… “Am getting late for the Parliament. Don’t doubt me. I have read the whole Indian history. I’ll tell you the answers when am done with the Parliament”

Believe it or not… this is the “crème de la crème” of this country! Our country!!
Huh! What are we proud of here?????

True, there are Indian’s in many top and highly influential posts all around the world. We can be proud of them. The forwarded mail did have a few points worth thinking about.

India never invaded any country in her last 1000 years of history.
When that’s something we all can be proud of, the real question is, has that ensured the safety of the Indians??? We are always a target for our neighbours and the terrorists. Though war is NOT the answer, we certainly have to do more than just listen to “a condemn speech” by the great PM. So many of our soldiers are getting killed, so many civilians are massacred by those bullies. India should be doing more than simply sending the soldiers on training in out dated MiGs that crash before takeoff. This public display of erratic administration is indeed an invitation for the enemies. After losing so many innocent lives, the PM has just “harsh words”????? And for all you know, those are not even his own words, but the staff member who wrote it for him.

The world’s first University was established in Takshila in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.
Hmm… But how many Indians would actually pick an Indian University over an American or English one today? Would you? How many Americans or Europeans come to India to do their higher education? At least half the number that goes to them to study? I didn’t think so. O’course our IITs and IIMs have made it big in the world, but Universities? Nope. How will it be? I have heard of people “take up” their MBBS final exams in a local coffee shop. Yup, an “agent” arranges everything for a small “fee” of a few lakhs and you can write the exam wherever you feel like, referring whatever you want to and be a “world class” doctor who kills the patient by his bills. Recently CNN-IBN exposed a few doctors in the capital, working in reputed hospitals and medical institutes, who were fakes. They had a pending case against them for being a fake, but they still “treat” patients and draw huge salaries from the organizations!!

A great history, but an amazingly corrupt present.

Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans.
Yup, but more than us Indians, the foreigners have faith in it today. They spend so much on this, that for us Indians it’s now more of a business than a tradition.

Although western media portray modern images of India as poverty striken and underdeveloped through political corruption, India was once the richest empire on earth.
Well…either cling on to the glory of our past, and blame it all on the East India Company for having looted us and left us poor OR learn from countries like Japan who did everything to wake up from the grave and fight back to riches and fame. And HOW!!!

This is not something we have to be proud of, but something we Indians should be ashamed of. Something we all should be acting upon. So many Indians are in the top ring of the worlds largest corporates. But none of them ever started anything in India. None of them had the resources to build it in India. They had to go to other countries to do what they wanted to do and those countries have come out with many of the greatest inventions of our times. With the help of “imported Indian brains”.

Hotmail happened because Bhatia was in the USA. Sun Microsystems was started by a small team which included Vinod Khosla, but that happened because they were in Stanford University (SUN is Stanford University Network)… not in JNU or IGNOU. Vinod Dham did all his education in India but for his Masters degree he went to Cincinnati. And thus came the Pentium chips.

Most people think India has suddenly become the IT super power!! But the truth is, India has just become an OS super power. Well, that’s Out Sourcing super power. The best brains from the country have gone out and started companies which rule their segments in IT. But the brains still in India stick to the huge flow of works out sourced to us due to the lower labor cost here. Instead of that why don’t we concentrate on building a software giant like Microsoft or Adobe or Google or Yahoo? All those giants get a lot of works done from their developments centers in India too. They believe Indian’s are highly intelligent. And YES, we are. But why doesn’t any of the Indian companies use that intelligence to create an Indian giant that can rival these “world leaders”, instead of doing the work for the giants themselves? The head count in Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc. are so huge, most of the giants don’t have so many “brains” and a large part of our population is still not utilized. What they find intelligent is only the ones that were fortunate enough to have got the exposure. With such enormous resource in our own hands, how difficult would it be to come up with a “Windows” or a “Mac” or a “Photoshop” or a “Google” or “Yahoo” instead of being just services companies?

Why doesn’t that happen? Is it because of all the hurdles they have to cross with the Indian administration?

I guess the same would answer many other questions, like why with a population of 1 billion plus we still don’t have a world football team. Or why we still have to rejoice over winning the single bronze medal in the Olympics.

Seriously. What are we proud of?????

After a very long gap, am posting something sensible here today. Since writing about the sixth sense which, unfortunately I couldn’t conclude as yet, a lot of things happened in my life which literally turned my world upside down. But that’s not for a post. People concerned, know about it. They will deal with it. And once things are all back up straight, I’ll write the concluding part of my “trilogy” on the sixth sense. Because, it wouldn’t make any sense to me otherwise.

So let’s see what else I can post about. Well, I’ll start off with a movie I just watched. Blood Diamond. A drama, an adventure and a thriller… starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Sheen, Arnold Vosloo etc. and directed by Edward Zwick.

The plot: Set against the backdrop of the chaos and civil war that enveloped 1990s Sierra Leone, Blood Diamond is the story of Danny Archer (DiCaprio), an ex-mercenary from Zimbabwe, and Solomon Vandy (Hounsou), a Mende fisherman. Both men are African, but their histories and their circumstances are as different as any can be until their fates become joined in a common quest to recover a rare pink diamond.

While in prison for smuggling, Archer learns that Solomon, who was taken away from his family and forced to work in the diamond fields, has found and hidden the extraordinary rough stone. With the help of Maddy Bowen (Connelly), an American journalist whose idealism is tempered by a deepening connection with Archer, the two men embark on a trek through rebel territory, a journey that could save Solomon’s family and give Archer the second chance he thought he would never have.

This is the second movie of 2006 that starred DiCaprio and man, did he have a great year! The Departed, where he worked yet again with Martin Scorsese, was a wonderful movie. And Blood Diamond was beautiful. It’s director Edward Zwick whose earlier movies include The Last Samurai (2003) and Legends Of The Fall (1994) has a way with touching your hearts. There is a light romance that buds in between all this, but it sure adds to the feel of the movie than being just a boy-meets-girl thing.

A lot of movies have been made with the misery of people in Africa as the subject. And many has raked in the big moolah! I sometimes wonder if any of that actually goes to the welfare of the people who really suffer out there in Africa. Every time something valuable was found in Africa, the people there had suffered. Ivory, gold, oil, diamonds. People who it really belonged to, were tortured and looted by the rest of the world, directly or indirectly. The native war-lords traded the diamonds and other valuables for arms and ammunition.

Through out the movie you get to see the horrible state of things, and the cheap price life has. How the rebels make sure the people don’t go to vote, how they take away little boys and turn them into one of them. How the innocent kids become one of the child soldiers and go around slaughtering people. Archer and Solomon meets an old man in a village where the R.U.F (Revolutionary United Front) just passed by leaving almost everyone dead, and he tells them: “Hope they don’t find oil here, or we have a real problem.” Am not sure if that was meant to be humorous or…???

What a horrible fate for such a beautiful land. So much bloodshed! Like they say, the soil is red from all the blood that was shed fighting for that land. Archer says “Sometimes I wonder if God would ever forgive us for all the things we do to each other. But then I look around and realize God left this place a long time ago.”

But then, like Archer says, TIA. This Is Africa! And I would say we sure were fortunate not to have been born there.

The same old adventure story maybe, but exceptionally well made, this is a movie worth watching and certainly one for the collection. And it has a wonderful score by James Newton Howard. You could listen to it here. I just love it!

Watch the movie. Tell me what thoughts go through your mind when you do. And one request. Nothing is worth the blood of innocent lives. Let’s never encourage conflict diamonds. The blood diamonds!

Nelly Furtado – All Good Things (Come To An End)

Honestly what will become of me
don’t like reality
It’s way too clear to me
But really life is daily
We are what we don’t see
Missed everything daydreaming

[Chorus]
Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end
Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end
come to an end come to an
Why do all good things come to end?
come to an end come to an
Why do all good things come to an end?

Traveling I only stop at exits
Wondering if I’ll stay
Young and restless
Living this way I stress less
I want to pull away when the dream dies
The pain sets in and I don’t cry
I only feel gravity and I wonder why

Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end
Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end
come to an end come to an
Why do all good things come to end?
come to an end come to an
Why do all good things come to an end?

Well the dogs were whistling a new tune
Barking at the new moon
Hoping it would come soon so that they could
Dogs were whistling a new tune
Barking at the new moon
Hoping it would come soon so that they could
Die die die die die

Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end
Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to an end
come to an end come to an
Why do all good things come to end?
come to an end come to an
Why do all good things come to an end?

Well the dogs were barking at a new moon
Whistling a new tune
Hoping it would come soon
And the sun was wondering if it should stay away for a day til the feeling went away
And the sky was falling on the clouds were dropping and
the rain forgot how to bring salvation
the dogs were barking at the new moon
Whistling a new tune
Hoping it would come soon so that they could die.

Really! Why do all good things come to an end???