Empty Cup

Its time to have game changers in education

2011-05-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

Last few days, I spent my time in interviewing fresh graduates from colleges (non IITs / Premium Colleges) for security internship in my company. I was both happy and disappointed. I was happy because I was meeting some smart youngsters and I was disappointed because I felt that, probably, they have wasted their four years of their life in colleges. I felt this simply because their basics were not correct in what ever they studied.

Is it because they are not smart enough or because we do not have good educational system / smart teachers in our non premium colleges?

With India's ever increasing population of youngsters, will we ever be able to keep up with the requirement of quality education?

In my opinion some of the main root causes of the problem are following:

Every one is running behind IT and wasting their actual talent.
Late Wake up Call. When the time for job searching comes, everyone starts studying.
Lack of Conceptual, at the same time Creative, teaching in Colleges. Students do not get their basics correct.

The problem is mammoth with millions of students graduating each year. In my opinion, one of the creative solution to solve this problem is to have early wake up call (a whack on the side of their head), probably a mid assessment where students are, in terms profession, industry requirement and research.

Probably one of the best way to learn is by examples and industrial projects that they can engage with, early in their curriculum. Some of the new startups, like Internfever or Stalk Ninja have already started creating a channel between students and companies in IT field. They provide a platform where companies their expose small projects and students can apply for the projects. It will provide some of the wonderful opportunities to students to refine their skill set at an early stage.

Let us hope they and similar startups can be game changers in Education!!!

Just a FALTU blog

2011-04-17T04:30:00.000-07:00

Recent movie "FALTU" got a good success, unexpected from a movie with no super stars. I saw the movie during its third week after getting some good reviews from my friends. At the end of the movie, I was stunned. The movie has good storyline and concept. No wonder, movie got connected with the people.

The movie revolves around word called "Faltu". "Faltu" means useless. It is a movie about people who are backbenchers and are considered as Faltu by parents and teachers. In the movie, few (founder) Faltu students, opened a fake college, named as Faltu, just to make their parents happy and convince them that their children also got admission into a good college of India. They published about Faltu in the paper, put up one website and invited their parents to the college.

To their surprise, they got accompany from 500 other Faltu students who registered online, thinking that the college is legitimate. In the middle of this caos, founder faltu students decided to continue the college, where everyone is free to study and do any thing that they like.

Faltu students studied what they like most, some studied acting, some cooking, some fitness and lot of other unorthodox subjects. I, personally, love this concept. I have seen a lot of people who are brilliant in their own ways, however, we do not have right examination for them. It is like you are judging a soccer player by how many runs he scores in a cricket game.

In the next few decades, India is going to have a lot of students, holding engineering degrees, however will be referred as Faltus by the society. Probably this movie is an answer to the future and it won't be a surprise that some entrepreneur take this idea to next level.

Inspiration from Tees Mar Khan

2011-01-08T22:35:00.000-08:00

Last two weekends, I watched two of the latest Bollywood movies, as expected from a movie freak that I am. One movie is "Tees Mar Khan" (TMK), a fantastic promotion but not so good show in the theatre. Second is "No One killed Jessica", expected to do decent show in the theatres.

TMK is almost a flop, but do not worry, I am not going to write about whys and what-if's. However, I want to highlight in TMK is the role of "thief", named Tees Mar Khan, as a brilliant concept in field of creativity. Tees Mar Khan, played by Akshay Kumar, is a world renowned thief and fraudster, a half Robin Hood who thieves money from rich but does not return back to poor. He can open any lock in the world.

Two of the inspiring lessons from the movie are:

1. Open the mental lock. TMK can open any lock.

2. Lead by Inspiration. TMK inspired Akshay Kanna at every moment.

3. Get ready to change your plan, depending upon situations

Roger Von Oech, a creativity guru, suggests the concept of a 'stupid/fool' in creativity. A fool reverse all the assumptions and suggest foolish suggestions/ideas to give totally different alternative to the main thinker. No wonder, this idea is not new and you might have seen that in movies and serials, a detective hero is always accompanied by a foolish character.

I believe that TMK can be used as another creative character who can inspire and open your mental locks. If you ever feel, you are arrested by police of same mundane routine, you should act like TMK.

A Flop: Inter State Horticulture Fair 2010 Bangalore

2010-11-28T19:00:00.000-08:00

It was Sunday morning and I was browsing internet for some events happening in Bangalore. Interestingly I came across an event called Inter State Horticulture Fair, It sounded a big event and big idea to me. It was happening in Lalbagh, largest garden in Bangalore. Suddenly few imaginary pictures came to my mind, I could see lots of people, lots of stalls, knowledge sharing and real life case studies of the exemplary innovations and ideas.

I quickly got up, took bath (uff so early), got ready, took my EOS DSLR 500D and started for Lalbagh. I reached Lalbagh with lots of expectations. I went inside, it was a pleasant weather and I started looking for the fair. There were lots of people in Lalbagh, probably a sign of a big fair inside. After roaming for half n hour, I got to see the fair. Guess what, I was totally shocked to see the scale of the fair.

There were not more than 25 shops, and it was more looking like a vegetable or fruit market than a fair, a total flop.

What I believe should have been there are following:

1. Knowledge Sharing (Cross Fertilization): As it is inter state, there should have been knowledge sharing sessions explaining the processes depending upon the climate conditions. Every state has their own strengths and lots of knowledge to share.

2. Case studies of some innovative examples: Case studies of the some of the innovative methods/ideas should have been there.

3. Promotion of Organically Grown Fruits / Vegetables: There should have been demonstrations of the benefits of organically grown fruits / vegetables and how to increase the scale of production via organic way.

Well my total trip was not flop, I took some pictures of the wonders, 20 million tree fossil (Have you seen anything that is 20 million years old!!) and 200 years old tree ( truly marvelous).

Amazing view of UB City
Inter State Fair !!!
Road to Heaven!!!
20 Million old tree fossil !!!
200 Year Old Tree, Sorry the 200 Year Old Big Tree

What's cooking in your life?

2010-11-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

One of the oldest thing, as old as, human themselves is cooking. Ohh, probably, I made a wrong statement just now. Does any other animal cook like humans do, No!, that means cooking is as old as only the creativity of humans. Or I should say that creativity is just as old as cooking. You may ask what creativity is anyway. Creativity is act of creating something new, possibly from same resources. When someone consistently create something new, he/she become creative person. Creativity does not get limited to any particular field, it can be applied to any field of your life, including love!!!

Few years back, I was a bad cook. I still remember my failed experiments with cooking, a half cooked potatoes and overly crispy brinjals. Very recently, I have started loving cooking and yes started preparing some decent and tasty dishes. Cooking generally involves following as part of the process:

Goal: You have some end dish in mind, a very vague idea about how it should taste and how it should look.
Resources: You need to find ingradients around you. You also need to learn the chemistry among different ingredients.
Cooking: The later part remains to mix the ingradients in definite order, at right temperature and at the right time. This is how a chicken tikka masala differs from chicken butter masala.
Presentation: Finally the presentation matters. Presentation involves aesthetic, smell, temperature and ambiance.

Resources, Chemistry, Order, Temperature and Time really defines the formula of cooking. When I first started cooking, I used to have the right goal in mind but I was not really great in understanding the chemistry of different ingredients. I used to dump what ever I used to find at any time during the cooking, resulting into dishes where things were not mixed together in proper way. Now I am realizing the importance of all the four factors and how important are they in preparing a good dish.

So what's cooking in your life?

My bad day is a sign....

2010-11-17T19:29:00.000-08:00

Two years ago I got a friend who always remained with me, and we became almost inseprable. This is my Samsung Omnia smart phone. I learnt photography with my smart phone, with its 5 MP camera I learnt to see things in different way and capture them in images, taking notes became fun because a picture is worth of thousands words. My passion of photography is increased day by day and very recently I got a Canon DSLR EOS camera, one of the best camera in the market for photography. So my smart phone became really a friend who taught me how to see things in a way that I have done never before.

One day, it was 11:10 PM in the night, I was returning from the office party. I generally walk from my office to home and I was doing the same that day. At one of the lonely place, I was trying to call my wife, Janu. Suddenly I realized a, hmzzzzzzhmmzzz, sound on my right and somebody snatched the phone from my right hand. I was shocked and still did not realized what the hell is happening. Then I realized somebody has snatched my phone, my 2 year friend, and I will never going to get it back. I felt a sudden fear and shock, I was still not believing that I will be never able to see again my friend. As I was realizing, they took a left turn, they were two youngsters on a bike. I started shouting and chasing them. I chased them but with no results. It was lonely road at that time, a typical of Bangalore, however I was really not prepared for this, I have never seen this before. Suddenly I left chasing them and sudden of trauma and guilt got into me, how I can be robbed like this !!

I reached home at around 11:25, I had no other spared phone, nor I remember exactly mobile no of my wife and friends. My whole neibhourhood was sleeping, I had no idea what I should do, I was totally devastated. Suddenly a certain courage got into me, I felt that I would not let aways these people like this and I decided to go to police station at around 11:45PM. I reached police station at 12:00 AM, probably it is the first time I was engaging with police. As I entered into police station, there was one gentleman, a police receptionist probably, was was sitting there just in the reception.

The police officer was looking more like an receptionist that a police officer. I told my story to him, I was expecting some emotional response from his side, but alas his response was "why have you come to us?". For sometime, I thought I had come to some drama company and this guy sitting there is a part of some B Grade Indian Movie. I again checked all around and outside, yea it was really a police station. So I continued to tell him my story but with more stress. Finally the officer agreed to write my complain and told me to write an complaint application.

I started writing the application with the statement, "I was robbed ...", he quickly reacted and told me to change it to "mobile is lost". I argued a lot but he keep on insiting to write that mobile was lost. What an Irony of Indian Police? I left police station with more stressed and trauma.

That was bad day for me. However the event has raised a lot of questions in my mind. I told story to all of my friends and relatives and found out that I am not alone and these incidents are increasing day by day. The problem here is the divide, Employed vs Unemployed. Employment is giving Indian citizens power to purchase expensive gadgets, we all are buying more powerful gadgets and the gadgets are mostly small and mobile entities. We use them while we walk, eat and travel. On the other hand unemployed people are deprived of more purchasing power. So the best way for them is to snatch what they do not have.

This problem is going to be worst in future. Probably this is just the sign and we need to act fast. My bad day can change future in couple of ways:

1. Business:

- Gadget location tracker services.

- Emergency and Rapid Action Teams on your fingertips. Just like call a no to get help any time and any where.

- Intelligent devices, just like intelligent pet dogs who know their owners.

- Insurance cover.

- Backup solutions.

- Self Destructive devices.

2. Government

- Need to improve eduction and employment. (They have dauting task at hand. India have more young power than anywhere in the world.)

- As I have written in my last post, government need to run like an modern corporates and not as beurocrates.

- Rapid action forces that act rapidly.

I hope that this problem, if not reduced, does not get worst in future.

Is it time up for Indian Villages?

2010-11-16T18:49:00.000-08:00

Manohar Lal, an indian villager, stays in one of the remote villages of Uttar Pradesh, India. Manohar's main source of income is farming and poultry. He has around 4 acres of land inherited from his father, who had around 20 acres of land. His father divided 20 acres of land among his 5 sons. Manoher also has four children, 2 sons and 2 daughters. All 4 children go to school. It seems to be a very happy tale, however there are some concerns.

Are these people well aware of growing prices, growing standard of education, gorwing standard of living in urban parts of India? Manohar is not as lucky as his father in terms of size of land, so his next generation would not be able to depend on farming for their source of living. The worst part is that neither Manohar nor his children are aware of future growing competition in terms of making their living, forget about making impact on the world.

Well, I am not saying that people like Manohar will not grow. There are many forces that can drive their growth like migration to cities, food price rise, individual struggle and brilliance. However there is not enough proactive effort in this area by the government, as a result we may have to wait probably for next to next generation before Manohar's grandchildren will be in upper/middle classes, with the assumption that Manohar's children will be able to provide sufficient resources and education to their children.

About 70% of the Indian population is still in villages, and the story of many of them is not different from Manoher's own story. Does it mean that it is a timebomb waiting to exlode? Can we still act fast and diffuse the timebomb? Can we bring million people like Manahar on the path of progress?

Well, I do not know but I have hope, a strong hope that 'Yes' it can be done.

In my opinion, a couple of things can be game changer that can drastically change the standard of Indian villages and bring smile on the face of Manoher and millions like Manoher. Here they are

1. Innovation: We need to more innovative ideas on how to connect Indian Villages into the main stream and progress path, and also how to execute those innovative ideas.

2. Entrepreneurship: We need more and more entrepreneurs pouring their energy, time and money into the Indian Villages. We need more business models focusing on quality but economical education, sanitation, food and creating jobs.

3. Young Leadership: We need more and more young leadership in politics

4. Government as a Corporate: Well I just love the way the corporates work. Their transparency, their way to bring innovation, their way to execute can bring a lot of good in the country. Note that I have not intentionally said "Government as a Business".

Finally I hope that we will be on the right track.

Cowdsourcing, a future big employer

2010-11-13T04:35:00.000-08:00

Amit is one of the 50000 students getting degree the year 2010 from medium size city Gwalior. Today, Amit does not have sparkle in his eyes, that onced used to be when he got into a engineering college in my local town, Gwalior. Today Amit wear tea shirts with message "No Job, No Gilrfriend". Why? Is it because he does not have a girl friend, well, you said, a girlfriend!!, frankly who cares. Amit probably worries about "a Job". This is not only the story of single Amit but probably a million amit in India and many more in the next coming years.

The basic question is "Do we have enough jobs for all these, so called, educated people in India?". US is reluctant to outsource because of umemployment in their country. UK and Australia are other few examples who thinks in the same lines as US. Does this mean that we have less work and more resources? Well my personal feeling says that, probably no. What we have is lack of management and uneven distribution of work.

Very recently uTest, a crowdsorcing testing company in US, has secured around 30 million USD. Their business model is to outsource testing assignments to any one on this planet who can reliably test a software. So this US company is utilizing more and more smart people, not only in US, but in each of the country on this earth as workforce to carry out testing of their client's softwares.

Well this sounds interesting!!! This means Amit can get a job in uTest. Not only Amit, many more people can get job in uTest. Does this mean that "crowdsourcing" is the next future business model and paymaster?

Crowdsourcing can be applied to varied areas of problems

Design Problems
Decision Problems
Testing Problems
Implementation Problems
Generating Ideas
Selection Problems
and so on ...

Some of the basic things requirements that lead to crowdsourced work are:

Online Work
Arbitration
Tolerance for errors and rough people
Compliance
Work Decomposition
Filtering and Aggregation mechanisms

It will be encouraging to see how this amazing model will turn out to be in the future.

Wizard from the Sky: Picture of the Week:

2010-10-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

Last day found a wizard in the sky. Do not believe it see the picture.

Analysis Paralysis: A corporate disease

2010-10-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

Analysis Paralysis in corporates is as common as cough cold common life. Corporates spend a lot of time in analysis and start finding the solution very late in the process. To show the side effects, I thought of explaining analysis paralysis by following amazing illusion found on the Internet. Imagine that there is a maze with a clear starting point and an exit point. Your task is to start traversing from the shown starting point, follow the white strip and reach the exit point. Well, you can try and you will never be able to do that!!!

Day to Day Rangolis: Pictures of the Week: 18th July 2010

2010-07-17T20:09:00.000-07:00

I recently shifted to Bangaluru (earlier known as Bangalore), a mecca of IT industry in India. Recently I noticed that people (normally females) in Bangalore draw Rangoli in front of their house each morning with chalk. The message of rangoli in front of house is a welcome and hospitality sign to the visitors and guests.

Visit my following album to see popular form of Indian common man's art.

Rangolies

Ramayana and Leadership Lessons

2010-07-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Ramayana is the Hindu epic that has been communicated from generations to generations via different means. I saw Ramayana on TV when I was a small kid around 20 years back and some of the teachings are still with me. Last week end, I again revisited the Ramayana TV serials on YouTube. This time I looked at epic from a different aspect that is "Leadership"

What Ram (human incarnation of Vishnu ) taught to the whole world are the principles of Leadership. On the other hand, Ravana taught to the whole world what mistakes a leader should not commit.

What Leaders Do:

Fight for a right Cause / Vision (Dharma): "Right" is relative and I will not try to define what is right / wrong here. Leaders stand and fight for the right cause and vision.

Fulfill your commitment/promise: "Pran jaye par vachan na jayee" (Will die but do not break the promise) was the mantra/principle of Ram. He has demonstrated this principle in two important scenarios:
a> Ram promised Sugreev to make him king of this lost kingdom by killing Sugreev's elder brother and Ram ultimately fulfilled the promise.

b> Ram promised Vibheeshan (younger brother of demon Lanka king Ravana) that he would make him king of Lanka and ultimately that had happened when Ravana was killed in the war.

Fulfillment of promise create trust in people and make them believe what leaders says is actually going to be true one day. As a result of trust, Ram achieved unparalleled trust of His supporters and army, confusion and doubts in the minds of His enemies and most importantly self confidence.

A leader must fulfill his commitment.

Relation build over trust: Ram built relations on the basis of trust. Friendship with Sugreev and Vibheeshan, Brotherhood relation with Laxman & Bharat, God - Devotee relation with Hanumaan are some of the examples of it.

The relation should not be merely a business but built over trust and respect.

Make the impossible possible: This is another quality of a leader. Leaders make apparent impossible possible. Rad and Laxman were only two individuals searching for Sita in the forests. To fight a most powerful demon king and rescue Sita is impossible task in itself.

Master in One thing: Ram was considered as master archer equipped with all weapons possible in this universe. A leader must be master in their his/her domain.

What Leaders shouldn't Do:

Be on the wrong side: However smart, powerful and rich a leader may be, everything will fall if the leader is on the wrong side (I will again differ to define right vs wrong here). Ravana was mighty, intelligent and invincible but he was standing on the wrong side.

"There is always win for Dharma in the end" seems to be winning mantra that causes doubts in the mind of people who people standing on the wrong side. The mantra had divided the Ravana family and created doubts in the minds of his own close people.

Do not identify and correct mistakes early: Kidnapping Sita was a big mistake done by Ravana as history shows. What I feel is that not rectifying his mistake over a period of time was the biggest mistake he had committed.

If a leader does not commit mistake then leader should be worried about it because mistakes are one of excellent ways to learn. However the committed mistake should be identified and corrected early otherwise there wont be any learning otherwise.

Do not listen: The day when a leader stops listening, ideally that should be his last day. Ravana stopped listening to his brother, wife, father, mother, son and almost everybody. Every leader must be a good listener.

Do not foresee Black Swan: If something has not been done by somebody upto now will never happen. Ravana believed that no man or ape would ever going to kill him and so he excluded them in his boon. Ravana believed that no army had ever crossed the sea so would not do it in the future.

When I reflected back over Ramayana, I clearly saw a set of assumptions that Ravana had never revalidated. He committed blunders after blunders at each step.

Leaders must validate their assumptions and foresee Black Swan.

Ramayana is one of the most important source of strategic leadership because it tells us what matters in the long run for a leader. I have not tried to be very comprehensive and there could be vast amount of other lessons hidden in the epic.

Expect the Unexpected: Pictures of the Week: 1 Jun 2010

2010-06-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

Life is full of surprises. Beauty can grow even on streets. Expect the unexpected is the theme of pictures of this week.

Freshness and Innocence: Pictures of the Week: 16 May 2010

2010-05-16T01:46:00.000-07:00

Email don't eeeeeeeeee mail

2010-05-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

One fine morning, I came to my office, boot up my laptop and opened my mailbox. There was nothing unusual, I had 200 unread mails, I had no idea which mail was important and need an reply and which mail could wait for some more time. The mails were from my sales team, service delivery team, customers, calenders and so on. For me all looked same until somebody rang to my phone and told me that I messed up in one of the mail communication.

I was really frustrated and was looking for some magic to happen. I even decided to close down my email address, I even searched one in gmail but did not find any.

Another fine morning, I was introspecting where I was going wrong. What I found was that there was "lot of clutter" in front of my eyes when I open my inbox. I clearly knew that I just want to read "urgent and important" mails first whenever I look my inbox.

So I turned on to google labs and found a life saver feature of gmail called "Multiple Inboxes". What I first did is to enable this feature from my Gmail --> Settings --> Labs and then route all the unread to the top Inbox. It helped me a bit because I had all my unread mails in front of my eyes. But still my unread mails kept on increasing and many time over shadowed my other important mails.

Then I realized another important thing, that for many of the mails like alerts from calender, alerts from social networking sites, webinar alerts, I used to follow same pattern ie read and mark them read. It suddenly gave me a instant idea and I labelled my mails into two classes: Alerts and Non Alerts. Now I could just see all the alerts in one click and either create events in my calender or added to my task list and then mark them either read or deleted.

Offcoarse labelling into Alerts and Non Alerts is continous process as new kind of mails will keep on coming but as I find new kind of mails that make to do same pattern of action every time, I use to label them so that I could follow same pattern on multiple mails at a time.

Other useful features of gmail that helped me to manage my mails are:

1. you can view calender, tasks, documents along with your mails. check out Settings --> Lab

2. you can add event into you calender via mail. check more actions

3. you can send invitation in your mail while replying or forwarding

4. you can add a email into tasks and assign date to each task

I also follow following guidelines in my email communication:

1. Always acknowledge a mail within a day. If you have not finished the task what was supposed to do, just communicate that too.

2. Keep the mail unread until acknowledged.

3. Be friendly in mails and each mail is an opportunity to build relationship.

4. One phone call is worth 10 mails. know mail limitations.

5. Wherever possible, always says thanks to conclude the mail thread.

In summary, by removing "clutter", label mails as per pattern of actions and continuous labeling had made my life easy by better managing my mails.

What about you?

In general, the approach have two important concepts; spatial display of emails, actions you perform on emails.

Spacial Display of Emails

The mails should be displayed to you as per their priority (define your priority). The are following type of priorities,

Urgent & Important:
Non Urgent & Important:
Urgent & Non Important
Non Urgent & Non Important

I feel that all the "Urgent and Important" mail should be displayed on most visible part of your inbox, preferably requiring no scrolling.

Most of the mails have following states based upon your actions performed:

State 1: Unread

State 2: Read but not replied

State 3: Read & Replied but need to take action

State 4: Read, Replied, taken first action but need to keep track of mail chain.

State 5: Deleted

State 6: Archive

Important Heuristics:

The most important thing is that your unread (State 1) "Urgent & Important" mails be always be in front of your eyes. You can use multiple inboxes to filter and display "Urgent and Important" mails always at the top.
There will be some mails that can automatically be categorized into above four categories for example emails from your customer should go to urgent and important, alerts from social networking sites should go to urgent & non important (offcoarse it is controversial :) and I am going to make some guys very disappointed). You can use filters and labels to categorize these mails automatically.
Action based categorization of mail. Generally I read all the social networking alerts mails in once glance and mark all of them read in two clicks.
The categorization is continuous process and you should do it atleast once a week.

Where new technology can help?

New advance technology can help in better email management in the following ways:

Automatic labelling based upon your history of patterns of actions that you perform on eac mail, contacts, subject etc.
Context aware email system based upon my preferences, interests and profile.

Colorful Angle: Pictures of the Week: 8 May 2010

2010-05-08T01:22:00.001-07:00

Sometimes life ask for an escape, an escape from day to day work, places and same way of looking at things. Sometime colorful way of looking at things can bring wonders and fresh energy to same old work, place or environment.

This week pictures try to convey the same.

Black and White: Pictures of the Week: 3 May 2010

2010-05-03T04:00:00.000-07:00

Probably it is law of nature that everything has always two sides: Heads and Tails, Black and White, Christ and anti-Christ, Positive aspect and Negative aspect. Similarly, every opinion has two sides, my side and your side. Every problem also has two sides, the problem itself and the hidden opportunity. Many times we get biased with only one side of looking at things.

The theme of this week pictures try to inspire to always look at other side of the picture as because then the picture will be complete and more beautiful.

Home: Pictures of the Week: 24th April 2010

2010-04-24T02:03:00.000-07:00

Home is one of the most beautiful place on this earth. It does not matter what size, shape or color of your home is. We feel safe and relaxed at home. Home is true gateway to infinite creativity. So I decided to post some pictures of home (someone's home) taken while my recent visit to Sikkim, gateway to Himalayas.

My Recent Sikkim Visit: Everything you want to know about it

2010-04-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

Gurudongmar Lake (@ height of 17100 feet above sea level), Zero Point (@ height of 15000 Feet) and Yumthang flower valley are some of the dream places to be at. The trip idea came to my mind at around one month back. In spite of having so much time to plan, I deliberately avoided too much planning for the trip as I wanted to enjoy each bit of the trip and to save some money!!!.

Day 0: From Kolkata to Gangtok

We (me and my wife) started our journey to Sikkim at 4 PM, 14th April 2010. It was hot and humid day at Kolkata. The traffic was its peak as usual. Our train was at 5:35PM from Howrah (around 1.5h drive from my house by road) and we were in no mood to spend our time in traffic. So we decided to take Hoogly River route in a public boat transportation and converted our boring journey to an excited one. The train journey upto New Jalpaiguri (NJP) station was comfortable. We reached NJP at around 7AM in the morning next day. After negotiating with a few taxi drivers, we got a shared and ready to go taxi (just outside the station) to Gangtok.

The way to Gangtok is extremely pleasant (atleast for first timers). The most part of the road is good (thanks to Border Road Organization BRO) and although the journey was 4 hour long, it was exciting with pleasant mountain views and various curves of the Teesta river. We reached Gangtok (taxi stand) at around 11:30 AM. We got one taxi and moved to a place near to MG Road, a busy market of Gangtok and you can find a lot hotels there. Luckily we got a decent hotel (Hotel Mandala) in an economical rate with around 50% discount. (as I knew the guys there in this hotel and the tourist season was still booming up).

Day 1: Stay at Gangtok

I have been to Gangtok quite a few time in the past. But everytime I visit Gangtok, it feels a bit different from the other times. It was sunny day this time. We got freshed and had tried a new restaurant for lunch (was a bad try although). As my wife was new to the city, so we decided to explore Gangtok. We walked uphill a long way to get glimpse of the city. We did some shopping at MG Road. We also booked the tour for next 2 nights and 3 days (including Gurudongmar and Yumthang Flower Valley). We had our dinner at "Alien's Kitchen" restaurant, a good find (just opposite to taxi stand and near to Mandala hotel). I tried one Tibetan dish, momos and chicken tanduri for a change.

Pictures top to bottom:
A busy MG Road, A must visit shop at MG road, Paljor Football Stadium, Alien's Kitchen Restaurant, A Tibetan Dish

Day 2: From Gangtok to Lachen

Second day started with amazing (golden) view of Kanchenjunga at 5:15 AM from my room window. It was bit cold in the morning. We had breakfast and got prepared for the trip. We started for adventure at 10:30 AM. We were sharing our trip with a couple (probably was going for second honey moon) and 5 other boys (also from Kolkata). It generally takes around 8 hours by road to Lachen from Gangtok.

For people who are new to Himalayas, the initial part of the journey is always exciting. They click a lot pictures in the starting part of the journey and exhaust their camera batteries, too bad if you do not have backup. The same was true for us, although I had sufficient backup. After 2 hours we passed by a waterfall called "Seven Sisters Waterfall". We stopped, we clicked some pictures and we moved on.

Our next halting destination was for Lunch at around 2:30 PM. We were hungry from ages (ok agreed few hours) and enjoyed home style food. Our next halt was bit unexpected. It was because of regular blast performed by BRO to cleanup landslides and clear the roads. It gave us some time to click some photos so that's what I did. After 1 more hour we left Mangan and started heading towards Chungthang (our next halt). The journey was going on perfectly well until we suddenly found a landslide at a place just few kilometers away from Chungthang. After waiting for half n hour we found out that road was not going to be cleared until next day morning. I could see a lot tension on everybody face. I was worried too. Luckily our driver knew another but more difficult route via another mountain. We had no chance but to take this alternative. We spent final part of the journey in darkness and at around 8:30 PM we reached to our hotel at Lachen. The hotel was not luxurious but decent to stay for one night. We were tired, so finished our dinner quickly went to sleep.

Day 3: Morning: Lachen to Gurudonmar
Bad news I am not going to write about this part of the trip. The good news is that you can follow my earlier blog to read about it: click here

Day 3: Evening: Lachen to Lachung
When we returned back to hotel, it was started drizzling. We were bit tired and hungry at the same time. We had lunch and started heading towards Lachung (around 50 KM) from Lachen via Chungthang. As it was downhill, the journey was comfortable and we reached Lachung at around 6:30pm in the evening.

Day 4: Lachung to Zero Point and Yumthang Valley
Well this part of the journey is another pearl in the gems. So you need to wait for my next post to know more about it. Anyway you can visit my album to view pics.

Zero Point and Yumthang Flower Valley Sikkim

Day 4 and 5: Rest of the Journey
After having lunch at Lachung, we headed towards Gangtok at around 2PM. It was already late to start and the weather was not that good. It was raining all along the way. Last part of the journey was totally foggy and dark giving us a lot of scares now and then. Finally we reached Gangtok safely at around 7PM. The next morning we did some more shopping and returned back to NJP to catch the train.

Some Tips and Useful Information:

To make a visit to Gurudonmar / Yumthang, you need to have one night stay at Gangtok. Gangtok can be reached from NJP (new Jalpaiguri) via shared taxi or by taxi booked by your hotel in Gangtok.
Please note that foreign tourists are not allowed to visit Gurudongmar Lake as per best of my knowledge (so please confirm with sikkim tourism department).
Have two passport photos and xerox of your photo ID card ready for each member.
Shared Taxi (10 people per taxi) from NJP to Gangtok take around 4.5 hours and cost around 150 RS INR / head.
You can get decent hotel double bed room at price 15oo Rs /day.
We booked the whole trip from Gangtok to Lachen, Gurudongmar, Lachung, Zero point and Yumthang Valley and back to Gangtok at 2100 Rs/head. The trip includes fooding and lodging.
Have atleast 5 hours in hand for the journey from Gangtok to NJP Railway Station.

My Recent Sikkim Visit: Gurudongmar Lake

2010-04-20T17:49:00.000-07:00

Well there is lot to talk about my recent visit to Sikkim. But in this post I will talk about most amazing part of our journey, visit to Gurudongmar Lake. Gurudongmar lake is around 40 KM from Lachen and it is at the height of 17.5k feet. Lachen is a small village in Sikkim, a common night halt is required here to visit the lake .

We reached Lachen a bit late in the dark. It was cold and silent and only sound breaking the silence was from nearby Tessta river. We were tired and we slept early with the hope and excitement of what is coming next morning. Usually one of the last thing that I have in mind is to wake up at 4AM morning. That is what exactly we did next morning. It was still dark, cold and silent with the exception of river breaking the silence with a rhythmic pattern sound. At around 4:45 AM, I got a chance to look outside. The weather was clear and fresh. My first glimpse of Lachen was immensely beautiful. Lachen was surrounded by high mountains with blue in color as a result of mist. Fresh leaves of trees, colorful houses and mountains with blue color created a sense of freshness and gave me immense pleasure like love at first sight.

We started our adventure at around 5 AM. We (me and my lovely wife) were sharing a cab with 7 other people all along the way during our trip. Luckily I got seat near to a window so I started trying some “moving objects” photography along the way. The road was completely zig zag. We were going down and up and down crossing multiple mountains and Teesta river. Once I was looking outside, I suddenly almost jumped out of my window as I saw some golden shining thing at the top of a mountain. Yes it was ice topped mountain and sun rise was illuminating the top like gold. We went ahead to our next halt, Thangu, located at around 14k feet and it seems last civilian residential village on the way to our journey to Gurudongmar. Thangu is lovely and colorful village at such a height. We had breakfast at Thangu and moved on.

The remaining area is controlled by Indian Army. At one checkpost, an army jawan, seems to be punjabi, asked whether everyone was well and like to have coffee or tea ("Sabhi log acche hain, kuchh chaheeya chaay ya coffee"). Tough men with sweet words.

Terrain was becoming tougher and we finally left behind mountains and found ourselves in a vast barren but plain land. There was no vegetation and nobody was watching us except mountains and patches of clouds as if they were saying "welcome to our soccer playground".

Finally we saw what I would say one of most beautiful place I have ever seen my life. Probably a few pics are worth of thousand words.

We spent around an hour at Gurudongmar. It was chilled and tough but immensely beautiful. The exact feelings are still in my mind and I wish that I could share them as exactly they are. Our return journey was less hectic as it was downhill road. We reached Lachen at around 2:30 PM, had lunch there and started for our next adventure, Yumthang Flower Valley and Zero Point.

More Pictures

Gurudongmar Lake

Change: Sometime a battle between short term rewards and long term goals

2010-04-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

Self improving team plays a significant role in small business setup where a team has to continuously invest in thinking how the current processes and system can be made efficient and faster. This type of team become a catalyst for "change" in an organization.

The concept of "Self improving Team" sounds very elegant but there some hidden challenges involved in it. One of the major challenge is battle in brain between short term rewards and long term goals.

Short term reward says use tactical solution and achieve the milestone with in targeted time and long term goal says invest some more (often one time effort) to achieve efficiency in performing a task (by automation, documentation, finding better algorithm etc) so that next time same task can be performed in more faster and efficient way. It is tragic story that most teams choose short term reward in time crunching situations.

I suggest, two strategies to tackle this:

Create a dedicated role of self improvement and assign to appropriate team with right set of skills.
Have a self improving culture in place. The team should have brilliant guys. The leader has to play a role of catalyst.

Shadows: Pictures of the Week 12 April 2010

2010-04-10T21:49:00.000-07:00

Today I am posting pictures with the theme "Shadows". By title, it may be tempting to think that this post is about some dark art or something but it is not. I never really thought about shadows until I started photography.

Shadows makes a very interesting subject to study because they come in infinite shapes and sizes, they are always black in color, they are found everywhere (do not believe me, just look around) and every one of us has (beautiful) shadow. Shadows live in their world, without interfering with ours. We simply ignore them 99% of the time.

Album:

Shadows

Shadows have also been studied in relation with different fields. Interested readers might like to view them.

Shadow and Art

Shadow and Photography (showcase 1, showcase 2, showcase 3)
Shadow and Leadership
Shadows and Psychology

Decentralization:The power of many: Honey Bees : Foraging

2010-04-03T22:35:00.000-07:00

This post explore "Food Foraging Problem" faced by honey bees. Honey Bees covers around 14 km of area around their colony to search for honey. There are around 45k bees average in a colony, where subsection of them goes for discovery of food and foraging. To make one pound of honey, workers in a hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers! To tap millions of flower, located randomly within the region, it is waste of energy of all the bees start searching food. To conserve energy, only few called scout bees search for location of food and pass the location to other fees. Well this is amazing form of efficiency with no single coordinator.

I will try to dive deep into this problem. I will divide the foraging problem into two parts, environment specific and honey bees specific.

Environment Specific: Environment consists of an avg. area of 14km around the beehive. Honey is found as nectar in flowers and flowers have limited lifespan and source of nectar. Environment has other competitors and hostile conditions (with urbanization in place).

So everything boils down "being at the right place, at the right time and having good luck"

Honey Bees Specific:

How do they distribute themselves the searching area? Do they search randomly or they follow some pattern? Remember if everyone starts searching food, there will be repetitions and bees will consume more energy on the other hand too few bees wont be able to search effectively.
What is their visibility area while flying?
How do they estimate quality and quantity of honey discovered?
How do they remember the path back to their colony once honey is discovered?
How do they communicate quality, quantity and location of honey source discovered to other worker bees in the colony?

I googled to find answers of the above questions and got some amazing facts demonstrating the how amazing these small creatures are.

The worker bees divide the labor depending upon their age. More aged and experienced bees perform foraging. Other worker bees perform other labour work in the beehive like nursing, cleansing, architecting etc.
Honey bees lack stereo vision as we have so they see the world in a different way as we do. They can distinguish high contrast shapes and patterns. They can use ultra violet and polarized light from sun to sense the direction from honey source to beehive. They demonstrate associative learning, color / odour learning and top down processing of information while foraging i.e. they can remember landmarks, colors and odour to come to same food source over many times a day.
Frankly, I faced a hard time to find some reliable sources to find the answer. I have found none. In this case, I will do some guesswork. I believe that bees can remember quantity of food using visual memory, odour and taste.
Bees use a couple of techniques to keep track of distance, sun as compass, Sun Polarized Light (in cloudy conditions), Earth Magnetic Fields and distance measurement techniques involving optical flows. All these techniques are redundant and specific technique is used depending upon environmental conditions. (see here)
To communicate quality, quantity and location of honey source, bees do a ‘waggle dance’ that lets other bees know exactly where they have been, quality and quantity of source. You could put a point in a map about where they have gone based on the information that’s in the dance.

Honey Bees demonstrate one of the efficient form of decentralization and its principles are hard coded in their DNA.

Related Posts

Decentralization: The power of many: Introduction

References:

Break Free: Pictures of the week: 3 April 2010

2010-04-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

World is full of misery because many times we have common mental models and patterns as the things should be. We want to remain in our comfort zones. We want us to be called "normals".

The theme of this week is "Break Free". This week pictures may not shows any pattern that clicks our minds. I clicked them at most unexpected place, I can imagine.

Let us come out of our daily routines.

Let us love things as they are.

Let us not always remain "normals"

Let us do something different.

Let us break free.

Decentralization: The power of many: Introduction

2010-03-31T19:53:00.000-07:00

Decentralization is the buzz word in todays world. There are striking examples of decentralized management and organizations all around. Some of the examples are wikipedia, Youtube, Open Source Communities, Blogosphere and many more.
In my view, decentralization is kind of organization of individuals (I will call them owners) where each owner obey following basic meta rules:

They have common values and vision.
They strive toward common goals.
They are the owner of their own roles and tasks.
They are driven by Passion and Choice

Similarly decentralization can be defined on collection of other decentralized teams where each team follow above basic meta rules.

Please note that

Decentralization is not alternative to leadership. In book, The Starfish and the Spider, the author has defined new role of leader in decentralization called catalyst.
Vision and Values are subjective to change with coarse of time. But once they are updated, every one follow them.
Central Authority is replaced by a role, called temporary leader/coordinator. For a particular goal, they provides direction to others.
Strengths of the individuals still play a important role in decentralization. Infact owners choose their goal and role based upon their strengths, passion and skill set.

Let us understand, decentralization with example of flocking of birds.

According to wiki, "flocking" of birds is the collective motion of a large number of birds from simple rules that are followed by individuals and does not involve any central coordination.

Probably everyone knows, flock of birds covers thousands of miles every year. But do you know, they do it by just obeying following three simple rules by all individuals:

Separation - avoid crowding neighbors (short range repulsion)
Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbors (direction alignment)
Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction)

Its truly amazing how these small and delicate creatures travel such a large distance. Artic tern birds travel about 22,000 miles in a round trip. It breeds in the summer months in the Artic, then flies to the Antartic to feed during the summer months there.

In this post, I have not tried to define decentralization as a whole but provided some food of thoughts to the reader. Decentralization is nothing new as the whole nature is filled with examples, ant colonies, bee colonies, flocking etc. I would be exploring this topic further in next of my posts.

References:

Best from the Week

2010-03-19T19:58:00.000-07:00

From this week, I am starting to post best pictures of the week, socked up in a theme. This week theme is 'Sunset'.

The pictures attached here are taken from a place, a government fish farm, near to my office. This week,I got a chance to get inside it and spend a lovely evening. So here it goes (Visit the whole album from here)...

Reinventing by packaging

2010-03-07T19:27:00.000-08:00

Many times packaging in different way makes wonders and attracts consumers and make them to pay money. Yesterday I visited one restaurant, Rajdhani Mani Square Kolkata. The theme of the restaurant is based upon Rajasthani way of presenting food and the food was normal as you can find in any typical Indian house (gujrati/normal) dal, roti, halwa etc. Also I found the taste similar to food cooked by my Mother.

So what works for this restaurant. I think there are following things:

1. Place: located at a mall besides other expensive restaurants.

2. Theme: Rajasthani theme (a royal one)

3. Packaging and Presentation

4. Good and Fast Service: good response time.

Some Rearranging and associating with different themes make wonders !!!

God's Own Creators

2010-02-21T00:20:00.000-08:00

Kumartuli is the place very near to 'Shobha Bazaar', a common market with common people. But there lies a very uncommon talent in the hand of God's own Creators, the Kumartuli Artists.

I visited this place last post summer just before Durga (Goddess) worship. As I passed through the market, I had no idea what I was going to see. There was no sign board. I asked few guys where is place and interestingly every body knew about the place.

As I entered the small gallery, the world got changed, as I entered probably in god's own place. Here is the place where god themselves are being created and god own creators are spelling their magic all around.

So I took some shots and posting some of the best of them here. Next time whenever you visit Kolkata during July/Aug/Sep, Do Meet God's Own Creators.

kumartuli aug 2009

Dancing Trees

2010-02-18T19:16:00.000-08:00

Tress has always been source of inspiration in my life. Imagine who are gateways of life on earth. They are none other than our trees. Scientists reveals how trees apply quantum effect to convert sun rays into energy (see here)

Recently as I looked at them, I realized probably they taught our ancestors to dance!!!

Dancing Trees

I feel pathetic dancer but these trees are inspiring me to dance. What about you?

Crow Wisdom

2010-02-09T22:31:00.000-08:00

"A thirsty crow once found a pitcher with a little water in it. But when he tired to drink the water, he could not. The pitcher was tall and his beak didn't reach the water. The cleaver crow thought and hit upon a plan. He went on dropping pebbles into the pitcher. The water rose up to its neck and he quenched his thirst."

Wow .. what a clever crow he was !!!

Recently, I noticed that I have been ignoring one of the common thing about Kolkata, my current city, and that is a lot of crows. Crow are in front of my house, playing park, streets, market and almost every where. They start their day early at 5PM, many times I have been woke up very early morning by their chatter.

I started my research and found some interesting articles on the intelligence of crows. One of my favorite is talk by Joshua Klein and his elegant machine over crows. listen TED Talk.

What may be more interesting is how crow behave in a group. Today I saw crows seems like talking to each other in a group.

As summary, some of the fascinating behavior about crows are:

"Never Die Attitude"
"Ultimately find the way"
"Adaptability"
"Negotiate Everything", well you might seen them negotiating among themselves.

Happy crowing!!!

Gathering is not really digital.

2010-01-30T21:53:00.001-08:00

Twitting, social networking, texting, emailing, calling, video chatting are some buzz words being told and heard all around. All of them promotes communication, meeting, talking and making the world really small.

Are they really close to say a meeting your friend on a cup of coffee or a informal get together of your best buddies at your room?

Recently, I came across to a painting, depicting a party time according to painter. Suddenly after seeing the painting, I realized what a digital gathering is not

A digital gathering lacks following:

Eating together
Laughing together
A sense of physical touch
Physical Appearance
Body Language
Ambiance
Lack of Visual Memory
Smile, and other contagious activities
Mood transfer
Dresses, perfumes, colors, jeweleries etc.

In Indian West Bengal, "Adda" has been integral part of the Bengali culture. In "Adda" sessions, friends use to sit for hours doing chit chat on topics ranging from politics, religion, neighbourhood, football, cricket. A lot of traditional places are there built on the themes of "Adda" sessions like T3, olypub, Coffeehouse. The concept of "Adda" involves a sense of informalism, special ambiance, eating/drinking and all other attributes of good people gathering.

I wondor whether we would be able to digitize the gathering ever or probably we should leave somethings to how the nature created them.

Saraswati Pujo (Worship)

2010-01-19T10:10:00.000-08:00

Saraswati, the goddess of learning, is being worshiped by students, artists and anybody interested in learning. Today we also worshiped Saraswati in our office. We bought an idol from the market, and some flowers, some sweets and some fragrance sticks and here we go we have nice setup in the office. It is followed by some chanting of "mantras" and give your "pushpanjali" to the goddess (do not forget to present your wishlist to the goddess in return).

Saraswati Pujo (worshiping) is an important festival, specially, in Kolkata. Everything starts with preparing a (ondemand) temple for Saraswati. People work whole night and day to prepare a decent looking temple. It is followed by buying an idol from the market and placing the idol in the temple.

All the idols are created from clay by set of potters and artists in kolkata, doing the job for over centuries from generations to generations. Kumartuli, a potter's/artist's hub in kolkata, being in existence for a century.

The Next day starts at 4AM, with different set of activities at different places, personal house, local communities, schools and colleges, private and government offices. Some of the events are shown below:

Local Saraswati Pujo

Saraswati Pujo at Community Hall

Saraswati Pujo at school

School Painting Competition

Found Alien!!!

2010-01-17T06:53:00.000-08:00

Today morning while walking, I was surprised to notice an alien face in a wood placed near to a house. The face looks stunningly similar to an human face (or rather an alien face).

Alien Face

Original Wood Structure

So close but yet so far !!!

2010-01-16T06:08:00.000-08:00

I like traveling by metro to commute between the places rather than traveling by private Taxi. Well today was another day I was travelling by metro. What I saw today was very interesting.

"People do not interact with each other while using public transportation. Not only this, they do not even try to break the ice"

Well I know there would be a lot of interesting people around me and in fact each one of them will be having some interesting things about them.

Some of the possible reasons of this phenomena are:

1. While each one of then appear to be human, they do not carry / display their identity to the people around them. It makes impossible for other people to know interesting things about them.

2. People find difficult to "break the ice".

3. People are in hurry.

4. People are afraid to talk to new people.