Home: Pictures of the Week: 24th April 2010

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. Have two passport photos and xerox of your photo ID card ready for each member.
4. Shared Taxi (10 people per taxi) from NJP to Gangtok take around 4.5 hours and cost around 150 RS INR / head.
5. You can get decent hotel double bed room at price 15oo Rs /day.
6. 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.
7. Have atleast 5 hours in hand for the journey from Gangtok to NJP Railway Station.

My Recent Sikkim Visit: Gurudongmar Lake

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

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:

1. Create a dedicated role of self improvement and assign to appropriate team with right set of skills.
2. 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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. What is their visibility area while flying?
3. How do they estimate quality and quantity of honey discovered?
4. How do they remember the path back to their colony once honey is discovered?
5. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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)
5. 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:

1. Honey Bee Navigation
2. Waggle Dance (a new twist in the tale)
3. A nice article (about honey bees)
4. Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing
5. Foraging Facts
6. Miracle in Bees

Break Free: Pictures of the week: 3 April 2010

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.