"Hello... Its raining.. "

It was the kind of day when people knew it would rain but did not exactly know when. Typical monsoon day in Hyderabad. Two minutes into my ride that day, it started pouring and I had to stop and find a shelter lest I find myself swimming in the Hyderabad waterways :) And so I did. It was an abandoned shop with a small extended roof overlooking the busy roads, good enough to give cover to four random people like me who had dared the rain gods and lost!

In a different world, it would have been an opportunity to strike up random conversations with these four strangers. And like any such conversations one would imagine, we would have started with Cricket - the universal subject. All four would have enough accolades for the Indian team. Then we would move on to Politics - the Universal language that everyone understands and has opinions about, and probably next about the unique feature of the city - how it can turn into an ocean when it rains. It probably was designed that way to make up for the lack of an ocean in the near vicinity. And at the end of it all, we might even have realized one was a distant cousin of the other etc. Happens sometimes ;-)

Yes, all of that would have happened, but in a different world. In today's world that isn't the case. All the other three quickly reached out to their mobile phones and started conversations with people they already know while I stood staring at the overflowing waters, knowing well that if I called somebody on a Saturday afternoon all I would get is a good amount of bashing! In a while the rain subsided, and everyone went their ways entrusting their bikes with the additional job of swimming. Obviously, the distant cousin will never be found.

May be I am generalizing this all too much to say that while mobile phones have brought distant people closer, it also made people around you distant. There is some truth to it though. One can always spot people fiddling with their mobiles when in new environments rather than looking around or talking to somebody. Our contacts have become our world. So it seems.

Ten thousand...

select datediff(day,'19840212', '20110630')

10000


For the number freak that I am, what can be a day more interesting than June 30,2011 - the day I turned 10000 days old? Ten thousand days!!! That seems such a big number! If instead of 365 days, a year had 100 days, I would be 100 years old already. How cool would that be!  But honestly, apart from the seemingly beautiful number of zeroes in it, nothing interesting happened on the day. Except that my watch stopped working, at around 10 AM, which I guess is ironic in a comical way! It probably had the 10K bug ;-)

And with today, I have completed seven years at work too. Approximately 1/4th of the ten thousand days. So numbers and numbers it is the past few days.

Mon-soon!

Monday comes soon enough. It always is the case. Though I was completely unwired the past week and away from the happenings of the dynamic and ebullient world, it still wasn't enough to eagerly look forward for Monday to get back to the sparkling life of traffic, ever-changing news, social networking updates and this beautiful invention called mobile phone.

It was calming in a way, to see the news come and go by the time I got to them and to find out that India already won the WI series before I knew it started.

And the week was also witness to the first showers of the season - the other 'mon-soon' had set in and Hyderabad, which was pretty close to a boiler the earlier week, had suddenly turned into this pleasant city with a cool breeze welcoming me on the way back to work. Makes me wonder how varied and rich the Indian seasons are. One minute they are something and the next, the exact opposite.

So its back to work and world, after a monsoon break. :)
And probably a few blog posts too!

Three cheers..

A look at the recent succession of events that dominated the headlines would convince anyone that one success begets another and that one victory spreads enough optimism to fight another. It was an interesting article in last weekend's Hindu magazine (couldn't find an online link unfortunately!) trying to link the optimism and the fighting spirit shown by the common man around the country in supporting Anna Hazare's campaign to that of the spirit shown by Dhoni's men in winning the World Cup. The joy of the world cup spread into this fight against the corruption, it says, backed by the feeling of 'we can', shown first by the Indian team and then by anti-corruption crusaders around the country. While I leave the pros and cons of the movement for the technically inclined, and the criticism for the skeptics, the biggest outcome of the fast was the unity with which everyone responded and expressed support for one of the biggest evils that hinders development in this part of the world.

Quick to follow it up was the successful launch of the PSLV placing three satellites up in the orbit - another thing to cheer about, makes it three in a row coupled with the two mentioned above. Though the debate continues on whether satellites are the need of the hour for a still developing country, what is praiseworthy is the effort put in towards attaining the scientific precision required for such high tech projects. Think about parking your car in a busy Koti road and you will know :-)

One enthusiastic journalist covering the launch live on tv asked a bystander if he thought spending on satellites was justified at all. If you ask me, he had the answer right in front of him. Without satellites, he wouldn't have been seen live across so many screens across the world. Spending on science is justified, I feel. It is for science to predict the future and envision things ahead of time and work towards making them a reality in the coming days. So anything that they do today might seem irrelevant, but as time progresses, it all will come together to give us a better future.

More optimism and victories for the hard working!

It's magical..!!

And so four years later, the Indian team, with their wonderful performance has answered the critics who had poured out their disappointment of the 2007 loss at various venues like me. What a victory it was, and what a time and place to make it happen. From the lows of 2007 to the victory of 2011, that too right in the midst of the people for whom they had to prove a point. Like the proverbial phoenix, they rose from the ashes to conquer the Cup, and with it, the hearts of millions who spent their better part of the month watching cricket and trying to make sense of the impossible-seeming UDRS. Integral calculus was easy!

Sure, when I re-read my post, I bit my tongue and felt sorry for having had been so harsh four years ago, but back then the defeat was so diasppointing. Hope Sunny will himself be part of the team in 2067 giving India the 15th World cup, and not trying to decipher an unknown word called cricket :-)

Personally, I had much more to be happy about the World cup for having attended one of the league matches India played, and having seen the victorious team perform on their way to winning the Cup, and having had a glimpse of the 'soon-to-be-ours' trophy that was displayed before the match (probably an imitation, but who cares!). How much I wanted India to win the cup at that moment! And a month later, it is all ours.

Congratulations Team India, it was great watching you play. And hope the success spreads a smile across every Indian staying far and wide.

Of poets and people..

రాజు  నివసించు  రాజ  సౌధమ్ములోన  

కవి నివసించు ప్రజల హృదయమ్ములోన 

[The King stays in magnificient palaces..
While the poet stays in the hearts of the people]

..so goes the fantastic poem written by Gurram Jashuva which very aptly describes the lines that I would have liked to write, post my visit to Mysore and Bangalore recently.

On the first day in Mysore, I was audience to the grandiosity and splendor of the high rise palaces, magnificient pieces of art that were hung in the museums, showing the rich and glorious lifestyle of the rulers back in the day, how people would throng to the palace to celebrate festivals and participate in processions, showing their loyalty to the King.

The very next day, in Bangalore, I was witness to the unparalleled affection and unprecedented admiration that a few thousands of people can have for a single man, and how, at the top of their voice, they were cheering for their super hero when he first entered the field and marked his place at the crease, like he had been doing for the past 21 years, never failing the hope people have in him. 

I could so easily relate the above poem to my experience of the two days drawing parallel to the King in the poem to the Mysore royalty and the great cricketer to the poet mentioned, and how the King can rule the masses, but it is the poet who truly wins them over.

My memory failed me in trying to recollect the other beautiful lines of the poem which would have added more meaning to this post.


On a very different note, it is such a sorrow to see nature's fury over the place I had written about earlier, and after I have written specifically about the beauty of nature in my last post. How contradicting! Hope they recover soon.

One thing is sure - 'nothing is for sure'.

Vertically off..

Adjectives always fall short when it comes to describing nature.  Many a poet have drawn inspiration from the swaying leaves, blooming flowers, chirping birds, gushing streams and twinkling stars to produce masterpieces.

A five minute gaze into the twilight sky on a full moon day can make anyone a poet I guess.  While the blue to orange to dark turning sky takes down along with it the glowing red ball which lends its color to its counterpart that rises from a distant horizon illuminating the world with a natural glow that no amount of man-made inventions can beat.  You are left wondering how precise and rythmic nature's workings are and start thinking of how it could all have come into being. Thoughts quickly jump back to the Universe, the planets, the big bang theory, the dinosaurs, the human evolution.. the never ending tale of how things around us were created, are being created, and will continue to be.. and before you get too far on this tangent, the traffic signal turns green and you wake back into your regular life, shifting gears, revving the engine enough to do your part in wiping off a few things off the beautiful canvas that you were appreciating a moment earlier..

Nature has been the greatest of inspirations, though it continues to be an enigma at best.

Lets ROLL..

Festivals are rejuvenating. And travel during festivals is an even more interesting thing. Especially if you are the kind who loves to watch people. People from different walks of life come on board the same bus/train you are traveling in and the atmosphere resembles a mini world. You have that perpetually nagging old man who has enough experience of the good times to earn the right to criticize. Then the lone traveller sitting aloof drowned in his thoughts. The group of friends who, with their discussions, keep you informed of all the important news going on. And then there are always a bunch of kids hanging on to their kin watching with an ecstatic yet surprising look on their face, happy about the new environs they are in, yet feeling insecure about the unknown people around them. Of course, no description is complete without the cell-phone-to-the-ear guy who keeps chattering away, generally a bit louder than he would otherwise.

If you are in a contemplative mood, watching all these people would give you enough food for thought to write about it. So, here I am :)

Not all of that, but one particular thing caught me. There was this two year old kid looking around and suddenly his mom thrusts a cell phone to his ear and asks him to say 'Hi' to his maternal uncle and then to ask how he is etc. The poor kid repeats her words verbatim clueless about  what he is doing, nevertheless with a tinge of excitement, seeing his mother all cheerful. Does the two year old kid know what he is doing. That there is an uncle far away waiting for their arrival, and he is "talking" to this uncle whom he can't "see"? Does his imagination allow him to feel that the communication is real?

What about the same age kids before the advent of the cell phone? Did they have the same imaginative capacity, except that they couldn't display it.
Or do the new tools that come up in this scientific age bring out skills hitherto unknown at that age?

Big questions! As long as the kid is happy talking on the cell phone, I don't mind.

Wishing everybody a very happy new year. 2011, in a way, resembles the word ROLL. So, hope everybody has a 'rock and roll' year and I hope the posts in my blog also roll..

Who's the best?

Comparison is inevitable in this world. Whatever people do, accomplish, fail to do, etc, it is always compared to things of the past, or similar things that others have done.
Comparisons are done, ratings are given and finally everybody wants an answer to the question "Who's the best". And the things that are compared range from infinity to infinity. Anything can be compared. Starting from which kid in the school has more toffees to who makes the fastest century in a 20-20 match, comparisons are a never ending phenomenon.

What do these comparisons serve? Probably, it is because of comparing and contrasting that we are able to improve our capabilities. So it might not be that bad either.

Again, within these comparisons, there seems to be an inherent trend, at least one that I feel, to put people earlier in time in a more positive light than they would deserve otherwise. And this is in every field.. Sports, music, arts take anything.. The earlier guy is always better/greater than the contemporary. Shakespeare, Picasso, Newton, Bradman, they are all great people and considered better than their current counterparts and probably anybody in the future too. As if great people are born only once and that too in the past!  Ghantasala is a better singer than SP Balu, Ilayaraja is better than A R Rahman, Nobody can think of a better actor than NTR in Telugu.. the list goes on.

Why so? One reason I can think of is that resources were limited in the past and anybody who achieved so much back then would have done even more now. True, but not always. Another reason then, probably, is that it is the modesty of the younger generations to revere and respect elders in their field and to attribute greater skill to their predecessors. Besides that, in most cases, the predecessors would have been their gurus or idols in the field, so they can't dream about surpassing the idols or at least openly accept it.

There might be other reasons, and I might be only seeing one side of it all (think about scientists before Newton and poets before Shakespeare, they existed too, but still the later ones are considered the best, right?) but it is mostly the case that in a list of successful people in a field, the earliest is always considered best. And, these comparisons never end.

So, which was the best movie of the decade, who was the best sportsman, which year was the best, etc etc.. and the comparisons go on and on... and while you are on it, you could also try and tell which of my posts is the best :) Yes, I am no different.

the canine question

Freedom. Contrary to what the word means, I think the word has a different connotation that is exactly opposite to the meaning, one which means restriction. We are all free by definition, but are we really free? Probably its a bit easier for us intellectually superior beings called humans ,to understand what the word really means and what we should and should not do under this empowering word called "freedom". But think about the animal world, specifically the "pets" the we so dearly love and have them by our side always. Are they free? Do they know whether they are free?

Watching two dogs on one day in different circumstances triggered a doubt in me as to what this word "freedom" would mean to each of the dogs.

The first of them was traveling in the rear of an air-conditioned car, sticking his head out of the window, wearing a dreary look on its face. One look at it and you would feel it is missing something. Is it freedom? But think about it, and the comforts it is enjoying, probably not even the upper middle class human can afford. But is it really free? Does it want to jump out of the window, hunt for its food, eat his hard-earned meal rather than eat artificial dog food fed to it every 6 hours. Is it happy being in the car? Probably yes. Is it free? Does it want to be? Only the dog can tell.

The second, a street dog, again with a dreary look on its face, this time looking out for some generous human who can give it some food. Is it happy? Not so much I would say, it doesn't know what its next meal is going to be and when. Is it free? It definitely is freer than the earlier one. Yes, it can hunt at its own times and for food that it wants. Sleep in its own time at any place it wants, be it right in the middle of the road under the shade of a tree. Freedom? Totally. But the very next moment a rash auto driver runs over its leg and it squeals in pain and runs amok as far away as it can. Is it happy being free? No. Does it want to be in the air-conditioned car, in return for the freedom? Only the dog can tell.

Never having reared a dog, I am not sure if these canines have a sense of freedom and whether they have a preference to have it or not, but what impresses me is their loyalty. They are loyal when they are free, and even more when they are tied up. One quality worth learning.

If only these canines could speak..

Been there.. Seen that..

It might be for just a couple of minutes. It might not be the greatest of the innings. But finally, I can cross an item from my list of "100 things to do in life".  That being "watching the master Sachin Tendulkar bat" live. Been there and seen that yesterday when I went to the test match played between India and New Zealand in Hyderabad.

On another day, it would have been a century that every cricket fan was waiting for - century number 50 in tests for the master, but it was not to be yesterday. That was the only disappointment, but not so much after seeing the other batsmen bat. All those batsmen whose shrugs and styles, defences and boundaries I was used to watching on TV were now playing less than a hundred yards from me. It was thrilling on that front but not so much in the play itself, it being a test match and our guys playing slower than usual, I was pretty bored with the game.

So, 1 out of 100 is over. Now I should plan for the rest 99, or rather I should make a list of those 99 first, because I never had a list till I did no. 1 :-)

Tweet.. tweet..

First there was the good old telephone. Then came the e-mail. Then the mobile phone. Social networking followed. Micro-blogging is the new fad. Like everybody I've taken to anything that's new and happening, and in the process, I've added a new gadget to the blog today - my twitter feed. I am not very active on twitter as such, but I thought interlinking them both would be a good idea because in a sense both the blog and the twitter are for the same purpose. I use them both to express myself to friends and readers.

While twitter is for an informal thought or a single line that flashes in the mind suddenly, blog is for the more-thought-about topics and things that I find time and words to write about.

So twittering, blogging and everything that the amazing world of internet has to offer. I particularly like the innovation that has come up on the communications front in these recent years. Its good to watch the trend :)

the new car..

After writing about bigger, grander and more meaningful things in the past few posts, let me turn a bit into the normal human this time. The kind that talks loud about global warming but still wants to own a car inside. :) After all I want my share too!

So it was a couple of days ago that I bought my first car. I am no expert in cars and how they work, and so had to do a bit of googling and the like, ultimately to realize that all these tech specs and comparisons do not make much sense if it is your first car. All you want are pleasing looks and enough space inside :) Trust me.

I zeroed in on the Hyundai i20 Magna and now I am a proud owner of one.

I wrote a similar post quite a few(!) years back about my CBZ and how it caught my attention on the very first day and I ended up owning it. Nothing like that happened for the car though :) Either I became older and more practical now or my dreams now know no bounds, for, only the Audis and BMWs catch my attention :)

To think or to act.

Much of what I write in this post is the result of a few conversations with friends and a few observations here and there..

So one day, a friend asks me "I do not want to see any destitute, poor and ragged on the streets. Can we do something about it?". And I said, "Well, what can we do?"

I am sure some of you are with me on this one. Many of us have this latent feeling to reach out and help people in want of need, but fail to do so because of various reasons. One, not to mention the busy lives that we live in, where some times we spend the better part of the day commuting to work and back rather than doing something useful. Second, the urge to relax and let the world take care of itself, rather than be out there and help the needy in a way that we can. Third, considering our contributions too small to even make a difference. Fourth, .. I can write and write but people might label me as being a hypocrite - much talk and no action. :-)

True, we are a majority, but every Monday and Wednesday enroute to my office, when I see this lady coming out of her car bringing cans of curd rice to distribute to the homeless, who spend their nights in the cold and the rain, waiting for their ailing kin to recover in an adjacent hospital, I tend to think no reasons are big enough to not act.

Probably a thing or two to learn from her. First, she could have been satisfied by donating an amount to an organization that takes care of such deeds. But she didn't, and instead took up the task to prepare the food and distribute it personally. Second, how much commitment would one need to have to return back every week and do the same act of kindness? Lets just compare it with.. say.. how regular are you to the gym or, on your diet? [The two most personally important things in these times of middle class affluence ;-)]

What this would mean is that for every action (or inaction) of ours, we have a choice. One can either shed some lethargy and act, or for the others who cannot, we have some good news. Because another friend of mine had said "That's ok. It is the thought that counts. Not everybody can go out and do these things. Besides, it is enough if a few people contribute and the rest support them". :-)

With a few days to go for the birth centenary of the greatest humanitarian of the 20th century - Mother Teresa, this post is also to remind ourselves of her service to mankind!

What's your language?

One would not question the fact that the main difference between us humans and the rest of the species on earth is the power of speech - being able to communicate. Empowered by "language",  developed through complex thinking processes and an evolved larynx, we, the humans, have the biggest advantage that helped us move beyond hunting and gathering food to taking flights to the sun and moon.

It has been a very uniform evolution pattern for humans across the world, wherever people stayed on the planet. Starting from becoming two legged from four-legged, cultivation, eating habits, hunting, running, eating with hands and not legs ;-) etc.. But why do different people on Earth speak different languages? One wonders why there are so many languages, some of them spoken by millions of people, while some, just by a few hundreds. And the scripts of these vary a great deal too. Left to right, right to left, top to bottom etc, evoking much interest in their purpose and origin.

Purpose, yes, there definitely is. Speech is definitely the fastest way of communicating. Think about sign language, or eye-language, or any other means of communication, spoken one stands out as the fastest and even helps people multi-task. You could do other things while speaking, except when you are eating, that is. :) And when the spoken one had its limitations, distance being one of them, people came up with scripts, to carry the language from one place to another (think letters!)

Origin is what confuses me. If people all over the world eat pretty much the same stuff, walk and run alike, think almost alike, how come they came up with different languages? Is language not something that is built into the human gene? Of course, the very fact that any person can learn any language of the world itself means that language is not genetic but a purely learned thing.  
              Probably each group that stayed together developed their own language, to be understood within their circles. They might have been unaware of other people on a different continent doing the exact same thing. If only they knew, all of us would have had just one language. :)

Lack of communication between early humans, thus, seems to be the reason for so many languages coming up in the first place and now, that very fact that these languages are so different is stopping us from communicating with each other :) Guess, we have come full circle on this one.

 Could we have done better if there was some built-in language into our human genes? Just like we have two eyes, two ears, if all us spoke the same language, we would have saved much time in learning foreign languages and many a barriers would have come down. Right?

Speaking of languages.. does anybody know what the newest language is?

Did I hear somebody say Java........!!!  :)

The First Decade of the century...

This day marks an era of my foray into the world of computers. Today marks six years at work and counting a good four years at college before that would make it a decade with the man-made-machines. So comes the new design to the blog, to celebrate.

Roughly ten years ago it was, that I wrote my first C program, and as anybody would guess, it was the hello.c program which printed "Hello, world!" with the exact punctuation and capitalization :-)

int main() 
 {
        printf("Hello, world!");
        return 0;
 }

What struck me the most at that point was the colors on each word, which I came to know later was called 'syntax highlighting'. Back in school days, all I knew was BASIC and it did not have this feature. So it was kind of new and colorful. What started then became a hobby, then a vocation and later a profession.

In these ten years, I have seen transformations and advancements in the computer industry of all kinds. But the biggest and the most far-reaching one in all of them would be the "collaborative web". Powered by the likes of wikipedias and the youtubes, this revolutionary idea has changed the game called internet.

 Back in the day a website meant information being pushed one-way i.e., from the websites to the internet users. If you had some information and wanted the world to know about it, there was no direct or rather "free" way of doing it. You had to buy website hosting services and host a website of your own.

 But today, if you have some information to share, you have a host of websites ready to present it to the world, all for free. Take blogger. I have been able to write for over so many years, without spending a single pie. Take wikipedia, or youtube, or yahoo answers. The collective knowledge of all the people in this world, wherever they are on the planet, is readily accessible.

 There were thousands of instances, personally for me, when this altruism of fellow internet users helped me find relevant information, that too in a few minutes.

 Imagine going to a library and searching through books when you want to find about interesting tour places in Japan, or understand what an "off side" meant in football, or the Bertrand Russell’s paradoxes or the billion things you to go to the internet every other minute.

 All of this has been possible through the advancement of technology, yes. But underlying the success of these collaborative projects is the benevolence of mankind in contributing their time and effort in making these projects so useful to all of us.

 It is these acts of selflessness that raises hope for a better tomorrow and fills one's thoughts with optimism in a day where we hear more about the bad than about the good.

 Hope, Empathy and Peace.

What's not in a name

Its been well over a month since I wrote last and before I get into the well of procrastination, let me jot down something. But suddenly why today? To be honest, I was watching TV over the weekend and Discovery and NGC had special programmes lined up for the World Environment Day. It rung some bells, and here I am, back to the blog, after glancing over last year's post about the day.

Speaking of Discovery channel and their programs about tigers and all, recently I happened to read the book "Life of Pi", the book is about a boy and a tiger, both stuck on a life boat in the middle of the Pacific for close to six months, imagine that! While the story itself is gripping and narrated in a very imaginative way, the book has some very good thoughts related to religion as well, a completely tangential topic. And the protagonist happens to major in Zoology and Religious studies. A unique combination! I wonder how he would've answered the age-old question about Evolution :) Probably that would tell which of his majors his favorite is!


And the book is set in India in the 1970s. Not having read too many books set in the Indian background, I found this book fresh and real. The familiar names and places, the description of the huge tamarind tree and kids playing under its shade, the earthenware to cool water and such minute things made it a pleasurable reading experience and the imaginary world one constructs while reading a book felt very real. Not so much with the books set in some foreign contexts.

Probably I should read more such books.. but how would I know. One classic mistake I did when I first came across this book a few years back was to dismiss it as some kind of self-help book. The words "Life" and an unknown/mathematical-constant "Pi" made me assume it is not my type of a book. But once I got to know that it is not, I started reading and found the title very simple and very apt to the story.

So, moral of the story: don't second guess what a book is about just by looking at the title :-)

La Belle Dame...

Is it just me or do others also find these fighter jets appealing? appealing as in 'attractive'. Sounds strange but these hit-machines are designed so beautifully and have these great looks. Aerobatics they can do and attractive they are. Compare them to the passenger aircrafts :) Leaving out the science part and the reasons for the difference in shapes, if we just focus on the aesthetic component, people would definitely vote for these fighter jets as better looking. Even other space vehicles like the rockets don't seem so elegant either.

Somehow I see an inherent sarcasm in the way these things are designed. For one, they are designed to kill. They carry dangerous explosives capable of wiping out civilisations but one look at these carriers and you would like them instantly. Compare this to the evolution theories put forward by Darwin et al, who say 'things that are attractive are generally safe'. Probably the most intelligent species that we are, went for the deception tactic to fool the natural senses and give a fatal edge to these good-looking 'beautiful beasts' :)

Reminds me of the famous John Keats and his La Belle Dame sans Merci -- the beautiful princess without pity. These hawkers are definitely the belle of the dames of their category and sure are 'sans merci'. :) Guess you can call it the Keatsian irony! They sure have kept 'thou in thrall' as well..

How the course of natural evolution has taken the wrong track with humans developing these tools that, instead of propagating human life to the next evolutionary phase, are taking the whole process one step back enabling the possibility of large scale destruction with these weapons. Or is this the natural path? only time will tell.


On a parting note, it’s that time of the year when we remember the man who has personified the word consistency. Wishing a great birthday to Sachin this year and many more on the field. The world needs more cricket.

The trip Far East

So the dream of going around the globe one day was taken forward one step when I went to Tokyo for a few days. While there, I had a chance to visit Kyoto as well.

Both cities are interesting places to visit. While both have the "old" and "new" sides to them, what is extremely fascinating to a tourist is the difference between the old and new sides of these cities and how you cross a street and see the old and new sides of the cities appearing and disappearing at will, one giving way to the other.

While on the old side you get to see ancient shrines, zen meditation centres, temples from the Buddhist period and numerous palaces and gardens built majorly with wood, all of them pretty stable and surviving many a natural calamities for a thousand years and more. A big set of them on the UNESCO World Heritage list too!



Cross over to the new side and you see skyscrapers, plush locales, suit-clad men and women on their way to work, big brands and great shopping districts completely and exactly the opposite of the old side.


And connecting the old to the new is an efficient transportation system, with the bullet trains being a special attraction. I was surprised at how we covered a distance of 500 kms in a couple of hours! Another attraction is the food. Food is big in Japan. You find hundreds of restaurants. Lots of varieties, cuisines and the preferred choice being sea food. Sakura - the cherry blossoms are another hard-to-miss things in Japan, especially if you are visiting in the right season.

Summarizing the trip to Japan I would say - Shopping, Restaurants, Shrines, Culture, Discipline.

Milestones!

Sachin going on to make a hundred hundreds is one. Federer getting twenty slams is another. They are big and the world watches with awe. Here's a tiny one for me and from me.

This is my hundredth post!

And the blogger dashboard said this, before I started writing this one...
Tiny, when compared with Sachin and Federer and the like, but a huge one, personally, for me. Because it proves a few things.

One, I stuck to writing and did not give up on it though it has been a few years now and there were periods of zero activity too. Isn't it easy to just to get lazy? However I came back.
Two, kind people have been reading whatever I write and have been encouraging me all through with comments and feedback online and offline.
Three, I can write. :-) Though not all the hundred posts were good, I guess a few of them, say a ten of them were good enough that people came back the second time, read and remembered.

I wonder if the word milestone is apt here, because milestones are measures to see how close or away you are from your target, but in this case, there is no target. I just wish to write more and more.. as long as I have things to write about.

More questions, more answers...