Its travel time again

Indeed, it is travel time again and I don't seem to fancy the idea of traveling like a blue-bottom fly any more. This time around its 10 days and seven cities! Doesn't sound very interesting, does it? Well, it really isn't interesting at all because its the same circuit every year. Hopefully, this year my Swiss clients will try and do something different by taking me up to Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps.

Its crazy but I have been traveling to Switzerland for 8 years now and have really not seen anything of this beautiful country other than a little of western Switzerland - the areas around Basel, Lausanne and Lake Neuchatel. Beautiful though the area is I feel I need to see the Alps in order to say I've been around Switzerland!

I'm pleasantly surprised by the fares available to Europe on Sri Lankan - its almost 40% cheaper than those of the other carriers such as Lufthansa and Emirates - I hope the experience will also turn out to be unbeatable in a positive sense!

The Schengen visa too turned out nicely for me in that I got a two year multiple entry visa without any fuss! That means I save on precious pages of my passport by not having to devote more of the pages for visas! And this time around it will be the first time I enter Switzerland on a Schengen visa - earlier I had to apply separately for one of those difficult Swiss visas which took ever so long to get and would be for 8 days, yes, 8 days!! Which again meant my old passport had a Swiss visa on almost every alternate page!!! Thankfully those hassles are over and done with given the new visa regime. Now lets just hope the trip is nice and easy and some work gets done!!

Unconditional love

Every morning for the last 7 years this friend of mine and I head off to the beach near our homes for our hour-long morning constitutional. Its been fun doing this almost without fail every day of the week except on Sundays. One of the first things that we encounter on our walk are a few stray dogs who look so happy to see us early morning when they are just about stretching their limbs and muscles to begin their day. One of them, a scrawny, small white bitch is so happy to see my friend that she goes into a barking spree that wakes up the neighbourhood people and dogs! All she wants is a simple petting and maybe a scratch under her belly and she is so happy that she's bouncing up and down and prancing about barking in that happy way.

Then there's another mongrel that actually breast fed her daughter's pups when they were little ones'! She too seems to just need a little petting and off she goes to start her hunt for food to keep her going for the day. As we get closer to the beach we encounter yet another white dog but this time its a male who seems to love to jump and rest his front paws on my belly, as he does so he makes this strange growling sound that almost makes it seem like he's angry with us! Being male he needs a little more than petting - he actually expects you to play around with a piece of rag or an old shoe that he expects you to tug at while he pulls in the opposite direction!

On our return leg of the walk we take a slightly different route from what we traversed on the forward trip - this is to meet with a beautiful specimen of the Dalmatian breed - he's huge and so full of life. He usually looks out for two people walking towards him and bounds towards the twosome but every once in while he bounds towards the wrong folks and the poor guys dont know whether to turn and run or stay their ground! The dog answers to the name 'Samsung' - I'm sure the owners meant it to be Samson!

These dogs dont get anything other than a few strokes of affection from the two of us yet they yearn for our company and affection and look forward to our presence every morning! It is indeed so heart-warming to feel the unfailing, unconditional love of these dogs - it almost makes me want to ask 'why cant people be more like these dogs'?

Back again

Its been a few days since I blogged and the hiatus was caused by a trip out of town and into the hills of north Kerala with some Swiss and German business associates. These folks are here in India to expose my team to a new technology they have put in place to manage thousands of square meters of building space over the internet. We have been in this domain of computer aided facilities management for some years now and little had changed in the technologies deployed in this domain but now we have some serious new stuff to handle and it was a pleasure to be working with these Europeans on the new systems they had developed.

The training done it was time to give the Europeans a taste of Kerala which incidentally they had read up about and were aware that it was one of 50 destinations that National Geographic recommends as a 'must see'in a typical lifetime. So off we went to Calicut from Chennai and checked in to the Kadavu resort on the banks of the Chaliyar river. I love this river for its pristine beauty and because I know that not so long ago it was a 'dead river' because of industrial pollution from a rayon factory that was built on its banks in the 60s. The local people protested and with a concerted effort they were able to close down the offending unit and within a few years the river healed itself and looks oh so beautiful today.

The European visitors feasted on the beauty of this part of Kerala and watched in awe as sand divers went down to the bottom of the river to bring up baskets of river sand to dump into their boats moored mid-stream. To fill up a typical sand barge a diver needs to go down atleast 200 times - this is hard and demanding labour that really could be done by a machine but local laws prohibit that lest people over-dredge the river and mess up the riverine ecosystem. Once bitten twice shy, I guess!

From Calicut we went up into the high ranges of Kerala to the Vythiri Resort - this is dense tropical rainforest area and is quite remote. There is nothing else around and the only sounds are those of a gushing stream, crickets, birds and the swishing of leaves as monkeys swing from tree to tree! The resort was full and it wasn't foreigners that filled the place it was people from all over India! It was a working day and the place was full - I'm wondering how these folks at this remote resort manage to get this kind of traffic even on working days. It perhaps has to do with word of mouth promotion. Whatever it is, I highly recommend a night or maybe two in this resort - take plenty to read because there really isnt much you can do in the place and guess what, no cell phone coverage!

The tree houses here are awesome - one is 60 feet up in the canopy of a massive silk cotton tree and the only way up and down from there is by a cage lift operated with a water assisted winch! And the food is to die for - guess they have to have it that way or else the guests who have no where else to go for food, would be a bitter lot!

Dis-respect for due process and systems

Not long ago I was charged with leading a search for the company's new International Data Centre (IDC) - this was necessitated by the fact that a US company that our company had taken over was to be wound up and its physical operations moved out to Singapore while the data centre would be re-located to India. We called in a bunch of known companies to bid for co-locating our servers in their data centres and I was expected to go out and inspect each of these facilities.

Data Centres these days go by Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 type - the higher the Tier number the more complex amd more reliable the DC is supposed to be. There are internationally acknowledged levels of compliance that these various Tiers entail. My job was to check if these facilities were indeed Tier 2 when they claimed it was Tier 2. One of the top companies in this space took a colleague and me on a tour of their spanking new DC where they had a huge amount of heavily air-conditioned space with raised floors to accommodate the cabling that goes with computers and the security was severe. They took away our camera phones, and they had us smile into a camera to generate a mug shot that would adorn our visitor's pass and once inside, CC camera's monitored our every movement. A hi-tech Siemens Building Management Systems (BMS) controlled the temperature, humidity, access and power and reports are constantly generated about the variance from set values in any of those parameters! CCTV camera images are channelled to screens every where and to a central security console!

It didnt take me long to discover that people working in the facility had camera phones a plenty! And the BMS that was the nerve centre of the whole facility was un-secured in that there was no password required to access the system! This makes a mockery of the crores of Rupees the company has spent in putting all this Tier 2 infrastructure together! This apathetic attitude towards systems and processes seems ingrained in us as a people. Little will change in the lives of people in this country if we cannot respect systems and processes. Even disasters like the helicopter crash that killed a Chief Minister are caused by due process (maintenance) not being followed - yet we don't seem to learn our lessons. Wonder how and where we start instilling these values into our people - would it be at home, or school or at work? I'm beginning to think that its a leadership issue - if the people at the top insisted I am sure people down the line would fall in line - isn't that how the armed forces maintain discipline and a respect for systems? Where have all the leaders of civil and corporate society gone?

Overseas visitor

The last few days have been busy thanx to a visitor from overseas, Australia to be precise! The lady is of Indian extraction, having been born here and moved to Australia at the age of about 21 - she is back here in India almost 40 years later to celebrate her 60th birthday in the place of her birth in Madurai. Now that's a nice, original way to spend your 60th birthday I would think!

This visitor had been to India once in between, some 16 years ago so she was seeing a new India, quite different from what she had seen one and a half decades earlier. I asked her what her initial impressions of the country of her birth were and she came out with some very original view points which I thought must be recorded lest we over look some of what we take for granted. She cited the industriousness of the ordinary people on the street as something that was striking - for instance the pin-men or the ironing man in our neighbourhoods who show up at our doorsteps and collect all our washed clothes that need ironing and return them all neatly ironed. Something she has never seen in the many countries that she has visited! She even noticed that these industrious folks don't use electricity, prefer charcoal, and noted that they have territories to operate in! I could bet that a lot of folks who use these pin-men are not aware of these issues!

The other thing that seemed to strike her is the complete acceptance of the driving public to animal obstacles they encounter on the road and the complete acceptance by the bovine species to traffic buzzing around them while they lie in the middle of the highway and chew their cud! She wondered whether it was a kind of 'live and let live' policy on the part of both humans and animals that allows such a situation to exist!! Now isn't that a unique perspective? After all its their world too, right?

Sometimes it takes a visitor to point out ordinary things in our lives!

Leaving the world and your surroundings a better place

Every person of faith has his temple or church or mosque or synagogue to revere and use as his guiding light in his or her life. Religion serves that one purpose quite well in that the fear of divine retribution keeps most people 'on track' shall we say. For atheists there really isn't a formal guiding light or principle to go by and for that reason most cultures tend to think the atheist is not someone you want to associate with, he/she must be evil. For this reason most atheists hesitate to announce to the world that they are atheists, much like people of alternative sexual preferences plying their sexuality without announcing it to the world for fear of being ridiculed or even cast aside by the public.

In western societies gay and lesbian communities have been reasonably successful in their fight against discrimination and have succeeded to a large extent to be accepted as normal people. Its a different story in our oriental cultures where being gay or lesbian can often lead to disastrous consequences, even death. Mercifully, us atheists are not stoned to death but shunned by most oriental societies as 'not so nice people'! So it was with some pleasure that I read of atheism becoming acceptable in many western societies so maybe there is hope for us here in the East!

But what really can be a guiding light for atheists who don't believe in a god that will show them the path? For me its about the laws of Nature - its about being respectful to Nature and leaving a place better than I found it. Starting with the washroom in a hotel or restaurant, I think it is possible to leave the place better than one found it when you stepped in to use the place. I find it strange that even well-educated people in these parts will wash their mouths after a meal and spit into the washbasin and think nothing about leaving the washbasin with food particles from their mouth lying all over the basin. I would think the least they could do is rinse the basin out after use so it looks presentable to the next person who uses it. One would imagine this is basic to most people but no its not so.

Cleaning up after ourselves seems anathema to most Indians - thats somebody else's job right? One wonders how this scenario can be changed in generations to come. Will we ever be able to make our people understand that spitting, urinating and defecating in public spaces is unacceptable in the 21st century? Can all these religious teachers and spiritual leaders prevail upon their people to atleast live clean and keep their surroundings clean? If that were possible I guess I'd become a believer too, in the goodness religion!!

Whats with us Indians?

My two kids grew up here in this city of 7 million people, they started with nursery school here and they went on to finish their schooling right here. The values we as parents tried to instill in the kids were the usual ones of respect for elders, honesty, compassion, fairness, loyalty and simple things like getting into line to be served. The children have long since left home, they have been away for over 6 years now and I often wonder whether those values that we taught the children stand them in good stead or do they actually hinder their progress through life.

These questions come to mind mostly when I drive to work every morning, there is a particular right-handed turn that I have to do to enter into a main road on my way to work - most folks driving cars stay to the left of the road and await their turn to take the right turn. But invariably there are those morons, some in fancy cars, who will ignore the line of cars on the left of the road, drive up the right of the road without bothering about the fact that they will hinder or even block traffic coming along that side of the road from the opposite direction. When the block happens, its chaos because vehicles cant come into the road from the main road and they pile up on that part of the main road and many think they should try and go around the traffic and block us who are trying to turn right on to the main road - the result is a grid lock and for may be 10 minutes its complete anarchy. All the while the inconsiderate violater thinks the guy who came in from the main road (on the correct side of the road) is the ass, 'he can see me, he should have waited for me to pass'!! Talk about self-righteousness!! We Indians as a people must be the most self-righteous people on the planet!

Those violaters can actually get through that traffic chaos and still ask whats wrong with the whole world - look at the mess 'they create'!! And we as a people can conveniently forget about those law abiders who chose to stay in line and await their turn - never mind that the idiot violater thinks they all must be fools to stand in line and await their turn to make that turn into the main road! Even the traffic cop thinks the violater really did not violate - he was just in a hurry to get to work you see!

Its the same thing in a ticket queue - theres always the violater who thinks its ok to jump the queue - every one in the queue are fools again you see! I wonder if I taught my kids the right thing by telling them to stay in line and never jump a queue - they must really look like fools to folks who think nothing about jumping a queue! Is it that teachers or schools dont teach these kids to await their turn? Will it help to hammer value education into kids in school? The cynic in me says that when there are so many people chasing so few goods & services there will always be people who will want their goods and services delivered out of turn and will even be willing to pay to get those goods & services out of turn - herein lies the root of corruption that we as a nation so bemoan - that then is my Queueing theory of corruption!