A Bike Ride to Pune

It’s another early Saturday morning, and I get off the phone. I look at my watch and it’s about five. I take my feet off the table and collect my gear as I head off to the parking. The cold air is refreshing and I don’t really mind the strap of the bag that is cutting into my shoulder. I have bigger fish to fry. I have to ride 150 km to my house in Pune, after a full day of work and staying late in office.

I switch on the music and put in earphone in my ears. I lay all my gear on the bike, ready to dress up. Having been a veteran at these early morning Pune trips, I have a fixed procedure. First my jacket goes on my torso, and then the cell phone goes into the inner breast pocket. The earphones come out and hang over my ears. The muffler is tightened around my neck and now the earphones go back in. I zip up the front and wear my bag. This is followed by the helmet, and at last, my gloves. Now I am ready to take on the world. But before that, I need to the wake up the watchman.

The watchmen at the office are weird. They lock the main gate and go off to sleep at night. And every single night when I wake them up to open the gate, I get the stinky eye from them. Today, however, is different. The guy is sipping his tea, and gets up before I can break, in front of his cabin. Without much of a fuss, he opens the gate & I’m off. I take the quick start as a good omen, and quickly lower my visor as I speed off towards the Highway.

I’m now on the Thane-Belapur road. This road is very familiar to me, and my mind starts wandering off. I recollect the first time I had biked on this road, almost two years back; That night too we were biking from office. But we had left office two hours early, and were going to Jimmy’s Birthday party in Khargar. What a change in those two years. Not only in me, but also in this road. It was basically a glorified dirt track then. Now it’s a respectable concrete road, one can ride on without too much of trouble.

I reach Nerul, and am riding in Pitch dark. I know when the paved road patch starts, and I’m waiting for it. The undulations of the paved blocks is dangerous, if ones attention wavers, and I want to reach home in one piece. A ST bus can be seen in the distance. It is dark and dusty, with no reflectors or light, so I constantly have to struggle to dynamically place it. It’s moving in the middle lane & I plan to overtake it from the right. Just as about 100 feet separate me from the bus, something catches my eye. I can’t quite make out what it is, but the light from on coming trucks, shows me there is something directly in my path about 100 feet away. Within a few hundredth of a second, I realize that it is a plastic bottle, and I start staring at a spot exactly one foot to the left of the bottle. My eyes are now fixed on to that point, and that is all I can see.

Initially, the bike does not waver, but I have enough fate in myself. I keep staring at the spot, and soon enough, my bike first dips to the right and then instantly to the left. The bottle is coming closer every second and I’m still not sure if I’ll make it. But I have enough faith in my body. The bottle is just about 10 feet away, and just about 6 inches off my path. I continue staring at the fixed point, and as expected I pass over that very spot.

I have now reached the Asugav junction, where the Express way begins. I however have to take a right and go via Panvel to the old Mumbai Pune highway. I hate this stretch, and have to put my mind and reflexes on high alert. This road is a two lane, two way highway with no divider. The oncoming traffic is causing a glare in my eyes, and I am practically blind. Thankfully the road is flat and porthole free, so I don’t have to worry about that. I just tell myself to watch out for oncoming traffic and stay out of the way of stray vehicles. My fears are justified just a few minutes later, when a sumo coming from the other side, is travelling in my lane, and I have to travel on the shoulder of the road to avoid getting hit. I know I can’t rest till I go over the Expressway and reach Shedung village, where the NH4, becomes a four way toll road. Thankfully I have an uneventful ride till Shedung

On the old NH4, the 4 lane road becomes a two-lane road at Khalapur. As I biker I’m very afraid of getting into accidents, and am especially guarded on roads without dividers. Hence my joy on the NH4, ends at Khalapur, and I’m again on full alert till Kopoli, which about 8 Km ahead.
The Ghats start at Khopoli & that is where the fun starts as well. The road is scenic and curvy. There is no traffic on that road, and I leisurely climb the hills, swinging out on the turns. It is still dark, and I can feel it getting chilly as I climb the ghats. I have to ride on low gear because of the steep climb, and my bike has to struggle to maintain speed. The sound of my engine at low RPM is the only sound I can hear. There is no other light around except for my headlights, and I am totally at peace.

I approach the Expressway. Before I get on the Expressway, the road goes over a strangely shaped flyover. It is narrow, has a steep decline and a sharp turn. The view from the sharp turn is amazing and I’ve often stopped there before. You can see the lights of Khopoli and the valley surrounding it. The sun hasn’t risen yet, and there is not much light in the valley, so I carry on, and get to the highest gear as I touch the Expressway.

Even though I know that I have to get to the Expressway, every time I have done the Mumbai-Pune ride, I have this insecure voice in my head, asking me if I am meant to be there. I ignore that voice and carry on. There is a lot of slow moving Truck traffic. I prefer this to the high speed car traffic, since the trucks are slow moving and I can zoom in and out of their paths, without any issue.

I get off the Khandala exit, and begin one of the best parts of the journey. The road from Khandala to Lonavala, is specious, wide and curvy. It lies along the railway tracks, and a couple of times, I’ve has the good fortune to travel alongside a train. If you haven’t done that, you cannot possibly understand the joy and excitement one feels as one races a train.

I pass Lonavala, and the highway expands to a nice 4 lane toll way. I look at my watch and see that it is 6:45. I have been neither too fast, nor too slow. I know I will do the next fifty odd km in about an hour. The road is flat, and the cold air is blowing. My bike is shaking and I’m shivering. It is a good experience, and brings back the memories of the Ladhak expedition. I can see the sun shinning, and look at the big orange blob, as it is rises just a few degrees above the horizon. The day is just beginning and I’m dead tired. It will be another interesting day in Pune.

The transition to GChat

For the last few weeks or so, I have been using Gchat in office instead of the usual Gtalk. This all began when there were whispered murmurs in Office, that our Instant Messenger conversations were being monitored. This can easily be done by a Network Administrator with tools like IMBoss and IMspector; that's why I didn’t dismiss them as baseless rumors.

I really don’t have much to hide, but I very much value my privacy. Hence to keep my conversations private, I turned over to using GChat, the Chat Widget in Gmail. This uses an encrypted channel when passing information in-between your computer and the GMail Servers, if you have the HTTPS option selected.

At times I have been rather annoyed at the difference when compared to GTalk and at other times, I have been surprised at how easily I have adjusted to the change.

Many people have preferred GChat for many years now. The most attractive feature for many people is the ability to ‘appear offline’ and then chat with people. Somehow this is not important enough for me. I accept that I am an Internet Addict, and am not ashamed to admit it. I have no problems being seen online, since I am online so much. In addition there is no one that I would like to hide my online presence from. I am quite open that way. If there is someone I don’t want to chat with - like a man - I tell them I’m busy, or ignore them.

Now this might come off as rather rude, and quite a few friends have been offended by this behavior of mine. I apologize, but they too have to understand my situation a little bit. When they usually ping me, it’s usually evening or night. They have come home, had dinner and are now chilling out and relaxing. I on the other hand, am working at this time. The evening hours of nine to eleven, are often the most productive part of my working day. And it’s not as if I’m deceiving them. I have put my status as Busy. What did they think the Red circle was for?

In some ways, I think that Instant Messenger conversations are tricky business. You never know what kind of mood or situation the other person is, nor do you often have much to say. Everyone is busy multitasking, so you never have anyone’s undivided attention. You can have only shallow conversations and useless chit chat. This is why I prefer emails. They are very effective when you have something to say, or something to ask. I know that this kind of behavior is rather rare, but I love it nonetheless. They are also better when you work like me: with an intense focus for a 15 odd minutes and then Chill out for a couple of minutes. This way you can reply to them appropriately whenever you get some time out. And since emails are so rarely used for these kinds of purposes, I get so excited, whenever someone actually uses them in this way.

Another reason why I am not so enamored by the ‘Appear Offline’ feature is something that is sort of contrary to the above points. I have often had these magical conversations with people, when I least expected them. I know that these people would not have left me an email and would only have had these wonderful conversations with me after I got them talking. This would not have happened if I ‘appeared offline’ and due to this, they wouldn’t have thought of pinging me.

So after I was forced to decide to use GChat, I decided to make the best of it. Like an obsessive compulsive geek, I arranged my Inbox. I got the GChat window to the right, and switched-off people’s status messages. I minimized the font as much as possible and made sure everything was perfect.


I had earlier decided to try this as an experiment for just a week, and see if I could adjust to it. And not only did I adjust to it, I took to it, like a fish takes to water. After using this setup for almost three weeks, I do have some observations.

Firstly I do miss GTalk. I miss the feature of File transfer that it offers. I miss the way that you can just alt-tab your way through different conversations. Secondly the most annoying thing about GChat, is that when you are IM’ing with someone, and they send you a message: Their window keeps on flashing. It isn’t enough that you have read it. You actually have to go and click on it with your mouse. For me, Gmail was a Keyboard paradise, where I could do everything without touching a mouse, and now I constantly have to use a mouse.

Another thing is that my chatting has decreased. This is because even though Gmail will always be open in one of the tabs in Firefox, it usually doesn’t have focus. I always have Firefox as well as Internet Explorer Eight open. Besides that I will usually have a window of ArcMap open, and atleast two different IDE’s open. If this wasn’t enough, sometimes I am not even working on the same machine. I might be working on a virtual machine or might be working on some other Machine through Remote Desktop/VNC.

This has been doing wonders for my productivity, but I am not sure how much it is doing for my social life and friendships. If you ping me on GChat, there is a big chance I might actually not read it, even though I am sitting right in front of the desktop. Compared to this, the Gtalk windows were prominent and sometimes grabbing attention, even though I was working in Visual Studio in full screen mode. And often at the end of the day, I want to pick up from the same spot the next day. Hence I do not disturb my setup; I just close Firefox so that next day it opens up with the same tabs.

So if I have missed any of your messages, I am truly sorry. Don’t take it the wrong way. It wasn’t personal.

Will in continue to use Gchat? The answer is twofold. In office I will, but at home I can’t live without Gtalk.

Social Networking and Me

With everyone getting onto the social networking bandwagon, I think it is high time I explain why I’m still very skeptical about the whole thing.

Being an Internet freak, I must confess that I am quite an old hand at these Social Networking sites. I was member of Orkut in mid 2004, when it was just beginning out, and I had very few real life friends on it. I was on Facebook, when it was opened up to the general public, just as everyone else was getting on to Orkut.

Some people have called these sites, Walled gardens, but that is not why I don’t get them.
The main problem I have with these sites is the absence of compartmentalization and the possibility of only one profile, which may or may not be public.

Let me explain. Being a wannabe polymath, I lie at the intersection of almost disjoint social circles.
I have interests ranging from Geeky ones like Physics and maths to not so geeky ones like Biking and Hindi movies. Besides that, I also have professional interests like .Net and GIS.
And my social contacts tend to lie in such kinds of broad categories. I know what you are thinking. These are not my social contacts. These are people I know.

Ok, then lets talk about my social contacts. I could basically categorize them as people from my primary school, those from my secondary school; Some from my JC while others from Xaviers, and some more from SIG. And this doesn’t even take into account the friends I have first met randomly: Either online, or in person via other people I have known, or just plain randomly.

Friendship is rarely transitive, when it comes to me, and most of my friends hardly know any of my other friends. I have such narrow and small sets when it comes to interpersonal relationships, that with many people I share no other common friend.
In this kind of situation, the usual purpose of S.N.S. is wasted on me. I can hardly put up pics and have 20 different friends tagged in it with 20 more commenting.

Further more social network is all about sharing. And what I have to share totally depends on my mood at that time. And what is on my mind at that moment will not be interesting to all my friends. Let me try to explain.

• There are certain fora I frequent, where it is perfectly alright to type out DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS, while at others I could easily begin with Fuck You, two of my friends died… If I did this in real life, or did it somewhere else, people might question my sanity.
• Often during the weekdays, I am mostly thinking about work, or have found an interesting thing while programming. If I share that, most people wouldn’t get it.
• This is not only with me. If A friend sends me a link to her companies website, asking me to check out their product, I will mark it as spam in a jiffy.

The other major problem I have, is with my worlds colliding. I show a very different face to different kinds of people. Many people think I am quite serious and decent. I don’t want to relieve them of this illusion, and would rather not show them my pictures taken while drinking and other wild things.

I think the problem stems from the fact that we as a society have shifted from having deep meaningful relationships with a few people, to having shallow relationships with a lot of people. The times when a person was your best friend, just because he lived next door,are gone. Gone are the days when your friends group, of 10 to 15 people, would do something together and be happy with that.

We now tend to select friends based on common interests and shared ideals, rather than physical proximity. And our Friendship with everyone is different. We are infact a different person for each one of them.

The Loneliest man

It was 40 years ago, from today that a man first took a step on the Moon. His name was Neil Armstrong. He was shortly followed by the first man to pee on the moon, Buzz Aldrin. But there was a third man, Michael Collins, the Command Module pilot that we often forget.

I consider the Apollo Space program to be Mankind’s greatest Achievement. At one time over half a million people were working towards a single goal, - of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth- as JFK once poetically said. Never before and never again in the history of the world, has so much mental and creative energy been channelized for such a good cause. I celebrate this day, not only for the three men who were up there, but also for these lakhs of people who worked towards this goal.

No doubt, this day will be remembered in all eternity for this one man:


Not surprisingly, very few photographs of him on the moon exist, as he was the main photographer, and almost all the photographs that we have from the Apollo 11 trip on the moon are of Buzz Aldrin taken by him. This is sort of like how most of the photographs I have, are of different people taken by me. But I digress.

The person I most identify with was actually Michael Collins.
One of the most accomplished Fighter pilot, he was the Command Module pilot. The Command Module(named Columbia) was the Mothership, and orbited the Moon while the lunar Module went to the moon, and part of it came back. The two moonwakers would then re-join the Command Module, and the Ascent stage of the Lunar Module would then be jettisoned. The three astronauts would then reenter the earth’s atmosphere within the Command Module, after it separated from the Service module.

Atleast that’s how it was supposed to work in theory. No one was 100% certain, since the whole system was never completely tested. The Lunar Module had never landed on the moon before Apollo 11, and even the engineers were not sure if the Ascent stage of the lunar module would successfully blast off the surface of the moon at the correct velocity, to mate with the command Module.

As two Astronauts left in the Lunar Module, Collins was in the Columbia, as it went around the moon. The important thing to remember is that when you are orbiting the moon, there will be times when the moon will be in-between you and the earth. In such a position, you are out radio contact. You are truly alone. And you don’t know if your two fellow astronauts will make it back.

I can only imagine what must be going through his head, as he patiently waited in Columbia, hearing nothing from the earth, or from his teammates, as they landed on the Moon. I have always known that in many ways, Coins has the hardest job. He could have faced returning alone to the earth if the two explorers in the lunar module did not make it back.

But thankfully, it all worked out well, and Collins could take this wonderful picture, showing the earth, the moon, as well as the Eagle.

I do not think that any other picture captures the beauty of the Space programme as well as this one.

The Problem in Answering Questions

Richard Feynman had the uncanny talent for making things so simple, that anyone could understand it. He could look at anything and figure out what is critical to understand it, and remove everything else out of the equation. This comes out somewhat from being trained in science, but he had that special gift, which was beyond all of this.

I have often felt very inferior and stupid whenever I have heard him talk, or read his writings. And I mean this in a good way. He was a magician, and if you looked at him talk, or try to get an insight into his way of thought, you would soon realize that he thought about things in a way that no one else every thought about them. I forget who said this, but someone once said that if you ask Feynman how an electron would behave in a certain situation, he would ask himself: “If I were an electron, what would I do in this situation?”

All scientist in specific and thinkers in general, have a framework for their thought process. You generally, have a framework, upon which you work. You build upon what you know, and use your existing knowledge to understand something new.

In many fields, not only science, the framework itself is so large, that understanding only the basics itself is a lot of work. Take an Accountant for example; He or she will have to know the 3 basic rules of Accountancy. On top of that you need to know your local laws. Add to it the conventions followed in your industry and so forth. Very soon, the knowledge base evolves to a humongous size. No wonder, filing your tax returns is such an annoying task. I should know; I did that just yesterday.

Something similar happens when one is describing basic physics to a lay person. I have no problem understanding how EM fields propagate, and how light is given out by an electron, when it comes down to ground state from and excited state. I have no problem accepting the fact that light is neither a wave nor a particle, but can behave like a wave under certain circumstance and like a stream of particle under some other circumstances. I can sleep perfectly at peace, knowing that particles themselves behave wave-like in some circumstances.

But when you try to explain these kinds of things to the lay person, it is often very difficult to convey the exact meaning without taking too much out of it. We tend to take these things very trivially, because they have become a part of our framework of thinking.

Here is a video of the great master himself explaining this, and telling us why he prefers not to cheat, by dumbing down the explanation.

Feminism

I was watching this Song on a show on Etv Rajasthan. The name of the programme was Bhule Bisre Geet and the name is perfect. Such a song can never be made today; Not only because there is no one like Shakeel Badayuni, but because such a song would never be accepted today.
Listen to the lyrics of this song:

n jaao saiyyaa, chhudaa ke baiyyaa
kasam tumhaaree main ro padoongee
machal rahaa hain suhaag meraa
jo tum naa honge, to kyaa karungee

If a song had similar lyrics today, the feminists would raise a furor over this. How dare a woman define her happiness by a man? How dare her world revolve around a man?
This in short is my main problem with the feminist movement. With the sexual revolution in the 60’s, women have progressed a lot. Let us get this straight. I am not against women’s liberation and emancipation.

What I am against is the ill-effects caused due to women blindly trying to do everything that men do. It is like they selected the worst things that men do and then tried to do it.
People might not agree with me, when I say that Family is the most important part of life. Life is too short to live it selfishly, in an individualistic life. The Glue holding two people together is the knowledge that they share a world, which is different from the whole world, and is experienced by only those two.

One of the requirements for that to happen is that their worlds revolve around each other. This is true for the man, as well as the woman. And if that doesn’t happen, then the motivation for both of them to remain in the relationship is affected. So is the passion, as well as the commitment.

One must be happy for all the growth in our society and culture; But not for a moment must one think that everything has been for the better.