Traveling solo ...

Just 2 more days to go for the trip I have been looking forward to for so long - Leh!! The biking trip has been converted to a trekking, hiking, and reading/relaxing trip coz of some friends who ditched me at the last moment (Sumeet I'll never forget to remind you this for the rest of your life!!). Neverthless, I'm still excited at the prospect of being in the Himalayas after a long long long time. And I'm excited about traveling alone!

Now my parents, and family, and relatives, and friends etc etc all seem to think that a trip up in the mountains alone is not a good idea, coz it will get boring after a while. But the 2 days I spent in Switzerland exploring the area alone has opened my mind to the idea of traveling without any companions. I actually observed more and took in more of the scenery while traveling alone versus when I was with Ashutosh, where our heated conversations would overpower the scenery!! Not to say that I didn't have fun being with a friend - it is just that probably some conversations are better had when you are in a dimly lit apartment in the middle of the night.

I'm taking 5-7 books with me, and I plan to spend some time relaxing in Manali (2 days), and then in Leh (3 days), apart from the traveling that I'll do around Manali and Leh. I also plan to travel to Pangong Tso lake, and spend another day or two doing small treks in the area. I'm looking forward to meeting other travelers who were ditched by their friend, and are therefore traveling alone :)

And I'm still due with all the pictures and the stories from the Swiss trip - seems like I'll have to wait till I get back to the US to do that - the internet conn in the cyber cafe I use is awefully slow!! I'll try some other place and see if it's fast enough to upload pictures. Till then - bubye!

Violence in Punjab

It's frustrating when you fly halfway across the world to travel, and stupid people fighting over non-issues hold up your plans :( Punjab has been sealed from three sides, and my plans to travel to Himachal have been held up as the situation is too volatile to take a risk. I'm not sure if the ground situation is really that bad - I'm sitting in a cyber cafe in the heart of Ludhiana city right now, and it seems like any normal day. And yet you switch on Star News and they keep repeating some images that would make any normal person believe that Punjab is on fire. I think if the media shuts up for a while, everything will be normal; they're adding fuel to a small fire which is escalating the issue.

Predominantly it is a political issue, because whatever caused the disturbance (the Saccha Sauda Dera chief wearing robes similar to Guru Gobind Singh and administering a ceremony similar to the Amrit ceremony for the Sikhs) has happened a lot of times before. The reason why it didn't have the effect earlier as it had now is probably because no political party could have drawn any political mileage out of it. This time around it was different with different parties at the Centre and the State. It's being potrayed in the media that it's two different parties (the Akali's and the Congress) backing two communities in the dispute (the Sikhs and the Dera followers); whereas it is actually these two parties who are pushing the people to fight (and not just backing them). In fact, the way things stand in Punjab right now, Akali Dal is not even a representative of the Sikhs, but they seem to be giving statements on behalf of the Sikhs enticing people towards violence. And the same's true for the Congress.

I hope the situation does not get worse, because the Congress wants an excuse to dismiss the Akali government, and for that they just have to prove that the conditions are bad enough to put Punjab under President's rule. In fact the Dera followers have been shouting slogans in front of media cameras -"We want President's rule". And most of them aren't even in Punjab - they were standing in the Dera in Haryana!! Makes you wonder whether it's a religious issue or a political one.

Punjab has suffered a lot in the last few decades with violence - the last thing anybody wants here is more bloodshed. Will the political parties realize this and stop instigating violence?

The Swiss Trip - 1

It's been 2 days in India, and the heat has already started to make me forget the 5 days in Switzerland! I guess that's one thing about travel blogging - you have to write when you are in the middle of it, while you are experiencing things, because once you've lost the ambience, it takes very little time for the experiences to be lost from the mind as well. I would love to hear from other bloggers on how they keep up with writing while traveling, as I had problems in finding time (as well as internet access!!) while in Switzerland.

About the trip - amazing! Europe is a totally different experience than the US. The first thing that really hit me was the diversity. Now most people are going to raise eyebrows as you wouldn't expect this comment from someone coming from the US. But the diversity in US is different in a lot of ways. Even though everybody is an immigrant in the US, people tend to leave their culture and language at home, and adopt this culture called "Americanism". So while you would find people from "n" different countries at a given workplace, you wouldn't hear "n" different languages as everybody speaks only English. Also the body language, the topics to talk about, the slangs used etc. all become similar for everybody just because everybody is trying to fit in.

With Europe, well, I'm not sure if this is a European thing or a Swiss thing, you go from one part of the country to the other by a 1 hour train journey, and the official language changes. This is similar to India where we have atleast 50 different languages, but the unique thing about Swiss was that most people could speak all the languages prevalent in the country. That would amount to an average person knowing 3 languages other than English! That's some way towards globalisation!! In fact I met a 15 yr old in the train who actually knew 7 languages, and he hadn't counted English in those 7 as he thought he didn't speak it that well, even though he was almost as good (or bad!) as me.

Apart from the diversity, I found the people to be very friendly. That was surprising, especially because I expected more stares due to my appearance (the beard and the turban which are a part of my religion, Sikhism - people tend to mistake me for an orthodox Muslim in the US, and orthodox Islam is not something you want to be associated with these days!). I guess that's one offshoot of diversity - accepting people for who they are rather than judging them by their appearance. Well all was not goody goody all the way, but it was much much better than the US.

The people's dress sense - I guess that needs another blog entry! In Switzerland, even when someone is going out for a run or a hike, they would dress up extremely appropriately for the occasion. And the number of people in suits that I saw when I went out for dinner at a budget/low-end restaurant made me feel out of place in my faded jeans and t-shirt. While walking in Zurich, I don't remember seeing a single person wearing loose or ill-fitting clothes - someone told me that its a Swiss thing, to wear neatly cut and well tailored clothes! The clothes were expensive though - I saw a handwoven pair of jeans for Sfr 1500 (almost USD 1350)!! Some price to pay for nicely cut clothes :)

My trip itinerary was as follows: Day 1 - land in Zurich, get a room in the youth hostel, and trip to a nearby hill station Oetliberg; Day 2 - trip to Lucerne (called "Luzern" in German), a small city at the foothills of Alps, and a train ride to Lausanne in the evening; Day 3 - travel to the Interlaken area, and trip to the Jungfraujoch (the highest train station in Europe); Day 4 - explore areas around Lausanne and Geneva; Day 5 - train ride back to Zurich to catch the flight to India at 3:30 PM.

I'll write in more detail in the next post, in which I'll have additions from travel within India. There has been some change to my original plans of traveling in Punjab coz of the ongoing voilence between the Dera Sachha Sauda and the Sikhs - mindless political games which are hurting the innocent local people. Hope the situation clears up soon!

And the journey begins ...

Another morning, another move from an apartment, end of another era, and yes, yet another trip! I fly out to Europe at 4:45 PM tomorrow, and will be in Switzerland from 10th to 14th May. Ashutosh (a friend from undergrad who everybody *lovingly* calls guptaji) is waiting with his entourage of desi friends to show me around the place and treat me to the desi dinners that are ubiquitous all over the world and know no national boundaries :)

I'll try to keep the blog updated - depends on where and when I get internet access. It does not seem like the youth hostel that I'm staying at in Zurich (www.youthhostel.ch) will have internet access, but I'm just glad to have found a place that cheap in Zurich. I'm there for only one night, and after that I'm with Gupta the whole while (and hence, not paying for boarding/lodging!).

Now I really should get some sleep - will need that for all the last minute errands that I have to run in the day (it's 4 am in the morning right now!!)

Changes changes ...

Well after what seemed like an eternity, I'm going to be awarded another degree this Saturday. I'm supposed to be elated, on top of the world, happy and all those good things, but somehow all I can think about is finishing up work, and packing for the month of traveling ahead (YES, I'm traveling to India - AGAIN!).

Had been lazy about finishing up things, and now the situation calls for such drastic action that I might have to work/plan/pack while cutting down my sleep to just a couple of hours. I guess subconsciously I wanted this week to be this hectic so that the trip to come feels like a vacation - coz otherwise I was on some sort of a vacation for the last 4 months :)

Anyways, time to hit the sack - but keep checking out my blog during the next 1 month - I'll try to keep things updated here about the trip to Switzerland, Punjab and Leh (looks like a cocktail of places to visit in a month!!). And yeah, about the rest of the posts on the wedding, I'll try to chuck in a an hour or so to clear the writing backlog!

The MBA types

Haven't posted here for a while, and the short hiatus was due to the end of the semester rush. Now that everything seems to be all set for my graduation, I have time to sit back and look back on the time.

From my time at Tech (as well at IIT), the classes that I'm going to remember are surely all the management and the humanities classes. While both my grad and undergrad degrees were at 2 of the techiest (I'm not even sure if that's a word, but that sure conveys the meaning!) schools in US and India, the management and the humanities classes were supposed to provide enough spice to balance out the geeks. While I'm not sure if we really had that many geeks (considering the varied professions my batchmates from IIT are into right now), the courses still did a very good job.

Apart from their apparently important role as discussed above, the management classes were a very interesting ground to observe the students who came from varied backgrounds. Even though I'm not a big fan of generalizations, preliminary observations in a couple of classes could help you figure out the background of a particular student (if you were a keen observer :).
For example, the students in a management class (atleast at Georgia Tech) can be (roughly) divided into the following categories:

1. The engineering student taking his first management class: Most innocent and naive of the lot, this student can be seen looking with awe and amazement at the other more experienced students in the class who are raising their hand at every other question that the professor asks to provide their opinion on and participate in the "class" discussion. The student is wondering where he has been all these years, whether he's been living in the same world as the others who seem to talk of product-process lifecycle, NIBT, ROI's etc. as if those were their first words when they were born instead of mama-papa. The student is making notes so that he can look up the terms on wikipedia, while also making resolutions to start reading the economist, the wall street journal and any other hep sounding business magazines on a daily basis, devoting 30 minutes to each magazine.

2. The engineering student taking his nth management class:
More experienced than his other engineering counterparts, this student has started participating in the class discussions, throwing in his "comment" or "observations" on the case-study in question by pointing out some technical aspect of the issue, while trying to embellish his comment with some management buzz words like "portfolio", "economies of scale" etc so that it is more palatable to the majority. This student usually provides his invaluable contribution only once or twice during the class, after which he gets back to the research paper he was reading for the meeting with his advisor, or the novel that he had to look up from at the most thrilling climaxes.

Observe that the gender used for the engineering student in general is not coz of a bias in my mind, but a safe assumption on my part that the engineering student in question would be male nine times out of ten (because this is Georgia Tech!!).

3. The MBA student who was a techie in some previous birth:
This student appears to be the most attentive in the class, coz to him it's obvious that he is probably the only one who's following the discussion in it's totality. It is not sure why he left engineering (probably the people at his old job told him that he was upper management material, coz he was spending more time hanging out with his boss than working on his seat!!), but he considers himself as an authority on all matters technical, and all things relating to business. Never the one to forget manners, this type always starts its monologue with "In my *humble* opinion blah blah blah ....." to go on and completely destroy everybody else's argument, albeit not so very humbly. Having conclusively proved themselves the master of that issue, this type does not sit back and relish the victory. Rather, they will wait attentively to jump on the next opportunity to tear apart any argument, like a hungry lion devouring a deer.

4. The MBA student with a business background:
This type speaks a language that most people don't understand, but it gives an impression of knowledge. Majority of the listeners just hear the keywords like "second-degree price differentiation", "forecasting", "market research" etc brought together by conjunctions that make them sound like intelligent sentences. A lot of people will nod when this type speaks - a sign of support, that no matter what you say we are with you. Usually very active in the class, they become a little reticent when one of the engineering majors starts speaking for too long, and sometimes have to interrupt them with "can you speak in a language understandable by normal people?", usually meaning that you haven't really adorned your sentences with enough management jargon so that it sounds boring (and complex, and over-the-head!!) for the to-be managers.

Apart the above 4 types, there is another kind - these are the ones who come to class a little late, a laptop in hand, and give you a look of coolness like they've just landed from the coolest club in Atlanta while you were wasting time on the stupid case-study deciding what a fictitious manager Joe should do about his fictitious company AlmostBankRupt to save it from going while his fictitious superiors have given him a fictitious deadline to turn things fictitiously around. Even though they aren't interested in fictitious stuff, you know they are going to be surfing the virtual world for the next 1 hour looking at weird posts and videos from anonymous people from around the world!!

So really the management classes have taught me more about psychology than business, but neverthless, they have allowed me to get through all the technical classes by providing that much needed spice every day :D

The Spring Wedding II

Continuing the saga of love, emotions and melodrama, aka, my brother's wedding, I would like to recall a famous statement by someone - "Every wedding has a drunkard, a jerk
and an asshole!" Well my brother's wedding was no different - it was the real deal in that sense :) I wouldn't elaborate on who played those three roles, but I just wanted to point out that the above statement is a very keen and accurate observation.

Well with 4 days to go for the marriage, the guests started arriving. The first to reach was Mike - my brother's friend from work who flew in from the US. I went to pick him from the airport in Delhi, and as his flight was supposed to reach in the morning, I had to make the drive overnight (it's roughly 6 hours from Ludhiana to Delhi, depending on who's driving of course!). So the taxi comes to pick me up at 2 am, and it's the most run down Toyota Qualis that I've ever seen! Well,there was nothing that I could do at 2 in the morning, so I swallowed my anger and got in the backseat. In spite of the rickety car, I slept pretty much the whole way - you can tell when you are tired! Mike's flight had already landed by the time I reached the airport. As he came to the arrivals section, I waved at him, and it took him a couple of seconds to recognize me even though we had met a few months back in California. 30 hours is a helluva long journey, and that too for someone stepping foot outside the US for the first time. Poor guy, little did he know that the most trying part of his journey had just begun!

He had asked to stop at a hotel so he could get a shower before we drove to Ludhiana, and from the little survey I had done, people had told me to get out of Delhi before getting a hotel, and also that there were decent hotels right out of Delhi on the Delhi-Ludhiana highway. Well, we stopped at the first hotel after the bypass as it had been over an hour since we had been driving, and it turned out to be one of the most rundown hotels I had seen - more like a youth hostel. I had to make a decision here - whether to shop around for better hotels and end up with something better (which I wasn't sure of after I saw this one), or to take the darned room and let Mike have a shower (or a bucket-and-a-mug that he calls it now :) ) so we could start for Ludhiana sooner. I decided in favor of the latter, but only when I actually got into the room, and Mike got into the bathroom, that I realized how bad the hotel room actually was! The curtains and the carpet were torn, the TV remote didn't work, the sheets were dirty, and well, in short, it seemed like the room hadn't been used in weeks. I didn't know then but I came to know later that even the water in the restroom wasn't clean. But well, I played along as well as I could, explaining to Mike that this was a decent hotel, and even though he must have been disgusted, he took everything very sportingly. I figured - if he takes all this on his first day in India , then he can take anything that follows on the trip :) Good reasoning, but I bet he wanted to kill me that day!!!

And did I mention - the air-conditioning in the taxi didn't work either!!

Anyways, 6 hours of a rickety ride in a rundown Qualis with no air-conditioning, and Mike was all set for his first Indian experience. I had taught him on the way how to say Sat Sri Akal, hello, hi, thank u etc., and of course some curse words in Punjabi :) Back home, he greeted my parents with a Sat Sri Akal in perfect Punjabi accent. It was funny coz they were kinda unprepared for this, and were gonna say hello how're u etc. - stuff that they aren;t used to at all. That night we went for some shopping, and didn't let Mike sleep so that he wouldn't be jet-lagged. Some day it was for the American!!!

So this was Wednesday night, and time for the first ceremony of the wedding - a kirtan that was supposed to start at 2 am!! Now I know that the Gurus recommended the Amrit Vela, early morning twilight hours before sunrise, for meditation, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't the way they intended it to happen. Most people who made it to the kirtan didn't sleep the whole night, and would have gone home to sleep for a gud 4-5 hours before going to work. I myself wasn't up till 11:30 the next morning. Probably having something at 6-7 am would have made more sense - but then I'm not the authority when it comes to decisions like this :p

I think I'll need a good 4-5 blogs to actually reach the wedding day!! Seriously - after the trip it felt I had been away for more than a month, just cause of the number of things that happened, and the emotional roller coasters that it made me go through!!!