Long and short of goodbyes!

So after almost a few months of knowing that my time in the US was limited, weeks of good byes with friends and family -- people i have had the best times in the states for the past 7 years with -- i finally bid adieu to the states (for the time being atleast) and am now in Oxford, UK. I shall be updating my experiences @ oxford for the next year or so now on the Oxford diaries (follow link on the left of this page for Oxford Diaries)...

Home? and SJS

I look out from atop (10th floor of the SAL hospital). I see the city on a rainy day. Just after the rain has cooled off the sweltering heat of Ahmedabad.

Suddenly a sense of belonging overwhelms. No, not the hospital, but being back in Ahmedabad, India – my native city. Rainwashed untidy imperfect buildings and bunglows. Chaotic traffic and string of cars parked by the side of the street with the chocolate colored wet mud serving as a contrasting base to the spectacle. A couple of rustic temples and a cow shed in the middle. Listening to an equally rustic Punjabi folk song on my ipod. Somehow it just seems to soothe the soul. I feel in a state which my inner being seems to remember from time so before, it almost seems a different life. A state my mind seems to be trying to remember and analyze but my heart wont let it. It seems to scream out to the brain: -- I feel just right, let me be!!

I know I will be out of this spell in matter of hours. Which is fine. It felt good to feel this way and it will be right to shake right out of it…and let life resume!!

Now to get to the real matter I wanted to write about. I am here on a very sudden trip I decided on a couple of days back. I am in Ahmedabad for a week attending to a family emergency. Someone close was suffering from a condition called Steven Johnson Syndrome (SJS): a disorder triggered primarily as a reaction to a drug. Though very rare and relatively modern and without a reliable cure, it is a disorder that all should be aware and cognizant off because it can be brought upon by the simplest of drugs like even aspirins and penicillin family of drugs. So just a word of caution to our pill popping allopathic friendly club (of which I am a patron) : beware and aware the next time you pop a pill as to what you are putting in your mouth ! Having said that allergies really are just a medical accidents. One you really cannot plan for. But just like accidents, you sure can take precautions to prevent them!!

Peace out. Later!!

A Full life?

The most burning question in my life for the past couple of years has been : What do I want out of life? It's one question that I seem to have struggled with OR enjoyed the challenge of OR been most often frustrated about OR been given a zillion different opinions and perspectives from people whose input I value OR lastly a question I have tried to make peace with.

Never though, have I gotten an entirely satisfactory and more importantly consistent answer. Though often recently I feel that one thing consistent about the answers is that they all seem to be grounded in my craving for seeking diversity -- of people, place and profession! The more I peel back the onion on this thought, the more I feel comfortable living with the process of contiually refining my answer to this question. I have what i feel is a trillion ft view of my answer to the question:

-What do I want out of life?

: I want to live a 'full' life!

One in which I have lived in places, met and mingled with variety of people with diverse backgrounds and have had a multiple professional tangents to my working life. I would want to have had a few careers before I am done - an engineer, entrepreneur, an artist, media person, a social activist, a philanthropist ... I would want to have had a few educational degrees in diverse fields and places - a masters, a mba, a phd ... I would want to have had lived in all the 5 continents for a reasonable amount of time before i m in the sunset of my life ... I would want to have loved and been loved by people whose lifes I would not have imagined I could touch ... finaicially I would want to have lived poor, getting there, obscenely loaded ...

.. n I would want to have done each of the above for a reasonable time enough to have lived it! That is a very doable list the way I look at it. Some could be done concurrently, others in certain planned 4-5 year slots in life. No - I am not saying life by a schedule. Infact I am suggesting the exact opposite. I am saying nothing I do can not be part of the plan. It would all fit in and make sense. Coz with the ultimate goal of living a 'full' life, everything flies as long as one enjoys it fully!!

I am just too full of myself ... aint I ?

The Oxford Diaries

Hey! Long time...i know!! Lets hope this time around I have a more consistent run of things with writing. I have created a seperate log under my profile, called 'My Oxford Diaries' (corny huh?!!? thats what I thought too :-)). There is a link to it under my links section. I shall try to log my experiences as I am literally weeks away from embarking on this whole new journey, saying good bye to life as I knew it for the past 7 years in the US. Reason I kept it a seperate blog is that I plan to put up a lot of details, pics and week by week account of my semesters at Ox and I figured its best logged seperately. So long...!

The magic of Web2.0

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

The Internet era today personifies this quote. A couple of decades back, it would be been considered magical that with a click of a mouse anyone could become a journalist, a photographer, a DJ or a film editor. As one blogger comments, “Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs were launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.”

Since the dot com boom and the subsequent bust, in the last two years we have seen the re-emergence or rather the re-evolution of the Internet in a new form. There is no one word or phrase which optimally captures the essence of this next way of Internet. However, the buzz word that has caught fancy the most is Web 2.0. Though yet fuzzy in definition, for lack of better word, that’s what I shall refer to the recent evolution of Internet as – Web2.0 and it is a development which has set my mind ticking like nothing else has in recent times.

An article I recently read summarizes fairly this recent phenomenon. It states: “driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity”.

It almost seems that the Internet revolution in the early nineties saw a deluge of software applications and websites all trying to somehow cater to the whole world at the same time based on their perception of user needs. The current revolution is more mature in its approach and at the very core has the concept of software as a service. It is more open, less controlling and very democratic in its approach. For this first time, the web as it has been in the last two years has truly been information for the people, by the people. It is a lesson well learnt and owed in no small part to the invaluable dot com experience of the nineties. It is almost as if after the dot com decade, there was the proverbial ‘alcoholics moment of clarity’ where it dawned upon all that user empowerment and socio-cultural focus should be the drivers of technology if it has to have an impact on the life of a common man. Web2.0 has triggered a social phenomenon embracing an approach to generating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use. It is exactly in these socio-techno roots wherein the power of this surge lies!

From a purely technical perspective, Web2.0 seems to be getting a little better defined, formalized and less ambiguous by the day. The concept really is of using the Web as a platform and data as the driver. Web 2.0 suggests a Web-centric source for just about everything: information, entertainment, news, weather, stocks, reference, pod casts, videos and streaming media. The surge and success stories are all around with the notable ones being Google, MySpace, YouTube, Digg and Skype among many others.

I think that being a technical person who has been awe of the whole Internet revolution from the very beginning, it would have been virtually impossible for this new revolution not to affect me. It excites me no end to see the Web2.0 consolidating and building upon what exists but revolutionizing the whole model to be much more user focused. I believe that great things happen in a truly democratic environment. It is a truly flat world when a kid in Fiji can voice his opinion and influence someone in a suburban part of a town in western India. It is a true social network when I can re-connect with a friend from second grade after not being in touch for 25 odd years. It is a powerful society when readers determine what news and articles they want to read and also comment on it via the same media for everyone to read. Web2.0 gives us all this and its just a start. The world suddenly is like a popcorn machine with different flavored ideas popping up from all diverse parts of the world and the well cooked corn is dished out. The world as a consumer then gets to savor whatever flavor they like. Pioneers and supporters of the Web2.0 have expressed this idea by saying Web2.0 is about glocalization. It is about making global information available to local social contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a locally meaningful fashion that is globally accessible.

The idea also excites me on a much more personal level as it means opportunity for me as for anyone else. It means that my long term dreams are more realizable thanks to this new face Internet. It means that the Internet as it is evolving today is the first ever ubiquitous, omnipresent, omnipotent, leveled platform on which I could potentially build something which could have the power to reach out to the whole world. It means that great leaders and personalities from our future generations will have a much wider impact. Can we imagine what it would have been to grow up in a world when we could listen to a live podcast from Mahatma Gandhi? Or witness Nelson Mandela 27 years imprisonment verdict? Or maybe we could have gathered enough critical mass of world wide protests to have reversed the verdict?

We could have grown up in a world where everyone in the world could be fortunate enough to relish my moms world famous ‘sai bhaaji (an Indian spinach based curry)’ by reading its recipe off her blog.

I am glad our children and future generations will and much more.

What they will not comprehend is that to me, it is nothing short of sheer magic. But then again, as the great Arthur Clarke noted, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic “

Dr. Singh -- true visionary

Just some of my favorite excerpts from a speech by India's PM, Dr. Singh, at an award function organized by Economic Times:

" I recall what Robert Kennedy had to say about the shaping of history, "It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." "


To all the successful entrepreneurs who have emerged from this process, my advice is to treat their wealth as a societal trust and manage it for the welfare of the nation at large. Lord Keynes, analysing the role of capitalists in 19th century Britain in his work The Economic Consequences of Peace said "If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a regime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community....(they) were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion."

"I would like to draw your attention to is one of even greater concern for the long-term well being of the nation. Millions of our fellow citizens are still deprived of the benefits of a fast growing economy. While the belief in a market economy is certainly justified, it must be remembered that markets serve those who are part of it. They have no relevance to those who exist on the margins of subsistence and who have neither the physical nor the human resources to participate in them. Our growth processes, while generating wealth and prosperity across large sections of society, have not been able to generate employment opportunities on the same scale. Agriculture in the past few years has not exhibited the dynamism visible in the rest of the economy but continues to support 2/3rd of our population. "

"Agriculture and employment generation can be ignored at our own peril. They can put at risk all the benefits that have accrued so far from reforms. We need to expand the meaning of reforms to include the reform of our education and health care systems. We need massive investments in education; in creating new and marketable skills; in skill building and vocational education; in the quality of governance at all levels of Government. "

"There is an agenda of reform waiting to be taken up. In the financial system; in agriculture, in infrastructure, in manufacturing, in banking and finance, in our educational and vocational training system, in health care, in government – at all levels of government. In no area of social and economic development can we, as a nation, afford to adopt a `Chalta Hai' attitude. "

" These are difficult tasks. But it is not these mundane matters of getting things done, and done better, that really worries me. What worries me is the mindset that restrains us, that constrains us, that holds us back. Reform is, in the final analysis, about changing mindsets. We must have the courage to think out-of-the-box. We must have the courage to think anew. To question old beliefs. To seek new pathways. As an old Chinese saying goes – a road is made by walking. We must learn to walk in new directions and create new roads to progress. I sincerely hope that the people of our great nation share with me this urge to be creative, to walk down untrodden paths, to find new answers to old problems. India is a nation of young people. New generations of voters and investors have been born in the past 15 years. If we do not address their concerns, if we do not meet their aspirations they will not forgive us. The road ahead has to be defined by their aspirations, and those of coming generations. The challenge before the political leadership in India today is to meet the aspirations of an energetic new India, and, at the same time, take care of the concerns of a less endowed, less privileged sections of our society, who are no less energetic. "

" We must all work together to build a new India of our dreams – a prosperous India of more equity and greater equality. An India of more creativity and greater enterprise. The two can go together. And they must go together. No pyramid of achievement and progress can shine at the top for long, if its base is weak and crumbling. We have to build a stronger base. A more energetic and capable social and economic base for sustained and sustainable economic growth. You, ladies and gentlemen, are the beneficiaries of a more open economy and an open society. You have benefited from what our country has been able to give all of us. It is time you contributed, in your own way, to building a new India. And as I said long ago quoting Victor Hugo that "no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come ... and the emergence of India is one such idea." We have come far and this idea – which was an idea then – is now an accepted axiom. Working together, working creatively, working wisely, I am confident we can realise our collective destiny as a great nation"

Seasickness, Woeful first impressions and parking tickets

Hi, Just ending an eventful day. (Eventful is my optimism speaking. For Realists read 'rough' :-) ). Started badly -- why? As I had to get up early thats why. Had a new hire orientation with the CEO of the company I just moved to in San francisco. The CEO was the last speaker and by the time she arrived I somehow had to get up right from under her nose in the first row as I had a dept offsite where we were going Sailing in the sea -- the San Franciso marina. I got to the pier late, running and panting (trust me, i dont lose those extra pounds soon, one of these days i am dying of a cardiac arrest :-) ). Well got there and guess who was I teamed up with to go into our sailboat. None other than our CTO. WoW..here is my chance to make amendments to the edgy first impression i must have given to the CEO. We started fine. The captain on the ship asking me to untie and shove the ship and climb on it as it moved -- luckily i did well there. Then came the tough part -- various nautical terms fend off, portside, jibbying etc later we were in mid sea-- one side of the sail boat almost in water, the whole jibby and mast majestically up in the air -- beautiful. And then just like that I felt this Knot in my stomach and started fallling seasick. Bad got to worse and I had to get off at a nearby pier while the rest of the team sailed on. There goes my first impression with the CTO too. Finally took a cab and got to work to pick up my car -- and realized there was a parking ticket to give my company for my drive back home....! So there you have it --Seasickness, woeful 1st impressions and parking tickets -- all in a day in San francisco. Attached is a short and informative link on seasickness. Good read if you suffer from it too. http://www.hmlanding.com/maldemar.htm