Kishore’s friends were doing the Sakleshpur-Yedakumeri-Subramanya railway trek. Having long wanted to do it too, I tagged along. There were 34 people in the group (of them 15 girls) so we pretty much had the bus to ourselves. We started at Donigal, a few kilometres from Sakleshpur, where the road conveniently passes within a couple hundred metres of the tracks.



This section of track has been abandoned for several years, apparently for conversion from metre to broad gauge. It is now a popular trekking route with both bus drivers and railway workers accustomed to the sight of backpack wielding youth.

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I was in rural Maharashtra last week, wondering what use they could have for computers. It’s not an easy question considering the state of infrastructure.

Bus driver and conductor got off to hand-crank this petrol pump. It must have been hard work, considering the crank fell off often and driver and conductor took turns at it.

The trip left me longing for another round of Cambodia.

My phone’s memory card died this morning. The phone won’t take it anymore; the desktop complains of data corruption and inability to format it. It’s still under warranty, but I’m not at all looking forward to the circus that is the claims process. Sigh! What is it with me and cell phones? Fourth hit in as many years. Thankfully, the phone itself is spared this time.

Maybe if I put it in a different card reader and try again…


Revellers lead a marriage procession in Jayanagar 4th T Block. At least they’re having fun.

For my first day at work, I hitched a ride with a colleague who lives half a kilometre from home. She has a car and a driver. We discussed my commuting with her daily. That day I got motion sickness and a queasiness that lasted most of the morning. Not sure what to make of it, I took the bike the next day, and there was no motion sickness. The day passed well. Did it have to do the nature of the vehicle? I confirmed it over the next week and a half:

Chauffeured car ⇒ Motion sickness.
Bike ⇒ Dirt on the face, but excellent mental faculties otherwise.

Why is a car problematic? Is it because given how uneven Bangalore’s roads are (when not potholed), a car’s breadth tends to magnify lateral unevenness and thereby toss passengers around, while bikes are affected only by potholes, which too are easily manoeuvred around? That seems plausible.

Anyway, that saw the end to my fanciful visions of being a high powered executive wielding a laptop in the back seat of a chauffeured car, firing off memos and crunching cash flow projections before even getting to work each morning. I’m going to ride a bike just like every other code coolie in this city.

Which is not very optimal. The ride from Bannerghatta Road to Rajajinagar is about 20km in each direction, taking the Outer Ring road to Mysore road, and then on up West of Chord road. That’s the route with the widest roads and the fewest traffic lights. The best time is 40 minutes. In rush hour, it’s up to 90 minutes. Losing between two and three hours a day to a stressing commute doesn’t seem like a great way to achieve a healthy work-life balance.

I like to believe that my day is comprised of three types of activities: production, consumption and administration. Production is making things. Getting things done. That which results in a sense of accomplishment. That which causes your boss to give you a pay hike. That amorphous factor labelled ‘Productivity.’

Consumption is learning. Fuel for growth. Consumption comes with a sweet sense of understanding, of enlightenment. Consumption is habit forming. It’s addictive. But consumption, though good, is rarely higher priority than production.

Administration is everything else. Brushing your teeth, sitting in traffic, paying utility bills. That stuff that bogs you down. That which you’ll never look back on and recall as a highlight of your life. Some administration is good for you (brushing teeth). The rest (paying bills, etc) is best outsourced to someone who sees it a productive act.

Which brings us back to traffic. My attempt at outsourcing the ride isn’t panning out, so I have to find other means to convert a period of administration (getting to work) into one of production or consumption. On a bike, I can’t make secondary use of my hands or eyes, but I can use my ears.

Sony’s very affordable MDR-EX51 in-ear headphones do a great job of cutting out noise from traffic. Together with an iPod’s worth of quality podcasts and audiobooks and off-peak travelling times, I barely feel the commute. Maybe I’ll invest in an Audible subscription.

Or maybe I’ll take sriniram’s suggestion to relocate. It’ll let me step up from consumption to production. He just moved and now walks across the road to work.

I went to Futura on KR Road, where they printed me an A3 sheet full of stickers. Eighteen copies. Anyone who wants one, ask me IRL. First come, first serve.

My laptop will be three years old two weeks hence. When it goes to its grave, I want it to go bearing signs of a full life. There is much acreage inchage left to be covered. The sloppy positioning is intentional, though I wish the Helvetica sticker were somewhat more artistically sloppy.

Because LiveJournal doesn’t allow fancy mouseovers and stuff, click for the picture’s home at Flickr where there be notes.

PS: No, I will not disgrace my desk with something as fuddly duddly 2.0-named as “MacBook Pro”. This isn’t even April 1. Apple should know better than to make such cruel jokes.

As the plane lifts off from the runway, you’re reminded of how tiny Singapore is: the entire country fits in your aircraft window. No wonder it’s so well managed.

In the picture here are Sentosa, Singapore’s official recreational getaway island; the harbour; and part of downtown Singapore, literally “down”, for the central business district is at the southern end of the island. The strip of land you see at top left is Indonesia.

Changi airport was the first I’ve been where they do not x-ray baggage prior to check-in. Must be done after. The airport’s pretty nice, but I much prefer Bangalore’s: it’s just a little building with an aeroplane on one side and a taxi on the other. No endless miles of dragging your luggage past duty free shops that you don’t want to give your money to; no gate after gate leading to planes not waiting for you; no queuing up at position #8 on the runway, sitting there hot and sweaty, waiting for takeoff, when the air conditioning will finally kick in and overpower your neighbour’s armpits.

Bangalore’s is a no frills airport that specialises in the business of getting people in and out of the city. There’s only one gate and miraculously it’s always the one where your flight is waiting. Okay, there are two, but they barely count as distinct gates.

I like small airports for the sheer quickness of passing through them. I will miss Bangalore’s when the forces of metropolisation finally take it down.

First impression on arriving in Bangalore: “My god, what have they done to the roads?” Then I realised they had done nothing at all, the roads were just like when I had left. What’s changed are my expectations of them.

Popagandhi has nifty pictures from the streets of Kuala Lumpur. Check them out, yo.

I’m experimenting with funky panorama software that automagically figures out how to align images. It’s the coolest thing I’ve seen yet. I may even register.

But it’s got limits; anyone know how to cure this one’s distorted perspective? The perspective correction tool in Gimp doesn’t understand that I want to slim this one down the middle.

This structure is one of four towers surrounding the main shrine at Ta Keo. The ground level you see here is two or three floors above actual ground level.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Angkor Wat at sunrise.


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The Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, Bangkok. Because of the surrounding pillars, this is the only point from where you can see the entire structure. The resulting accumulation of tourists makes it appear like paparazzi hounding a celebrity.

Tyre puncture. I watched as the kid laboured to unscrew wheel and disconnect brake and chain, danced on wheel to retrieve tube, proudly displayed the sharp-tipped screw, and inflated tube and immersed in a basin of water to find the leak.

I stopped watching, trying to make this picture, while he patched the leak, tested, and again danced on the wheel to reinsert the tube. Then he had the unenviable task of putting the wheel back on the bike. Tightening the screws was especially calling on his little hands.

Fifteen rupees and half an hour. I’m no automobile enthusiast to understand the consequences, but I think tubeless or steel-belted radial tyres make sense for two wheelers. It’s simpler to use a better tyre than to fix the road.