White water rafting

Last Sunday, we went to Rivertouch resort near Karjat. Other than having a good time at the resort swimming pool, I was able to do white water rafting in river Pej. The rapids were no where close to what I have experienced in Colorado or Seattle rivers but even then the experience was priceless.

it is not all punekar's fault!

Lot has been said about how pune-ites are bad about following traffic rules. Much of it is true but there also another reason for their collective behavior. I feel the following things cause some people to dis-obey the rules even despite their best intentions to do so,

• Traffic lights are not functional after say 9pm. I don't understand why they can't keep them on all night because what this encourages is the behavior where people think it is okay to not obey traffic lights at night!
• Many times, half of the traffic lights in an intersection are not working. e.g. as I approach SP college traffic lights, the lights are completely blank/not working. This leads me to believe that traffic lights in all directions are not functioning. However that is not the case. The lights in other directions are working fine. Once again this creates confusion whether or not I am supposed to stop at the non-functioning traffic lights.
• Just yesterday I saw traffic police directing traffic EVEN WHEN traffic lights were working just fine. So essentially the traffic police was OVER-RIDING the traffic lights. So here I am supposed to go through a red light because a traffic police is asking me to do so. Tell me that this does not lead to people not stopping at red lights.
• For the life of me, I don't understand the sequence of traffic lights in some intersections. Around the corner from my house (Girija/Kalpana BheL chowk) the traffic light goes green, then briefly becomes red and then goes green again. If you have stopped on the crossroad trying to get on to TiLak road, then you feel that you can proceed when tilak road light becomes red but then again it turns green! My logical mind goes for a toss every time I pass through that intersection.
• Do you have any more such supporting instance? if so please add it in the comments!
  

history about to repeat?

On July 10th, I blogged about how crazy sensex climb seemed to me. I wish I had shorted stocks since then cause sensex since then has been on a nose dive! See the graphics of it just this month. I hope rest of my musings don't come true! :(

India Inc.

It has been about three months that I am working in India now and I have been totally amazed with the talent that is all around me. Every one (and that means everyone!) on my team has a bachelors degree in engineering AND a MBA degree. Keeping the education qualification apart, my team members are smart, talented, dedicated and more importantly ambitious. With right leadership and work ethics, these talented guys (and girls) will be able to achieve great things. I am very bullish that Indian IT companies are soon going to make the transition from a back-office offshore type business model to top notch product model. The only bad part of working with such talented/young group is that it is sometimes hard to keep up with them :) I must be getting old(er) :)

Things I miss about not being in US

Now that I have already blogged about, "Small things i thought I would miss about USA but am not" it is time to write about things that i do miss about USA.....once again I will start with small or rather peripheral things before delving into personal things...

1. Customer service : Just before coming to India, we needed to do some mortgage related work in the bank. The teller gave us a particular time and was waiting to open the door for us at that exact minute. He promised to get our application approved in a specific amount of time and it was done in that time frame. He even called us home to notify us of the status.

Even now I needed to call King county records department and was able to speak to a live person within minutes. She was not only helpful but followed it up with an email so I could communicate more easily. Try that in any indian government office!

All fifteen of the things that we needed to take care of as part of putting our house in Redmond on rent happened at scheduled time; cleaners came on time, painters came on time and did the work in specified time and within budget, landscaper came on time, garage door repairman came on time etc. etc. etc.

People value your (and their time!)

I contrast that with my experiences in India, Tata Indicom person took our order and check. Then lost both the form and the check. Then didn't tell us about it for a month. Then wanted a second check before they could process our order...I made a feeble attempt to remind him about "customer service" but it was so blatantly obvious that he did not get it. It is not his fault. The culture itself is like that. Not that I didn't anticipate it and was able to manage it in the end but still it is one thing I would like to change.

2. Simplicity/non-showyness of people : While in Redmond, I would go to the gym where I would frequently (in fact every wednesday morning at 6:30am) see Steve Balmer. I don't even want to know how many zeros apart we are from each other in terms of net worth. But the very fact that I had access to the same club as him felt very good. Even in other places, I met numerous people who owned large businesses but drove non-flashy cars and behaved as normal human beings.

Here in India, I was on my way to Pune airport and suddenly all of the traffic was stopped because a caravan of some important person was passing by.......Membership to various clubs, poona club in particular; is regarded as a status symbol and people go there just to show that they are one level above everyone else. Everyone gives you advice on what car to buy that would suite my "status"....Why, why and why?

.... more coming later....

How much is enough?

As it might be apparent from my earlier blogs, one thing that keeps bugging me that I am making less money than what I used to....regardless of what other gains I now have, this feeling is still there somewhere! But in reality how much you make really does not matter but what matters is how much you make w.r.t. those around you! :) (The good old percentile methodology)

I came across this great article just today from New York Times. May be it was some type of omen that I ran into this article.....i like some of the following comments from it...

“Everyone around here looks at the people above them,” said Gary Kremen, the 43-year-old founder of Match.com, a popular online dating service. “It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7 million wondering what’s so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Or the article concludes with the following remark,

To Mr. Milletti, it all looks like a marathon with no finish line.

“Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent,” he said.

“You try not to get caught up in it,” he added, “but it’s hard not to.”

Monthly expense comparison

This is another post that I am sure many of you would-be R2Iers are debating/mulling/looking forward to...

Feel free to agree/disagree/point out missing expenses for me....

Obviously not included in this comparison are annual expenses such as vacationing etc. But trust me, I just booked a 4 night 5 day vacation to Goa, to-fro flights from Mumbai and all inclusive meals for 25k Rupees, you can't beat that price

To my surprise, overall the monthly expenses came to about 25% of the US monthly expense. Thats a comforting thought considering the 50% pay cut I had to take to move to India :(