Trip to Bonn, Germany

I haven't had time to blog for long time recently. Partly because I have been traveling a lot. Just got back from Bonn, Germany. You can find some pictures here.

Some highlights of the trip,

• Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located about 20 kilometers south of Cologne and 170 kilometer northwest of Frankfurt on the river Rhine. It was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990.
• My hotel was called Hotel Beethoven. Everything in Bonn is something or the other Beethoven. Quite naturally as Bonn is the birth place for him. Beethoven is one of the most famous and influential musicians of all time. As some of you may already know, Beethoven composed some of his best symphonies even after he was completely deaf at the age of 20. Every September Bonn celebrates a Beethoven festival and even when I was there the city square had musical programs going on daily
• Mercedes must be costing a lot less in Germany. Every third car was a Mercedes. 95% taxi cabs were Mercedes! Never seen so many mercs and beemers in the same town. (not even in rich redmond where many micro$ofties have them)
• Every week there is a hindi movie on german TV channel. I got to see "Salam namaste" dubbed in german! :) Apparently Germans are big fans of bollywood movies. This was a total surprise to me.
  
• I got to travel on the cool ICE trains. These trains travel at the whopping speeds of 300 km/hr. That is 80 meters per second! One point I was sitting in the Siegburg station where I saw an ICE train approaching. Before I could take my camera out the train had passed the station. VERY COOL! ICE stands for Intercity express. The brand name "ICE" is among the best-known brands of Germany, with a brand awareness close to 100%, according to DB! Apparently some crazy teenager has already surfed the ICE. You can see that video here.
  

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 :(

Small things i thought I would miss about USA but am not

Okay, so these are probably the series of blog posts that many of you have been waiting for. I will start with the easy things first in this blog entry and then tackle hard more delicate things later! :)

Small things i thought I would miss about USA but am not..

1. Starbucks coffee.
I was never a big fan of starbucks but every working day :) I would go grab a cup of non-fat, no-whip, extra-hot latte or mocha. I thought I would miss it but Rupali's extra strong coffee has filled that void perfectly. And it comes non-fat by default too! :) Barista's latte is also very good although it is more like "flat white" coffee that you get in Australia and less like starbucks latte. Barista has been a good place for quick business meetings similar to how people use Starbucks.

2. Pro Club health club (by far the best health club in the entire world)
Yes I do miss it a bit but not so much as I had thought I would. Tennis on Sundays, tekdi on weekdays and swimming in Tilak tank every once in a while has been very good. I think lack of club facilities has been compensated with good company of friends....so far!

3. Food
Believe it or not, I actually thought I would miss italian, thai, mexican and just plain old american food. I am a big fan of fresh sub sandwiches and was sure that I would miss them a lot. I do miss them somewhat but so far it has not been an issue. Occasional desire for cheese can be satisfied by visiting local Pizza Hut! :)

...More things to be added as I think of them!

Lonavala villas

This photo is taken from pune-mumbai expressway in Lonavala. Due to monsoon, the entire lonavala area has turned into beautiful velvetti shades of green.

How NOT to pay toll on indian roads

All you have to do it belong to one of the categories listed here and you don't have to pay Rs. 15 toll! It's that easy :)

outlook feature request

Ok. This has nothing to do with return to india but hey while I have you reading my blogs why not make you read this too! :)

Here is a feature request for Outlook (Aparna B are you reading?). Wouldn't it be nice if as you hit send button, outlook scans your email looking for word attached (or enclosed or attachment), then it checks to see if the email has an attachment and warns you if there is none? It would save so many of us from sending those "oops forgot to attach, here you go..." type of emails!!! Do write a comment if you ever had to send such an embarrassing email to your colleagues.

day at the zoo

One of the biggest problems of moving back to India is how to entertain the kids on weekends. We are very used to having lots of open spaces such as parks, lakes and hills in a close proximity of our house in Redmond. Such places do exist here but are not within easy reach and are at least few hours drive away. When we asked other parents their response was that we take our kids to mall or to a restaurant or simply leave them alone to play in the neighborhood. None of these options are very palatable to us, yet!

So we took our kids to a local zoo, Rajiv Gandhi Udyan. This zoo is built upon a large area which also has a very nice lake, katraj lake. This entire area used to be outside of Pune but due to the recent growth of Pune, has now come inside of the city limits. There are buildings all around this nice zoo, some of them I would imagine have a direct view of tigers and other animals! I wonder if the builder puts that into his marketing brochures! :) Upon entering the zoo we were treated with this artistic map of the zoo. We thought this was a real map and kept on looking for the elephant exhibition area. In fact we hyped it so much that Rhea/Roma kept on asking for elephants. Only then we discovered that the map had nothing to do with reality and was just there as a piece of art! :)


The zoo turned out to be pretty nice. Here are some pictures of it,

























After the hectic two hours (?) at the zoo we HAD to take the girls to a place they would feel like at home.....Pizza Hut! :) You can see how much they enjoyed savoring the cheeses based on the smiles!!

hidden treasures of pune : Hanuman Tekdi and Vetal Tekdi

Even with all the urbanization there are still some gems in Pune. Hanuman Tekdi (tekdi == hill) is one such place. From where we are currently staying, Kanchan Galli (galli == street) one can easily walk to the trail. Comparatively, hanuman tekdi is pretty small. I can jog up to the top in less than 6 minutes! But then one can continue behind it and go all the way up to the Vetal tekdi (vetal==ghost) The entire round trip from our place to observation deck takes less than an hour and is my current attempt of keeping in shape! There is an observation deck on top of the vetal tekdi that gives you 360 degrees views of Pune and it's urban crawl. Very few people go up all the way to the observation deck so it is a nice place to sit, meditate and worry about global warming :-)

Here you can see the observation deck from a distance.

We also did a small family hike the other day and took Rhea/Roma all the way up to Hanuman tekdi. Both girls were so happy to get some open space to themselves and enjoyed quite a lot.

Does history repeats itself across continents?

They say history repeats itself but does it really apply to events across two different continents?

I have seen and personally experienced the stock market bubble (and the subsequent crash) in US from 1998-2000. It was the time when NASDAQ kept on going up! There would be an news item daily on how people are quitting their primary jobs and going full time into day trading! Every one, and I mean every one was trading stocks and talking about it all the time. It seemed like you couldn't go wrong, just pick any stock and it would go up and up and up...everyone (including myself) started believing that we can pick any stock and make money. NASDAQ doubled in those years! US dollar was running very strong against any other currency in the world! Real estate prices were soaring!!

Then as you all know, bubble burst NASDAQ came crashing down. Real estate growth slowed down. US currency started to weaken...etc. etc.

Now 7 years later, now that I am in India, it is deja vu time (all over again) :) for me. Sensex (india's stock index) has doubled in last few years and more than quadrupled in 5-6 years. Real estate prices are soaring. Indian rupee is strongest it has been against US dollar in last 10 years! Just check out the comparison chart between sensex and dow jones! This chart by itself shows why India has been so hot in recent years! You don't need a degree in finance to figure out that the growth at this rate may be a bit too fast!

Real estate prices have ballooned in last few years. Mortgage rates are at whopping 14-15% And people are still buying properties in speculation of making money. Pundits are saying that sensex will continue to rise because of strong india story...blah blah blah...there is a difference in being bullish and total bullshit! :) (hey i came up with this quote just now and I am taking full copy rights on it!)

I have seen it happen in US when everyone was saying that it won't happen...it won't happen. Right now, people are saying that it won't happen here in India. I hope that they are correct and that the history will not repeat itself.

If at all there is a downturn in indian economy, large foreign investors will pull out their money in a jiffy and the common man who has all his fortunes invested in this bullish stock market will crash and burn! I hope it does not happen! I hope history does not repeat itself across continents!

Two good web sites I recently came across. One is designed to empower citizens by allowing them to register issues that the web site promises will get looked at within 72 hours!!! http://www.OurPune.com. I am definitely going to register few issues and see if the promise holds up.

The other web site is actually pretty old by now but still worth a visit. It was started as a website to educate people about improving pune traffic. Check it out at, http://www.SavePuneTraffic.com

is anyone out there?

Is anyone actually reading my blogs? As I am finding out, writing a blog is very much one way activity. I need to know if you are reading my blog. If no one is reading it then I will stop wasting my time! :) So this is a request for you to enter a comment letting me know that someone out there is reading my rants!

Changing face of MY earth

Pune is growing without limits in every direction. There are HUGE buildings coming up everywhere you see. All this construction is an indication that Pune as a city is booming. However so much construction can also get appalling at times. As it is the infrastructure (roads, water, sewage, electricity) is lagging behind the old Pune population. Consider this, a vacant plot or even an occupied plot that sustains at most 20-30 people is used to construct 30 story building that contains over 150 flats, which would then host anywhere from 400 to 800 people. How does a city go from supporting needs of 20 people to supporting needs of 600? The building will take at most 2 years to build but how do you support a 3000% increase in capacity in just two years! And this is just one plot!!! When plots all around it are also developed at the same mind numbing pace, the future of the city becomes very bleak.

The slogan by Kakade city builder sums it all up, "We cannot change the sky" THANK GOD "but endeavor to change the face of earth". Yes, all builders are changing the face of earth here in Pune and making it a city that I cannot relate with anymore!

I am sorry but I am in very saddening mood today after having spent almost the entire day in a registrar's office trying to register our rental flat agreement. The office resembles an office from gold rush. People are there to get their property registered or traded or rented and to make money, they don't give a damn about the planet.

Here are couple of photos from that office. The second photo captures the mentality of people perfectly. (The sign in marathi says "do not spit") :-(

Daily mumbai photo

As I was browsing the web to find photos of recent rain havoc in mumbai, I came across this nice blog. The photos are excellent and I like the concept of blogging via photos. In fact I think I am using that style already in my blog partly due to the fact that it is very hard to come up with content everyday that is blog-worthy!

Monsoon shots...

Just the other day, I was returning back to Pune from Mumbai. Now it is the sixth straight week where I have travelled to Mumbai once every week. Wow!

On my way back in a rickshaw, I had my faithful mini digital camera ready to take some of these monsoon photos. The theme here is how bike/moped people deal with rain in Pune. BTW, the guy on a red bike with helmet is actually trying to reach for his mobile phone while driving his bike with one hand going at atleast 25 mph! I dont know how he managed to talk on his mobile phone with his helmet on, while it was raining! I was really hoping to catch that on my camera but my rickshaw could not keep up with him :)