Travel ... These days!

We are going to be launching a travel blog - the idea being that people working here travel a lot and research their travel well and also go to unusual places, ,or go to the usual places but do unusual things, usually - so why not let our dear customers read about it and maybe even teach us a thing or two.
Getting blogs was easy enough and so was the design and development, however, this is the first time that my team is making something which is on the website and IS customer facing. Therefore the butterflies.
I caught a really cool movie over the weekend - Life... in a Metro. According to the movie, the following are true:

• The world is very small - everything is interrelated
• Almost all married men have affairs
• Married women are less likely to have one, , compared to men, but for the right man, why not
• Men are not emotionally involved in an affair, all the involvement is to ensure the woman does not bale out on them
• Women are always emotionally involved in relationships, whether they realise it or not
• Kangana Ranaut is hot, though she can not speak English very well. (Who cares - reminds me of "Talk!!!! who wants to talk!?!"

The music works wonders - Pritam (composer) and Syed Qadri (lyrics) reinforce their comfort and command over this genre of music which has been the domain of Pakistani bands. The songs take place in the movie, with the performers visible, but not part of the story with the characters going on with their lives.
I love Hindi movies!!!!
PS - So when you listen to "In Dino", remember where you first heard about it

My Life

I wonder if I have a life which is particularly interesting or that every one else has one like this. This trip to India had (note the past tense) suddenly opened up a lot of possibilities. There was a particularly intoxicating smell of possibilities in the air. I had to look away from the past and look towards the present for a fresh start and I managed to pull it off, only by focussing on what could lie ahead (
Alas (and apologies for the simile), what lay beneath blew up in my face, or rather, on the phone.
If there was a square one, I passed it so fast in reverse gear that I am not even sure how far back I am in the scheme of things to be.
(I know I am speaking in riddles, but this blog, apart from entertaining millions of readers all over the world and filling them with hope and contentment, also serves as a diary, and I need to jot things of importance down in some way)
What do to I now - this very moment, today, tomorrow and for this month?
Where will I end up?

The Heat is On

I saw the trailer of "an inconvenient truth" a few weeks ago and it has been nagging me. I will watch it as soon as I can get the time... In the meantime, there are a few questions which I wanted to put to paper .

1. How bad is Global warming? Is it really happening or is it periodic/episodic?
2. Can normal people like you and me make a difference?

I guess that short answers to the questions above would be:
1. Very. Yes it is happening. Does not matter if there is something periodic. We are definitely hastening it.
2. YES.

I think saving power, water, gas, fuel, food all add up in a big way. I wish I had numbers to show this, but this is the example which I can think up of -

Imagine the water that flows from the tap while you brush.

It has been sucked out of the ground, filtered, treated, pumped into the mains and then onto the supply and then to the overhead tank to the tap. And I let it flow. It then heads back through sewage, pumped again to be filtered and treated on its way to the river/sea.
Each of these verbs - sucked, filtered, treated, pumped has a carbon footprint because of energy needed to do them. The energy required per litre of water might be quite small in absolute terms, and CO2 produced might sound even smaller.
However, multiply that number by 3 times day, a lifetime of 25000 days and 3bn people, who live in urban areas and the factor is not ignorable any more.

The above example is something which people fail to realise. Given the number of people and the innumerable conveniences of modern living, there is a lot of energy being used up. By being careful and smart and just a little more responsible, it all adds up.

1. Saving water (look at above) by using the sun to dry clothes, using the dishwasher only when it is completely full (or better, cleaning them in the sink). My score - 4/10.
2. Saving electricity by not keeping gadgets on standby, tubelights or LEDs instead of bulbs, climb stairs instead of a lift, motion sensitive lighting in offices. My score - 2/10
3. Eliminate waste and recycle (this is something I do not do at all and need to work at). My score 0/10.

(By the way, whats with keeping shops and offices lighted long after business hours. Have a look at here and here. This is something we as consumers should make businesses realise - that a dark carbon neutral store would shine out more. always. I am proud to work for a firm which encourages recycling at the workplace and the lights are switched off at night, I would be proud to shop at a shop which does the same.
In Delhi, long long ago, they started charging for shopping bags at the cooperative stores. That made people reuse polythene bags. The trick was to price the bags high enough for it to matter to people.)

Update - Read another post about the same, hits closer to home- about developing countries and climate change here

Unrelated comment - Life continues to be more like some light with a tunnel fast approaching!

Dreamsailing - contd.

As I had referred to before , lucid dreaming could be quite fun. The one from this morning I will narrate - There was something I really wanted a few years ago but could not get it at all. I think I came close but then things went very wrong and have not really been set right since.

So, I get this dream last night with characters related to the theme above. About five minutes into the dream, I realise whats going on . Instead of being greedy and quickly tweaking things to the way I would like it to be, I went on to have a conversation. I really wanted to understand what was going on the heads of the others involved, and this was just about the easiest way of doing so. It was good while it lasted but I had to get up as my friends (visiting from India) were ringing the door bell to let them in - they just got back from Amsterdam (a 12 hour bus ride).
I went back to sleep immediately after that but the dream did not come back.
I was analysing the conversation and realised that the other characters in the dream were saying things which I would have wanted them to say. In fact, it is not so cut and dried. They said things which made sense to me. Actually, they said things which did not make sense to me. But, knowing them, in a way it did. In yet another set of words, if I were to imagine myself in their place, I would have probably said the same thing.
This means that a lucid dream is the psychological equivalent of a closed system (as it should be).
I could NOT have come up with something from outside. The source of information, no matter how fantastic they seem, are coming from somewhere inside my brain itself.
Ho hum.
Good while it lasted.