Many of us have the complaint of not getting enough work done because of distraction during the normal work hours - through the meetings, small events, coffee breaks or just because of the fact that a colleague has lot of questions. I typically solve these by either working for a couple of hours in the morning from home and/or working late nights, when not many are around.

But it looks that those are all old-fashioned way of doing things. Based on the routine delays of flights to / from the Delhi airport (read here, and here), it looks that taking a flight is the latest cool way to get work done. You still have to reach the airport fairly early because 1) you wouldn’t know about the exact delay until you reach the airport and 2) you also wouldn’t rememeber how many marriages (36,000? 18,000?) are happening in Delhi on that day - potentially increasing your travel time to the airport by 4 times. At least I am careful - after my parents missed their flight last week. 

So - if you haven’t already - it’s time now to prepare yourself to spend some time on the airport and get the work done when there isn’t enough (forced) distraction. I did that yesterday when I spent over 6 hours at the Chennai airport waiting for my Indian Airlines flight to Delhi. And since many people were trying to do the same, I had to sit on the floor with my laptop cable plugged to the power-point. It was funny this time - not sure if I will find it funny next time!

By the way - it did appear to me that I was more efficient at the airport than I have been in the office for the last few days

In the first quarter of 2005, after I had just returned from the US to India for good, I was making my first air trip out of Delhi and was flying Jet Airways when I met a friend of mine who had chosen to be an entrepreneur immediately after the engineering school. He was flying Air Deccan and made a statement that “Now that you will be an entrepreneur, Low Cost Carriers are going to be your friend.” I had smiled at his statement and continue to do so as I realize the experience behind what he said then. In the past 20 odd months, LCC airlines have indeed been a good company for me. Almost 75% of my domestic trips (personal and business) have been on the so called No-frills airlines - primarily on Air Deccan and Spicejet. 

Without doubt, LCC Airlines have been a tremendous boon to the Indian Aviation industry. Not only these have made the air travel a lot more affordable but have also provided much better air-connection between various cities. Just a week back, I took Indigo Airlines - yet another low cost airline. Following were the good things about the same:

1. The return ticket to Chennai was 2/3rd the cost of any other full-fare airlines, and I bought the ticket 3 days in advance.
2. The planes were pretty new - which is very different from how it is with Air Deccan. Spicejet also has pretty good planes.
3. The flights were all on time - contrary to how other full-fare carriers (Sahara / Jet) operate.
4. The air-hostesses were, I must say, pretty cute (Kingfisher will probably be the only competition - with the balance tilting heavily in the favor of Kingfisher). I heard that the group behind Indigo Airlines also has a modeling school. I haven’t verified that but if that is true, I will only say that they have taken good care of supply-demand equation.

However, there are still certain things left to be desired in these low cost airlines. And that is the availability of decent food item that can be bought. Indigo had nothing other than cookies and cold-drinks to sell - that’s pretty lame in my opinion. Why can’t they sell some more packaged, non-perishable snacks along with tea / coffee - I am willing to pay and so were others in the flight who demanded the same.

What’s up airlines guys - am I missing something? I love you guys but yeh dil maange more. It can’t be because of the human resources - the flight did have a decent number of air hostesses for the service.

I have been continuously traveling for the last 6 weeks. 2 Chennai trips, 1 busy US trip, a much awaited trip home for 3.5 - 4 days (with stop-overs at Kolkata) and now Jaipur Trip - is the maximum I have done so far in such a short span of time. There was a time when I used to complain to my folks that I haven’t been to as many places as a lot of other people I know. It won’t be too much of an exaggeration if I now say just the opposite - but with the difference that most of the travel has been limited to business.

We had been planning to organize a major team event since the last couple of months but kept pushing it till the past weekend primarily because we wanted all of us to be present during that big event. The trip started at 6 AM on Saturday (July 22nd) when we all assembled in the office and boarded a bus booked for the trip by us. That was just the beginning of the fun.

The first 15-20 minutes was quiet with everybody settling in as the bus departed to Jaipur. My younger brother Amit was the only person on the trip who was not from Tekriti and I am glad that he agreed to go else I wouldn’t have been able to. Amit was visiting me for a few days after he wrote his 4th year end semester exams towards his MBBS course. I could feel the unrest in the bus immediately after that as I felt people wanted more activity than what was happening there.

We begun with organizing the usuals - Antakshari and Dumb Charades. I was organizing the events, something that I have always found myself doing in a group - and so was having the maximum fun. The noise level was very high and I had to literally shout at the top of my voice to make myself heard to everybody in the bus. I had a bit of sore-throat and was asked to speak less (by the doctors - my dad and, even, my brother) for the next few days but the temptation to see everybody on the trip having a real good time was so strong that I defied the orders and pleas.

Here is the journey in pictures:

Everybody got seated in the bus preparing for the journey.

Last minute negotiations with the bus-driver who had some confusions regarding the payment. We had to call the travel agent to get it sorted.

I don’t know what Kapil was thinking here. The bus was pretty good.

OK - people had to get up at around 5 in the morning but it was especially tough for Gurpreet since he was partying till late the previous night.

We broke for breakfast here on the Delhi-Jaipur highway - oh well, the restaurant was inside.

We started to play ‘Mafia and the villagers’ and few people who were not playing the game tried playing a spoil-sport by disclosing who the actual mafias were. This single incident evoked the maximum laughter from everybody and was the highlight of the onward journey. Check out Sunil and Kapil standing on their seat and trying to look at the cards of those playing.

Amer Fort!

On the way to ChowkhiDhani. We had pretty bus conductors

Come on - don’t bother the conductors because there isn’t a prettier bus conductor in the country.

ChowkhiDhani - the place rocked as it showcased the Rajasthani culture.

Waiting for food! It was difficult to say No to the guys serving the food. Very authentic food - little too much for everybody. They gave me a roasted papad even when I stood up and clicking snaps of others who were still eating.

All in all - Jaipur trip rocked. Apart from the sight-seeing, the entire team bonded well during the trip (or so, I like to believe). Keep up the great work TeknoKrats - we will have many more such trips.

Saad has an awesome collection of photos from the trip. Don’t miss clicking the link - he is one exceptional photographer.

I have been doing a bit of driving these days in the Bay Area - going from one corner to another, meeting with clients and friends. Here are some links to share - I will write in details about few of these.

Attended BloggerCon and BarCamp, San Francisco: Verdict - Not impressed! BarCamp was particularly unimpressive - there hardly was any direction and the sessions got over by the time there was a potential of those getting interesting. 1st day at BloggerCon had some boring sessions - the 2nd half was much better though. It’s amazing to see so many ‘thinkers’ in one room. Meeting and listening to those people - I feel more and more that I am more of an executioner than a thinker. You just need to be in a different mode to cross the line and be qualified to call yourself a ‘thinker’. For BloggerCon audio, click here.

GoingOn sponsored 25th June breakfast at BarCamp. There were more than 10 sponsors for BarCamp but nobody sponsored T-Shirts. That is weird - we at BarCamp, Delhi were one of the sponsors for the T-Shirts and it was free for anybody who was there.

PeopleAggregator release announcement will happen at Gnomedex - I will also get a chance to be at the conference in Seattle.

My cousin, Siddhartha, have also started a blog. He has just gone through a few engineering exams and will be joining an engineering school in a couple of months. He talks about his experiences while preparing for the exams and the life during it and plans to talk about the life during engineering. Siddhartha - keep it up and continue blogging. You write much better than I had imagined.

Paavani had written a post on Tops a while back - I wanted to link this earlier but just forgot. Girl - it’s time to write another post - I love your posts. You write about things that not many people write about.

One of my close friend from IIT got married last week - I regret missing the ceremony. Animesh captures the mood there. Congrats Ajit and congrats Vijeta! One line that I really liked is: ‘Ajit’ means somebody who can’t be won and Vijeta means somebody who won. So, looks like ‘Vijeta’ won ‘Ajit’ - nice! I look forward to see you guys sometime soon.

I badly want to go visit Las Vegas again - I know that I won’t be able to go there this time. May be next time - or probably a client will invite me over for a conference there sometime soon Making a pleasure trip doesn’t seem to happen - anytime in the future.

Finally - landed in the Bay Area, California on Tuesday afternoon local time and catching up with emails, friends and other stuff. Everytime I come to US and drive on the roads here, I feel that traffic is the number 1 difference between the two countries: India and United States.

Anyways - I got to meet a couple of more people today before meeting Marc Canter in the evening and then heading out for BloggerCon tomorrow and day-after. I see that the the list of attendees is pretty interesting for the conference - looking forward to that!

Tekriti started on paper on Feb 7th, 2005 and I haven’t been home since then. My parents, brother and sister - have all come to visit me more than once but it’s been almost 18 months that I haven’t visited them. My mom says that I was much better when I was in the US - and she is totally justified in saying that.

So that I don’t hear it one more time, I have finally decided to make a trip home for a few days. I will be taking off tomorrow afternoon and will fly straight to Kolkata from where I will take a train home. I will have at least couple of hours free time (more like 3 hours) in between and I don’t know anybody there - so if anybody is in Kolkata and want to meet up, let me know by email. (I know this is too late a notice but I am just taking a chance).

It’s hard to leave the city, especially knowing that it adds pressure on the others at Tekriti but, it will be much easier for me to take a small break, be with family and come back rejuvenated and be more productive. I have postponed it long enough, I don’t feel right doing that any more.

I am flying directly to Chennai (and so are Manish and Gaurav) for a day for our meeting with the other TeNeT companies and will be back in Delhi the same night.

The other major travel this month is my trip to the US on 20th of this month. Gaurav and I are going to be in the Bay Area and Seattle and will be there for a couple of weeks. Apart from meeting up with Marc and other clients, I will like to meet more like-minded people in the 2 cities for coffee or something. So - if you are in one of those cities and want to meet up, please drop me an email and we can try to plan out something.

I got a chance to make my 2nd trip to Chennai early this week. I was there for a couple of days to attend a few meetings. The meetings, particularly on the 2nd day, were quite eventful and thought provoking and had left me drained. We had a couple of hours before the return flight to Delhi and we thought to go to the Besant Nagar beach and just relax (even though it was pretty hot) for some time.

Now - I am really a beach person! Mountains, valleys, monuments are good for a very short trip but it’s always the beach and water sports that fascinate me the most. I can spend days on a beach and do all sorts of water sports. Speed on water thrills me - hell, I even have a speeding ticket driving a water scooter (something that I am not very proud of!). Having said that - another fact that is true is that I loved Seattle, where I spent 3 good years of my life, too. And Seattle is anything but a beach place - it has amazing natural beauty when it comes to mountains, valleys. Probably the only bad thing about Seattle is the number of months it rains there! But - then - you get used to it and the Seattle summer more than makes up for all the rainy season.

But this 2nd trip to Chennai made clear that I had a very wrong notion about Chennai from my friends (both North Indian and South Indian) and I wouldn’t mind being in the place for even a few years. The other thing is that there are many more startups there doing some real amazing stuff - which is something very interesting to me. Just meeting and interacting with them opens so many windows with great ideas - and those are not always related to the stuff that we are doing - which is awesome!

Overall, I had an excellent trip to Chennai!

I am back from the New Year vacation. It was a pretty short one - just 3 days out of which 2 were weekends - but I did keep my promise of not touching my emails even once in the period. The flights, even though they were in early mornings and I suspected delays because of fog, were all on time. I took it pretty easy - ate at good places varying from road-side dhabas to multi-star hotels, had long chats with friends, travelled a lot in the auto-rickshaws and generally spent time with friends.

I am really drained out today because of lack of proper sleep in the last 36 hours but will be in much higher energy tomorrow after I wake up. Of course, I am still to come up with the New Year resolutions for 2006 except the one where I have decided to blog a little more regularly. Oh actually - I quickly thought of another one - changing the theme of this blog and utilize the space a little better than in the current one.

Now - before I head out to home - let me continue on to catching up with all the emails I have been replying since morning.

And, yeah, not to forget mentioning that this New Year celebration was a lot different for me. I was neither in any dance and booze party nor just chilling at home - but was in the auto-rickshaw trying to reach a place I was supposed to reach a little early. Definitely - a very different experience than all other New Years I can think of.

I am back in Delhi after a short trip to Agra. Agra is really big with monuments - all from Mughal period. Apart from the wonderful Taj Mahal, I went to see Agra Fort and the fort at Fatehpur Sikri. The 2 forts were used by one or more of the Mughal kings during their tenure as king.

Taj Mahal didn’t impress me a lot - I don’t know why is this counted as one of the wonders. But I think the same thing applies for a lot of other wonders also. I have also come to realize that I just don’t have an eye for recognizing the beauty in the monuments. Here is the magnificent Taj Mahal:

The thing that impressed me the most about Taj Mahal was its painting-like look. If you look at it from a distance, you don’t see anything behind that and it just looks that somebody has put a large painting there. It looks so 1-dimensional. I have often heard people liking a good painting by saying “This painting is so real” but I have never heard the phrase “This real monument is so beautiful to look like a big painting” - I guess that’s the beauty of Taj Mahal.

Some of the pictures from Fatehpur Sikri and Agra Fort:

The tour guides outside the Fatehpur Sikri are easily the most annoying guides one will come across. They will pester you to death if you decide not to hire them - I had an awful time keeping them away from us - and more so because they saw a white lady with me, an easy prey for them. I even thought of paying them once just to keep them away - the place really need to put some checks if they want to keep attracting tourists.

Nothing gave me more excitement than the thought of being in Seattle, the place where I stayed for 3 years after my graduation, after almost 9 months. I was really looking forward to meeting my cousins, who recently had another cute baby girl named ‘Kavya’, and the ‘gang’.

I was again late after the conference in Portland and decided to take Amtrak to Seattle instead of renting out a car. Business class ticket was only $12 more expensive than the general class and I was getting a free power point to connect my laptop to - a perfect opportunity for me to get some pending work done. Bhaiya (my cousin) picked me up from the station and it was already late evening by the time I reached his home.

Nothing has changed in Redmond and Seattle in these past months and I think that it’s highly unlikely that anything will change even in the next few years. I just happened to have a couple of hours with friends over lunch - though I really wished that I had a little more time to catch up with what everybody has been up to. I guess, like old times, it was again me who did the bulk of talking

The flight back to San Francisco from Seattle was a pretty entertaining one. My co-passenger was a girl of the same age group who was just returning from a 2 weeks Europe trip. She had a lot to talk once I initiated the conversation and she found out that I had never done tourism in Europe. Vishal again saw me at the SFO airport and gave me all the stuff that I left with him while going to Pittsburgh.

My long meetings with Marc on all the projects that Tekriti is doing with BroadbandMechanics was just about to start shortly and I was all geared up for that.

Coming up: Last Post -> SFO and back to India

P.S: This is my 100th post on this blog. I am quite thrilled to have reached this landmark