Treks transform us every time in its own way!

Trekking is always a rich experience, when embraced with open arms it has the power to transform us physically, mentally & emotionally.

Gearing up!

When we planned our first mother-daughter duo trek to Chopta-Tungnath-Chandrshila trek, I was certain that I needed to be double prepared to have my 10 year old daughter climb a Himalyan trek, though a beginner friendly trek. We started preparing ourselves for the trek 20 days before with a 30 minutes daily fitness routine comprising of fast walk, jog, cycling and climbing stairs.

Whenever anyone enquire us about vacation plan, my response would be "We are planning to go on a trek, hope it goes well", Meera would ask "Why are you not replying as we are going on a trek and always say planning to go". Smilingly I would reply, "It's always a plan, making it happen is in Bhagavan's grace." Though we prepare physically, the mental & emotional preparation is much more needed for a trek to happen successfully. This trek made us understand the real meaning behind these statements.

Two weeks before the trek had tense war situation of Operation Sindoor by India, so we were not sure if we could go ahead with our trek. By God's grace, it became normal and got informed by the Trekking organization "Trek The Himalayas" that the Trek is on as per the plan. It's a 3 days trek, we reached Dehradun airport, went to Rishikesh after a 45 minutes taxi drive and stayed in Swami Dayananda Saraswati Ashram.

On the first day morning, TTH trek team picked us from Rishikesh and took to Baniyakund. It was a slight descent hill drive of approximately 6 hours. We stayed on a Swiss cottage tent and went on a stroll to nearby meadow. Meera enjoyed the weather, new place and excited about the trek. There were totally 10 trekkers of which 8 were ladies. Our trek leader briefed us about the trek and asked us to get ready for the trek by 1 AM the following day. You read it right - early morning 1 AM, which will let us see sunrise from the summit among snowclad Himalayan mountains. Both of us ate dinner, packed backpacks and slept early at 8pm. We woke up at 1 AM got ready and reached the base camp. Trek team gave us some cooked black Chenna dhal which would give us energy during the trek. Meera liked it and ate a full bowl.

Twist on the trek!
Geared with head torches, hand gloves & jackets to cope up with below 10 degrees, we started our trek at 2 AM from Chopta village offering our prayers by ringing bells on the Tungnath arch on the entrance. It was quite dark, cold and silent without even birds chirping sound. While I was the last one on the group to climb, Meera joined others before me. After 20 minutes, I could see Meera slowing down a little and a bit uneasy. She started complaining of stomach pain and sat on a stone. With initial symptoms I could understand it to be gastric problems and gave Digene tablet to chew. We both walked together accompanied with the trek leader. Within another 15 minutes, she again sat down with stomach ache. We gave her something to drink, comforted her and started the climb again. 

Can we make it?

After an hour, she had tears in her eyes because of stomach ache and just sat on a rock. While I soothed her, trek leader gave her medicine. We were halfway through the 5km trek. It was quite dark and cold perhaps 5 degrees. I prayed to Bhagavan Shiva from the bottom of my heart to give strength to Meera to climb up and reach Tungnath, for we cannot rest here in an open freezing dark mountain place. We can neither go down nor stay there as it would worse Meera's health. The only option is to keep going and reach Tungnath which has some dhabas (hotels) to rest. 

Grace of Bhagavan Shankara

While I asked her to chant "Jai Sriram" and motivated her that she can climb up overcoming this challenge, I chanted "Jaya Jaya Shankara, Hara Hara Shankara" deeply with a bhava that He alone brought us here & He alone can take us to reach Tungnath. By taking breaks every 20 minutes, with silent prayers going inside, we reached Tungnath around 5.30 AM. The dhabas were open then and we both sat inside a dhaba just 100 metres away from the temple. While rest of the team went to Chandrashila summit which was another 1 km climb from Tungnath, Meera slept on my lap inside the dhaba. Cool breeze made me shiver a little and I realized from a visiting customer that the temperature was  -1 degrees. 

Birds chirping sound, snowclad mountains amidst beautiful ochre sunlight, warmth of the hot piping tea made two hours go in a jiffy. Around 7.30 AM Meera woke up and after she went motion she felt a bit relieved of gastric problems. Tungnath temple got opened at 6AM and I cajoled Meera to walk 100 meters more to have Tungnath darshan. She agreed and extended beyond her pains to climb up to the temple. She could not remove her shoes and walk as it was freezing -1 degrees, she had darshan from outside, while I went inside temple and offered my deep pranams to Tungnath Mahadev for blessing us to reach his abode in Tungnath - the highest Shiva temple in Kedar range and prayed for everyone's welfare.

Thrilling solo horse ride

On our way back, Meera ate few spoons of Khadi Chaval (buttermilk & rice) and agreed to hop on a horse back on her way back downhill. Thankfully our local guide accompanied the horse and Meera as the horse climbed down very fast. While the horse ride took 40 minutes to reach the entrance bell, I took 3 hours downhill and eager to see Meera. She was feeling better and waiting for my arrival.

When asked about her experience she chuckled and replied, "It's the early morning trek that I could complete even with stomach ache & the solo horse ride on the hills that made this trekking special!" For me, the trek certainly developed endurance to handle emergency health situations with poise and developed a deep and strong bhakti bhava towards Bhagavan by connecting through prayers.

It is these situations that makes trekking a rich experience that transform us in physical, mental & emotional aspects. This first Mother-Daughter duo trek certainly will be etched in our memory forever. Meera also understood the meaning of my response,

 "We plan to go on a trek and Bhagavan's grace makes it happen".

Here is a short video on our trek and Rishikesh ashram stay made by Meera 

Ganga Arti - 

@Pujya Swami Dayanand Saraswari ashram, Rishikesh

Ganga Arti @Swami Narayan ashram, Rishikesh

Ganga Maa flowing mellifluously

Om Tat Sat

Transition from building Great Products @Cisco to Building Great Minds @GYM Foundation

It has been one year since I left Cisco to support my kids and family during the pandemic. Being in the industry & working for around 18 years, I was certain that I cannot be idle & I should not be idle. So, when I took the critical decision of leaving a great company like Cisco, I also had the plans of what I am going to do in the coming years, like

1. Enrich the thinking process of NOT ONLY my kids BUT kids at large.

2. Spend dedicated time to understand & imbibe our Indian Shastras from revered Guru Pujyasri Swami Omkarananda ji.

3. Volunteer and give back to society.

The first plan of enriching the thinking process of kids did not occur all of a sudden. Being a curious kid during my childhood, I used to scribble down many math patterns, small findings about shapes, formulas etc in a red colour diary! Unfortunately, I did not get a handholding or environment on how I can build that math interest further. So after few years, the board exams & marks took over & my interests faded slowly. During my Engineering studies, the math interest sprung again, however I could not relate my interest with real life or subjects I learnt. With the advent of Internet, I slowly built my passion on math over a period of many years.

Thanks to open resources offered by many renowned Universities, Educators around the world, I understood how math concepts are linked to real life and how it can be shared with children in an engaging way. The main goal of making kids "Think and Enjoy Math Learning" paved way to start "The Growing Young Mathematicians Foundation". The focus of the programs offered by GYM is to make kids think systematically; enjoy exploring and finding patterns & formulas on their own; get the skills & confidence to solve math problems. The monthly once open to all "Math Everywhere" event showcases how math concepts are related & applied in the environment around us.

It has been 10 months since I conceived the idea of GYM Foundation and took it to execution. Thanks to the parents and kids who believed in the STEPS in MATH concept (Systematic Thinking Exploring and Problem Solving) and enrolled their kids. When I hear below messages from the kids, I am glad that GYM Foundation is serving its purpose of cultivating "The Joy in Guided Discovery Based Learning" among kids.

From kids own words,

"I found this pattern & came up with the formula by myself & enjoyed the AHA moment!"

"I never thought Math is related to Music! Math pattern can be seen in plants! Now I want to know more about Math & how it's seen in Nature!"

Personally my transition from Building Great products @Cisco to 
Building Great Minds @GYM has been a satisfying & enriching experience.

If you are interested to Volunteer or Share your knowledge with GYM Community; Support this cause and help in taking it to wider kids community & build Great Young Minds, please comment or send mail to thegymfoundation@gmail.com

GHCI 2016 - a review

Conferences are always good to attend for many reasons like catching up with latest trends, what & where the industry is heading and of course goodies. Grace Hopper Conference 2016 was organized as a 3 day conference and is special for it had a theme of "Celebration" of women in computing which meant lot of technical tracks alongside motivational career track tailored for women. This is the first time I attended this 3-day conference. Being a family woman with 2 kids, I decided to attend the main 2 day event and skipped the first day event having some key note sessions. Nevertheless, I wanted to share my experiences and thoughts about this conference.

My inclination towards attending this conference was to understand the trend in Machine Learning and Data Science (ML & DS) and also in general how women are progressing in their technology career, the struggles & difficulties faced and how they circumvented them.

The 2nd day conference had following 4 tracks namely ML & DS, Open Source, Human Comuputer Interaction (HCI), Emerging Technology, of which I decided to focus on ML & DS.
The first presentation on "Data Science for Health Care" topic was about "Pneumonia detection using ML". It gave me a strikingly different perception about how ML is been used for pneumonia detection and early intervention. With the help of previous history of factors leading to pneumonia, doctors could now predict if a patient's symptoms could lead to pneumonia. The second presentation was also related to health care, where in the researcher deployed ML algorithms to understand bio-molecular interaction of a particular protein type. Though it was a bit difficult to follow, what made it interesting was, how she used SVM, Random Forest algorith,s on her dataset, undelining the fact that both could not extract much features and is not effective in prediction. I could learn, how to evaluate the applicability of a ML algorithm to any domain.

Followed this was the talk I was waiting for by our own Cisco Veteran Mr. Srikanth Narasimhan on how deep learning is applied to Business Applications. He shed light on how machine learning evolved over the decades starting with perceptrons and neural networks. However they had a limitation that those models cannot simalate new data from the learning and also could not scale.  Another main hindrance is the non availability of a large data set with labels to verify the output in real world.  This paved way to "Deep Belief Networks" which solved two significant problems seen in other methods, namely they could not infer information from the unobserved variables of dataset and could not generate new metadata from rich dataset. Unsupervised Machine Learning algorithms addressed these problems and Srikanth wonderfully linked this evolution history to the business application Diet Guru and explained how his team deployed RBM - an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. He stated how the next gen networks would infer, interpret and predict using such ML algorithms. Next came IBM's "Whatson" presentation - a ML based IoT platform with rich API's that can be customized to any domain like cancer research.

With more of DS & ML since morning, I thought of lending my ears towards Virtual Reality. Thanks for the decision for it turned out to be my best presentation in the conference. A team from Microsoft presented their Hololens product (similar to Google glass) and explained how its been used in treating person affected with autism spectrum. Besides the cause where its deployed, I was impressed by the way she presented the Hololens App platform, its simplicity and the need of apps to transform the lives of autism affected people. Though the underlying intention could be to sell their Hololens product and vouch on app developers, the manner in which it was put forth made the presentation stand out.

Following this was the workshop on "R & Python" in Predictive modelling. The handson session on R language given by Maheshwari from Cisco was very good, that I could grasp it instantly. Kudos to their efforts in sharing the preparatory slides beforehand which made me hit the ground running. Being already did Python and Scikit programing found the workshop to reinforce my learning. In crux, I understood R technically and also learnt that I need to open up, structure my thoughts and share the knowledge I have acquired in this domain.

Post Lunch sessions were from Flipkart and Amazon on how they are solving online retailer problems using ML. Some of them are identifying anomalous/rogue users, reviews & rating. It was interesting to know how Amazon benefited by using visual deep learning in delivering features like "Similar products/designs, recently bought ones" etc. The day however ended with an okayish session on "The art of secure coding". Perhaps after securing Cisco's Security Ninja belt, I might have found the session too naive.

The conference on third day had sessions on Career Mastery, Entrepreneurship, Management excellence, etc. I peeped into one of the sessions and found it to be all "known" stuff. These were the things which are perceived as "known" but hard to implement. I was looking for more practical ways to implement which I could not see them delivered on the sessions. So I decided to visit the company booths and demos, get to know their work and try my hand getting goodies. Below are the interesting updates from various companies.

1. GE Health care - It was exciting to know about Predix - The Industrial IoT platform which offers Data Science Analytics using cloud deployed machine learning algorithms. They claimed that this was already been deployed and used in big industries like Aerospace, Medical, Wind Power. Being inquisitive to know more, I had a 1-1 discussion and came to know how they developed Predix and their strategy for Go-To-Market. The platform is been deployed - Yes, however, it was deployed on the domains, where they own the assets. It is offered as Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) thereby incur recurring revenues. So they own both the risk and growth of the Predix, while slowly trying to acquire external customers. Very good strategy for innovation deployment indeed. (https://www.predix.io/)

2. Adobe - Adobe had a demo of their latest FREE products Photoshop Fix, Adobe Draw. Very easy to use and good to know to use it for creating my posters. (www.adobe.com/in/products/fix.html)

3. Alexa from Amazon - Alexa is a voice controlled IoT product from Amazon, something similar to Siri from Apple, Cortona from Microsoft. However, Alexa is a bit more intelligent that it could process complex commands from a person and act based on them. It can be integrated with other home appliances and also in industrial automation. Have to watch how this IoT product is evolving in the market. (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa)

4. Arm educational kit - Arm's educational wing demonstrated a ARM Cortex processor built by ST Micro which can be used as Robot. Their main aim is to reach to more university students by donating these products and give them their development environment to create products using ARM. I could infer that they want to get more students' mind share for ARM processor technical proficiency and also get their involvement in developing innovative products.

5. GE portable scanning machine - This is a path breaking device from GE health care which is a portable Ultrasound scanner device that can be taken to remote villages to perform abdominal scan, pregnancy scan tests etc. It would be a saviour to people living in remote areas. 

6. Microsoft bot - Got to know how Microsoft's bot framework operate and how easy it is to deploy bot for websites having social media plugins from various social media channels like Twitter, Skype etc. (https://dev.botframework.com/)

7. Cisco's Next Gen Network protection firewall - Last but not the least, paid a visit to Cisco's demo about next gen network protection. They demonstrated two wonderful demos about how our products safeguard the network threats. I was amazed to see Stealthwatch product (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/stealthwatch/index.html)  about the network anomaly detection using Machine Learning. It's exactly the similar idea which we presented in one of our Hackathon and later wanted to build on that. I wish I could spend more time on the Machine Learning technology on an innovative product that come under Cisco's market landscape.

Thanks to Cisco for giving me this opportunity to attend GHCI'2016
Fingers Crossed and Brains ticking - to present some cool ML product next time in GHCI?!

Learning is always a pleasure - this time car driving

Few years back, I was not interested and also reluctant to drive a car myself. As with every other thing in our lives, there was a change in my attitude towards car driving. Recently, I thought I have to learn car driving for very many reasons like to be capable of driving car during emergency situations, to be a good grandma cruising around the city with grandchildren in car (well, futuristic thinking that in future, car driving becomes indispensable like two wheeler now).
Okay, jokes behind, I thought it is high time to learn a new skill especially car driving which needs confidence and courage to maneouvre in a city like Chennai. So I decided to join car driving school during my maternity break. Thanks to my mother in law who encouraged me to learn and told she did not get those opportunities then.
So finally with a month's time frame I took car driving lessons and also got driver's license. The test for license was easy - just we need to start the car, pace it down slowly to pause and start again without stopping it. I thought how can they determine driver's capability with this simple test. Indeed it is a simple test, however, after cruising around the Chennai city, I could completely understand how the test is evaluating us if we are ready to really drive in the congested roads of Chennai.

So now that I have my driver's license am I courageous enough to start driving on my own? No, obviously not and that is because of the sheer traffic and the unpredictable circumstances that are happening on the road. Without confidence on us that we could handle these unpredictable circumstances (for example, while driving on a side a bike or a person from another side appears all of a sudden and goes in the wrong direction), I strongly recommend not to drive car. Nevertheless, confidence comes from practice, but practicing alone in this case is risky. So having a good car driver as my husband, I had to look up to him to guide me in driving.

I used to hear from some doctors, that they may not be able to do surgery for their own family members because of emotional attachment. Also, I have heard that astrologers would not prefer looking into his children's horoscope because emotional bonding may conceal foreseeing the negative things that are going to happen. On the same lines, I can say, having my husband as a guide to car driving comes with a coin having two sides. He knows your strength, weakness and can guide you appropriately. However, with personal attachment, he may want to prevent accidents, damage to car etc and therefore may not give you leeway to attempt car driving on own.
My husband though guided me well in handling many situations, his sudden out pour during my small mistakes made me more tensed and gets my brain blanked out. One such was in a signal that even after many attempts I could not start our car and get it moving (now remembering the simple test during driver's license!), his repeated high tone instructions made my brain blank and we had to swap seats. I became embarrassed and resolved to learn driving well and drive confidently.

Without time & focus, learning a new thing and especially mastering it may not be possible. So I decided to take 20 days off from my work (before I would join new company) and  learn car driving to the level I can drive it on my own. Found a good driving instructor who can guide and teach me in our own car. His first few words are "When I am driving, I should not damage others/properties even though they are wrong. However, I should also be assertive and display confidence." So with that thought instilled in my mind and the instructor's able guidance get me going. Within few days, I got confidence on myself and could also predict which places are prone to violation of rules. Therefore one fine day, when my instructor could not come for the class, I thought its time for me to venture out. I did take the route which I was familiar with, and could drive back home safely, albeit the car did stop at some places. But I gathered courage now on how to handle it. The moment, I reached safely, I called to my husband and asked "Do you know what I just did?", to my pleasant surprise he replied, "You drove on your own, right?". Thanks to the instructor.

After this training and venturing out on my own, my husband provided his consent to start doing the driving on my own and these days I drive to work and other places. More than my learning of car driving, I would like to share the most important highlight of what I liked during my driving, which is

Being on car, I stop and stop others to give way

         * The thanks sign shown by an auto driver with many school children on his auto, when I    slowed down my car and gave him the way to cross
         * A smiley thanks displayed by a husband who was waiting to cross the road with his wife        having injured and stitched legs, when I stopped on the main road and gave them the time to cross.
         * I think I have the power now to stop not only my car, but also the vehicles behind me, to give  time and way for others. :)

As always, it is indeed a pleasant journey and experience while you attempt to do some new learning. Have to think what I would like to learn next from my long list of "To Learn"

PS: Btw, I had to say that the 20 days off I took from joining new job, gave me an opportunity to join another big company. God's grace always showers best.

Life in a startup company!

Whenever I hear success stories about big companies or small companies which have made a feat, I would get goosebumps and hooked up completely on it. Especially when I read lines saying how it all started from a garage or a room in their house and how they could hit the headlines of the newspapers later. Sometimes, out of sheer regular office boredom work, I have even imagined how it would have been, if I was part of that small team! The team which brought in the wonderful product that all of us are using now.

Time indeed had come! But for a short while though. I was given an opportunity in a small ambitious start up company which aims to reap benefits of wind power at high altitudes. I never really hoped that I would get an interview call when I applied for the developer position in this start up company. It was like a cake-walk for me during the interview, that I simply made them flat with the knowledge I had acquired all these years! However, my hunch for being selected was the airplane terms that I used which were highly relevant to the work they are doing. I learned terms like ailerons, flaps, fuselage etc when I taught my son "parts of an airplane!" and I believe that helped me to get through this interview :-) (and, of course God's wish as well).

I joined the team, knowing that I will be there only for 2 months and with God's wish and more investors pouring in money, I may continue. Isn't taking risk the first trait needed to be part of a start up team? So I accepted the offer!

After many years of experience in working for big companies like Nokia, I prepared myself mentally on how it would be to work in a start up.However, there were still some surprises! The work in fact, demanded more working time and faster response for all the assignments. So no excuses to relax. And, remember the assignments might also include ones which are  different than our previous experience like in my case from web page design to trash clean up.

Two months just went and I had learned also things which are essential for a start up company from day one! Thought it would be useful to all those including me, who are aspiring to build upon your idea and so here I share them.

• How to plan and manage the activities and tasks? You need to have some software which satisfies the purpose on hand (there are many free cloud based software like "Zoho" with limited options). The software will essentially give the power to prioritize your activities and measure your performance. Ah, needless to mention, visualizing the work you have done these weeks does add confidence in your activity and future work.
• Version control is equally important. So if you have some code based projects, having a handy version control will solve umpteen problems that would pop up in later stages. I do not have knowledge on other domains like mechanical, but for software based projects Git is a very handy version control.
• Have your eyes and ears wide open and look for possibilities to collaborate or rope in investors from diverse fields. Certainly, there is more probability that you do not get response from many of them! However, keep trying as there is some reason behind ignoring our requests. At the same time, do not spend more time with those, who are least bothered about your idea. Time is indeed as precious as money for start ups.
• Be prepared to spend time on accounts and other operational activities which grabs time from focus on developing and building the idea.
• Things change fast, that the work going on currently might seem irrelevant. Judiciously plan the work with long term focus and include ifs and buts during planning. Scenario planning will help in coping up with the surprises and changes.
• Last but not the least, cheer yourself and your co-workers often for the work done and that would keep up the spirits high! Indeed it is the spirit which is driving a human to be passionate.

Two months might be shorter time to understand much of start up dynamics and I am sure I have more to learn. Would be great to hear from you, the reader and your experience.

PS: It is indeed bad that I cannot continue my job in this start up and therefore could not see how life in a start up turns into a job in a flourishing company. BUT, it seems God has some better plans for me :-)

Surprising similarities!

I was surprised on listening to some similarities in culture among people from entirely different geographies! Especially at a time when there is no ways of communication across countries and borders. But these similarities could substantiate the theory that human minds could think alike even when distanced apart and does not need any communication tools.

And, the similarities I observed from the two cultures is of course from my motherland India and resident land Finland. One of my colleagues in Finland, had arranged for a team get together in his family owned country side Inn. I got to visit the museum portraying the place's historical roots and the Finnish's cultural highlight "smoke sauna". It was interesting to see the lantern used in the early days, to find the way to sauna which is few meters from the Inn. The lantern looked very similar to those used during my childhood days in India. I am sure these are designed many decades or even centuries before but I wonder how people came up with similar designs, or perhaps settled with this design after many other improper ones.

Then during the dinner time, I was surprised to listen to the Finnish tradition of using "rye-juuri" meaning "root of rye", to prepare Finnish's famous rye breads. They believe some angel would have bestowed them the original rye-juuri and it has been passed along all these years. This rye-juuri is added in small quantities while making bread and is preserved in a container for later use. It seems breads which are prepared without using it is not tasting good. And we had a good round of laughter, when we heard that this rye-juuri could also be bought from super markets! :-) I supplemented the discussion saying that we also have this kind of tradition in India to make curd (yogurt), wherein we save some used curd to prepare curd for the coming days. The obvious question of how the first curd prepared, remains a mystery (at least to me)!

Then the old lady of the house popped in and shared the practice of making "viili" a form of yogurt, in the olden days. They had also added used viili  to milk and prepared new viili and similarly the first viili remains a mystery. The old lady was also telling that they used to hang these viilis in a mud container from the ceiling roof to get it fermented. Ah, this reminds me of the picture of Krishna taking curd and butter from the containers hanging from the roof.

From this short chat about lives in Finland and India, I could observe these few interesting similarities in people's practices in those olden days, despite lack of communication with each other. I am sure there could be many more which might reveal interesting information, like how people's thinking evolves based on the living circumstances and the needs. Perhaps after many tests and trials, people eventually might have settled with the best possible results which could have been same across various regions!

Experience!!!

I had wanted to scribble one of my recent thoughts but could not find time. However, yesterday I mustered courage and did a thing, which washed away my earlier thoughts and instilled some new thoughts.
Its worth while to mention both though.
The earlier thought is about fear. It was the time during my childhood when I started practicing to ride bicycle. I used to rent bicycle for an hour or two, and ride all through our neighbouring area. The main road near our place is quite busy with all kind of vehicles and there is a down hill road which is crowded with people, shops and vehicles. This road also leads to my school. My father had asked me not to go there as it is completely packed and being a new learner he finds it to be a risky place to ride. Also riding on the down hill road needs some experience. I am an AaKo(ஆர்வ கோளறு) - one who is always interested in trying new things in our local slang. I wanted to ride on the main road and on the down hill road. I took that as a challenge for my experience(!) in cycling. One fine evening, I rented the bicycle and rode on the main road and down hill road. Though butterflies were flying in my stomach then, I was proud and happy that I had become an experienced cyclist(!) who could go through busy roads. There is a saying in Tamil, "இளம் கன்று பயம் அறியாது" - Calfs are not afraid and roam around as they like. As I have the habit of telling truth, I told my father about my achievement(!) and mentioned that I will go to school by bicycle from then. My father excused me for my bicycle venture and warned me that I have to grow big before going to school by bicycle. However its a different story that I pacified him and started riding on the main road and going to school by bicycle.
Now, my university and office are near to our home so that I can go by bicycle. There is a down hill road (similar to the one I rode during my childhood), which has to be crossed while coming from my university & office to home. I was a bit reluctant to cross it with bicycle. I had the fear, that if something happened to me, then I would not be able to take care of Barathraam. Though I may cite that as a reason, I also had a thought whether it is possible for me to cross such a down hill road. This incident made me think, that are people in general as they grow old are reluctant to take risks and try new things? For example, our parents are a bit hesitant to try the new technology and gadgets, though they are not risky. The courage I had during my childhood waned away now.
Though atleast I could accept that our parents have different interests now rather than trying out such things, I cannot accept my fear to cross the down hill road. I have not become so old that I should refrain from taking such risks.

My current thought is about experience! Yes, yesterday I mustered courage as I did during my childhood and crossed the down hill road. It was not as risky as I thought and that made me realize that things are always not as risky as we perceive it. Its only our mindset which limits us from taking such risks. And by venturing such tasks, we can keep our mind young. Once I experienced crossing the down hill by cycling, its no longer fear for me.
Thus its the courage and experience which will remove the fear from us. Ah, how great are the saints, sages and seers for they have experienced the Ultimate Truth. We (atleast me) still have the fear or being hesitant to take efforts to experience Ultimate Truth. I hope that I overcome that fearness or hesitancy, and experience the Truth.
Though such thoughts moves around in my mind always, it gets reemphasized during such incidents.
Thanks to God for making me face such incidents.

Teachers same everywhere!

Before I start writing about this post, I would like to say that this is based only on my personal experience. Like many things in life that cannot be generalized..

I have hardly seen any teacher who does what he preaches. Almost all of the teachers I met from my school days are good in commanding and getting things done from us. But least is their interest in keeping up their words.
Finland teachers are not an exception!

I had many rounds of discussion with my Professor for my assignment and he gave me a strict deadline to submit those changes we discussed. Sadly, I could not spend more time for the assignment before the deadline (as always), and rushed up in the last two days. Spent two days of round the clock thinking, sleepless nights and finally managed to send it on time.

Its been more than a week now since I sent him the assignment. He is supposed to give me comments about my assignment in a day or two after my submission.
But I have not got anything from him yet!

For a second, I felt if the efforts I spent on it is worth? When I try to keep up my word so badly amidst work and other assignments, why is not he?
Is it because he is a busy Professor and need not keep up his word to a Student?
So am I going to be the same way as he in my future assignments?

Wait. This is not a Student's attribute.. As a Student, I have to learn only the good things from the Teacher , and should discard all such bad things.

I think we should be only a Student all through our life and seek only good things. Never become a Teacher unless you do what you preach.

As the Tamil saying goes,
கற்றது கை மண் அளவு கல்லாதது உலகளவு.

So let us be a Student and Seek good always.

Juggling, responsibility, commitment and more...

As you grow so is your responsibilities..
At some point of time we could suddenly recognize that all our time is completely occupied. This point of realization can happen out of our frustration or lacking time for hobbies(includes sleep!), perhaps on our introspection when we did something ugly in our activities etc.
But, in the first point its good to recognize that we are completely occupied, may be entangled in our activities! Only then, we can understand the importance of planning.

I still cherish the childhood days spent roaming around claiming it as studying, playing and fighting with brother.. but then I cannot afford it now.
I have to say it was quite difficult to me when I started studying at Tampere University though it is flexible.. may be because of the heaps of assignments..
and have to manage cooking and stuff.
Then when I started working at Nokia, I know its going to be a nightmare to manage all: work, study, home..
During initial weeks of my joining I had many meetings.. not only at office, but in college.. As most of our assignments are group assignments, groupmates have to meet and discuss about it. Oh!

But now when I looked back on how I handled them, I am satisfied though there are some scope for improvements. I havenot missed any meetings, been prepared with my assignments and discussions and also attended the induction meetings. Though it wasnt so many meetings, it really demanded planning and preparation. One important aspect to ponder is the quality of activities I pursued. I would say neither it was best nor it was worst.

I am happy it dint turn worst and I know it wont be best. But the reason I am feeling satisfied is the courage I mustered to not abandon my activities and shrug off my responsibilities. Juggling can be easy by tapping the tactics but juggling with responsibility & commitment comes from proper planning and preparation.

This experience and satisfaction has brought in me being committed to all our activities, for we dont know which one brings us favour.
Needless to say, I am motivated, for I dint do those activities for recognition, reputation nor remuneration but for my satisfaction.

Another view that struck me is, do we need to have a limit on our activities??! Ofcourse yes, will pour in my view in a separate post.

Exams! Exams! and some more exams!

This week had been a rally of exams for me. But there is much more than my exam experience in this post.

Exams in Finland are not quite frightening as in India, not because of simple questions though.
There are three times that you can take up an exam and best of three is considered as the grade for that course. If fortunately you got good grade in the first attempt, you can be satisfied with it. If you dint get good grade you always have a possibility of taking it twice again. You can even skip the first exam if you cannot make it. Its quite really flexible!

I could see some striking significance in having this kinda exam flexibility. First and foremost, many a times in India, I always fell sick during exams (not exam fever!) and happened to take it by mustering energy. For I will be considered Fail if I skipped it and the next time I take it, its considered as Arrears! Oh pity on me..
So I really like this flexibility for I always have two more chances (hoping I wont feel sick then).
Isnt it real that my case can happen to anyone. Does students who cant prepare or attend exam for some worthy reason, consider that its their FATE to be failed.
Why is there only one chance to prove yourself?? Exam is not a competition, it just tries to evaluate your understanding. Isnt it the sole reason behind students getting frightened about exams??! How can we ask students to not get afraid on exams with this exam structure?
Something serious to ponder on our Indian exam structures.

Yesterday I took my Finnish exam without a single minute preparation. Though I spent my time preparing for another exam next day, I really wanted to give a try based on my class work.
And, it did went well, except that I know I am wrong in my answer but dont know what is right :-). It was real fun writing it.

Ofcourse, I am going to take my next Finnish exam with some preparation knowing what to prepare!

Fascinating to see snow first time!

Since I had come to Finland, I heard people warning about the November month dark climate and people's depression feeling then. But now that November has passed, I could say, yes it was dark most of the day, but may not be depressing so much as people were warning.. I think its perhaps the people's slight dull feeling got aggravated by collective feeling. Like, when I say its dull and I am down, and gets the same reply from most of my friends, I feel even more dull. I am not an expert in psychology, but I could infer this from my experiences with people here.. Though I basically feel that we can change our moods by changing our thoughts and involving in different activities, I have to accept, that it is quite difficult in practice. Yes, I did feel tired after spending long hours of lectures and assignments, and it gets even worse when I came out of the college and saw the dark evenings. I do wish it to be bright then, to make me bright. But Nature is not on our demand. Once I reach home, sheer presence of Sriram charges me up. I do scream at him manytimes, but he remains calm and cheer me up in his own way. Nowadays I get accustomed to this climate and know how I can be charged! After a few days of ordeal in this climate, one fine afternoon in the midst of my assignment work at my Chinese friend's 6th floor apartment, I saw many tiny white dust flying down. On a second look, I could recognize that it was SNOW! sorry, may be flurry. But I was excited.. Next day, I was not feeling well, and woke up late. Sriram woke me up and told that it snowed last night. We both enjoyed seeing snow for the first time. It was nice to walk down to college that morning, walking over fresh snow. Children had started making snowman early morning. I could understand why Finns like snow instead of rain. It really makes the place bright. On my urge to know, how snow makes the place bright even when the sky is cloudy, I found a research paper substantiating it. You can find it here How places covered by snow is bright! You can go through selected parts of it according to your liking. One and all it was really fascinating to see SNOW and that too after November's climate. At the same time, I would say we need to learn to relish the taste for all types.

Nature has something for us on November before it reveals itself as snowy December!

WALK ANSWERING A BLIND FAITH

That night was special for me,not because of the walk I had, but because of a wonderful lesson it taught me. Being crazy on taking photos with my camera, somehow I forgot to take camera that night. Instead of worrying about it, I thought of capturing the scenes within me and describe it vividly. So here it goes..

I was accompanied with two of my friends and we joined along with people from TREE foundation. There were few journalism students too..

All set we went to Nynar Kuppam along East Coast Road. The sea was glittering under full moon light. The walk is organised by TREE foundation which actively works on protecting Sea Turtles. Yes we were heading towards a Turtle Walk!!!. We were also accompanied by some fishermen belonging to Kadal Amai Pathukavalar (KAP) by Tamil Nadu Govt.

In Brief... TREE organisation founder Dharini briefed us about the walk. Sea turtles, an endangered species comes to the coast to lay eggs(nesting) from January to April. There are several threats both for the eggs and the turtles which come to lay them. The eggs get stolen and some eaten by dogs. These sea turtles have flippers which are like paws in tortoise. One of the differences between a tortoise and turtle is that the latter cannot withdraw its head & flippers inside its body. This poses a severe threat when it comes near coast for nesting. They get caught in one type of nets(which is banned!) and die when their flippers get cut.

Our Walk... The belt we covered is around 2 kms. Soon after we covered few 100 meters we found a dead turtle. Dharini mam showed us its damaged flippers & head and told that it might be around 25 years. The turtles which comes to this shore belong to Olive Ridley variety and have a life span of around 100 years. We felt sad to see such a huge creature died entangled in nets. These died turtles will be buried by KAP members.

We continued our walk and saw died crab, octopus etc along the shore on our way. After an hour we completed our stretch and thought of walking our way back.

Chat abt sea turtles... Sea turtles become adults by 15 years and then starts nesting. The most astonishing fact is that the turtles hatched from eggs in a shore comes to the same shore for its nesting.. A research project has been started by placing an antenna on its body to track its travel path. These turtles come to the surface of water every 40 minutes to breathe. The antennas will then provide information to the satellite. It seems the Sethu Samudram project crosses the same path, as the turtles coming to this shore take their way back to sea.. Hence might be another threat to them..

Wow... At some distance, we could then see that a turtle has come for nesting and started digging a hole. A good thing was, once they started digging a hole and lay eggs they wont go back in the middle. Hence our presence dint disturb it. :)

It digged a hole of 19 inch depth and 12 inch wide aesthetically with its flippers. Then it started laying eggs.. These eggs were rubbery & hence dint break when laid one over another. You know how many eggs they lay?? 1,2,3.. 10,20.. hmm. its still more.. 150 eggs!! in a nesting. As it lays eggs, since it stays at shore for a longer time, their eyes started lubricating.. It tooked around 45 mins for it to dig hole & lay eggs. Then it covers the hole with sand and presses it so well that no one can figure out that a hole had been digged there.. It then starts its journey back to sea. Unlike crocodile which stays in water near shore till the eggs hatch, these turtles does not return back to see their eggs. They merely believe that their eggs will be hatched and their small ones will come home to sea.

What next??? Now comes the important part, perhaps answering what for a turtle walk??!! Protecting eggs... The fishermen were skilled and diligently started removing the eggs from the hole and safely placed them in a secure hatchery nearby. These eggs has to be replaced within 4 hours from it been laid., otherwise it will get spoiled. So everyday they walk twice during night and early morning. The temperature each egg experiences determines whether it will become male or female. At the end of the season around May, many eggs will become boiled & get spoiled.

After 48 days they will get hatched, small ones come out and start their journey towards sea...

This was a scintillating experience with full moon light & beach adding to its beauty.. It also threw me 2 thoughts...

1. Blind faith the turtles had that their eggs laid on the shore will be hatched.

2. How do the small ones knew that they have to go towards sea & not towards shore.. perhaps a silly question, but thinking it deeper will let us know, that we dont have answers to many whys??

I too dont know the answer for either of them. But I find happiness in answering its blind faith by protecting their eggs. And the second question taught me a lesson that every species including us are doing what we are ought to do. Nothing more or less to be proud of...