Ooty : The queen of hill stations

It was almost 12 years ago that I visited Ooty as a student from college staying in rustic run down dormitories for a couple of days and doing the regular sights that had to be seen by every tourists visiting this wonderful hill station.


It was so different this time - we stayed in 3 different resorts in different parts of Ooty. It all started with taking the flight from Hyderabad to Coimbatore and then the lovely drive up the hills that took about 3 hours to do with 34 hair pin bends that brought nausea to the strongest of stomachs. But at the end of the drive we arrived at Kingscliff to the most wonderful view of Ooty from high up in the hill.

We then had lunch in the award winning restaurant at Kings Cliff called Earl's Secret. A beautiful restaurant serving fine dining that makes everyone feel special. After some trekking around the hotel and some shopping at Charring Cross it was time for drinks and dinner which was served in the Bar Room of this resort with a real crackling fire place. Having never seen a real crackling fire it was wonderfully exciting.

The next day started off with a trip across the hills to Destiny that is a farm stay. Its about 45 min by car from Kings Cliff. If the ride through the hills is exciting then the last 500 meters on the jungle road in an army truck is the icing on the cake. Once you reach there - you have so much to do one does not know where to start. We started with the walk around the farm seeing the stables, the cow shed, the horse riding track, the duck pond, the fishing tank and then all the fields with carrots, herbs and strawberries. Then in the night there was a bon-fire with barbecue and then there was disco night.

The next morning after a lovely buffet breakfast with a lot of stuff cooked from the produce of the farm we went on a trek through the jungle to the lake that is adjacent to the farm. It was a beautiful walk through very rustic mud roads that were slushy from all the monsoon rain. The 10 km walk gave us an opportunity to view some of the best views i have seen in my life. In the afternoon we witnessed rain for the first time and the whole valley looked so different. The night ended with some Karaoke, Disco and a crackling fire place in my bed room !!!


The next morning after breakfast we started off to the next resort called Sherlock. Based on the Sherlock Holmes theme the resort is tastefully decorated with wonderful views of Ooty town. One can just sit for hours in the lawns with a laptop (what i did) just watching the view and ignoring the laptop sipping on some nice hot Nilgiri tea. In the evening we trekked on a hill called Tiger Hill. Again the most beautiful views to assault the senses mixed with a fragrance of Eucalyptus was just the right mix to not want to go back home. One more crackling fire place to finish our 3 day stay in Ooty.

Having thought we saw everything we woke up the next morning to a fog filled valley with visibility down to a few meters. Just another facet of this wonderful hill station that makes us want to go back and visit it again and again.

These 3 hotels are run by The little Earth Group. They are small, homely and tastefully done up hotels that bring back the British Raj with a wonderful modern twist to it. The wonderful food, the crackling fire places, the wood paneled walls of Kings Cliff, the views from Kings Cliff and Sherlock, the farm experience at Destiny makes one want to come back again and again and there were so many guests who were repeat customers. Its not surprising that these hotels are among the top hotels in TripAdvisor.

Double standards of going green

We just celebrated Earth Day and Earth Hour. I am for these two concepts to try and save the environment. A lot of organizations are going green and i had an opportunity to see first hand how one organization is going green and the double standards within that organization in implementing this.

Let me recount my experience. There were no paper/plastic cups at the coffee/tea/cold drink/water dispensers. When i looked around i found coffee mugs and then realised that we had to use those to drink anything. A very noble idea to save paper and the environment - but what about water. In a city like Hyderabad where water is a problem i was observing that each time someone drank from those mugs they would wash it and then again wash it after it has been drunk from. Now you might wonder why was it washed twice - the reason is the person who used the mug washed it because he used it. The person who was going to drink from that mug washed it because he did not know if the person who last used it washed it. So with the intention of saving paper are we wasting other resources.

Next we were to have a meeting to discuss a document. We were 4 of us in the meeting and since there was no projector/computer in the meeting room there were 4 color print outs of 20 pages each that were taken just for that meeting. I do not need to elaborate any further on the possible number of trees that must have gone into making those 80 pages for that 1 hour meeting. The meeting after ours too there were quite a few of them holding print outs which only shows that almost everyone that goes into that meeting room ends up taking print outs for the meeting. How can one save paper in this situation. Every conference room big or small should have a computer monitor/projector from which users should be able to remote desktop their own machine and open the document that is being discussed.

My point is it is important to go green and think in that way for all organizations. But there is no point implementing it in only certain aspects of the organization. Every function of the organization should be thought through and a unified approach implemented to truly go green. It is only when such a unified approach is implemeted with every member of the organization on board with what is being done and the effects of their efforts will such initiatives really be effective. Otherwise it is only on paper and words but not in implementation and real effect.

Another thing that I have noticed is that the more affluent the country/city/organization/individual the more environmentally damaging they are. But it is these affluent sections of society that do the most preaching about being green. The poorer sections of society anyway do not have the money to be environmentally damaging in a big way so there is no point really preaching to them. So it is the affluent members of society that should seriously introspect the way they live their lives and implement going green in their own little ways.

Awesome Indiblogger meet

It was great to be back at the Indiblogger meet after more than 2 years. The meet was held at the Fortune Select Manohar hotel near the Begumpet Airport and it was great to meet some old friends that i got acquainted with in the last meet and it was nice catching up with them after so long. I also got to meet a lot of new friends and learnt about their interesting blogs that I am sure to be busy reading over the next few days.

The meet started off on time with some entertaining videos on a mystery blogger who wanted to come all the way from Germany to attend the blogger meet - the Indiblogger ice breaker spoof is always very entertaining. After that it was the 30 seconds of fame where each participant in the bloggers meet could introduce themselves and their blog. There were a lot of interesting bloggers with a mixture of the young and the old, the quirky funny bloggers to the serious bloggers. There were bloggers who blog about stories, dreams, inner voices and a lot of other varied subjects.

After this there was an interesting session where each of the participants were given a chart to wear around their neck and anyone could scribble anything on the chart. This was a wonderful idea to collect blog address' that one can then go through without the fear of forgetting the address of the blog. This went on for quite some time but the time just flew during this session as i was meeting a lot of interesting people and getting to know them better.

The quiz that followed was very informative and interesting. Came to know about a lot of things which included Fake Steve Jobs and one red paper clip. This was followed by some lovely food and enjoyable conversation.

Thank You Indiblogger team for a well organized event. Hope we don't have to wait another 2 years before we can have another meet here @ Hyderabad.

The Khan Academy

There are a lot of universities that have made their courses online which usually involve a  professor taking a class and the class is recorded and published on the internet. These are usually complex courses that are long and very involving and it takes time and patience to complete them.

On the other hand there are courses for school children which are usually custom paid programs that cost quite a bit. These programs are delivered via custom programs for children to watch and learn.

I came across The Khan Academy which has videos for teaching children Math and Science and has a lot of videos related to banking, finance, investing, venture capital funding and so on. All these videos are done by a single person Salman using paint as a whiteboard and with him explaining the concept. The wonderful part is the simplicity of the whole delivery mechanism and the effectiveness in using this delivery mechanism to teach a concept.

All the videos are free and are available on you tube. Happy viewing and learning.

Being passionate Vs Making money

Over the last few days I have been having interesting discussions with my friends on being passionate in what we do versus having focus on the money aspect while doing things. Here are my thoughts on the same.
I belive that one needs to be passionate about what one does. There should be an excitement while thinking about what one is doing. What this does to the person is that it makes them enjoy what they are doing and it also ensures that they feel responsible for what they are doing. This automatically leads to a better product and a more caring service. This all sounds so wonderful but there is a downside to this just having passion and doing things may not result in short term monetary rewards but almost always there are long term monetary rewards if the person sticks to their passion right through the ups and the downs. Also during this time the person is enjoying what they are doing and this keeps them motivated and happy.

On the other hand if a person is doing a job only for the monetary aspect of it then this makes it very hard. There are always ups and downs in the monetary side of things. If there is no other motivation other than money in doing a job then the person will find it very hard to navigate through the downs. The downs are inevitable - one cannot try to escape them. Its just inherrent in the monetary cycle. Money also tends to make the person lose focus on the quality aspect of the product and the service. This in turn finally effects the long term monetary gain expected from offering the product or the service.

Its important to have passion in what one does with a focus on ensuring long term monetary gains. Focussing on short term monetary gains and compromising on the passion never works. Having passion while doing things eventually gets noticed and will be rewarded.

Something new to learn always

I believe learning can never ever stop. Everyday there is something new to learn and there are times when you are forced into a situation that drives you to learn even faster. These situations are crisis situations - during this time you always learn at lightning speed and you feel it is the hardest time in your life but the important thing is to stick in there ride out the crisis, do your best and you end up coming out of it a more knowledgeable individual. No amount of make believe scenarios and training can give you the kind of learning a crisis situation gives.

Having significant experience in Software Development and having worked on more than one large project one feels that they have seen pretty much everything. Over the last 15 days I have been through two crisis situations that have made me realise that I have not experienced it all yet.

The first situation involved our servers that were on a public IP located at a data center that hosted our website http://yourschool.in/. I got a call one day from the data center telling me that the bandwidth used by our site was 25 times more than normal in a month. So I immediately went and checked the usage information given by the data center and realised that the only way this kind of traffic can happen is if someone is hacking into the server. So I start investigating this and I sudenly realise that I need to start learning about Firewalls, Ports, IIS Vulnerabilities, IIS Logs, ... to solve the problem.

The second situation involved an application that we built that worked fine in the development environment, Quality Assurance Environment but was crashing in production. We spent more than a week every night in the office trying to debug the problem in production but to no avail. After a lot of persistence and patience and learning from our findings in production we were able to replicate the issue in the development environment. It was related to an issue of deadlocks happening in the database. This time I was forced to learn about SQL Profiling, Deadlocks, SQL Error Logs, CLR Profiling,...

I could have found it very hard to create these two situations in a laboratory environment to be able to learn how to handle it. But after riding through these two difficult situations I have come out feeling like I am a more knowledgeable person now which does make me feel good. So my hope is to never stop learning and the more I learn the more confident and happy I feel.

How life can change in a moment?

I was reading a very deep and touching post today on Subroto Bagchi's blog which is about a young girls life changing in a momment for no fault of hers. Its a very touching story that can happen to any one of us.

There have been 2 devastating earthquakes in the last 1 month one in Peurto Rico and the other in Chile. In just a matter of a minute the lives of millions of people changed. Again something that can happen at any time to anyone.

Life can change in a momment for any one of us and it is important that we enjoy and have fun with every momment that we have.There is no point in thinking about the missed opportunities in life or what life could be if only we did something - you are wasting precious time that can be spent just enjoying life.