Pedal to Venugopal Swamy Temple, Bagalur

September 18, 2016

It was a long discussion to have a cycling trip to a far off place with one of my friends’ son, Rishi. I never doubted on his fitness but had my own doubts if I could pedal far enough. However now that I was pedaling to office which was 5 km far from my home since a year, I had gathered enough immunity to take a bit more. I decided to go to some place but often if you don’t fix a destiny the motivation to reach the goal becomes flexible. Hence to give a meaning to our pedaling effort, I decided to go to old temples and explore them. So we now fixed Venugopal Swamy Temple in Bagalur which is 30km from my house. It didn’t make any difference to Rishi as he was just interested to pedal. We were also accompanied by Rishi’s father and my cousin whom I call dearly “Mama”.

All four of us got on our bicycles and left to the temple at around 6:30 am. We didn’t dare to estimate the time that we might reach our destination as we didn’t know our riding speed. We all had bicycles in good condition except for Mama and the issue was with his bent pedals which almost activated the wrong tissues of the body and I had to force him to change the pedal at some bicycle shop.

We reached the destination around 7:45 am which was not a very bad timing for the first timers. We had a glimpse of the temple from outside as it was closed. We tried to inquire about the age of the temple and the person in the temple who was around 60 years old told us that his grandfather’s father had not seen the construction of this temple which explains us that is was around 300 years old.

Before we returned back to Bangalore we visited Mama’s colleagues house who was form the same village and they were very happy to see us pedaling for such a long distance. Our legs were strained with a good feeling in all of us. I felt this was one of the best way to enjoy the nature.

We plan to do more of these so with intention explore more temples and also keep ourselves fit.

Venugopal Swamy Temple

The Auto Guy - Ramagundam

Ramagundam – 8^th June 2016

Ramagundam for me was quite a life experience. It all began with our visit to mine where we had scheduled the tests of one of our product. It was a coal mine and it can be a haunting place for anybody as we can find only huge trucks moving and people busy with their work despite the scorching heat. When I mean scorching heat, the temperature was around 42 C and this is the time you will feel as if you are carrying sun on your shoulders. It is a tough job and appreciable as to how people work for their living, for their family well-being, staying away from them for months deprived of the basic luxuries what we enjoy every day. Yes, it feels bad but it is part of life which probably few are destined to.

I was scheduled to return today (8^th June) to Secundarabad by Bhagyanagar express which leaves Ramagundam at 5:15 am ideal time. I mentioned it as ideal time as the train was delayed by almost an hour. However, I had got up at 4 am and called up the auto guy and got myself ready. Strangely it started raining heavily when I came out of hotel. The auto guy didn’t turn up as it was raining. I soon rushed to a circle which in a normal time is an auto stand. There were no autos and I had to wait in rain half drenched for few minutes and after which I found an auto guy who agreed to take me to railway station.

The railway station was 3 km away from the circle but had to run into quite a bit of twists and turns to reach there. At times I was really afraid not knowing where we are going. I tried to engage into a conversation more than once just to confirm that he is a good guy. At one point of time I asked the auto guy “3 km seems to be taking lot of time, are we going in right direction, where is the railway station?”  The auto guy just replied saying “We are in right direction, Sir”.

Few minutes later the auto guy showed me the railway station from far and told me in a soft voice, “You are not from this town and I understood that you were anxious as you didn’t know the route and moreover you are travelling in Auto who have never been trusted for safety. But not all Auto drivers are like that and we try to take care of you as much as we can.”

We reached railway station and the words of auto guy is still ringing in my ears which left me dumbstruck but gave me a soothing experience of Ramagundam people.

HOPE

Gone are the days

When my parents paved the ways

Now its my turn to do the deed

And its only me who will have to feed

I see where I have to go

And pave my way to and fro

I hold my head high and spirit full

And Hope is the basket which is never null

All I need is to do everything RIGHT

Hold the light to make my day BRIGHT

Rajesh Khanna

It was 2:30 pm on 18 July 2012, Wednesday working in my office and there comes a pop-up on my screen. It’s a ‘Hi’ from my uncle (mama). I was not as busier as other days in my work and hence started chatting with him and more over he is one of the closest person in my life and I don't hesitate to stop my work little bit for him.

After few minutes I typed ‘Rajesh Khanna is no more’ and he replied…. ‘What a shocking news, really??? I am his fan.’ And I could feel the stubbed silence from other side. The silence said it all. My uncle is such a huge fan of Rajesh khanna. Back home in his collections were numerous audio cassettes of Rajesh Khanna, all the nostalgic music of his films. During my childhood days I used to listen to these songs and sing along when we visited his place.

Today when he heard the news from me, he felt that he has lost one of his family members and that is the emotional thread what my mama shared with legendary Rajesh Khanna.

We remembered the famous dialogue from Rajesh Khanna where he plays a role of a person who is suffering from blood cancer and wants to live through is rest of the life in a lively manner and believed that the ‘Life has to be bigger and not, longer’.

The dialogue goes this way

{ Babu Mushay........... Jahanpana.... Zindagi ki dor upar wale ki haath main hain. Hum sab is rangmanch ki katputaliyaan hain. Kaun, kab aur kaise upar utega yeh koi nahin janta. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha } in Hindi.

….. and the translation goes this way

Babu Mushay…. Respected Sir…. The control of everybody’s life is in God’s hand. We are just the puppets on this stage of life. Nobody knows… who, when and how each individual dies….. and….. (laugh).

This dialogue has nostalgic effect on almost all the people in India. Girls believed he was one of the most handsome actor in film industry and believed have crush on him at some point of their life.

People till today stop by the TV channel in which Rajesh Khanna is shown and feel cherished to see him.

Its indeed a great loss to film industry and I dedicate this blog to my mama who is still depressed and mourning for the loss of his Idol.

Pragmatic or Enigmatic

‘The enigma of Indian engineering’ an article in Hindu forced me to come back on blog and write something about it. (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3547601.ece?homepage=true )

The lines what I liked the most or may be the bottom line of the article – ‘it is not the lack of money that influences national poverty as ineffective engineering that imposes crippling high costs for water, energy and other essential services. Good engineering liberates human effort for social developments such as governance, healthcare, education, social services and even recreation’.

After I read these lines the immediate thought that struck to me was – how paralyzed the current Indian engineering is standing on weak pillars of service industries. When the world economy is trembling down and trending topics of the country are Presidential elections, Cricket, lifestyles, facebook etc etc, when are we going to link infrastructure developments to daily life requirements by Engineering.

Now a days engineering is considered to be a colorful certificate which can endorse a colorful VISA stamp to fly to foregin countries. It is sad to see when Engineers are most required to build the amenities of one’s country, they are being fled away or infact lost to other countries. Currently India is thinking of increasing the funds on Fundamental research from 0.1 % to 2% and I would say stop thinking and just implement things which don’t need much thinking. We are so happy when we compare ourselves to immediate neighboring countries and say that we are better than them.

We are not ready to accept the reality of the situation. It’s time to STOP doing this!!!!

In fact, the article says it to be ‘Enigma’…. I don’t see anything enigmatic in it because we have forgotton our fundamentals and it’s very clear. It’s time to get back to our fundamentals of engineering, fundamentals of developments and fundamentals of industrialization.

Engineering in its education and application should be more robust because it is one of the most important link in building better India.

India Pakistan Border

We all know about the partition of India and Pakistan and we are still struggling to sort out the issues between the countries. Above is the ad which shows a sense of patriotism in itself. I wish the border between India and Pakistan could be erased just by printers.

COMMONSense

After a long time when you are with your parents you don’t like to go out on weekends and wish to spend the entire weekend with them. It was this time when my friend and mentor Narendraji called me to his native village Channakeshavpura (CK Pura), Pavgada. I happened to agree to go to CK Pura half heartily. On Friday we started our journey. We were nine of us in a Qualis with full energy, cracking all sorts of jokes. All were happy since we had met after a long time. We spent our journey in sharing the latest updates of our life.

We reached CK Pura around 1 O’clock midnight and Narendraji’s family was waiting for us. All of us in a sleepy mood had our dinner and slept planning to go to the farm the next day. The morning in the village life is so fresh. It had been days since I had breathed clean air. My ears were happy not to hear the honking sounds with which you are welcomed every morning in Bangalore. The village atmosphere was so nice. I was very happy since my mobile was showing “NO NETWORK COVERAGE”. Wonderful, I said and set out like the only King in the middle of the road to see the farm. Everybody was very relaxed free from hectic atmosphere of Bangalore.

The farm had “adike tota” (areca nut trees), coconut trees and rest of the field was ploughed for the upcoming season. The main crop of CK Pura was Groundnuts. The farmers and workers stared at us as we walked in the farm. We stopped near a well and relaxed for sometime. The atmosphere was cool and people chose their own interests to spend the time. Few people swam in the well and few took a nap and I was busy taking some snaps. It was time for us to return back to home for dinner. On the way back we stopped at the coconut farm and had little coconut water.

As we were walking back home we saw a strange board which read “COMMONSense Project, with IISc” and soon everybody started laughing saying “Probably this project is used to measure the common sense of the people in this village.” We came to know about this project only in the evening during our music session when Mr. Sheshgiri walked in. He had heard from Narendraji about us. He told us that people from this village, with help of IISc are doing a project called “Community based Natural Resources Management using Sensor networks” which in short is called as “COMMONSense” project. This is when everybody eyebrows were raised and the topic arouse curiosity in the group. It was actually very impressive that people from this village were contributing to the development of the village.


He told that this is one of its kind of the project where in the effort was to use Wi-Fi technology outside the conference room for the first time. It is very easy to use Wi-Fi technology in a conference room since the environmental conditions are almost stable and risk in making it to work is very less, but as soon as the Wi-Fi starts interacting outside the conference room, lot of issues will come such as signal strength, signal fluttering due to wind etc. The risk in the implementation was very high.

The team consisted of around four people in the project M/s Suma, Hidayat, one more person (I don’t remember his name) and Sheshgiri himself. Sheshgiri who was post graduate in Chemistry was looking after the project management. Hidayat was pursuing 2nd year ITI – Electronics and he was responsible for installing all the sensors and other electronic setup on the field. Sheshgiri proudly said that Hidayat had recently learn’t the skill of data entry. Suma was pursuing her 2nd year MCA and she managed the entire website which collected the data from field and created a report. She also wrote codes to manage the sensors and probes on the field.

The team collecting various parameters which would influence the fertility of the soil and also the water level from various fields thru’ sensors, and this data was stored in a flash memory which was later transferred to a memory disk (normal pen drive fulfilled this purpose) and created a report and sent it to IISc for further research and also, they educated the farmers with that to take precautionary measures to grow good crops.

Sheshgiri told us that people from IISc helped them only over the phone and whenever they came to the village they came for short visit. This actually helped the Sheshgiri’s team to troubleshoot the problems by themselves. Sheshgiri also told that Honeywell and Wipro corporations also visited CK Pura to see the project so that they can further develop this project. Sheshgiri ironically said “They just came and went”.

I was really touched by Sheshgiri’s intentions on using village people as resources. He said youngsters from village go to Bangalore for working and earn around 4K to 6K because they are not educated to get a high salaried job. By working part time on this project, people would get good experience on the system, exposure towards computers and above all a certificate from IISc which will help them to earn a better remuneration. Concluding his talk he said they were not looking for funds, they were looking for engineers who can come and work with them to increase the number of applications that this COMMONSense can perform, give innovative ideas to improve the current system. His words had the urge to improve the current condition of the village and villagers. Not many people think like Sheshgiri, who stay back in their own villages to improve it. With all the words from Sheshgiri in our minds we started back our journey back to Bangalore.

This COMMONSense project provoked me to write this post after a long time. I am happy now that I made this trip; else I guess I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see the work of Sheshgiri.

For more information on COMMONSense project, you can logon to http://commonsensenet.in/