punekar's Xanga

Calm before the storm?

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 03:58:21 GMT

The last two months were a maelstrom of proposal writing, presentations, more presentations, mad meetings, madder travel and what not. Today I suddenly have nothing to do and I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach - panic if you will. This is the price one pays to live the life I live. Pointless? I sometimes wonder myself.

And guess what, a new big driver in my life is greed. There, I said it. Growing up, my pleasures were simpler, my wants lesser. The more life throws at me in terms of experience, the hungrier I get. No, I don't want to be the "Noble Savage"; Donald Trump is my new icon.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:48:21 GMT

Chicago

The mid-west is freezing and I'm freezing in it. I've been here before but man, each time you come here, the cold seems to have gotten worse. One step over the line. It's going to come to the point when it gets so cold that I'll probably end up as an ice sculpture.

My punekar@yahoo.com mail account hacked- discontinued

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 02:05:48 GMT

Looks like some smarta$$ hacked into my punekar@yahoo.com account. I've had it for over 7 years now. Fortunately I was able to retrieve my address book and my contacts. I've sent everyone an email and also asked my credit card issues to cancel and reissue just in case.

Henceforth I can be reached at sureshnageswaran@yahoo.com

Monday, May 16, 2005

Mon, 16 May 2005 21:17:06 GMT

Dateline Tokyo

My chervissu apartamentu (service apartment) offers no service. It's a tiny room with a couch and a bed on the loft !! Each morning I have to step outside the bathroom to dry myself.

Upsides:

Fantastic metro system. Move over New York, London and Chicago. Tokyo metro kicks a$$. No need to buy a car in this city - you can just take trains everywhere. Extremely polite people wherever you go. You can "sumimasen" (excuse me) anyone and they'll go the extra mile to make the gaijin (foreign barbarian) happy.

J-chicks keep checking me out in the train rides wherever I go.

Downsides:

Very few speak English though I suspect they understand. Everything is in Japanese - I can't even order in a restaurant without someone accompanying me. Yesterday I walked into a KFC outlet and spent 5 minutes explaining chicken sandwitch to a counter girl who just wouldnt stop smiling though she understood zilch of what I was saying.

There's suits, suits and more suits wherever you look. I've started wearing mine to work to blend in with the sararimans (Salary man) and "Office Ladies".

TV: Slaindaaatoooohne Figura! That's the first thing I heard when I switched on the TV. Generally is rubbish. Irritating ad breaks every 60 seconds. No English. It's lucky I have Internet access and can listen to BBC news each morning on streaming.

Culture Shock:

Dirty, no, filthy manga in ready reach everywhere you go. Featuring tentacle r-ape of little girls and horrible stuff. Try selling this in India and we'll lock you up with Gabbar Singh in a federal prison who will be happy to give you a demo of the aforemenioned.

Work is very formal and you are expected to stay back until 7 or 8 everyday. Otherwise you'll be considered a gaijin slacker. Still learning. This is different from the last flying sales visit I was at. This time it's up close and personal.

Oh, btw, if you havent seen Sakura (peach blossoms) you have missed something most wonderful. Will see if I can snap pics of these.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:07:26 GMT

There are some of us who constantly seek to constantly define ourselves either as a function of our profession or a function of ethnic, national or religious identities. When we arrive at some definition, a quick diissatisfaction sets in and then spend our energies trying to change it. This is not true of everyone, but it is certainly true of me and a select few I've observed. This is also not always a positive thing - there are any number of people who decry a static existence. But humanity thrives as much on stability as it does on change. I've changed many identities and continue to do so continually. Personally I do not believe I will ever be a single atomic, definable entity and I reject the very idea of definition vehemently. I feel stifled, like my independence to act, to think, to dream and to speak will be taken away if this happens.

This is something I've only begun to realize - and accidentally. On my layover at Heathrow, I browsed the bookstores there. London's Heathrow is by far the most professionally organized. As my eyes roved through the rows and rows of shelves, a brightly-coloured book in the Travel section arrested my attention. A large picture of Lord Shiva, the Hindu God of destruction on the cover and a title announcing the author to be Sarah McDonald. The back cover talks of a fantastic concotion of myth, holy men, cows and curses. Incredulous, I think, but then again, travelogues are not supposed to be taking a a lot of creative license. And the realization sweeps over me that I want to hear about how a foreign eye perceived my country. Not that there are not enough accounts of fantastic skirmishes with mythical babas, snake charmers, elephants and technology folks. But India is not a monolith and being Indian does almost nothing in terms of understanding the country. So I *do* look for definition - indirectly, trying to define myself in its wake.

Monday, August 23, 2004

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 12:09:56 GMT

The Larger Purpose

Sometime last Friday morning I got a call from work. Apparently my trip to Tampa has moved by about 5 days. Well, no great loss - it was a bit of a relief really. Going on a long trip is always stressful for me. Initially, there's all this intense activity right from the start of the week leading upto a frenzy to the time I board. Then 24 hours of absolutely nothing to do, a few fleeting encounters with total strangers and finally an alien place, new smells, new sounds. It's an assault on each of my senses. And a churning feeling of uncertainity at the bottom of my stomach.

Athens in Greece is where the Olympics are happening. Winning medals is a national ambition - something a whole country can look upto with pride and hope. We are here, peoples of the world, and we can compete with the best of the best. With one billion people, it is reasoned, India should have been in the forefront of nations bagging medals. Sadly, this is far from the truth. This time the solitary medal India consoles itself with is the silver in the Men's Double Trap event (shooting) won by a resolute armyman - Major Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore.

And each time something like this happens, India goes into raptures of self-flaggelation on our abject failure to produce more winners. What is wrong with us, the common man seems to be asking. Are we racially inferior, incapable as it were of competing physically with the Caucasians, the Asiatics and other coloured races?

Watching a rowing event was what seeded the idea in my head. Paulose Pandari Kunnel from India was in the Men's 1000 m rowing event. As the shot was fired, Paulose gritted his teeth in determination and poured his heart out and rowed. Sweat dribbled down his arms and chest in streaming rivulets as his boat shot before the others. In a few seconds though, his lead was whittled down as the Paraguan rower next to him and then the Chinese rower overtook him. Paulose, despite his valiant effort and initial lead starting falling behind slowly until he was at number 5. It was then that I realized that the others had merely allowed him to take the lead initially - they were conserving their energies for the final few seconds of the race. With disappointment I flipped channels to something else, realizing that there is only so far he could have gone. All he had was brute force bereft of technique, bereft of a greater strategy.

And over the next hour I was wondering if the problem were with the way he'd been coached. What if there was a way to let him strategize to conserve his energies over the race? What if there could be a simple technology-enabled mechanism to give him this advantage over the others ? Indian coaching is at least 40 years behind the times - the 60's methods will not work in 2004. We need technology-enabled solutions for modern-day problems. The athlete in the US or China is not an individual - he is part of a superstructure which bankrolls him, trains him, does research on technique and optimizes his performance.

But technology alone is a force multiplier. In rowing, for example, creating a simple device to measure the number of strokes per second over the period of the race would cost less than 200 Rupees ($4). All we are talking of is an IC555 and a couple of resistors on a board we could fabricate in less than 10 minutes. Something like this would be priceless to Paulose. I can imagine him using this technology during his training to practice rowing at various speeds and as a differenciating metric by an authority to determine which is our best medal prospect. It can't be technology in isolation though, since sports has everything to do with human physiology. Something I learnt on Discovery the other day was that a majority of calorific energy spent over a period of aerobic exercise is utlilized only for regulating body temperature. I can imagine a body-cooling jacket being worn by athletes and rowers before a big race.
There are many more such simple ideas that have taken seed in my mind. And it excites me to think that I could single handedly change the future with these. Bring honour and glory to my country and make my life and my knowledge serve a larger purpose. I see a bunch of researchers working in the area of sports research - a Sports Research Institute of India so to speak. Getting funding for something like this would be a huge ask - something of the order of 200 million rupees ($500,000). An angel investor perhaps. I need like-minded people to work with, a business proposal, a roadmap to profitability. It's a dream I've begun to dream. Someday I may have the wherewithal to make it a reality. Until then, its going to be my pet project. So many years from now, if you hear about pathbreaking research changing the face of the Indian sports, remember, you read it here first !! :))

Sunday, August 15, 2004

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 02:28:50 GMT

The bags are packed and I am leaving for Tampa Bay in Florida. Apparently I'm flying into the centre of the biggest hurricane to hit the US East coast in years - Hurricane Charley. Ironically the work situation I'm flying into is also a bit of a storm.

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 02:47:31 GMT

There's something about Russian folk music that I find irresistible. It has a timelessness that spans pre-Slavic times to the times of the Tatars, the Mongols, the Cossaks and the Revolution. The language is lyrical to hear and Cyrillic looks so very mystical.

Anyone wanting to know about Russian history without thumbing through a dry account of its formidable past - I recommend Edward Rutherford's Russka. The novel is unique because it actually relates history through the centuries through the generations of a single family. The only peeve I had was that the book does not go past WWII and modern day Russia. Still, this is an excellent read.

Monday, August 02, 2004

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 15:57:47 GMT

So today nothing really got done. It rained and rained and then it rained some more. I've been trying to get this piece of work done but somehow I can't even get started on it. I have to begin somewhere and I was hoping staying at home over the weekend would help. It didn't.

Over the past weeks, I've had an extraordinarily good run at work. It's like I'm invincible. Sleet turns to gold when I touch it. It's almost scary when things start working out like that because you're afraid you'll get used to it. And then feel terrible when your normal life begins again. I'm not sure I'd want to go back to being ordinary.

I've also been trying to learn from my experiences - and I find myself with an inordinate amount of maturity. I feel I can face almost any kind of situation alone.

I want to write a paper for the next CMG conference. I haven't made up my mind on the topic but a few ideas come and go ever so often. Showcase my work - that's the idea. :))

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 06:38:56 GMT

Coming of age ? When do you "feel" mature - or is it a state of mind that is temporary?

These days I'm on a little high. Actually I'm enjoying myself a lot more than before. Partly because, like my earlier blog mentioned, I've begun to accept myself a whole lot more. Also I'm experiencing a clarity of thought I never had before.