The Life Carnival

It's not often that you get to meet and greet someone on his 100th Birthday. So when the opportunity came by recently, I gladly did. We were going for a walk, when one of my friends said, "Hey, it is Sri.Gopal Rao garu's 100th birthday, shall we drop in to greet him ?". I hadn't interacted with the person before, though I roughly knew he had been the Chairman of Andhra Bank many decades ago and was now approaching 100. Nevertheless, I thought let's just drop in to have a quick word. Or, to put it formally, to seek his blessings and mention our prayers to the Lord for his good health and long(er) life.

Two things I liked about him: his liveliness and his sense of humour. He didn't know who I am, so he asked, "where do you work ?", and when I mentioned, he quickly recollected a couple of related incidents. "An old man like me lives by his memories, and fortunately in my case, they are all sweet memories", he said. He had a free-flowing chatty style and always had a quip, a remark or a slight touch of sarcasm that brought a giggle in you every once in a while. He had problems of the body but he wasn't sulking about them. "I sometimes recollect my memories aloud in the night", he said, "but then I realize that there is someone sleeping in the next room, then I become quiet. Poor fellow, his sleep must be getting disturbed". It seemed to me that he had learnt to live with the body's problems, put the mind in charge and also to divert his attention to other lively things like interacting with people, listening to the radio and so on. The experience and wisdom of 100 years is definitely something to celebrate. There was a felicitation function and he gave a talk the next day and his sharp wit created waves of laughter in the audience. Wow, what humour at this age man, was the talk of the town.

It set me thinking on aging. I think, after an age, lively old people become more like kids. Both like storytelling. Both feel good when someone talks to them and feel terribly bored if there is no one to talk to. Both don't want to stay in one place, if they are able enough to move around. Both are attached to their toys, albeit different ones. Both hum to themselves when they are alone. Both speak the truth, the kids until the world corrupts them and the elderly since they have seen it all, the futility of falsehood. Both remember the gifts they have received from others almost with date and time.

Ironically, the same instructions and caring advice that a parent gives to his kid, returns to him/her in his old age in a slightly different flavour. Some of these instructions, you can slightly flip and see that it can apply both in a father-young-kid conversation and in a son-old-father conversation.

1. Look at either side of the road before you cross. Be careful not to bump into old people / Be careful kids don't bump into you.
2. Don't move around too much and tire yourself.
3. Not too many chocolates, not too many ice creams. Eat healthy.
4. If you are not well, don't hesitate, let me know early so we could take early action.
5. Follow doctor's instructions verbatim.
6. Go for walks in the morning/evening (Don't miss your games).
7. Plan your travel well in advance.
8. Don't try to lift weights that are heavier than you can, you are going to hurt your back.
9. Don't read in poor light, it harms your eyes.
10. Wear your sweater and monkey cap when you go out in the winter.
11. Don't climb the stairs too fast, you might slip and fall.
12. And remember, I am telling all this for your own good.

The other day, someone asked me to frame a greeting message, for writing on a greeting card to give to his uncle and aunt on their 50th wedding anniversary. I knew nothing about how one might feel on such an occasion, but I tried to write up something in general about Life as a celebration. Because it takes a lot to hit a century or to partner for a 50 each together. These folks acquire a kind of learning from life that can be acquired only by living life. Having seen so many ups and downs, they acquire a certain balanced, yet positive, approach to life that is tinted with the equanimity that rests in the understanding of "even this will pass away". They raise above petty fights, jealousy and hatred that people engage in, in their middle years. Which is why, the ripening of the fruit should as much be a cause for celebration as is the blooming of a flower or the germination of the seed.

Customer Service - Tonty Pour By Cheven

After my younger brother passed away last summer, I had to deal with the financials of his estate. If you think I haven't seen much of the world in 30 years, I had to see quite a specimen of it in those 30 days. Among the names I had to deal with, mostly in the BFSI segment: Citi Cards, ABN Amro Cards, Kotak Mutual Fund, LIC, New India Assurance, Medi Assist, ICICI Lombard, TTK Healthcare, United India Insurance, Central Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, ICICI Bank (including Cards, Loans and ICICI Direct), Royal Sundaram Insurance, TVS, Airtel etc. Add to this, a suite of government / PSU institutions, like RTO, BSNL, Government Medical College Hospital, BharatGas, BPCL Office, Income Tax Office, Office of the Superintendent of Police etc. The list is somewhat like that of a diversified equity fund and it was interesting to handle all kinds of customer service responses and to meet the procedural abracadabra face to face.

Years ago, I had done a project work on the role of front-line employees in customer service, but travelling to all the four directions of the city almost everyday is no match to a spiral-bound booklet you write after some literature survey and a stretch of imagination. I can't write about the frustrations here, because, my blogging guidelines prohibit ranting. (I did make a list of my own blogging guidelines before I started the blog which I want to post only if the blog survives 25 posts). Perhaps, I should convert some of those experiences into more generic issues and present them in a non-rant fashion some day.

I was mentioning to my friend about the variety of service personnel I had to interact with, in this array of companies and offices and he asked, "Hey, why don't you blog about the good part of the show ?". I thought, yeah, it's a good idea, I had always thought the media often under-reports the good news and doesn't give the beauty of the world its due. Needless to say, it's a very subjective opinion and wouldn't mean much in terms of organized research and the rating I give in the end are entirely the riverside walker's indigenous service ratings, so please read this post sitting next to a salt godown so you can pinch it whenever you want.

One thing I found common in every place is, unless you follow up, nothing, nothing ever happens. I used to have a bengali boss, an operations guy, who did nothing but make a list and follow up all the time at regular intervals. Many times, he won't even know the specific detail of what exactly he is following up, he just knows it's a follow up issue for him. For example, someone says to him "Sir, we need an Exchange Server to be set up so people can send emails to each other". He would sometimes get only half the words and would often say, "Did you set up the Exchange ? I want to have email." He would put it in his organizer as "Exchange" with a particular deadline and priority. Someone used to jovially mention, "for all you know, he must be thinking it's a piece of equipment like Telephone Exchange". But he would indeed follow it up and get it done because you can't escape his follow-up claws.

Among the private players, Kotak Mutual Fund stands out. There was an investment with Kotak MF that had to be transmitted to the legal heir and this one also had attached accident insurance cover. There were other companies with whom I had to interact under a similar scenario with heavy follow-up, but Kotak was different. They would follow it up with you, actually. Isn't that nice ? I had been to the Kotak MF office in Coimbatore. Their ambience was good, their notice board was full of internal team contests, performance targets, winner of the month and so on. Hey cool, looks good, I thought, let's see if they are worth their display. Ironicaly, the officer didn't know the exact procedure to be followed in the case, although he had a hazy idea that there is a procedure somewhere regarding this. In fact, I knew what is likely to be the procedure, so I said, we are ready to present an application from the legal heir, along with whatever documents you may require, so you let me know the list of what you want. And we also wanted to send it by courier since we were moving out of Coimbatore shortly. He offered me a seat and a glass of water since I was sweating in the May heat. He made a series of phone calls, probably to his head office, made notes, asked the officer, to send an email immediately detailing the requirements. As he was explaining it to me, the email arrived, he fired the print and gave it to me, took my email address and also forwarded a copy. And yes, you can send the bunch to the specified address by courier, he said. He gladly gave his contact information and asked me to inform him after I send the application so he can follow it up. I told him we are moving out of Coimbatore, he said he would make a note and facilitate any follow-up accordingly. We sent the application and someone from the head office called to acknowledge it. Later they called to say, while the insurance documents were in order, one more document was required for the transmission of the investment and he would e-mail the format. We sent that too, and within 10 days, we received the insurance claim as well as transfer of the investment. With a nice letter saying, we are sad to know about this, we can't help you in any other way, your documents are in order and we are admitting your claim. We replied acknowledging receipt and thanking their quick service.

Among the banks, Bank of Baroda stands out, No, Citi or ICICI bank don't even come a close second. We had to close the PPF account at BoB. As usual, we had all the docs ready on day one and we were worried that, since the amount was high, there will be much delay because of a series of signatures. We submitted the docs. Here too there was a little training issue. The officer said, he is not exactly clear about how to input this kind of transaction in the Core Banking software to which he was only introduced recently. He said he will find out the next day from the manager and try to get it processed. Nowadays, it doesn't take much time, he assured us all the docs were in order. We mentioned that since my dad had undergone surgery recently, he has authorized me to collect the payment on his behalf and we also had the attested authorizations and the IDs ready. He said, that shouldn't be a problem since they will be issuing an a/c payee cheque, asked us for our alternate bank account details and gave me a specific date and time by when it will be available. I went at the stipulated time and he was ready with the cheque. He apologized for the bit of delay on the first day and quipped, "now that I have learnt it, I will be able to serve someone else better next time.". Frankly, I never had experienced or expected such a nice response from a nationalised bank, which was probably cynical of me, but I guess the running around wears down your positive thinking capacity. They didn't have the leadership contests on the notice boards or neck ties for the officers but they had a kind of simple devotion and sincere interest in the work they do.

More than the frustrations, I learnt, from people who served me well, how to do so carefully and courteously and from those who made me suffer, how not to do it myself in a similar situation. It was humbling when people yelled at you and soothing in contrast soon after when someone else spoke better in the office you climbed next. In both cases, it's not that they had all the required skills. But they took pains to find out. It's not that they flouted accounting controls to give premium customer service, but they communicated the procedure firmly and gently, gave an exhaustive list of requirements in one go, not requiring the customer to come up and down a hundred times and releasing the documents one by one in stages as if it were some assembly line, understood specific situations that needed attention, gave a date and kept it. And were courteous all throughout. Both offices were so different in externalities, but had the same kind of impact on the customer. Both had technology to help in efficiency but retained the value addition of human interaction. One spoke in posh English and the other didn't, but you can study in tamil medium and be equally good at trignometry. One was 10 years old and another was 100 years but both knew what really matters at the end of the day. That it is as much important to make a goodwill impact on someone who stepped into your premises as it is to spend millions in advertising to get someone there.

A third experience was even more interesting. And that had to come from the "unorganized" sector. The day before we left, I spotted a household scrap dealer in the colony nearby. Hey, I said, we are vacating and we might have something to sell away as scrap, would you come to my house sometime ? The young lad was a real excited fundoo guy, he immediately gave his cell number and said, call up any time, and he added: Tonty Pour By Cheven, Anna. I was surprised and complimented him for his attempt in English and found that he had discontinued education after the fourth class, many years ago. We didn't have much time, I said, and I will reach home only by 7.pm. after work in the city. He took driving directions and later he was there at 7 sharp. He made a quick assessment, called up his assistant to bring an appropriate cart, weighed it then and there, gave a category-wise quotation and made an offer. He also gave insights into how the industry works and the various levels of scrap retailing, which understandably, was to talk us into the rates he was offering. After the deal was struck, he made his assistant load the stuff and reached, you know what!, to the nearest ICICI Bank ATM and withdrew money to pay us. Quite filmy, I thought, and now I knew where he picks up these cute English phrases on customer service. My prediction is the guy will go places, what say ? Glory to the great indian middle-class entrepreneur!

Till the blogging guidelines are relaxed, here is a quantitative rating of the various servicewallahs, to avoid verbose ranting. It's not fair to compare private and public institutions so I will give a percentage ranking keeping Kotak MF and BoB as benchmarks.

Kotak Mutual Fund 100%
ICICI Direct 95%
ABN Amro Cards 90%
Standard Chartered Bank 90%
Airtel 90%
ICICI Bank 85%
ICICI Cards 80%
TVS Dealer Lotus 75%
United India Insurance 65%
ICICI Loans 65%
Citi Cards 60%
Royal Sundaram Insurance 60%
TTK Healthcare 60%
New India Assurance 60%
ICICI Lombard 55%
Medi Assist 50%


Bank of Baroda 100%
Indian Overseas Bank 95%
Office of the Superintendent of Police 90%
LIC 90%
Central Bank of India 85%
Bharat Gas Agency 80%
BPCL Office 75%
Income Tax Office 60%
RTO 50%
BSNL 50%
Police station 35%
Government Medical College Hospital 5%

The 24 x 7 Scrap Dealer 100%

Defragmenting the Mind

Ever wondered what regular clean-up and maintenance activities are required to keep up this big, complex, mulithreaded, multitasking, operating system called the Mind ? If your mind is like a strong, stable and secure OS like Linux, then probably you would need to do very little to maintain it or you might already be doing it by design. But if yours is an old, average commonplace mind like Windows 2000 Professional, then, after a while of using your mind for all kinds of activities, you might actually find, things have become slower from that first day when you had this freshly installed OS. You have been installing and uninstalling all kinds of software left, right and center. You never knew that there are these hundreds of little files with extension .tmp. You have been browsing the Net, with cookies planted three years ago still crawling in some deep non-descript local settings folder, like cockroaches in your kitchen proliferating until the Annual Cleaning Mela. If you have been acting really irresponsible, not updating your antivirus software and clicking on any link anyone presents to you, opening attachments indiscriminately and enjoying a false pride of administrative access while doing these things, then even the Cleaning Mela might not be of much help. You might be better off with an overhaul of your operating system.

Our minds too have these issues. We interact with all kinds of people everyday and sometimes, invite good and bad events and sometimes are bombarded with them. Sometimes a situation presents itself from which we can actually walk if we act like a responsible administrator, but we still don't. We know the thought cookies which others plant in us can be both good and bad, sometimes they enhance our experience by being there, and sometimes they proliferate even after their due validity. We should be knowing that we should give temporary phases in life, like temporary files, their limited value and delete them regularly, if our minds should start nifty and fast. We know opening untrusted attachments in life can have malignant effects on our mind and even worse, when someone is going to exe-cute something on us without our conscious knowledge. We seem to be enjoying administrative access but we have actually given it to away to the other person who tries to use that very pride of ours to piggyback on us and crash our mind. Keeping your mind's health often involves updating your definitions of defence against evil, regularly, so that the bad ones are knocked off by a real time protection scan even as they try to enter us.. Some thoughts are like worms, they self-replicate themselves at a furious pace and consume all your bandwidth. Some thoughts are like trojans that mask their sinister motive, look like performing one action while performing right the contrary. Some thoughts are like viruses causing visible damage to your mind and might even require an exclusive removal tool session to restore order. Even then normalcy cannot be fully restored. We run around like cats and rats from pillar to post, that even by plain regular usage of all kinds of compartments, the average commonplace mind that it is, it gets fragmented with thought pieces not lying in contiguous stretches. You wonder often why your mind sometimes is just lazing out, sometimes is so busy doing "its own" work and not your work, then you know that some unhealthy background processes are taking all the energy. You have just been on auto-pilot for a while and dozed away in a state of suspended animation causing the much-dreaded blue screen.

To keep this complex operating system nimble, use a tool regularly like Meditation or Social Work or Music or whichever tool that suits your regular maintenance schedule. Just as you might use Ccleaner to clean your computer or Lizol to clean your kitchen tiles and Mortein to kill those domestic nocturnal pests. Defragment your mind. Remove temporary baggage that has been accumulated out of age-old bitterness. Attach yourself only to trustworthy friends. Give thought cookies which others plant in you their due validity only as long as they enhance your experience of interacting with them. And most important, remember, there is nothing greater than keeping yourself alert for a real-time protection scan of your thoughts, when they are just about to enter you. For this, connect online to God from time to time and download your defences against unhealthy entrants. Be a responsible administrator of your mind. If you can't do all this (or if you can be diligent enough to do all of this), overhaul your mind and develop a strong, secure, stable mind.

Welcome to Andhra Pradesh

You have just seen this milestone go by, welcoming you into the State of Andhra Pradesh. Suswagatam. There are a few interesting things that happen when you move from one language zone to another in India. If you know a bit of semi-common languages like English or Hindi, and if the locals also know it, life is plain. But it’s more interesting to watch people interact when it’s not the case. If you are the type not to be inhibited by language barriers, you would freely roll out in your mother tongue, implicitly believing in national integration and assuming that the party in conversation will perfectly understand, not just the essence, but even the minute details of what your are saying. And if the local is also a similarly enthusiastic conversationist, you lose track of time irrespective of the fact that you are in a different land. Except that you should take care not to use a few select word-warps, words that are found in both languages, but have A meaning in one and B meaning in another. Particularly, if you have moved in from Tamil Nadu to Andhra Pradesh. Here are a few pointers.

1. Let’s start with a simple one. Nalla means Good in Tamil and Black in Telugu. So you can praise the goodness in a person by calling him Nallavan, make sure there is no problem of discrimination by color.

2. Asuya is used in the context of ‘disgust’ in Tamil, and I think, in Telugu, it means jealousy. An unclean toilet, for example, is disgusting and definitely not the neighbour’s envy.

3. Two phrases you are bound to come across quite commonly : Avasaram Ledhu and Akkara Ledhu. Usually, Akkara Ledhu is pronounced shortly as Akkarla. Avasaram Ledhu in Telugu means Not Necessary, where as Avasaram in Tamil means you are in a real hurry. In telugu too, I think it can mean hurry, but more often used in the context of necessity or occasion.

Akkarai in Tamil means Care and Attention. You might courteously ask someone “Innum konjam sambar venuma ?” (Would you like one more helping of sambar ?) and if he says Akkarledhu, don’t get worried he is accusing you of carelessness in your hospitality. It just means, wonderful that the sambar was, he has had enough (of the sambar). And in case he indeed wants to have more and replies in the affirmative, saying “kavali”, wait a moment, he is not referring to you as a street rowdy.

4. I had an experience with this one in my early days. I was fixing the printer in a hurry, and an elderly colleague asked me, “Ippudu Adavadi yenthuku ?”. What arrogance did I display here, I wondered. In fact, he was the one being arrogant accusing me of arrogance when I was quickly and quietly doing my work. But I just looked up and saw that there was a harmless factual inquiry look on his face, so I knew there is a goofup somewhere. It turned out that while adavadi means arrogance in Tamil, it means hurry in Telugu. So if someone cautions you “Adavadi voddhu”, he is warning you about your pace not about your politeness.

5. This one is a tricky swap. In telugu, Adavaallu means Women and Mogavallu means Men. In Tamil, Aadavar means Men and Magalir means Women. In the beginning, when you hear the phrase referring to Men and Women, you would naively think it should somehow mean the same in both languages. So if you are organizing a distribution and wish to say “Women on the Left Side, Men on the right side”, make sure your audience understands it in the same orientation. Or change the direction of distribution. The colloquial usage in Tamil is actually Aambalai (Man) and Pombalai (Woman), Aadavar and Magalir is bit of a pure usage, found in Pallavan bus seating instructions. But when you suddenly hear the phrase Adavallu and Mogavallu you are bound to be confused for a moment about which is which. So better remember one of them clearly and “derive” the other . Like I did while writing this paragraph.

6. You might invite a mischievous giggle when you say where you hail from. Careful, it might even become your nick name for life. Kumbakonam, the Temple Town in Tamil Nadu, is famous for the Mahamaham festival celebrated every 12 years, but the word, in Telugu means, scam or corruption.

There are some words in Telugu, which have their origins in pure tamil, I mean, Tamil of real good olden days, so much so that they are not even in daily use in Tamil nowadays and found only in literature, but are of daily use in Telugu. Gnamali (or nemali), referring to peacock, is one. That’s another thread.

It will also be interesting to know what are the phrases to be careful about when someone is moving from Andhra Pradesh into Tamil Nadu. Btw, It turns out, word-warps between English and French can be even more funny.

What goes up, up and further up..... has to be suspended for one hour when it comes down....

I have always thought, a certain amount of stoicism about the markets is a healthy habit to develop. Recently, when the Indian Sensex fell intra-day around 1700 points hitting what they call a 10% lower-circuit, SEBI suspended trading for an hour, probably to cool it off. (For novices like me, I think the phrase 10% lower circuit roughly means that Sensex fell 10% in a single session). I wonder why they didn't do such a restrictive thing when the markets went up, up and up too ? Going up is okay, coming down is not, is it ? Or they should have allowed the free fall under gravity, come what may, so that the market finds its own realistic evaluation bottoms, whatever that might be and rest comfortably on the sofa. If indeed it is overvalued, then a prick of the balloon might actually have been helpful in knowing the solid stuff within. Looks like: It's somehow okay for the market to pick a large number of points spread over a week or so, although such pace is far different from earlier acceleration levels and not reflect fundamental strengths .... but it's somehow not okay when it falls. :). It's okay to make unusual gains when they are spread over a week but not okay to lose such gains on a single day however unusual the gains may have been.

I wonder how the free market enthusiasts would like to look at this : Is this financial systems regulation or interfering with free markets ? Another blog of Ramnath, Free Markets India, tries to keep a log of the various forces pulling and pushing, for or against the pursuit of free markets. I can understand corporate or political lobbying for exclusive economic privileges can be categorised as a pull or a push, but i think it's difficult to categorize regulatory actions. It's tough to draw a line between what is healthy regulation, developing robust financial systems, putting market infrastructure in place etc and what is just ad-hoc damage control. That day, even FM intervened to make a statement, which I thought was a little extra. Of course, I haven't researched to write this post, but I wonder if there is such a thing called breaking a 10% higher circuit, in the SEBI regulations, just like the 10% lower circuit. Asked an economics friend about whether such a thing is of importance to the free markets discussion. He said, in real life, there are a lot of constraints to free markets and these constraints are to be handled first in the pursuit of free markets. I might have to read up Raghuram Rajan to understand what these are.

I tend to subscribe more to the long term value addition approach. I think if one can:
park and wait in good (intrisically value adding) stocks/funds, stoically,
remember a bit of Shankara's references to Economics in Verse 30 of Bhaja Govindam, :) :) ,
be not worried about the everyday ups and downs,
keep cool without looking for reassurance from the FM to heave a sigh of relief,
sit on the eggs and wait for them to hatch for five or ten years,
then equity has the scope to fetch far better returns than other forms of investment in an equivalent period. Of course, this doesnt apply if one is sitting on a donkey fund or a dead stock or special disasters. Otherwise, A little peep, now and then, to just see the eggs are fine should do.

Quite possible, I am over-simplifying here what the Finance guys read across a few semesters. I have seen the non-tech guys trying to figure out a simplistic understanding of the tech abracadabra, and succeed in achieving a functional understanding and the non-finance guys try to do the same thing to finance subjects. When I was first unsuspectingly "exposed" to the verbal weapons called Debit and Credit, when the duo mockingly stared at me from the blackboard, Drawing a T-shaped organism to tally numbers used to cause nightmares and make me sit up and draw the Holy Cross on my chest. I used to cheer myself up with the Lakshmi Ashtothram, try to ignore those two words as mere hallucinations and think of it as just Inflow and Outflow. As if water flowing into a tank would be Debit and water flowing out of the tap, then, must be certainly Credit. Or is it the reverse ? :) . Well, depends on whether we are talking about the tank or about the bucket. Closing the tap and measuring the water must be.... wait, is it Balance Sheet ?. Whateva. Something is better than nothing. Of course, Everything is even better, if you can handle it. There is no powerful substitute to in-depth research into a subject.

Seeking the Source

I have a fascination for rivers. One reason is my early impressions of Cauvery in full flow at Srirangam in my childhood days. Nowadays, it's more often dry due to "known issues" but the images of the river in all its majesty have stayed. Okay, if you want, etched in my memory. It used to be mentioned in our textbooks that while in some places it can get as narrow as "aadu thaandum kaviri" (so narrow as a goat can cross it in a jump) , it also becomes "Akanda Kaveri" (so vast that you see water till where your eyes can reach). Krishna @ Kanakadurgam is very good, it's tough to be in flow all year round in the south and it's Andhra Pradesh's good fortune that it is blessed with two of them, Krishna and Godavari.

Best so far and almost matchless are Ganges and the other further north rivers that drive in to the Ganga. Mandakini @ Kedar, tops them all. Heard Brahmaputra is among the most ferocious rivers and makes it extremely tough for river-rafting. Our raft coach, whom i believe has rafted in 11 countries, rated Brahmaputra as the toughest and the most exciting raft destination. A friend who visited Beas @ Kulu, Himachal Pradesh was full of praise for it.

Two rivers I want to visit some day : Godavari and Narmada. Godavari for comparing it with Krishna, particularly, Godavari @ Bhadrachalam. Seems there is a two-day trip on boat that ends at Bhadrachalam. Narmada, for the fanciful images I have about its grandeur and also about its enormity as discussed by the NBA. Walking all the way from Kerala, Adi Shankara is said to have met his guru Gowdapada on the banks of the River Narmada. Why mention this here, well, he is one of my icons, so I have to bring in my icons and all their fascinations into my posts. Someday, I should post nice pictures from our Chardham trip, taking the blog to the next level, photo blogging. Even as I write, Ramnath has already beat me to it by posting pictures of the Bhagirathi Mountain, hopefully I will supplement that by posting pictures of the Bhagirathi River.

Chitravathi is rarely in good flow, but when it recently indeed was, we all made a beeline to the river especially to watch it flow. There was even some news/rumour that some bund/dam upstream was broken due to heavy rains and chitravathi would flood, that was not to be. Or as in local slang, antha scenu ledhu. But it was in pretty good flow. And that was good scenery. A friend of friend of somebody offered Chilli Bajjis, it aptly fitted the occasion, so we put a heheheh face and gladly accepted, munched and shot off and dedicated that day's group discussion entirely to the Chitravathi river, its origin, its problems, it's floods in the earlier years and to the responsible policemen who were warning the folks not to venture into the river. Now there is a also a nice road that runs parallel to the river, so makes it a very good stretch for walkers, thinkers, poets and meditators (as long as you are not on the road). And hey yes, more recently, for bloggers too. One of my friends mentioned it's particularly wonderful on cool early mornings. Hmm.. to confirm that personally, I will have to change my schedule and check out some day.

As kids, we were trained to chant a sloka when we are just about to finish our bath, invoking the sacred rivers. My sanskrit is poor and even worse when I put it in English, but here it is:

Gangecha Yamunechaiva Godavari Saraswathi
Narmadey Sindhu Kaveri Jalesmin Sannidhim Kuru

(The meaning is here. )

I think rivers have something ethereal about them. For one, they have a calming effect on your mind. After a brief calm, they can ignite your imagination. They make you reflect on your imaginations and prod you to seek their source, i mean the river's source, and when you reach their source, they inspire you to find the source of your imaginations. And once you are done, they make you blog about what they have done to you.

Blogmentor Parampara

So... Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here, finally. Been thinking of starting a blog for the past two years but it never materialised for the usual reasons. One of these Web 2.0 sites should study what inhibits people like me with an initial inclination to blog/interact on the web and makes them put it off for later. And probably also why interest wanes after a while.

Among others, the two things that helped it happen are :

(a) Inspiration from a friend whom I should call my "blogmentor" Ramnath
(http://ramz.blogspot.com/ ) and
(b) a laptop, broadband connection in my room.

I was never comfortable about the idea of blogging from office and I am too lazy to walk down all the way to a cyber cafe for the noble cause of creative writing.

Two things to create when you need to make people buy a product/service:
1. Interest and
2. Access. (Aaha, what gyaan !!) .

There should be something like the blogmentor parampara like the guru-shishya parampara, who inspired whom to start blogging.

Started the blog on the Vijayadasami day, but quite funny that I didn't know what to write after I created the blog. So today I thought I will push myself to write something up. To call it a writer's block will be too hi-fi a term to describe the starting trouble. Nor can I say my mind went blank, you might think I have attained too high a spiritual state too quickly. Probably I should start by providing links to stuff I have written earlier but that would be like serving cold bindi fry from the refridgerator, the majaa is lost, not on Day 1, so will reserve that for a gloomy day. Hopefully, I will pick up some momentum and write without pushing.

In the meanwhile, you are welcome to push me. And thanks Ramnath for the first.