India after Gandhi

Started reading this book. With 800 pages to cover, its more like the Shantaram, book which I had read earlier. Not sure, how much time I need to wrap it up. But one thing is for sure, I will be finishing many other books during the course of reading this book.

Cheers to reading,

Retirement from trekking

The day we crossed Auden's col pass at 18500 feet, something spectacular happened. We had not yet descended from the pass, when a snow storm started. And by the time we pitched our tents, it had taken off.

We had left couple of our stuffs before ascending due to the huge storm and now we were stuck without food, water and no stove to cook. It snowed continuously for almost 7+ hours and through the night. We had no option but to stay in our tent. So everyone started chatting and in our tent, we just came up randomly with a question.

" What would you do if you reached safely home after completion of this trek?".

Our scenario was such that, even completing the trek looked difficult and reaching home safely was also another concern.

So my answer was that, I would retire from trekking, if I ever got home safely. Now, almost a month after returning from the trek, when I still remember that day, I get goose bumps. The whole trek was well worth the effort.

Am I retired from trekking? well, not really, I am just avoiding monsoon treks, let me see when I can start again or rather come out of retirement!

Cheers,

Co-Incidence at 18000 feet

During the trek to Auden's col, one of our team members had a book by name Full Tilt, written by Dervla Murphy. It was about a lady who toured few continents on a bicycle.

It was about her bicycle tour through Europe, Iran, Afghanistan and India during the 1960's. It was like a dream reading about this trip of her's. Lots of stuffs about different places were written. Though I could not read beyond 25% of the book, I could still recollect about the places which she went through.

Then on a particular day during Auden's Col trek we were stuck at Auden's col base camp as one of our porters had gone back to drop one of our team member who was suffering from sickness and one more porter also returned owing to bad health and bad weather. So were kind of using up our buffer day while waiting for them to come back.

During that day, we spoke to one of our team member from Germany. So we asked him since how long he has been coming to India. Surprisingly his first visit to India was during 1974, years before we were actually born and I could not believe the way he reached India. He was telling about the route which I had read in the book few days before through these continents. Only difference was he was either on a bus / train or by car. He had traveled through these continents in fact before making it to Kashmir.

Its such an co-incidence, you are reading about a person's experience about travelling across continents and reaching India and all of a sudden the German guy appears and tells us about his story with utmost humility which resembles the one you have read before!

It was a strange co-incidence at 18,000 feet I thought.

Cheers,

Back to reading, Amazon kindle

What quora did to me, was that, it made me go back to reading. Instead of reading answers by n00bs, I could fallback on bestsellers. What better way than a kindle? I have completed 4 books on kindle since last 2 weeks and simultaneously reading many of them including technical.

Also I am downloading free books from the Amazon Store. I have plans to buy some books which are available for Rs 60-100 odd, which seems to be very cost effective. One meal at office squares you up by Rs 100 odd, while these books are so pretty cheap. I can afford one, no doubt.

I am so so glad I am back to reading, Instead of tracking the books read, using shelfari which is powered by Amazon itself, I have moved to goodreads!

The new kindle being Rs 5k, I am itching to own one, but instead considering a reading light worth Rs 575. Let me see!

Cheers, 

Bye bye Quora

Disclaimer - this is my personal opinion, I do not care about what others say!

Finally.. after using quora for 2 months I finally found my calling to actually de-activate and delete my quora account. People on quora generally speak about deleting or deactivating facebook account, but, yeah, as you understand, I prefer to walk away from the crowd, so I decided to do the other way round. deleted the quora account instead of facebook.

I chose to do this since I very well know how to use facebook. I have 75% of my friends on restricted list and remaining 10% of whom I do not follow. Now you can imagine, how many handful of updates my facebook wall shall have. So I have mastered the art of managing time on facebook.

But on quora it was all about mastering the art of not reading the so called junk written by n00bs. Well let me put down the reasons why I chose to quit quora.

1. I chose to follow top writers, most of whom had a fan following of thousands highest being 35k.
I thought these gentlemen or women, would write something interesting, something which I could relate to. But it was nothing but disappointment. They wrote about their ups and downs their field experiences etc etc.

So the point is-
- Why should I read about their failures / experiences when I can myself be in the field and experience failure myself. May be reading their failures might help me make a better decision, but no guarantee. Who knows if I can remember what they wrote and apply at that very moment.

- If I had to read about failures, I would read about failures of Mahatma Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln and why a bunch of people who write on quora?

2. Quora  had become more of a disturbance at office, with two monitors, I would have one monitor dedicated to quora or would browse it for 10 minutes in every hour. It was very distracting. I reduced my quora usage to 10 minutes for every 3-4 hours. But still after reading answers of few people, I thought even 10 minutes was not worth it.

3. People told me to follow even better top writers. I could find some top writers on quora. but believe me, I could not relate to what they write. They wrote about aeroplanes, physics so many topics, none of which I am interested in. Even in the section for automobiles, I found it very tough to actually make quora give out stuffs which I am interested in.

4. Career advice and self help answers written by Indian counterparts was a big let down. I thought it was nothing but copied and re-phrased content from self help websites available on the internet. So another big let down.

5. 40% of quora users are Indians, now you can take your decision wisely!

Will add more points. but for now, happy to use facebook in a limited way instead of quora. Its been 4-5 days since I read from quora.

One thing quora did help me get into. More on that in another post!

Cheers,