When we started cooking dinner at night 11 30 (PM) - TTTT 10

There are days when we travel to far places to trek. So travel time itself is huge! It was one such occasion. Reaching Honnavara from Bangalore was the plan.

Late start from Bangalore and there you go, reaching Honnavara was a big ask. It was nothing short of 500 kilometers. And then, we went through Sirsi and there you go, one more pitstop a temple visit and all that.

So it was 12 in the afternoon when we finally made it to our trek start point. We started in the summer heat with temperature around 38 degrees and high humidity.

After two hours we reached our camping place, base camp. We had our lunch, the problem is the water falls was a good 6-7 kilometers away and it was all rocky path.

So we started around 3pm towards the water fall and boy we made it around 6pm, when it was about to turn dark. Soon we took turns to visit the waterfalls bathed in waterfalls and in another 45 mins we were about to start.

It was turning dark and it was full moon day, We were up against a dark dark night amidst forest all for ourselves. Navigating with torch lights, sure it was fun. But we reached back to our base camp at around 11 PM. Once we made sure our tarpaulins were all laid out we soon embarked on the journey of cooking.

And there you go, cooking at 11:30 PM in the night. Above that, your's truly that is me was trying desperately breaking a big tree trunk with a blunt machete.

It was fun, doing all those crazy antics in the middle of the night. Once dinner was ready at 12 AM, we ate, it was rice with puliyogre mix.

So there goes the after effects of starting a trek late and ending it even late!

Cheers,

Motivation for writing about cab/shuttle drivers and about tales from travel

I have been writing about cab drivers and tales from travel, wonder what motivated me to write about it. I am not sure, I have really opened up about that, if not, I guess time is ripe to let it out before I forget and it takes months together.

Reasons include -

• Increasing number of posts.
• Getting the number up with burst of short posts which take lesser effort than long story telling, well, that is my motto.
• Interesting encounters
• There are tonnes of interesting encounters which I had in the last couple of years owing to travel, writing would end up in a book for that matter.
• Getting to know myself
• Writing opens up more info about oneself than anything else. 
• Experienced hands.
• Meeting different people, not only gets their culture going, but also lets out their experience speak. People who are driving vehicles for large part of a decade, the problems they have encountered, what makes them click, its all part of learning curve.
• To write about uncommon things
• Who could have imagined, writing about travel/tale experiences would lead to recollecting and reminiscing so many funny and awesome incidents.
• Its not everyday that I tend to notice intricacies involved in other activities, like travelling.
• Sometimes, we are so much head over heels about our jobs or profession that, we fail to notice, other people too, what value add they bring to our ecosystem. Like the guide for our treks, porters, helpers, these people come in handy when it requires the most.
• I think, meeting them, interacting with them, opens up a whole new box of knowledge which ceases to exist within books.
• Experience is a great teacher and believe me, their experience just shows.
• Reading books and gaining a degree is one side, braving a real storm is another!
• Met drivers who were themselves ace mechanics.
• Met drivers who drove from Bangalore to Bihar/Assam/Kolkota on trucks/car/pickup.
• To add later

As of now can recollect these points, but sure shall add more,

Cheers,

Shuttle driver #15 - A driver who previously drove a truck, 10 wheeler

As I try to do multiple tasks at the minute, I recollect having a wonderful shuttle driver recently. Once in a while we do have shuttle drivers who have driven exceptional vehicles. From an ambulance to a, soda bottle carrying 6 wheeler, and now a proper 10 wheeled truck.

So, this driver, was a temporary one, probably for an evening's drop. He was around 5 ft and looking very slim. He started out with the vehicle in a very rough way. I mean it crossed potholes rather hurriedly. I was quick to assume that the driver had poor visibility and thought he was in a haste.

Then, since the vehicle as pretty new, we asked the driver about its ownership details. He told us it was his own self vehicle, and a week old, thats it. So we asked him what was he driving before and what made him buy a new vehicle.

Considering, he was so slightly built, I some how got a feeling, he was probably driving a 6 wheeler, but the real surprise came when he said, he owned a 10 wheeler Leyland truck on partnership with one more person and had run into loss. His family feared accidents would happen while driving a truck and hence scaled him down to a Tata Indica.

Its not very often we get a driver who responds to our question and has previously driven a truck. So the conversation began with a small hint that the driver was eating betel nut and gutka / zarda whatever. It somehow turns out people from North Karnataka eat pan masala gutkha while drivers from South Karnataka smoke cigarettes. The pattern is consisent.

Over here too, it matched, the driver was from Raichur and had been in Bangalore for over 15 years. For the good part of 6 years, he had owned and driven a truck and prior to that, he had joined as helper for a MAN Truck. I wonder, MAN Truck existed in India 6 years back? Need to check on that.

So we asked where all he had been his truck and about his bad experiences while visiting other places. He had been to Bihar, Assam from Karnataka and had carried loads of potatoes, onions, groundnuts and few other things for that matter.

Regarding bad experiences, he told he was robbed of his stepney in Mumbai once and nothing else. He also insisted he carried less money and had only a ATM card with money, so he felt very secure.

We also spoke about Tata trucks versus Leyland trucks. I was under the impression Leyland was in huge demand and performed better. But he corrected me saying, Tata trucks were better off pulling heavy loads when compared to Leyland. I'm sure its individual perception, but still, TATA has a loyal customer in him, even though he owned a Leyland truck.

There goes one more driver intro, almost 5 months have passed since I have written about the driver series, the reason being we had consistent Toyota Innova cab till March.

Cheers,

PS - Now back to some reading!

A driver who gave sweets/chocolates for his birthday - TTTT 9

I would like to key in this post, before I forget this incident. It happened so, on one of our trek/travel, we found a very jovial driver. He was very much casual, and friendly.

So once the trek was over, we were about to return to Bangalore and the driver proudly announced, it was his birthday. He was organizing a liquor party and cake cutting with friends once he reached Bangalore. But before that the most unexpected thing happened.

Well, he purchased sweets and chocolates and distributed them amongst us travellers, me my friends. I mean, what more can you expect, even after many years of travelling, this was the first one of a kind incident.

Cheers,

Last 2 weeks at office

Last two weeks at office have been pretty rough. It all started with me losing 20% of my bonus. It came as a rude shock as quite a bit of money was in jeopardy.

I really did not know what to do, the amount was yet to be given to me on paper. I had seen on the basis of amount given as a part of salary.

Nothing was going well this season. Temperatures around was horrible, travel this month was almost impossible. Working out during summer and following a diet has been thrown off gear. Loads of reasons to crib about. And on top of this, I get nothing in the form of bonus.

I could be quiet and quite satisfied with the outcome, had I not performed. In fact the non performing team members had gotten more bonus amount than me. I literally lost my sleep. I felt like beating the living hell out of everyone out there.

Well, I can say non performing, the reason being, I was continuously working on production issues, end user support, talking to onsite people, local QA, onsite QA, doing screen sharing with onsite QA for issue replication, giving builds/fixes for production issues, doing hell a lot of work and there you go, whilst the others, yup, I bet, did lesser than this, though they were working on development issues. I do development work but highly occupied into production sustaining work since last 3 months plus atleast.

Yep, development work gets far more time and no one to return back to until QA passes it. Production work has the management standing on you, asking updates from you and the questions of timeline. Its like asking for trouble.

And then the inevitable happened. Lack of exercise due to summer was taking a toll on me. And then the stress levels were increasing too. On top of that, was continuously being pin pointed to in the meetings for being quiet and not participating.

So finally, I had to really stretch some muscle and tell people who's who in the team.

When I was finally called for discussion regarding performance bonus, with our Sr Director, I told, let me bring my laptop. Though my director insisted on not having my laptop for meeting, I still carried it over there.

And boy, did I make a big dent over there. I made clear what work I had done, and I even pointed to what work others had done and I unleashed hell a lot of uncomfortable questions which our's truly director gave answers, which according to my standards, were nothing short of unsatisfactory.

I even showed exact statistics of how people were misusing official time, going for food courts, how when I was on leave, people were so apathetic that, they could not do even a screen share with onsite team. Just shows, whose got real guts after all to deal with US/Europe teams. (Well, one is me of course, now I can say that proudly!)

Finally the tide turned to my side, and the meeting ended abruptly, when two people interrupted us, since our director had other meetings too.

Before leaving, he told, meeting is not fully done and held back the bonus letter, not before folding the paper exactly in half.

So there you go, its almost a week to that incident, and I anxiously wait for my new bonus letter which should have turned up with a 100% number. (though I was targeting 120%).

And my biggest achievement was not losing temper. If I generally lose temper, I do not care who is around. So this time, I kept quite and directed all my difficult to answer questions to our director.

Next installment of our meeting, well, few more statistics and few more uncomfortable questions, and I guess, more embarrassment not for me though!.

Cheers,