The biggest surprise of the tour was how far the Road biking community had come. The first TFN was evenly divided between Mountain Bikers and Roadbikers. This tour was probably 90% Roadbikers. And what bikes they had, some of the most expensive and awesome bikes came to the Tour,  Most of the top riders had bikes in excess of USD 5,000 (not counting the upgrades).  OH my god that beautiful Pinarello Dogma. And fast they were, riding the in excess of 25kmph over distances of 150 km on the hills and the heat. Most early riders would be at the hotel in 6-8 hrs depending on the distances, however this was not the case in the first TFN, most early riders came much later in the afternoon.

Maybe the riders then were not as fast as they are now, but also there was a huge sense of Competition, while earlier it was camaraderie. This did not man there was dearth of camaraderie, Bangalore riders had formed teams to ride as a peloton, so that they could save their legs for the Competitive section.

The organization of the Tour has certainly gone to the next level. The first year, We would reach the end and find our Bags have not arrived, food not ready and shoddy conditions at the hotel.  One of the worst thing from riders perspective coming in after hours of hard ride, is not having clean cloths to wear after a cold shower and not having some food ( I don’t mean energy bars) to eat. The recovery for the next day’s ride has to start immediately. This year the organization was impeccable. We would arrive early to the hotel and find the bags were already in the room, food in place, and above average hotels to stay at.

Also different was the planning and communication from the organizers, I do not believe in the whole tour anybody missed a turn or went the wrong way. The markings on the roads were impeccable, and support stations and vehicle support were great as well.

The Tour definitely has become harder since the first edition, that probably explains the drop in number of Mountain Bikes entering the tour. It’s a Road Bike tour and even though it sounds hash, there is no reason for Mountain bikers to enter TFN. Maybe the have fun the few days there are downhills and bad roads, but most of the 900km are tarred roads that offer no respite to the heavy MountainBikes.  The tour is also getting faster, most riders train rigorously for TFN and the riding speeds are on average higher (thanks also to the super awesome bikes)

There is one final change, Of the 10 people I hung out with Cycling wise, 5 were CEOs  or Head of their Organizations. It may be too early to call Cycling the new Golf, but there definitely seemed to be a lot more successful people( and  a loser among them), at the TFN.

TFN is evolving, and has come a long way since it started 4 years ago, and it could soon be the preeminent Tour in India the sort of Tour de France of India.

If you travel around Middle east, one question that you will keep encountering especially with travelers are their thoughts on the most impressive or beautiful mosque in the world. And since Mecca is incomparable, and not accessible to most travelers, the choice boils down to the following three

The Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey

From istanbul

The LotfAllah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran

From Esfahan

Ummaiyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.
(Unfortunately, I have not uploaded the pictures Damascus yet)

Most people I met also rate it in the order I have mentioned above.

Blue mosque, inspired  by Hagia Sophia, the masterpiece of Byzantine Architecture,  which it stands opposite to in Istanbul is something else. You see a series of symmetrical layered domes, But most people come there not pray, but to have their photograph taken. I am not so fond of such places.

I have a special liking for Lotfallah Mosque in Isfahan, because Isfahan is probably the most beautiful big city in the world. Those lazy  and lavish Tea Shops ( Iranians take their tea very seriously), Succulent Kebabs, and Fabulous Faloodas. I also have a fond memory of this mosque because the day I visited, a middle aged Flutist stood in the middle of the mosque and played the most haunting tune, and the music echoed in those beautifully painted mosaic tile walls like never I have heard before(It also ended dramatically, as music is not tolerated much in Iran, and he made a quick getaway as the Guards came looking.)

Damascus was the last city I visited (between Isfahan, Istanbul and Damascus) and there I found the mosque I think is the most fascinating and beautiful.  You access this mosque via a large marketplace whose tin roofs have holes that were caused by French Aircraft fire, It leaves you with a eerie feeling as shafts of light  come through it. At the end of the Market you see a Mosque, that does not look like a mosque, But once you leave your shoes behind go inside you can see the difference. It is beautiful not only because it has gold paintings of what paradise looks like for Islamic scholars, and the white courtyard and grand interiors, but because this is a living mosque. People still come to pray here. Children play in the courtyard as their parents sit and pray. I came to this mosque over and over again in my 7 day stay in Damascus, and felt completely at peace, despite the people. This place comes alive for Friday prayers, as you see an outpouring of faith like I’d never seen before.

If all the violence in Syria stops, make this the place to go when you are looking for a nice off the beaten path vacation and good food.

Anyways, where I was heading was, even when i was finishing up a book a day I realized I was a slow reader compared to my brother and other people at school.

And over the next decades unconsciously or consciously I tried to read books faster. It was also influenced by the (may I say, American) Accelerated Learning schemes that tell you that your success in life depends on how fast you read. Instead of reading words read sentences, and instead of reading sentences read paragraphs, blah blah blah.

Unfortunately, most of us do not have photographic memory, and unless you are reading Hardy Boys, there are nuances in the words, metaphors in the story and characterizations that you will likely miss. Over time I realized that reading fast was the  reason, I had no memory of what I was reading, or understanding, I just read a novel for the sake of story, missing the bigger points and metaphors.

Now a days I find myself taking weeks to finish a book, that I would probably finish in a day. I also tend to read books for a couple of hours before moving on, instead of trying to finish it in one or two sittings. This gives me more time to mull about the content, and sometimes do some research on the sidelines as well. I am no longer unhappy with my reading pace, and find myself enjoying the process of reading a lot more.

I started with a bang with around 8 km barefoot on the Road Surface, it was not really hard on the feet at all, but after the run i came back with really tight calfs. For almost a few days I was limping and had to take support on the rails to climb. This was unexpected, none of the blogs/books i had read before talked about this. But I continued running barefoot alternate days, thinking the calf muscles would just learn the new way of running in a few weeks and it will all be OK. Any barefoot runner will tell you that once you get the High of running barefoot it is hard to go back the shoes. It seems like running like that is a primal instinct.

In a few weeks I had increased my mileage to 15km alternate days. Also in the mean i had acquired a slightly large pair of Vibram Five Fingers, and I had started to run on the road surface with my Vibrams. I had also started to do runs in the morning at the Lake near our place. This i would do barefoot only because the track was not as rough as a the Road, and calluses on my feet were good enough to take care of stray stones and twigs. This was great because i was running much longer on the Lake than on the Road.

As most people will tell you your running style changes fundamentally when you switch from Shoes to barefoot, this is more apparent when you run on the soft surfaces. With shoes i under pronate, which means that i used to run on the outside of my soles. But now i was landing on top of the arch of the foot and literally using my big toe to push off the ground. I was also not dropping heavily on the foot, this helped reduce the pain of landing on gravel or stones. There is no such thing as pronation when running barefoot. It is all a way to differentiate one shoe with other for technical runners. I was also running with a straight Back. Not with a slight lean as running books recommend.

It was not all hunky dory all the time. One day i could just run 3 km and the legs an the heels hurt really bad, I could just not push myself, and i was glad i did not, because it really hurt for a week and I gave up running for a few weeks before i went back to running again. I think it was because i pushed myself to do longer mileage without my feet/heels getting used to the pounding.

I persisted with 10km runs alternate days and now i can run 20 on barefoot without much problems.

Couple of thoughts for somebody wanting to start barefoot.

It is an awesome experience, so do it without worrying about weather it protects you from injuries or not.

Start slow, Run on a soft surfaces before you go on to the rough roads.

Increase your mileage very slowly, even if you feel good after the run, keep knocking a consistent distance for a while before upping it.

On Roads, I prefer Vibram FiveFingers, Buy the right size if you want it.

You can still run the right posture and build up your calfs running with shoes with the right technique. I know it is slightly hard, but you can consciously try to land on the arch of your feet and power off with the big toe.

To each his own, it may not workout for your style of running, so know when to get back wearing shoes. It’s all about enjoying the run.

Talk about it. I see a few people running barefoot, but there seems to be very few good barefoot running blogs and running tips.

A few years ago in between jobs I spent 3 months hanging out in Madgaon, Goa. Sounds like a lot of fun, and it was. But when money used to run out,  We’d have to go find work and for me and some of my friends it meant going to Madgaon Docks and work on daily wages as Longshoreman. Basically that meant Moving loading unloading stuff,  fixing minor mechanical issues, operating cranes et al. It was intense physical work in the hot sweaty Goan sun. It was not fun but it had to be done to support my lifestyle. For a day of hard work I’d get paid almost the same amount i get paid what I’d get in an hour’s work as Computer Programmer, actually lesser.  Being a Longshoreman is easy, everybody in decent physical shape can do it, and there is no talent required here.

It was easy to recognize, that some people cared about doing it right read piling stuff up correctly, and not taking extended tea and lunch breaks) and some people did not.

That was the time I realized despite the tough conditions, people want to care about what they do. That’s when I started to realize appreciating what you do, and not do it just for the money, which is what I’d been doing.

At my current job I  regularly meet a ton of run of the mill programmers ,  just doing enough to get the job done, without a thought about craft. It’s not really hard to program badly, anybody who can Google, and Stackoverflow can easily write something that works.  But you really need to care about your craft to make it work well, and not pile stuff on top of other stuff and just get it done, especially when we are getting paid so much for what we do.

When i mean care for the craft, I have very little idea of what it means but i have a few heuristic questions

1. Is it exactly what the customer was looking for?
2. Am I making the right technology choices knowing what I know about the Project?
3. Have I made it Better than it already was(Faster to run, easier to read, specific to the need)
4. There is no 4th Question.

If Knowledge is Silver, Outlook is Gold, and IQ is just lead weight”. -Alan Kay

I do not make as much money as I would in a “stable” company job. I dare say I don’t expect to make much more even in the long term. It also has challenges around making some tough decisions around whom to hire what to do next and how to deal with “Losers”.

What I get instead is the enormous flexibility in working, In my previous company, i had to be at work latest by 10:00 and would be still at work at 8:30 PM, not by force of course. Now I reach office around lunch and leave by 6:00PM. I have been regularly cycling to work, leisurely and taking the longer ways because i choose to go to work at the time when traffic is at the minimum and not in a hurry to make the standup at office.

That also means that I have about 4-5 hours at work and maybe a few hours later in the evening. This has been another change for me.  I get 4 hours of focussed work and that generally is sufficient for me to get my work done.  I have no responsibility to train somebody or work to maintain Organizational Leverage. All my colleagues are smarter than me and I get to go full steam towards what i am supposed to do. Yes it also means that i learn less of the ‘git’ tricks or new tools to get things faster.

Soon after losing out on pairing, I noticed that I was in the ‘Stuck’ state (like staring at the screen for without a clue about why things were not working) for longer than earlier when the pair would help me make some of my decisions. It lasted for a while, before it became much lesser in frequency. I think that might be ok, the overall productivity benefits I get. We’ll see.

After multiple failed attempts at running consistently, I have also started to run regularly averaging around 40 km a week for the last 3 months, and  will run my 2nd Half marathon at Auroville this weekend.

When I quit my last company i was thinking of doing something other than consulting, something more meaningful. I definitely am not doing what I intended to do, but it’s definitely a better place than earlier.

Let’s see how long this lasts.

I love his unique and picturesque writing style, that makes me see the landscape almost as he is seeing it. His writing hand and his heart are very close, he writes movingly about Africa, a continent he had come to in his youth as a teacher. He returns to the dark continent again to observe the continent he left 30 years ago.

I thought there were big change rippling through Africa, you could see it in the football, you could see it in the cellphone usage stats and you could see that in rapid fall in AIDS numbers. Not true says Theroux.

The dominant theme in the book is how much worse Africa has become from the time he was last  in Africa, in fact he repeats it so many times that it starts to bore you. But you can see that he holds out hope for people of Africa, unlike is equally illustrious and once friend and now bitter rival V.S. Naipaul or Sir Vidia, who had famously quoted as saying “Africa has no future” and “Africa has no culture“.

His mantra is “leave Africa to Africans” and don’t try to impose western style society in Africa via the myriad development agencies, charities and missions. It is making locals more and more dependent on aid rather than their toil, and over a period of few decades proved counter productive. Represented by  foreigners in White Landcruisers they are volunteers that come but don’t interact with locals and leave in a while, and after leaving there is nobody to take their place and it falls into disarray. In their desire to do good things they disrupt the fabric of society, like picking up educated local teachers to work for these NGO’s in administration at higher salaries

I also like him for being extremely opinionated, and in stark contrast with IMHO the other modern travel popularizer Michael Palin(Whose Himalaya’s I dig, because I traveled parts of that route). I remember Theroux taking jabs at Palin in his superb “The Ghost Train to the Eastern star“. He visits Bangalore in the same book and savages the city as ‘botched cosmetic surgery‘ and ‘huge unfinished and deforested city sagging under its dubious improvements‘, both of which I could easily relate to. Bangalore has become a beast that did not evolve but was created in an instant by a nature’s freaks. But that’s another blog coming I guess

More i learn about the “cool refresher”, more i think it is evil. It is not just about the use of  pesticides in coke, or about Health diseases it causes, it is environmental.

Firstly it was never good for the health, it has a ton of sugar and caffeine. It’s not great the teeth and the stomach and the body. But the  sugar in Coke is not the sugar we are used to, but High Fructose Corn syrup(HFCS), which is cheaper, thanks to the abundance of Corn. Oh! yeah a lot of it  (atleast in the US) comes from the infamous Cargill, which is known to use GM seeds. Though debated, HFCS is different from regular sugar(actually has worse effects on the body than just sugar) and it may not be coincidence that  it’s rise in US has coincided with the dramatic rise in obesity.

My biggest reason for disliking Coke is the way it has managed to use water in India. All across india, in stated as diverse as Kerala, Punjab, and Rajasthan farmers are accusing Coke depleting Water from the aquafers (without paying a penny)  that were  used for irrigation of the crops. Even government figures show a dramatic drop in the water table in such areas. To make matters worse, it is not even efficient with it’s water consumption, A liter of Coke uses up anywhere between 3.12(coke’s claim) and 9 liters of water.  It seems rather stupid that our “cool refresher” costs so much in terms of water. Not to mention food as well, because the lack of water for farmers means higher food prices and distressed farmers.

It has also consistently refused to use more environment friendly packaging for it’s drinks. Bottles of Coke and packets of chips are the most common form of litter on the streets and rivers and streams in India.

It also became notorious for the outrageously high amount of pesticides in the bottles, 35 time the allowed limit. It has also been reported to run the bottling plants in unhygienic conditions.

Companies like Coca cola do not operate democratically, they have nothing but their shareholders to keep happy, and they have huge propaganda machines to keep doing things that reduces their costs. The way it makes sense for them would be either stop using the products of Coca Cola or provide them with economic incentive to do it differently. I guess i can only do the former.

Some links on Coke.

A whole pandora’s box of Criticism of Coca cola

http://www.fromwhatiheard.com/2007/03/14/the-effects-drinking-a-coke-has-on-your-body/

Coke Facts, a website setup by Coca cola

Per capita Coke consumption over the years. Look at Asia’s growth and US dropping of dramtically

I was pleasantly surprised when I clicked a button on moneycontrol.com(where I’d been tracking my portfolio for a while) to compare my portfolio with the stock indices . Since my portfolio was mostly large companies, I decided to compare it to BSE-100. It was sucky that i could compare only for an year and not longer than that.

Most mutual funds manager aim to beat the Index, and get big bucks for doing that.  If this year is a decent benchmark then i should get the real big bucks, because I outperformed the Index by around 4 times.  Simply put (assuming the same return for a while, which is totally hypothetical) i would  double my money in 2.5 years while the Index (at the same rate) would take you 8.5 years.

Some of the best equity funds have returned around 20% this year, probably gold funds are the only funds that would have given you better results.

One reason i think is the fact that i stuck with my best bets and did not face liquidity crunch that other fund managers were facing. Also i was mostly in stocks even in the worst of the times.

Are your experiences the same? Have you seen your portfolio outperform Benchmarks? What are your strategies?

The comparison is here .

This year Ishey Sir told me that they decided to not sow barley at all and leave the land as it is, bringing to an end a tradition of growing crops that is probably as old as arrival of man to this area. These farms are located on the fertile banks of river Indus, i have not seen any of them using fertilizers, so weather or overuse is probably not the problem.
“It was becoming too expensive to farm and it was not worth the effort” he said. I could see that he was probably more disappointed at that decision than me. I wondered what he would be doing if the farm was the only means of living(he is a Principal at a nearby school), which is true for most small holding farmers across the country.
When everybody is talking about end of cheap food, how is this possible? The idea was expensive food will drive more people and corporations to farming.

As P.Sainath puts it, farming is not dying it is being killed.

Inputs costs have become exorbitantly high, because of companies like Monsanto and Cargill making exorbitant profits on their seeds, and the fertilizer prices have been raising since deregulation started around 1992.

The future looks bleak for small holder farmers, which forms a bulk of Indian agriculture, which despite massive growth in Indian economy takes upwards of 20% of GDP.