Category: Personal

  • To Mumbai and back

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    Diwali gave me my first occasion to return home from Bharuch. This is a relatively small route to travel but is perhaps the busiest. Being on the straight Mumbai-Delhi line via Ahmedabad means some pretty heavy rush on the train lines. Wait listed tickets and endless refresh button clicking ensued.

    The Bharuch (BH is the Indian Railway short code for Bharuch Junction) – Mumbai Central (BCT is the Indian Railways short code for Mumbai Central) journey was nice enough. Got on board at 2338 hrs and reached Dadar at 0415 the next day and reached home by about 20 minutes.

    I used IndiaRailInfo.com to get the time-table. The website is pretty accurate in this regard. I also found it had this volunteer group that did many interesting things around the website – reported train progress reports, guessed whether a waiting list ticket would get confirmed or not (it predicts this but does not claim accuracy) and provides a very basic interface. I first started using this website in January when Kirk was here. Slowly I began to notice some of the crowdsourcing features around this website. One more piece in India’s strange love story with its Railway network.

    IndiaRailInfo.com predicted that my ticket would be confirmed, however it did not and I returned from home by bus – a Neeta Volvo. I slept pretty well and reached Bharuch at 0430 hrs and walked the last mile home.

    As I type this, I am back in Bharuch and back to work.

  • At Bharuch

    I usually look up the place I am going to – if not days in advance then at least while going there using a mobile web application. While reading up about Bharuch where I have been since October 6, 2011, I found little or no information. The geographical information (which I have taken recent interest in learning more about) about the place is lacking. The Wikipedia article on the town just keeps on repeating a similar set of facts and figures and is in need of copy editing and addition of a lot of information. Google Maps doesn’t do much better. While it has captured major town locations, it does not have road names for every road. In short, it is a mapper’s paradise.

    All of that said, my first experience of staying in any place other than Mumbai can be best defined with just one word – SLOW. Bharuch is a slow town. It is a small town. Although, it is a town that is growing at a frentic pace as the nearby Dahej SEZ project is building up. The landscape is changing – faster than the pace of life here. People seem to be only coming to terms with the change. Slowly, there are more people from outside Bharuch in Bharuch than people who are originally from Bharuch.

    It has been 2 weeks since I have been in this town. I have spent most of that time going to and fro to work and learning the ropes there. I am yet to go into town and explore it like it should. Mostly, it is the heat that stops you from wanting to go out anywhere after 9 AM in the morning. Then, it’s only after 4 PM that it is even worth considering going out. The constraints that this places means that I have not had time to explore this town.

  • Moved to Bharuch

    This article originally appeared on my blog http://lifeofpradeep.wordpress.com. I recovered the post using Wayback Machine.

    I travelled in Saurashtra Express for about 7 hours to reach the city of Bharuch on October 6, 2011. I got off the train, checked myself into Shital Guest House and on the next day reported to work at ABG Shipyard Ltd on October 7, 2011. My position here is as a Graduate Engineer Trainee (GET) in the Planning Department.

  • First rains for 2011 in Mumbai

    [Placeholder: I lost the images in this post. Post skeleton found here. 7 pictures]

  • What’s next?

    This is a question that I was asked multiple times during my vacation to Kerala last month. It was perhaps a way of conversation for them but I did not really have a good answer for this one despite knowing well before hand that I would be asked this question. For the past two days, this question has returned with a vengeance and has forced me to think along a future trajectory.

    My bad graduational injection means that my life needs an orbital correction. Based on various conversations I had today and yesterday, these are the options I have narrowed it down to:

    1. Go to Russia and learn about rockets
    Russia is a country I admire for their rocketry prowess. I love the shear volume of rockets they have and they launch every year. It is a trade that I’d love to learn and it’s best to learn from the best. I am looking at Universities that offer post-graduation courses in Aerospace Engineering/Rocketry/special machines. I learnt that admission for international students closes on June 20, 2011. I think applying for the 2012-13 academic year will give me the benefit of learning some Russian and in the meanwhile accrue some work experience.

    2. Join the Armed Forces via the Short Services Commission
    I’d love to be in the Engineering Core of the Armed Forces and help use space to improve India’s military prowess. This option is a bit clouded because I’m not entirely sure why I want to do it and is my father’s dream (he has not told me so openly  – but I see it in his eyes sometimes) of what I should be doing.

    3. Get some job – marry and settle down
    I know it makes you go eek in your guts but for some people it’s a very good option. At various points in my engineering degree, experience has made me want to do this. Complete my degree – get some job that pays well – marry and settle down. Not exactly path breaking but gives you time for hobbies like astronomy, weather man, philosophy etc.

    More options are yet to be considered – like being a liason officer with ISRO, going to Bhutan and settling down there, going back to my older interest of working with a museum, becoming a weatherman or becoming a sadhu and wandering in the Himalayas . I probably wouldn’t do some of these out of sheer laziness but these are thoughts that have passed through my mind as answers when relatives in Kerala asked me the question – What next?

  • Me is back

    It has been a tumultuous month of May. I was in Kerala with my folks for nearly 3 weeks and am now back in Mumbai. Will start contributing to Wikipedia from this month as well. Regular blogging should resume soon.

  • Trip to Kerala

    We’re going on vacation to Kerala. We’re leaving on May 11 and will be back on May 30. Will continue to update the blog and add pictures when I get near an internet connection.

  • Weather – Renewables – Space

    I’m in a period of re-definition. I’m re-defining what are my core goals and what are my add-on goals. I am a guy with various interests and I’m as passionate about one as the other. This makes things interesting when trying to make a career choice. The three things on top of my mind right now are – weather, renewables and space. Writing has slipped in and out of this. Whatever I do, I want to be able to do all of these and much more in my time.

  • Hello world!

    Today is our New Year according to the Malayalam calendar system, called Vishu. I thought that this was as good a time as any to start something new. 

  • What to do between work – scientific travel writing?

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on April 6, 2011. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    For quite some time now, I have been thinking about what to do generally between work. The thought of traveling did strike me as a useful thing to do. While I have not arrived at any useful direction on what to do for work, I have come to an idea on what to do between work or to take a break from work.

    The idea is an extension on my “Telescopes of India” tour, which did not really work out so well. The idea is to travel to a country which has an astronomical observatory. What I would do next is not really very clear to me now. But, I think I’ll figure things out as I learn more and more about the observatory itself. I don’t know if there’s a genre called “scientific travel writing” but it would be an interesting genre to begin writing in.

    There are many people interested in visiting scientific places – like observatories and laboratories. It’ll be interesting to see how an ordinary guy is given entrance to these facilities. This will be in addition to living with a scientist and learning about the “scientific culture” of the organisation. I think that’s how I would define scientific travel writing.

    This is really the first draft of this idea but it sounds like an interesting concept for me to try and explore in the future. Since, I have been following the space and astronomy community, this is where I hope to begin probing. It’s a huge experiment.