Sorry to keep you waiting….

It had been quite a while since I posted my last blog. As things changed quite a lot and kept me busy !

Another phase of life started, both professionally and personally !!

That gives enough clue on whatz happening. I quit my current job and moved to another continent, usa. Nothing seemed to change much since my last visit here in 2003.  Things went well in the initial phase of getting settled here.. Managed to get the driving licence in just one visit.. that too without an appointment!! Followed by buying a car, new phone blah blah blah..

Things are back on track now… Will try to keep posting more often in this year !!

Obviously I am not referring to your meetings with fiancé in lake view restaurant corner table on Friday evening.

I’m talking about the office meetings, in particular to most happening IT industry.

Meetings are essentially of two types. One way meetings & No way meetings.

One way meetings are those where the boss announces and everybody listens. In the allotted Q&A time, no questions are asked, and if any dumb guy asks, the answers are too confidential to disclose in the meeting. Typical traditional industries style.

The IT industry, which boasts of no hierarchy (its okay to ignore your boss as long as he doesn’t know), open doors culture (you can keep an eye on others, may wink occasionally) & team work (No one will be responsible for the failure, end of the day), invented the second type of No way meetings.

In a meeting, at any given time, essentially one of these two can happen.

1. A person describes his problems or issues, respectfully called as technical challenges.
2. Others give advice to the above.

In first case, rest all having no time to listen others problems (everybody got enough of their own) burry their heads in laptops checking the mails with [FWD] in the subject. Else they practice their childhood drawings with great passion on their notebooks.

In the second case, no body having time to listen to others advice, follow the suit as above. These are the early state syndromes.

In the advanced state people have weekly recurring meetings where they can start creating the mails themselves & browse web more officially.

In the acute state people start sleeping, occasionally snoring.

Got to leave for the third meeting…. Meet you later …!!

The Most Climbed Mountain on Earth !

Your are wise to climb Fuji once and a fool to climb it twice - A Japanese Proverb

These are the few mostly used words to describe Mount Fuji, or Fuji-San, as Japs call it respectfully.

Beauty lies not just at the destination, but all the way too ! This is what applies for our journey to Mt.Fuji. We visited on 27-Aug-2006.

Sunny weather is sine qua non to get a good view of Fuji. This weekend is the last but one weekend left for us in Japan. So, though the weather forecast is not on our side, we calculated our odds and started off. This time we planned to go in car along with family of Kimura-san from our company. We left Tokyo at 8 am (I did weather forecast 1000 times by then). Expected to be two and half hours journey.

Above photos are taken in Winter season, where its not possible to climb Fuji. July and Augut is official climbing season, where there is no snow. But winter is good to see Fuji as clouds will not be there, particularly for photographers. As you can see its a perfect inverted cone, and a Valcano.

One can go till half of the mountain called 5th stage in car, and then climb over to top. Its a trek worth 8 hours up hill, and we choose to go only upto 5th stage.

As we go on and get into mountain area, weather got worse and it looked like an overcast day. This is how the sky was..

On the way, there was a place formed by rocks completely. And Compass does not work in that area; more over, with hill, rocks and dense forest, it became a famous suideside spot near Tokyo. But we did not come across any souls, unfortunately.

In the same area there were few Caves, below the surface, filled with chilling air. Even in summer, water is frozen into ice in those caves. In olden ages, people used to take ice from these caves in summer for the King. The way is very slippery, thin path, low height. Few pics here

Entrance of the cave and Ice insdie

Ice is there on the both sides of the path in the cave like this !

When I came out, mist formed on my glasses and world looked like this for me

Cutting the story short, we headed for Mt.Fuji 5th station. If weather was good, we would have got the glimpe of Fuji from the way itself. But it was almost raining and we could not see even we approaced Fuji and started climbing upto 5th station by car. When we reached 5th station, it was full of fog and visibility is less than 20 feet. And it started altering quickly. To get an idea, in each 5 mintues period, the parking lot looks like this or that as you can see here.

And Fuji is completely covered in fog.

After waiting for an hour or so, which lasted for ages, we got some clear sky and could see Fuji like this. Again, this view lasted only for a minute and again your one hour clock starts ticking.

So, now I am also one of the very sacred persons, who visited Mt.Fuji.I wish to visit Fuji again in the next weekend if weather permits for a better view; but there is a strong disapproval from home department. So, I spend my next weekend buying chocolates to who ever reads this post.

With this, I finished most of the visiting places in n around Tokyo. Next time wish to come in winter.

Today I reserved my return ticket to India, that will be on 8-Sept, Friday.

Cheers !!!

PS: Can anybody tell me this. In India we measure everything in Centigrade, the city temperature etc. But the body temperature in Fahrenheit. Why ?

http://images.ucomics.com/images/pdfs/sadams/godsdebris.pdf

Read at least first 15 pages before deciding to continue it or thrash it.

Word of caution: Its not a regular novel. Its a “thoughtful experiment”, philosophical and scientific. Just by referring this book here in my blog, I neither subscribe to those ideas nor deny them !

If you like the book, do tell me so that I can suggest you few more !

After dreadful experience of queues while visiting Disneyland, we planned to visit Disney sea on a non-weekend day ! Plan worked well!!

We woke up at midnight 5.30 am on friday and left home at 7am; thanks to JR, we reached the resort by 8:15am. I feel JR is one of the best managed metro rail network on the globe.

There was a huge crowd at the entrance. This is the summer holiday season in Tokyo and I can see the effect. But once we are in, the crowd disappeared into the various theme lands and things started looking spacious.

More or less, both Disney land and sea are both similar to the Disney land in Paris. May be now its enough of roler coaster rides. Impressive shows are journey to the center of the earth and Indiana Jones. Anyone who played the Jones can see the physical construction of the temple here. Very nice in deed. In fact there was some mechanical problem and they stopped the ride for 2 hours. When they opened, the standby time surged upto 150 minutes…you got to stand in queue for 2.5 hours to enter Jone…Lucky enough, we took the fast pass in the morning…and saved our souls.!

This huge globe welcomed us at the entrance !

This is the Terror Tower and will be opened on 04-Sept-2006. If any one of you see this, let me know how terrible it is !!

This is the Venice city look alike theme in Disney sea. Impressive.

Well come to the weekend. Kudos to who invented 5-day week ! No more plans to go out.
Rest Rest Rest !!!

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1873757.cms

The state is worst hit and thousands of people are just waiting in neck deep water and on roof tops for the rescue teams and food packets. Irony is there is water all around but not a drop to drink from days together !

This reminds me the relief works carried out during Lathoor earthquake, Maharashtra (I was @ I.I.T.Kanpur), and Tsunami disaster at Tamil Nadu (I was @ Bangalore).

I feel floods pose much tougher challenges for relief teams. In above two cases, it was not tough to access the disaster areas, at least by foot. Only way to reach the hapless souls is either by boats or by air. So, only government can do some help and its lot difficult for individual volunteers.

Last few disasters happened at places unfamiliar to me, hundreds of miles away. But now my native town itself in trouble, but I’m thousands of miles away, sitting here in Tokyo.

I strongly feel the government can take early lessons and plan to stop future floods. Its pathetic that many people were unaware of floods until their knees were wet.

Feeling nostalgic !