What would you tell a 20 year old you

I would tell this to a 20 year old me.

1. Be adventurous

2. Don't be afraid to try out new things

3. You might fail,so what.

4. Become mentally strong. You are gonna need it for all the heart breaks that come in.

5. Become physically strong. It will be needed for one particular nasty incident in 2007.

What would you tell yourself today

1. Don't care what comes out of your mouth

2. Be persistent, don't quit too early. 

3. Love the ones who you really care for. What? You do it already? Well, express it.

4. Don't be afraid to try out new things

5. Stand by the people who do anything for you

These are on top of my mind now. Will add as I remember.

Will i revisit this in another 10 years. Let's see.

Goodbye America

I am surprised that I am a little sad to be leaving the country, on the contrary, I am way too excited on coming back to India. A couple of things I liked here in the past 18 months:
Courteous people, by courteous I mean, very courteous people. Good roads to drive on. Good clothing at affordable prices (all made in India :)). 

It is always people that make your life beautiful. I was lucky to befriend a whole lot of people here on a professional and a personal front. They made my time here go quick. They will be missed.Starbucks coffee, you will be missed. But I prefer the filter coffee and tea available back home to this. I'll miss the High speed Internet, the one which allowed me to download the entire FRIENDS series in one night.IHOP, you make nice delicious pancakes and real filling omelet. You will be dearly missed. But you will be the bar against which all future omelettes I try will be measured.

I am looking forward to some major changes in the months ahead. Looking forward to running on a daily basis. I have 2 marathons to run in the next 30 days. I am looking forward to getting back to my clicking. This has been untouched for a long time.

I will be home in a couple of days. Looking forward to meeting my friends. There is a whole list of things I am looking forward to, before I do those, let me touch down safe. A bon voyage to me. There are many other people back home who make me happy about life. Looking forward to the next phase of my life as a married man. Yes, I would still say, Life is beautiful.

Online since...

I went to Mumbai for the first time in Dec-2006 for the new year's. I was amazed by the city and decided to blog about it. So on January 5, 2007 this blog was born. I used to post at a different address but later on moved to this link.
My first post was ' Local trains faster than Planes, vada paav better than 5 star hotel buffet'
,inspired by a friend's post about Delhi when he was there for his training.

Why the name?
I decided to blog and at that time was deciding on a name. I saw a book (diary sorta) my wife used to maintain. It was named 'Rich-Tales' and got that idea for this blog.

Why the blog?
I wanted to maintain a diary no one at my home snooped into. An actual diary never worked. So went online. I knew they would never find out ;)

On a serious note, wanted to write a travelogue and started this as a trial. No travels happened after this Mumbai trip. Correction: I did not get a chance to travel after this Mumbai trip for about 6 months.  So moved on to maintain this as a journal for my jibber-jabber.

What else?
I got into photography by this same time. Once I thought I was ready for an SLR, after 2 years with my point and shoot, bought one and started publishing my pictures here  since Mar 9, 2009.
This was my first flickr post

Wanted to check out twitter and tried out this. Not very active there. Very Active these days.

Why this post?
Read a couple of blogs talking about their humble beginnings. So wanted to check out how long have I been blogging. It's been 4 and a half years. There it is, my humble beginning and the humble present ;)

A drive to remember

As you know I have been driving to and from office everyday. It's a 35 minute drive. After a couple of weeks I got bored and started to do some things to keep me awake. This is one such incident.

I started observing the drivers in whichever vehicle was driving behind me. Once I saw a nice, good looking, young, (other adjectives are toned down here) lady behind me. To show off I started speeding as I was in front of her. Being a good sport, as all girls are, she too chased me. She had a good car, infact a better car. After a couple of signals we were on the express-way and now was my time for real show-off. I sped a good 20 miles over the limit and she was still on my heels. After a while she switched on her police lights indicating me to stop :) Ofcourse she had the complete history of my 15 minute drive with all the speed violations.

Disclaimer: The above story may or may not be true. It might or might not have happened to me. I might or might not have oggled at the lady in the car behind me. All this may or may not be my imagination. All in all you should or should not believe anything written here over a period of time. I may or may not have got a speeding ticket. I may or may not have paid the ticket yet.

They say, if there is enough space for a cockroach to insert its whiskers into, then that space is enough for the entire cockroach to get into that space. Actually the cockroach calculates the space it needs that way.

Similarly, for most of the men, if their tummy can get into a space then they can fit into or get through that space.

As a corollary: For most men, their tummies make an entrance and then they do.
As a lesson: Reduce tummy.

The 100th one

Well, people have been asking me whats up off late. How have I been. What am I up to. I don't seem all that active these days, both online and offline.
Well, people, nothings up. I have been good. I am always online and invisible ,stalking some one unsuspecting.

Coming to online, I was doing some research for some purpose and found some interesting results. These were studies done for the launch of a product. I was checking market behavior to a product. This product is being launched as the next big thing for people connecting to the WWW.

So they are promising tremendous increase in speeds. I agree, as I have used the product and a minimum speed of 24Mb/s was observed. This is would increase the average speed of the nation, provided everyone goes for it. Believe it or not, US is NOT the number 1 when it comes to internet speeds.Have you heard of republic of Moldova? They come in 3rd and I had not heard of this country before


I always go to the extent of looking up stuff to see where we are back home. We fair better in terms of speeds delivered to customer per unit of money paid. Before that, several things that came to my mind were:
1. We are not people who go online all the time. I prove this with a screen shot of my usage data in the past 3 months in the US. In India I never crossed 2 GB.
2. People have other means of entertainment.
3. People are still peoples' people. (I don't know if you can understand).
4. One thing I like changed would be we need to charge for speeds delivered instead of data usage. i.e. ask a person to pay a fixed price for a speed of 2Mb/s instead of speeds up-to 2 Mb/s and 2 GB limit per month.

Speeds around the world

Where we stand
Watch out for our neighbors above and below us

My internet usage history for the last 3 months

Few screen shots with the numbers. All the images courtesy of speedtest.

PS: in case you are wondering about the title, yes this is my 100th blog post :)
100 good for nothing posts floating in the internet, wasting up the space in those 450,000 Google servers.
Well, about the title, you know.

What do I do with this much data? How do I manage? I have a paid subscription to  one of those all you can watch movie websites and I also watch shows online from my internet service providers streaming sites. :)

A nail biting climax.

I always wondered why this term came up. What was the origin of this term. Not to be thrown out by the word 'climax' lets concentrate on nail biting. The camera zooms out from the current webpage to our protagonist who is about to enter an IMAX cinema to watch a movie. Of course, inception. The first person narrative is just for the feel, not necessarily self experience. It is just a coincidence that I am the protagonist, I went to watch inception in IMAX.

After 3 people suggested me to watch the movie, I decided to give it a try. I bought the tickets and entered the movie hall. While entering I bought a small drink. The definition of small changes. It is the smallest of the glasses available. It can hold 1 liter of the drink. I bought this and entered the hall.

Midway through the movie the drink was done and my stomach was full. Story was also building up well on screen. 10 mins later, my stomach was still full along with my bladder. No I really had to go. I tried all sorts of stuff (censored), of no use.

These guys don't have breaks (intermission as known back home)

By the end of the movie I could not control and had to go. But the movie was interesting as well and I could not risk to blink. So I just waited for the movie to be over. By the end of the movie I realized that I was biting my nails due to the pressure (not in the movie). Finally the long long movie was over. The long long wait was over, is what I thought. But there was a long long queue in the hall for the loo. I was again biting on my nails, now that I did not have the luxury of sitting, and gravity acts in weird ways.

Finally I get to the loo, pee and get out. This was the nail biting finish

Rambling: All in one

I have seen it since I was kid. All the games kids play are decided by whats being watched on TV currently. For example whole of last month kids used to play football on the streets. I was no different to this. Only difference being we had to make do with whatever was available to us.

As cricket is the one that'll be watched atleast once a week at home, we all became natural cricketers. We used to feel that we were the best in our field of 'specialization'. There was this guy who used to 'bowl' well (atleast everyone in our group found it difficult to play him). He used to feel Sachin cannot stand more than 3 of his deliveries. Now even I agree. The ball never made it till the end the batsmen stood. We had shortened the field for him.

Coming back to the topic, We used to have this tennis ball with wich we played everything. It was cricket all year round. This was broken only when our folks used to watch tennis. We played tennis with the same ball and some cardboard we could find. This time around some cup came up for hokey, and ofcourse we played hockey with the same tennis ball and ofcourse cricket bats, some plastic as well.

Then came FWC. We played football with the same tennis ball, mostly because none of our parents agreed to buy us a football. Finally after a couple of bruised feet and torn shoes, we got our new ball. This was to be the new all in one for sometime to come. We used to run around kicking the ball. our only aim was to kick the ball. We never bothered which side. Half our play time was spent searching the ball which went into the bushes and the woods. The other half was spent arguing whos team someone belonged after a goal was made. Everybody obidiently said they were in the opposite team after they had made a saelf goal. Once even our goal keeper said, he was in the other team.

Then came the volleyball. We used the same new all in one ball. We considered ourselves lucky compared to those poor girls shown on TV who could not afford shorts and Tees and played in bikinis. Also they did not have a ground and played in a beach. But we had nice Tees and a ground. The Tees used to be nice until we started playing.

Then came basketball, which none of of us understood. Still we played aiming at the dogs face in the first floor because he used to bark incessantly when we played football. Well, basketball stopped after the ball got stuck in the first-floor next to the dog, and the owner let the dog loose on us.

It was time for cricket again and no body remembered where the old all in one was. Finally we had managed to convince the dog/owner to throw the ball back promising not to trouble the doggie and his pet again. So we played cricket with the new all in one ball until one of us broke a hand and convinced ur folks to buy us a new tennis ball.