Brown Motion

I was browsing online one evening when I happened on a recording of maestro Jagjit Singh in concert at the Sydney Opera house where he regaled the crowds with his (true to his name) indomitable voice and sang a famous ghazal called  - Wo Kagaz ki Kashti (One paper boat). This ghazal that Jagjit belts out showcases why he is indeed a master singer where he reminisces and gets nostalgic of a past that he misses dearly.  He longs for a simpler time where kids play in the rain water with paper boats.  He remembers how wisdom was not some complex idea but metaphorically an old lady on the corner with her million wrinkles that always had a long story to tell about many a thing and time flew by when listening to her tales. That made me think back some 40 years when my paternal grandmother who visited our place in Bombay with a Quasimodo like back and entertained me and my sibling through many an otherwise boring evening with tales of kings and kingdoms of a past that seemed...

I have been in many a crowd.  If you take the idioms to heart that would make me a perpetual occupant of one - crowd that is.  Since two is company and three is a crowd. But I am referring to the serious mass accumulations on the planet.  I have been amidst a variety of those.  They are different in their mood and temperament as I have come to notice. They are also temporary or constant.  The crowd phenom is one where I am one amidst many of my species but not necessarily of my cultural background (I'm not sure what that may be but whatever) in the literal sense. Say for example traipsing through a national park in some country.  Many nationalities and varieties of humans are crowding to see the major natural landscape and gape in awe in their own special way.  These are ephemeral events as these individuals disperse at the onset of dusk or where they have a flight to catch etc.  They have arrived from many parts of the globe to witness s...

Visited Sonoma County today.  The rolling hills east of the Pacific are perfect breeding ground for good grapes.  The morning mist coming off the Pacific hangs out late cooling the grapes until the sun burns off the fog and the loose clay soil adds flavoring to the fruit. Chemistry of each acre creates a varietal within a type of grape giving the oenophiles something to crow about. I checked out a few wineries in the region looking for my kind of beverage, that with high residual sugar.  Found two. One winery located  at the end of a winding road bordered by large old growth eucalyptus served an amazing 'late harvest sweet wine'. Founded by a Hungarian migrant in mid 19th century it had the best tasting wine in today's tasting.  A nobleman born in Pest migrated in early 19th century seeking to see what the land of the free promised him and ended up in Sonoma where we played with some vine growing importing plants from his native land.  Tokaj is a...

Back in the 70s when I grew up in erstwhile Bombay, now Mumbai, there was a burb where the planes flew from and it was called Santa Cruz.  It was almost synonymous to locals as Bombay's airport.  There was probably sketchy international service back then and all of domestic traffic operated on the two runways. Fast forward to California and I found a town on the Pacific coast also by the same name.  This one named by a Spanish explorer and labeled to mean the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz).  Well actually I had found it many moons ago and have visited often but this past Thanksgiving it was another day of R&R that found the familia doing familiar things and celebrating nature around us.  Thanking the good earth for the beauty it has to offer, our way of Thanksgiving.  The only bird(s) we enjoyed were the brown pelicans on the coast. So going back to what was special this time around was a visit to two regional parks operated under the State Parks jurisdic...

I have gone round the earth 20 times in as many years of being in the United States.  That is 1 trip round the planet a year on average. Okay I have driven that distance using an automobile to be precise.  How you ask?  Well simple.  I have owned several vehicles during the two decades of being here and I noted the odometers when I sold them.  Add them up and I get a number.  Add to that all the vehicles I rented for short duration to make many trips criss crossing the continent and then some (drove 150 miles in New Zealand once). Grand total is just north of 500,000 miles driven.  That is 20 times the earth's circumference for those of you keeping score or vaguely aware of what a circumference is. So the perspective is that given a propensity to drive a lot you can easily cover the distance equal to going round our planet in a years time.   That comes to around 70 miles a day of driving every day assuming you take Thanksgiving and Xmas off...

Not exactly an aboriginal activity when the said event took place along the San Francisco shore.  But today being the day before Thanksgiving I decided to stroll the quiet eastern shoreline that is the Embarcadero in the morning hours before the crowds came in. The weather could not have been better.  An overnight downpour had left the city sidewalks shiny clean and the upcoming sun was soaking my back warm.  Here are a few glimpses of how the walk unfolded. Along Pier 1 - where nary a soul stirred.  Even the gulls had the day off. New tallest building pushing into the clouds in its semi finished state - will belong to a software maker that helps run big business in the cloud For the newbie a few things to note if you happen to visit this part of the world.  The piers are numbered from 1 to 41 with the odd numbers running north from the Ferry Building. Pier 39 known by some where the sea lions party and an Italian setup a chocolate factory (a...

Well now let's not be fatalistic. Didn't someone say its not over till its over?  Okay so we are past the milestone of the American electorate voting for a new leader.  CEO of the USA or the newest POTUS. It was a time for many firsts.  In some ways it could be summarized as Slovenia 1 - Pundits 0.  As in the newest FLOTUS is from a foreign country that many on the planet may not have heard of.   Slovenia.  A dot in the south of Europe.   Maybe Trump had not either till he met her at a Fashion Show.  Having Mr. and Mrs. Trump be the First People was not what the pundits thought.   All the pundits that forecast the future were wrong. More analysis reveals that it would be the first prez that has no political background.  First prez who had multiple marriages before he was elected to office.  I have not researched this but likely the first prez who has a wife 25 years younger than him.  Fast forward to the end of his term an...

They say you never stop learning.  I sure hope so.  I was fortunate enough to find a variety of careers after graduating from school with what appears in hindsight was a toolkit to open many jars.  Jars of knowledge and understanding. In doing so each jar or opportunity was just that - a chance to learn a bit of the industry I was working in and make myself smarter in some small area.  I kept learning and extrapolating the skills and ideas of one to another and pretty soon it gave me the confidence to embark on adventures that I had little to no knowledge about. In that respect I worked in Financial Services, helping customers open trading accounts to buy and sell equities in an underdeveloped market; before which I produced steel from scrap, for variety of manufacturing companies. Then came my career in consulting which by design was an opportunity to appear smarter than I was and jump headlong into an area with some of the same tools that I had left school w...

Travel is one of my personal joys.  Joy to discover. Joy to experience.  Joy in appreciation of many things natural or man made.  Here are some glimpses from our various continents.  Enjoy. Street in Seville, Spain Shedding Light, Seville, Spain Working out in Bali?  Indonesia Enlightened in Java, Indonesia What do you think? San Francisco, CA USA Seat of learning, Stanford, CA, USA Mt. Tamalpais, CA, USA Andean Adventures, Peru Washington Monument, USA Good ole Abe. Washington DC, USA Smoke on the Water, Big Island Hawaii, USA Waterfalls in Hawaii, USA

There is a trend for media outlets to publish some nonsense that might sell their less than worthy content.  To that end they take some high flyer (who may or may not be one but they think so) and decide to publish a list of books that he or she recommends (that they may or may not have read or recommended) in hopes that their subsidiary business who published those books might also thrive. I decided to imagine what the local homeless would recommend if I asked them to do so for their less erudite but abode occupying brethren. Here is a best five list - Lost and found - the complete guide to the idea that finders keepers. How to make the most of nothing - Not having a home is a boat load of work not required. Inventive scamming - how to come up with weird and wacky signs to earn a lazy day's income. When I woke up it was gone - Belief system that curses others for all that you don't have or own Spit - the art of aggravating the entitled.

Not unlike a loud Bruce Willis flick it was a very good day to be out by the waterfront and listen to some hard rock.  As in the loud booms created by the flying fighter aircraft of the US Armed Forces as part of Fleet Week celebration.  You cannot hear yourself speak as the display dazzles the million plus audience mere feet away from the screaming hardware overhead that costs millions. So this being a fine autumn weekend a work colleague and I decided to check out the aerial acrobatics and air power display by the American and Canadian navies.  This is an annual tradition here in San Francisco where for almost 30 odd years the armed forces and public get a chance to interface and learn and appreciate some of the challenges of and awesomeness of the American military. The air show is the most watched and admired part of the entire three day long celebration.   It varies each year in terms of overall hardware displayed but always ends with the grand finale of th...