200 minutes on the road

that was every day, and that too, at least 200 minutes -- in the past few days, while i was on business travel.

this is more than three hours every day!
considering that i usually spend about an hour and a half every day normally - maybe this was not so bad.. i know some colleagues who spend that much time in Bangalore every day - living close(!) to 50km from the office.

one day, i had to visit four different office buildings for meetings from early morning till late evening.
the cab driver was wondering which office i worked out of, as he was apparently used to dropping visitors off at one facility in the morning and pick them up in the evening.

but the comment that triggered my thoughts were by the cab driver in Bangalore who had come to pick me up from the airport.. he was the same person who had been been driving me to and from the airport almost every week in the last few weeks, when i have been spending two to three days away from Bangalore - he asked me very innocently : Sir, don't you have any work in Bangalore? :-)

while it seems to be a lot of time in transit, and i believe and have been one of the regular users of technology for team working, there is no substitute to face to face meetings to establish the instant connect.
at least, i guess, it will stay that way, till most people are comfortable with not having face to face meetings.

for those that do, i use a lot of the 200 minutes for phone calls! otherwise, that is useful time for reading the newspaper or catching up with books.

i can now fully empathize with : bus drivers, cab drivers, travelling salesmen, pizza delivery boys [!] and many more professions that need their teams to be out on the road many more minutes, every day..

restarting with Ganesha

After a gap from this blog, thought it was a good way to restart with this year's ganesha.
both the government agencies and many social organizations have been creating a lot of awareness of the pollution caused by painted ganeshas and indiscriminate immersions of the idols along with the flowers and other stuff.

this year also saw just plain mud ganeshas in the market.

we [my son and I] decided to make our own mud ganesha this time.
with some clay from our own garden, we set out to make a ganesha based on our own imagination.
the clay needed cleaning - to remove the pieces of stones and concrete etc.
and then had to be kneaded to make a smooth paste.

then some complications, as the clay was probably a little too watery.

with some more work, could get that to be more consistent to be shaped.
was looking for the 'kundumani' beads for the eyes, before deciding to use black pepper.

finally, it was all well and ready for the puja the next day - with time overnight for the idol to dry a bit.

Happy Ganesha!