Bad Birding Pictures, Good Birding Trip

I have a 6 mega pixel Nikon S4 digital camera, that is as good or as bad as most digital cameras, except for a decent 10X optical zoom, and a swivel screen.

That said, I can now be forgiven for the quite sad to very sad quality of pictures that I took of birds I saw during a recent birding trip to Pangot.

The Jungle Lore Birding Lodge in Pangot, is such a wonderful place to holiday in, and if you are a birder (or are trying to become a birder, like me), then it is heaven on earth.

It is about 15/20 kilometers from Nainital, ahead of Kilbury. The road leading to Pangot, from the point where it turns off from the main Haldwani Nainital road, itself is a high. A meandering badly maintained but safe road that sees not more than two vehicles an hour, it goes through beautiful forests and swerves along streams and then reaches the hamlet of Pangot.


Red Billed Blue Magpie



I’ve been to Pangot many times, and sadly each time there is a little bit more construction around the Jungle Lore Birding Lodge. I feel a little bit sadder, but it remains and will remain a fabulous getaway. Just a few cottages, very carefully placed on a hillside, with just the right balance of trees, shrubs, open space and natural beauty.

As it happened on almost every visit to Pangot, there was an expert birding guide in the lodge, and he was relatively free. As soon as he saw my binocs hanging from my neck, he asked me if I was a birder. I replied with a ‘uh uh… kind of…’ answer, and told him that I was a very keen learner.

Ganesh was from Nepal but shifted base to India about seven years back and has since been working with Mohit Agarwal, who runs the lodge and several other nature-laden properties across India.

I sat in the porch of the main wooden kitchen cum dining cum meeting cottage, and started to spot birds. Ganesh was busy for some time, so I walked a little downhill and sat on a quaint little bench amidst trees and shrubs and low bushes. As I looked around, I saw a beautiful green bird with orange around the edges of its wings (Orange Flanked Bush Robin). I got clicking, getting some awful pictures, what with auto focus, that usually focuses on the background, lighting problems that doesn’t let any photo be taken unless it is bright sunlight and the many other problems of trying to take a picture of a bird that keeps moving and flying off, with a regular digital camera.



Verditer Flycatcher



All of a sudden I saw several other varieties of birds, and my heart started to

Footgolf

Yep, you read it right... footgolf. As I allowed my imagination to swerve wildly (most probably on the path of a bana kick), while trying to concentrate on my work at hand, I came upon a vision of Ronaldinho teeing off with a football (with his foot of course!).

Then I saw him being cheered by the onlookers as they saw the ball curve over the footgolf course, and land a few feet away from the first hole. Ronaldinho would give a short salute and walk off (without a caddy, as there are no foot golf sticks, just your own legs). The onlookers would, unlike the uppity golf crowd, be drinking beer, showing skin, cheering madly and doing Mexican waves.

Next we would have a veteran like Zinedine Zidane teeing off, with a precisely powered kick that would send the ball even closer than Ronaldinho’s. This would draw loud cheering from the crowd and Zidane would just smile and walk away.

The television audiences would be watching with bated breath as at the seventh hole, Ronaldinho is on a flamingo (footgolf lingo meaning three below par). He finally manages with two kicks what others do in five.

Footgolf can have all the biggest football stars as readymade superstar players, and could be a game of incredible skill and excitement. While they would go on playing their soccer games, footgolf would become an added on sport where they can win huge money and become mega champions.

Footgolf sounds like a very interesting idea to me. Any takers?

Google Wave

I'm quite interested in Google Wave, unfortunately no one I know has access to it. If you or anyone you know uses Google Wave, it would be great if you could send me an invite at sanjeev.saikia at gmail.com

Awaiting a wave of generosity from someone out there.

:)

A trip to Chandni Chowk

We took the metro. From Noida to Rajeev Chowk in Connaught Place, and then to Chandni Chowk, the famed amazing market that was maybe as old as the city itself. We changed the metro at one station. The number of people crowding into the state-of-the-art metro turned it into a most inconvenient way of travelling. But it was fun. The rush of people was such that when getting out, if we hadn’t pushed and shoved like mad, we would have got left behind. Getting on to the connecting metro was equally difficult. We managed to reach our destination station – Chandni Chowk.

We got off and walked a while and got onto a cycle rickshaw. On enquiring from fruit-wallahs (fruit-sellers selling from hand carts) and random people, we were told that our destination was the ‘Gharhi’ (watch) market. Through roads that were permanently crawling, we reached the market. The journey was most interesting with people, shops and transportation from what seemed like a different era. We walked into the dingy ‘Gharhi’ market, and looked into a few shops. It wasn’t what we were looking for. We got back on the rickshaw and headed towards Sadar Bazaar. En route we saw shops that dated back to 1940s and even earlier. Everything here was packed into unimaginably small spaces, be it buildings, cars, shops, roads, electric wires, billboards or people. There were people and more people and more people and still more people. We saw a haveli (old colonial kind of house) with several floors that was most intriguing. We tried to imagine who lived there now, and who must have lived there a hundred years back.

Enjoying the bustling marketplace from our cycle rickshaw, we entered a road that was incredibly choked with traffic (all of Chandni Chowk is incredibly choked with traffic, but this was something else altogether). All around us, there were a million cycle rickshaws, scooters, bikes, cars, mini trucks, vans, hand carts, bullock carts, cycles, jeeps, auto rickshaws, pedestrians and cows. As we inched ahead, suddenly our rickshaw went into turbo mode and shot ahead. A motorbike behind us got impatient and started to push us ahead. The rickshaw wallah was barely managing to avoid hitting pedestrians in front. He kept hitting the backs of other rickshaws very hard, but it didn’t evince any reaction. Hitting the rickshaw in front to stop your own rickshaw was a necessity and the norm.

We reached Sadar Bazaar and came to a section where rickshaws were not allowed. We alighted. Suddenly there was a commotion and we saw a policeman mercilessly whacking a man with a stick. The man was rolling on the road and whining, he looked like a wasted drug addict. I asked someone what had happened but the man only shrugged and walked away. We walked ahead and after much asking and enquiring discovered the ‘Gubbarey Wala Gali’ (the balloon alley).

It was very narrow, if you stopped at any of the teeny meeny shops on either side of the alley, it actually caused a traffic jam of the people walking along the alley. We were weaving in and out of the shops in that alley and several connecting alleys for about an hour, and we found everything we wanted, at one third the price. The bargain was great, but the whole experience was far greater.

When we reached the metro station to get onto the train, we discovered that we had been pick pocketed. Cool. We lost about 1500 rupees. We reached home, happy, sad (at losing the money) and filled with a sense of awe for this awesome amazing market called ‘Chandni Chowk’ (Silver Crossing).

Fragrant Peace

Title: Fragrant Peace
Size: 12" X 8"
Date of creation: 2009 Aug

Ancient Dancer

Title: Ancient Dancer
Size: 12" X 8"
Date of creation: 2009 Aug

Public Enemies

Title: Public Enemies
Size: 12" X 8"
Date of creation: 2009 Aug

Face 5

Title: Face 5
Size: 12" X 8"
Date of creation: 2009 Aug

Face 4

Title: Face 4
Size: 12" X 8"
Date of creation: 2009 Aug

What is a great ad?

The idea is not to define a great ad but to see which amongst these two types is actually the greater ad:

Type 1
Brilliant creative idea, makes you gasp with the power of the idea, impinges on your brain and stays with you. Eg. Budweiser frogs going ‘Bud’ ‘Wei’ ‘Ser’ ; Bravia ‘Coloured Balls’.

Type 2
Brilliant connect with the target audience, good long term brand idea, nothing that makes you gasp but seems to find a permanent place in our brain. Eg. The Marlboro Man, Energiser Bunny.

Before you start screaming “Type 2… Type 2…”, please consider that a Marlboro Man or the Energiser Bunny was built over years and years and years with scores of ads, whereas the Type1 ad created huge awareness and a massive user interest and brand recall with just one burst.

So, which one is greater. I can’t decide but one thing is for sure, “Advertising is persuasion, and persuasion is not a science, it is an art”, as spoken by William Bernbach. I am a great disbeliever of consumer research where a group of people are forced to say something about ads so that they can enjoy the FREE food afterwards, and all other things that fall into that bracket.

However, I still can’t decide which type of ads are the better and greater ads. Can you?

My understanding of finance and investments…

Is sub sub normal. Sad but true, I am unable to bring my mind to grasp the workings of finance and of investments and good returns and other such things. Thankfully people around me are much smarter in such things so I get by, but the fallout is that when someone who is financial-knowledge-ally good comes by, I am over awed.

Just today we met a person who showed me how to get together a good deal of money that I needed, from my very own investments. I was amazed and struck by the finesse with which he discussed loans against LIC, and PPF and only 0.5% default loss for breaking 3 year lock-in periods etc etc. Wow he was a genius, and I was totally floored.

I felt that I should gift him something for imparting such profound and immensely helpful knowledge. My near and dear ones stopped me in the nick of time, as the gentleman giving us advice would have felt offended if I had actually done that.

But the fact remains that I am amazed by people who understand finance and investments and returns and the intricacies of making money through calculations, interest rates et al.

Face 3

Title: Face 3
Size: 12" X 8"
Date of creation: 2009 Aug

Face 2

Title: Face 2
Size: 12" X 8"
Date of creation: 2009 Aug

Face 1

Title: Face 1
Size: 12" X 8"
Date of creation: 2009 Aug

How to see who is following you on Twitter, and who isn't.

Are you expecting some roundabout slightly techie way to do this? I hate to dissappoint you, but it's actually incredibly easy.

Just go to 'Your Twitter Karma' website at http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/, enter your twitter username and password, and click the huge 'Whack' button.

In a minute or two, you will be able to see everyone in your twitter account, people who follow, people whom you follow, people whom you follow but who don't follow you, people who follow you but whom you don't follow etc.

Just select the people who you want to follow or unfollow and click the right button at the bottom of the page i.e. bulk follow or bulk unfollow etc.

For the historically techie minded, when such sites weren't there, then the way to check who was following you and who wasn't, was like this:

On your Twitter home page, towards the top right you will see three numbers and text below each. Click on the text that says 'following'. See image below:



Now you will go to a page which will show you all the people who you are following. There are two symbols to the right of each name, click on the second one and see if the option 'Send Direct Message' is there or not. If it is there, it means the person is following you, if it isn't, it means that the person isn't following you.

Now you can happily un-follow all those who aren't following you back.

Go ahead and tweet, it is a liberating experience.

How to sleep better in 5 simple and effective steps.

A good night’s sleep can help you get over any trouble and get ready to take on any challenge. The problem is that many of us find it difficult to get a good night’s sleep. I am about to tell you 5 simple steps that will definitely improve your sleeping ability. They are simple and easy, and they will over time make a definite difference.

Point 1

The first thing to be done is that one must sleep with a clear mind. By a clear mind I mean a mind that has been emptied of all the worries, tensions, excitements and happenings of the day gone by. This can be done in many ways, but one very simple way is to lie down and mentally feel a wave of calm white light rising up from your feet to your head and leaving you calm. Then look into your head and with a pair of mental hands start pulling out thoughts (imagine it to be like sticky bubble gum and you are pulling the thought out firmly with you hands) from your mind and washing it off in a river of white light. One by one remove all the things that have given you tensions, worries, excitement or whatever. Now your mind is calm and ready for a good nights sleep.

Point 2

Another simple method of getting better sleep is to wash your feet in warm water just before sleeping. You can step into the bathroom and wash your feet with warm water running directly from the tap or in a bucket. Some people also prefer to have the water in a low plastic saucepan near their bed, and then dip their feet for a while and then go off to sleep. Some even take a warm water bath before sleeping, but I feel washing the feet is more effective.

Point 3

This one works for some and doesn’t work for others. It’s more of a trick really, but what’s the harm. Pick up a very difficult to read classic, say ‘Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce’. Now force yourself to read and UNDERSTAND ten pages of the book. It’s important to try and understand, that’s what’s going to make you drowsy. If it’s going to work for you it will start working by the time you reach the second or third page. Then close the book and switch off the lights.

Point 4

Drink Chamomile tea (without sugar and milk) before sleeping, it helps you relax and makes you drowsy. Drinking a glass of warm milk is also considered good, but not for everyone. So, nice herbal tea like chamomile is a good way to prepare for sleep.

Point 5

Another useful tip that works for some and works against some is ‘visual stimulation’. Do not get your eyes too stimulated before sleeping, by watching TV or a DVD or playing a computer game or surfing. This creates images inside your head that take a long time to dissipate and allow you to sleep. However, there is a flip side to this. Some people find it to be almost a ritual to watch some TV, or surf or play a game before they sleep. So use this tip with care, try it for a few days and see what works better for you.

Over all you need to be aware of what makes you sleep better. This will happen only if for a month or so you actually watch your habits and behaviour just before you sleep and even a couple of hours before you begin the process of sleeping. Things like what you ate, what you watched, what you did, whom you talked to, what your emotional state was, were you happy or disturbed, were you tired, did you just laze around all day etc. etc. You are the best person to actually find out what is the best way to improve your sleep. However if it is a very serious insomnia problem, you MUST consult a medical authority, or a doctor who will be able to direct you to the right expert.

Hope you get a great night’s sleep tonight!

How to search more effectively - Part 1

Hey what is there in searching, just go to Google and type in what you are looking for and hit the search button. And what do you get, a whole mountain of sites with leads to search through before getting to that particular information you want.

Maybe for regular searches get you the best results right away, but when you have to search for something that is a little specific and not readily available, then what do you do? Try many combinations of the search words and hope that you will get lucky.

Frankly, most times you are unable to get satisfactory information even after searching for hours. I won’t say that I can show you how to search for anything and get the perfect results, but I can surely make your search a whole lot more effective.

Point 1

Let us begin with the basics. Did you know that if you want to search for a specific combination of words, then putting the words within double inverted commas (“ and ”) will get you only those search results that have those words in the exact sequence and one after the other?

This is the very simplest of ways to refine your search. Let’s say you are looking for any information on James Davis who lives in Illinois. Go to Google and search for ‘James Davis Illinois’. You get all search results with the three words mentioned anywhere within the webpage. Now put the words within double inverted commas and search in Google – “James Davis Illinois”.

You will get much fewer results and in every result the words ‘James Davis Illinois’ appears together. Makes it so much easier for you to find the correct James Davis isn’t it.

Point 2

Now, let me tell you a further tip on how to get better search results. Using your common sense and your imagination, just think that if this person’s name was being mentioned in an article, write-up or anywhere, what would the most likely construct of the sentence be. In all probability it will be ‘James Davis from Illinois’ or ‘James Davis from Illinois’ or ‘James Davis living in Illinois’.

Now do a search of these phrases within double inverted commas. You will get even better results. A simple modification but improves your chances of finding information about the person. You can use this technique to search for anything. Just imagine what the thing you are searching will appear as when written as a part of a sentence, and search that phrase in Google within double inverted commas.

Point 3

Now, let’s get a little advanced. Do you sometimes look for the definition or the meaning of a term or word by searching for it on Google. And when you search for the word, results appear where the word or phrase has been used as a part of a sentence or write-up, without showing any meaning or definition. So what do you do? Well you just write the word ‘definition’ with a colon (:) in front of the phrase or word whose meaning you are searching for. Let’s say you were looking for the meaning of ‘best-of-breed’. Just search by typing in ‘definition: best-of-breed’ (without the single or double quotes, I have put the words within single quotes so that they are seen as separate from the sentence), and you will get its meaning and definition right away.

Point 4

A very simple thing that stares u in the face yet few of us use is ‘Cached’ under each result. It is very useful because many a times when we see the results it shows that the page does not exist, that’s when you can click on cached and get that very page as it was recorded on Google. Just make sure you make a copy of whatever you need quickly as the cached page may be deleted very soon.

Point 5

Now let us enter the arena of Google Search Operators and . Don’t be intimidated by the term, they are merely a way of saying words and terms that help refine your search. There is a huge list of operators and what they do, but when you see it, your mind gets a little boggled. So what I am going to do here is tell you just a few of them, so that you get a taste of their power. Once you are comfortable with them, I will point you to the webpage where you will find a bigger list.

minus sign -

Let’s start with ‘-’, the minus sign. It exclusdes the word that is qualified by the minus sign. Before I explain any more, let me tell you that the sign is useless unless you give a space before the minus sign and no space between the minus sign and the word you want excluded.
Example: You want to search all about cats but not about Siamese cats. Your search query will be [cats –siamese]. If you search [cats-siamese], it will be considered a hyphen.

star sign *

The star sign * is very useful. It is the wildcard sign. Let me give an example. Suppose you want to know what was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, search [Alexander Graham Bell invented *], and you will know the answer. You can use your own imagination about how many ways you can use this symbol while searching.


The OR operator

The OR is a very useful operator too. You want to know all the Hollywood movies that were made in either Canada or Ireland, then you will search [Hollywood movies made in Canada OR Ireland], to get the best results.

Well let me stop here for this first part. The rest will be in part two that will be coming very soon.

How to decide what to blog on

This article’s title sounds like a no-brainer, but it actually isn’t.

Most people start blogging to express themselves, whether through random thoughts, or as a way of keeping daily records of their lives or travels, by writing poetry or short stories or by putting up their photographs.

In most cases what begins as a mish mash of things slowly but surely begins to take a shape. After making several posts, the blog begins to take on a distinct personality. It becomes a blog on a certain topic, subject, issue, reason, genre or even of a certain kind of tone (say humorous or sarcastic).

For most people it gets very difficult to decide beforehand what they are exactly going to blog on. What their blog’s topic or even tone and style will be. All of this develops as the blog develops.

This article will give all the regular netizens and blogging newbies simple guidelines on how to decide what to blog on. It will act like a simple guide on how to choose a blogging topic, subject, genre or tone.

By sheer common sense, the simplest way to decide on what your blog topic should be is through elimination. Let us begin by eliminating one of two basic kinds of blogs – the personal blog and the non-personal blog.

Very broadly, blogs can either be personal or non-personal. Personal blogs are about your own thoughts, views, artistic self-expression through art, music, poetry, videos or anything at all of a personal nature.

Non-personal blogs are based on anything that is not of a personal nature. It could be on other people’s views, thoughts, lives, art, music, interests etc. and may or may not have your own added views in them.

Let us take examples to explain this better. Suppose you start a blog in which you write about your experiences while traveling across the world, it becomes a blog about you, and what happened to you. It becomes a personal blog.

On the other hand if you have a blog that is centred on the best movies being released in Hollywood, it become a non-personal blog. Even if you express your views on these movies, they are non-personal, because your main subject is not you, or anything created or written basis your own experiences or self-expression.

Well, let us now assume that you have eliminated non-personal blogs. Now you are left with the arena of personal blogs. Personal blogs can be broadly and very rudimentarily divided into three types – your experiences, any form of self-expression or your personal views.

If you now decide to eliminate self-expression and personal views, you are left with experiences. Blogs on personal experiences can of many kinds, but let us for the sake of simplicity take these: Travel experiences, Daily experiences, Professional experiences, Recreational experiences, Spiritual Experiences, Relationship experiences.

Suppose you zoom in to recreational experiences, then you have a plethora of choices – eating experiences, partying experiences, sports experiences, cinematic experiences, theatre experiences and others.

Now, lets us suppose that you decide to eliminate all except eating experiences. You have finally come down to a very specific topic to blog on. You will blog on all the gastronomic experiences you have in the course of your life. Be it eating in an obscure restaurant in your home town, or having the local food of Hawaii or the special dinner your wife cooked. You will be writing on your experiences with food, and that becomes the topic of your blog.

Quite simple, but there is the hurdle of a large number of choices. However this hurdle becomes a blessing, because you will never be able to identify all the choices, and will maybe identify only a few of the. The good thing about that is that is that if you could not think of certain choices, it is because you actually aren’t even interested in them. Thus they get automatically eliminated.

Similarly if you had eliminated personal and chosen non-personal, you would go about in a similar manner to eliminate the choices and reach the right one. As a rudimentary example, we could say that there are choices like celebrity, technology, finance, books, nature etc. Using the same method as we did for the personal blogs, and with your imagination and common sense, you will be able to quickly find out exactly what you want to blog on.

So, happy blogging, and choosing what you want to blog on.

How to start blogging

Blogging is a wonderful way to express yourself, send out news, keep an online diary, share with friends and family and even earn. But how does one start blogging?

It is easy to blog. Let me show you the simplest way.

1. First create an email account with gmail (if you already have one, then use it to create your first blog). Lets just assume that it is myfirstblog@gmail.com.

2. Now go to http://www.blogger.com/

3. Here click on the button 'Create a blog'

4. You reach a web page where there will be a form that you have to fill. You will need to fill in your email id (myfirstblog@gmail.com), a password for your new blog (this will be used to enter your blog and start writing blog posts), a display name (this is the name that will be associated with your new blog) and you will need to fill in a word for verifying that you are human and not a automated computer filling the form (this is called word verification).

5. When you click on the 'Continue' button, you will go to a page where you will need to fill in some more details.

6. You will have to fill in a name for your blog. Don't worry if the name is already taken, just keep ing it a little and you will soon find that you have hit upon a unique name.

7. Click on the 'Continue' button.

8. You have now created your blog, and are ready to write your first post.

9. In the blog title give a heading ot your post (say 'My first blog post'), and in the bigger box write the text for it.

10 Click ont he button 'Publish Post' and your blogging has begun.

Now when someone types in the url of your blog, they will see your post. If you want to add another post, you just need to go to http://www.blogger.com/, and using your email username and password you can enter you blog area, where you can make as many new posts as you want.

So happy blogging, and stay tuned for more on different options to start blogging!!

Do write your queries, views and comments, so I can answer them in the next post.

An accident that happened today morning.

I was waiting at a traffic light. The lights turned green. Cars from the opposite side were still trying to muscle their way through. I moved my car ahead. Suddenly there was a screeching sound. I stopped my car, and saw to my right, a scooterist had applied sudden brakes and had skidded. Scooter and scooterist were lying on the road. I rushed out as did other people nearby.

She was a girl, maybe just out of college, dazed and limping. I was distraught, and helped her to my car. An elderly lady in the car behind me came by to assist.

I asked the girl if she was alright. Holding back tears, with a shocked look on her face, she said, “I have to give an exam… a very important exam.”

I immediately took her to my car, drove to the side of the road, and asked her to just calm down. She took a few minutes to calm herself, then I offered her some water. She had a quick look at her leg and realized that it had only been grazed. The pain reduced and she said she was ready to go on ahead.

I and the elderly lady helped her to the scooter. She tried to start it, but it wouldn’t start. A man on a bike came forward and tried to start it. I told the girl that I could take her to the exam venue in my car, but she was sure that she wanted to go on her scooter.

After a few minutes, the scooter came to life. I advised the girl to drive carefully and reach safely. She managed a wan smile and putting on her helmet (which along with her thick jacket had actually prevented any injury), she drove off slowly.

I thanked God that no one got hurt, and headed towards my office.