Human Beings: Creatures of Habit

With the effective conclusion of my school term in San Francisco two days ago after the final project presentation to my client Panasonic North America, I would have imagined myself jumping up in joy at yet another milestone and excited at the prospect of spending the little-over-one-week break not having to worry about course readings, assignments, and daily team meetings. But that was not to be as here I stand two days hence...bored, despondent, staring at the vacuum that life has suddenly turned into, and trying to up the activity levels before I return to Boston for the final term.

The past two weeks had been grueling, to say the least. The penultimate client presentation had not gone well: the client did not like anything we proposed. It was one of those very rare occasions in life where one drew a blank - an absolute and perfect blank! The entire team was demotivated and and had lost the drive to work any further. It is here that I and another team-mate started to pick the threads and attempt to move on. We decided that whatever happened, we will not go down without a fight.

What followed were intense and long hours of re-thinking the strategy, looking at the client's problem in fresh light, make sense of what the client was "not" telling us through the limited interactions we had with them. We usually met at noon, had a quick Starbucks 'lunch' with coffee at 3:30 pm, returned to work until around 9 pm or later and planned the next day's activities on the 20-minute walk towards Embarcadero on Battery Street. Bad days ended with wine in the evenings and indulgent ones with a proper lunch at Pier 39. Given the state the team was in, the weekends were no different. The effort we put in brought results as the client liked our final presentation and though we did not end up on the top of the charts, we literally blazed the trail with the biggest jump in rankings among all teams causing a few upsets along the way.

And now that the challenge is over, life seems to have paused. With no morning alarm to wake up to, sleep ought to be better but is actually worse. A lack of urgency in getting ready to leave home to make it to the daily meetings on time has made the whole process of getting ready more excruciating, not less. All of a sudden, there is lots of time but few ideas on what could be done with the sudden surplus. There seems to be no motivation for going to school and even Starbucks is not as much fun anymore. In the absence of mental stimulation, even the walk along good ol' Battery Street seems to be a waste of time.

Such is the nature of human beings - we are creatures of habit! Take our habits away and the mind is unable to comprehend what to replace those habits with. What an interesting creation of the creator we are!

Stepping out of the comfort zone...

There's an old Hindi proverb from one of the great Ramdhari Singh Dinkar's poems that when translated into English reads as "He who is afraid to dive into the ocean is not going to locate any pearls". It aptly describes what I did several times over the past two weeks in San Francisco, (symbolically and not literally!) with the best payback one can receive in life - peace and contentment.

Enter The Sequoias - an active, engaging retirement community for seniors in San Francisco. I first went there with a friend to volunteer time and help make a difference in my own little way. I also hoped to learn more about the typical challenges they faced in their daily lives and if any of the technologies that pervade our lives today could help them overcome some, if not all of those.

I still remember the first day I went there. The Director of the place gave us a tour of the entire facility for over an hour and a half. Like curious children, we kept asking questions and she kept answering them as long as we kept asking. Then, she took us to the Activity Room where we met a bunch of residents who had assembled to play a dice game as part of their daily schedule for mental exercise. We were invited by them to join them and over the next hour, we got introduced to each one of them, played several rounds of the game with them, and got to know all the women's ages :)

One of the women was 106 years old and another one of Japanese origin was going to turn 100 in a month and several others who were in their 90s. They were as curious about us and what we did in this beautiful city as we were about them. Every once in a while, they naughtily cracked jokes at each other and had a good laugh. I did not see them frown or fret over anything in life including the limited mobility that age brought to some of these very well-traveled residents of the home. I am certain they had played the same game countless times before but I did not sight any boredom either. I couldn't help but surrender to the experience and in no time, I was in a different world...it didn't matter who I was and where I came from...I lost sense of time and I just sat there, smiling, like a fortunate bystander watching these fabulous souls go about their routine. This was the sweet smile of peace and contentment and it had indeed been a while since I had last felt this way.

Oh I was so glad I stepped out of my comfort zone because if I had not, as Ramdhari Singh Dinkar said, I wouldn't have discovered these treasures of happiness hidden deep within the urban layers of this extreme city that the world knows as San Francisco. And god bless my lovely friend who took me there!

'Sunny' San Francisco

"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is public transportation and therefore there is no such thing called personal space", announced the driver of the Muni (municipal transport) during morning commute hours as frowns turned into grins. It was starting to get crowded inside the one-car historic streetcar and the driver's comment was indeed timely. To me, the comment appropriately captured the essence of this city as I have known it for the past three weeks: it is not an easy city to live in but yet people manage to retain a good sense of humor about all things in control and those outside (the 'Muni' is surely a prime example of the latter!).

A month ago, I was excited about the prospect of traveling from Boston to San Francisco. After six months of New England winter, my outdoors-loving tropical soul was craving to break free from the thick winter jackets and limited mobility that winters in general bring to life. So sure was I of the sunny Californian weather that I did not even check the average temperatures and happily left my warmest winter jackets back in Boston. And once I did arrive, it wasn't precisely fun to find that day temperatures in Boston were mathematically twice that of San Francisco (26 to 13 degree celsius). But then, no wise man said that there is ever a bad time to commit stupid mistakes and just smiling at my folly gave me enough warmth through several mornings during the first week.

This is where I will touch upon another key aspect of every San Franciscan's life - travel! I wouldn't be wrong if I said that people here travel for two hours everyday on average. That I stepped into the city to skew the average beyond two is a different matter altogether - only a naive newcomer would dare travel from San Jose to San Francisco daily using public transportation (four transportation systems and three connections in my case!). But the transportation systems work very well overall and the Caltrain still remains my favorite. I have always been a romantic and trains always have a very special place in my heart. Through these trips, I was able to re-establish that life in the big cities across the world is so similar that sometimes it does even not matter whether it is San Francisco, Mumbai, or New York. Case in point: just look at the way people queue up at Starbucks in the morning and you will find it is no longer or shorter than the queue for purchasing a local train ticket in Mumbai, or, just take a look at the way pedestrians cross streets out-of-turn during morning commute hours!

Like all tourists to the city, I did take the opportunity of visiting the Golden Gate - once on bike and again on foot - and am sharing a few pictures here. More coming up soon about other action in the city so stay tuned...

Shaky Arrival!

#ibmcsc Kazakhstan It was exactly 5 minutes past 11 o'clock when flight LH 0646 touched down on a Saturday summer night on what seemed like a desolate airstrip and a sparsely populated airport (one might argue this is true for any Indian travelling abroad as we are so used to being in the middle of hundreds of people everywhere). This was my introduction to Astana.

Despite being treated like a king by Lufthansa on what seemed like a brand new Airbus A340 (did I mention that the flight had been selected for a passenger survey [wink]), I was sleepy and eager to hit the bed in the shortest possible time. That said, I couldn't help notice the generous use of green all over the airport. Maybe it is the national colour, or so I thought.

The policemen I saw at the airport reminded me of the Soviet era what with their unusually large & slanted service hats. Passport Control was fairly quick and once at the exit, I couldn't find my hotel driver holding a placard with my name. I took a couple of rounds of the entire area just in case there was another exit but it was clear to me that this was not a typical time of arrival for flights for there were hardly any people around.

Enter the iPad 2 - my best buddy everytime I get lost. Thanks to the free airport internet & my phone which was on international roaming, I pulled up the hotel website and dialled their number. Oops...incorrect number. Again...incorrect number. All of a sudden, I felt as if I was stranded on an island in the middle of the ocean.

My sleep vanished and I told myself not to panic: how could someone who has travelled to so many countries in different parts of the world panic? So I looked up my IBM mail for the NGO coordinator's local number that she had emailed to everyone the week before (I was too busy to even read email that week [sigh]) and noticed she had put an "8" instead of a +7 (International Code for Kazakhstan) before her number. So I dialled the hotel again by prefixing 8 and voila! Just the voice of the hotel operator speaking fluent English was sufficient to make me feel at home. A taxi was on its way is what I was told and I felt relieved. Used the occasion to let my family know via Skype that I had reached (and deliberately ducked the question when they asked "uptil where").

I was the only soul sitting on the chair at the terminal exit chatting away on my iPad when I saw a guard walk in my direction: he seemed suspicious. I must add that the feeling was mutual. I had wild hallucinations of being thrown into a dark Soviet-style prison without ever getting to know why, so I quickly disconnected my Skype call and sat quietly. He walked away. Maybe I was too loud...but hello, there wasn't a soul around to hear me anyway!

Within a short while, the hotel called me back to announce that they were sending a lady driver. Lady driver! To pick me up past midnight! My first reaction: does my name & voice sound as feminine to Kazakhs as it sounds to most people in India that they thought it fit to send a lady driver to reassuringly pick up a 'lady'? However, I was mentally exhausted & saw no point in brooding over this. I quickly reconciled to the fact that 'someone' was picking me up [phew] in what seemed to me a ghost town on that night.

In no time, a lady arrived with a walky-talky looking for someone. She didn't have to look too hard as I was the only person at the terminal. And soon enough, I was zooming past wide Astana roads to the King Hotel. The lady spoke a little English and asked me if I knew about Mittal Steel. Yes - I answered, smiling away in recognition of the fact that I had been recognised...as an Indian national! I knew Mittal Steel had a huge plant in Kazakhstan and was certain that this was the basis of her question.

Once at the hotel, I entered my room at half past one o'clock in the morning. I quickly unpacked and went to bed with a tough wakeup target of 9:30 am after an effective travel of 25 hours. The front desk had told me that breakfast was only available until 10:30 am and after missing my airport pickup, I didn't want to miss my first meal in the country!