Punch the keys

Others may have celebrated Fathers day on 20th of June this year according to the Gregorian calendar. But Father's day for me is today! The day I became a father for the first time. I can still feel the bliss I felt when I looked at my daughter for the first time and got to hold her. It has been 5 years now since the day but the thought of it still gets me smiling and all warm inside. Mashaallah. I was a little tensed up that day with some confusion going on at the hospital. (Well, that's another long story) And the doctor was moving my wife to the operation theater. My wife, as she is going, tells me that we should name her Taheyya if it is a girl. She just had that name pop in her mind and she liked it since it rhymed with my mother's nickname/ "ommana peeru". After about an hour and a little more, the nurse came out with my daughter wrapped in the white sheet. She was looking wide eyed and held a steady gaze at me. She was all pink and looked heavenly. The nu...

Giving a demo to an audience always requires some preparation. Even if it is only one member in the audience, it matters a lot because the impression the person would have depends on how you are doing. As it is, it is difficult to give a presentation or market an idea to another person. Add to that the language barrier and the mix gets interesting. Well, I had my first experience with such a mix a couple of days back when I gave a presentation of the proof of concept that we were working on. My colleague from China acting as the translator for the presentation. He had already instructed me to go slow since it would otherwise be difficult for him to keep up and translate. Having no experience in this and  no chance for a rehearsal, we dived in. The important thing for me was to keep track of what I was saying. Speaking slow and having to pause in between, I needed to keep my attention on where I was more than usual. My colleague would say the gist of what I had said and then te...

Some of my friends who had traveled east, told me how difficult it was to have food in these parts. Either it was the lack of vegetarian food or the different crawling or other creatures on the menu that were the point of contention, the gist was that food was going to be very very difficult here. So I was mentally preparing myself for a big diet which would have been good for me, I believe. But fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, it was not to be. I find the food here at Shanghai quite to my liking. To be fair to my friends, they had not come to Shanghai. They had visited the southern parts where, my Chinese colleague tells me, the menu has a lot of crawling creatures. Of course I am sticking to vegetarian and sea-food only. But still liking it. I don't think I have had so many vegetables in a single meal. Hmm, come to think of it, possibly only with the exception of an Onam Sadhya! There is a choice of spicy and non spicy food and the cooking style is ...

One of the must visits, that my friend here told me about was the world expo that has been going on at Shanghai from 01 May till the 31st of October 2010. You can see the theme of the expo "Better City, Better Life", the logo and the mascot, Haibao, all along the streets, on the public transport and billboards. According to the Wikipedia page for the expo , this is the most expensive expo in the history of world fairs. Around 90 odd countries have pavilions in the expo. During conversations about the expo, we never had any inclination of the mammoth setup of the expo. I imagined that it would be a grand fair, one we could spend about 6-7 hours and finish off. When another of my colleagues suggested that three days may not be sufficient to see it completely, I attributed it to an exaggeration. On Tuesday 15th Jun 2010, I understood that it was not so. We spent about 5 hours there at the expo and could cover only one pavilion completely and about 10 percent of the Ch...

It is just my luck I guess! I could have watched the world cup matches at a very nice timing this edition but then my luck had to play. I had to come to Shanghai for the month the World cup is to start. I just cannot watch all the matches because I need to wake up the next morning for office. Still hope to be selective in watching the matches.  But in some ways this is better than the US one I had to watch at 2:00 am or 3:00 am in the morning :) 

The first weekend in Shanghai was a working weekend. The following week had a couple of holidays for the Dragon Boat festival and so the client was working to compensate for that. At the end of the day on Sunday, my colleague took us to see The Bund . It was an amazing view of the Shanghai Skyline from the Bund. You can see the panaromic view on the wiki page. The lighted up buildings are really an amazing sight. There were a lot of people visiting the Bund. It seemed as if there were Chinese tour groups too visiting. Most of the people had cameras and flashes were going off all around. Many had superb SLR camera with tripod too. It was totally understandable. This side of the Bund has all the older architectures. The Peace Hotel, which is supposed to host the foreign dignitaries and important personalities on state visit, is also on this side of The Bund. The Bund is along the Huangpu River, on the other side of which we could see the Shanghai  Pudong ...

The Shanghai Experience till now has been a great one. I really liked the place. It is very clean and planned. Thats the short of what my time here till now have been. Now getting into the details. :) The First day We landed at the Pudong International Airport on time. The local time being around 4:15 pm. The first act being to find the baggage. That was easy. All basic stuff which have now kind of become standard at international airports. After collecting the baggage, we went through the queue for the immigration check. The police officer on duty went through the documents and had only one question. "Where is the hotel address?" Locked safe in my baggage I told him. And he was kind of fine with that. Apparently, the hotel would have to register my passport number with the local police within 48hrs of my checkin. Hmm possibly the reason why he was asking for the hotel address. The next was to get a cell phone. I had heard that it was possible to get a pre-paid card at the ...

Our itinerary was from Hyderabad to Bangkok and then from there to Shanghai. There was a six hour break of journey at Bangkok so we were thinking of a short visit of Bangkok city too while we were at it. The flight was pleasant, but the time being 11:50 at night, the only thought in my mind was to get some sleep! We had comfortable seats in the Thai airline, and were treated to a nice meal. The colors of the airline are pretty vibrant and the seating and all accessories reflected the same. I could manage a couple of hours of sleep. The flight was not too crowded and I could see a couple of folks in the middle set of seats converting 3-4 seats into a bed. Do not know if that is comfortable or not! Overall a pleasant flight. Anyways, the Bangkok airport is a huge airport. We went to see if we could process the tourist visa to go into the city. The problem being that it was 5:00 in the morning at Bangkok and we were wondering where to go. The tour operator counter had not opened up ye...

I shall be jotting down some of my experiences of my trip to Shanghai and/or other places in this eastern part of the world in these posts. I don't want to put up everything in one post since it would become very long and I would tire of writing it. My journey to Shanghai started out because a customer of the company wanted some features to be demonstrated as a proof of concept. So my colleague and I were sent in to perform the duty. The first part of the journey started when we took the Coimbatore to Hyderabad flight. The flight was en-route to Delhi and was almost full. The monsoon provided its fireworks in the form of lightening and the turbulence scared up my colleague, who is still trying to get used to air travel. He was thankfully able to find another seat away from the window! Our papers were being processed from Hyderabad and so we would be waiting here for 3-4 days for the Visa to arrive and our journey to begin. Although it fe...