Monday, July 28, 2008

Ride Report - STP 2008

This year I'm doing a video report of our Seattle to Portland 2-day, 200+ mile bike ride. Be gentle with my experimentation in movie making and spelling skills, and if you have not donated already please consider supporting this ride, by making your contributions here.



I have shared the pictures of ride here.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

July 4th Weekend - Hanging out with my favorite gals :)

Vaidehi came over for July 4th weekend. After all the busy weekends only this weekend i got some time to get the pictures ready and share the goodness. It was really fun time motorcycling, biking, salsa dancing, strolling and climbing with her and Maris. :).

How to make the best Sambar - Vaidehi Style

My sister - Vaidehi is one of the best cooks. Here she is in live action showing the intricacies of making sambar from left over dal and frozen mixed vegetables. This is really quick to make and tastes wonderful!!

Saturday, July 05, 2008

The Small City India - and the change we need!

SiliconIndia, apparently one of the primere India professional network reports that India has degraded in its Forbes business potential ranking. The prime reasons it gives is high inflation and increased personal freedom.

For a while we have been the media has been focusing on every form of outsourcing, technology and the big business cities. But the "gross" in the India GDP comes from small city and small town India. The inflation is attribute of the increased disproportional spending of this small city India. Bit city India was always able to do this! What pains me is that the core problems of the economy are not made a day to day problem talk:
- How is the O of outsourced economy going to finally reach small city India?
- How is the T of technology affect the education in small cities
- How is that bright young folks can find employment in small town India to make a not only local but a global change. Can an infrastrucure to support this be built?

I gradually moved from a small town to smaller town to wealthy city to wealthier country. There is immense opportunity on all this levels but we publicize and want to go after only the top notch ones. It will be great exercise to actually start building the belief in local oppurtunity, and i love that my friend Nipun is doing something like that. Check out Karma Tube is a set of inspirational pieces motivating the change which can happen locally.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Sponsor my ride - help a cause!!

Every year I do the Seattle to Portland bike ride as a part of fund raiser. Next weekend I will be testifying my bike + butt endurance skills for 202 miles between Seattle and Portland. If you are interested in supporting Asha for Education and it’s cause of bringing change through education in India please support my ride by pledging and donating here. One of very personally gratifying things I was able to do with support of Asha was to help sponsor a school for hearing impaired back in my home town.

Enjoy the long weekend and happy Independence day.

Mt. Baker Climb

Maris and myself went for a Glacier climb with Mountaineers June 29-30. This was my first this season and Maris' second in a week! Pictures of the trip are shared here and a video is below:



The weather was really awesome! We started from the trail head about 11:30am and reached hogsback around 3:30pm, we decided to set our camp (base camp) here since we had running water and roping up and getting up to high camp, melting water + dinner would put us to bed pretty late. By the way the journey to the camp was not as easy - the trail is in a really in bad shape and we had to scramble our way in and walk over thin logs with a 50 pound pack :). And Oh! one interesting thing happened, Maris dropped her pole on a shitty slope and i volunteer to go get it. I had to go through some loose gravel and some snow but as soon as i grabbed the pole on of my feet slip and before i realized i was doing a butt ride towards a raging creek :). Fortunately i had my ice axe and i could self-arrest in time and make my way up safely!! This was a pretty freaky i think everyone was a little haired up seeing it ;).

Anyways we started our climb around 2:00am from 5700'. After making our way up the first slope one of the rope mates felt a little weird to after a lot of back and forth Jim (the leader) decided to go back with him. So we were then five folks on one rope 50m rope ! Anyways the weather held great and we were on the summit at about 8:30!! We made our way back down to camp at about noon and headed out from the cars at about 4pm to have the much missed Mexxi-Mamma burger ..