Everyone is a superstar in London. Well, not really.

How do you feel if you are photographed every minute as you walk on a road, buy a drink, catch a bus or just stand on a bridge and stare at the views around? Well, you feel like I do. A superstar? Hell now! I feel like I’m meeting the future of real-time entity monitoring. I’m not a criminal nor am I a VIP to demand this level of active monitoring. I’m just a traveler in the London city.

London has more than 500,000 closed circuit cameras strategically placed and takes a significant share out of the 4.5 million cameras the government installed all across the United Kingdom. One of my colleagues from RSA worked on this project in the past and was telling about the level of sophistication they have in the control rooms and systems. It sounded stranger than fiction.

If you land in Heathrow and travel through London, you are probably photographed 400 times in a day and state-of-the-art face and entity recognition and tracking technology is used if they want to connect the dots and focus on you.


I work in a field where we strive to prevent bad things from happening in life – well, more in the information fabric. Most of it is related to protecting the privacy and identity of people. But truly, I think that true privacy is a thing of the past. As we digitize more information about individuals and as computing power reaches a level where real time correlations of multiple data points are possible with commercially available technology, many more organizations will have systems in places to watch you 24 X 7.

We are not far from a day when our friends and unfortunately, others too can just “see” us in real time anytime they want irrespective of where we are. They will even get information about our body temperature and other vitals to figure out our mood. So just get used to it.

These guys ruled us. But I'm feeling at home here.

Since I landed in UK 3 days ago, strangely I’ve been feeling at home. I don’t know if it’s because of the “connection” between UK and desh or just looking at all these signboards, ads and papers in English instead of things in Italian or Swedish or German. Everyone speaks a language I understand here, obviously, and things look and feel very familiar. Even my full day meetings at the office were very similar to those I typically have in Boston. I did not have this feeling in other countries I’ve been traveling to in the last 10 days. For some reason, it feels like a gentle mix of desh and Boston. May be I need to get out of Bracknell and London city and see other things around to actually realize the differences.

By the way, the chicken korma curry and tikka masala here are just freaking awesome! Very creamy with well cooked meat. Very delicious.
PS: The picture is taken on a Saturday evening at the house of parliament.

How to know what makes you really happy?

I think everyone comes across this question, may be more than a few times. Seriously, how do we know? And what do we focus on? Short term happiness or long term happiness? Some things make us happy for a moment but might make us really unhappy in long term and there are things that are little painful to start with but can make us really happy in the long run. Logic and conventional wisdom recommends we aim for long term happiness.

I’m a person who believes that we have a lot of people on this planet and someone out there has already thought about a question or an idea you just had. So, I googled this question and was pleasantly satisfied to see 130 million pages that contain answers for this question. Some of them are from reputed organizations such as Harvard and Stanford. So I researched a bit more only to realize this is a specialization in itself and there are highly trained professionals who can help you answer this question for you. I’m thinking “really?” Do I seriously need to consult with someone with degrees more than two lines long to help me realize what makes me happy?

What a world we live in!