What do you talk when you meet an Ex-President of a country?

If you are wondering that the title is quite hypothetical you might want to think again. Interesting things happen when random dots connect.

Today, I had the privilege to meet and talk with Dr. Jamil Mahuad, Ex-President of Ecuador, well known in the international community for preventing a war and settling the dispute between Peru and Ecuador in 1998 through a series of negotiations with Peruvian then President Fujimori. He seemed more of a scholar than an ex-politician of a country struggling with poverty (38% plus).

In our chat, we discussed about the concepts and frameworks for negotiation and how they can be applied to some of the tough challenges in India such as the Kashmir dispute. Overall, it was a delightful experience.

Curious on what random dots connected for me to meet Mahuad? Well, the dots include a law school newsletter, my mentorship with our VP, an interesting guy at Cisco, politics in a marketing group...oh boy! I can keep going forever.

Why did Ram Kill Ravan?

Seriously. Why did Ram kill Ravan? Is it because Ravan is a bad dude and does all sought of evil things through his Rakshas kingdom? No, that's not the reason. Ram killed Ravan for personal reasons. Ravan abducted Ram's wife, Sita. So what's the moral of the story?

If someone is evil, and even if you have the power to stop or eliminate this evil person, do not do it. Fight only if it is personal. Ram did not even challenge Ravan, even though Ravan is a Rakshas causing trouble to people until the wife kidnapping episode. Ravan became a personal enemy by kidnapping Ram's wife and that's the reason Ram killed Ravan.

Why was this moral from Ramayan never inferred and taught (at least I never heard it!). Is this a loop hole in Ramayan or was it actually written to teach this moral?

Congested!

Overload of everything! Cars, information, things to do and even options for drinking water. Let me try my part to reduce the overloading of one thing. Words.

If I have to present for two hours, I prepare for 15 minutes and if I have to present for 15 minutes I prepare for two hours. Less is more for audience and harder for presenters.

Instead of writing long blogs let me try to see if I can tell better stories with lesser words and more pictures. Who has the time and patience to read long blogs in this information overloaded, multitasking, gadget addicted, attention deficit traited, hitech world anyways.

If you are still reading you read about 120 words and will read 140 by the time you are done. Let's see if I can have 147 words as the limit for my blogs.

Pleasure and Pain. Which one first?

If you ever prepared hard for a major exam or trained for a marathon or worked out to build muscle or lose weight you probably know what I'm going to talk about. You go through a certain kind of pain in anticipation of pleasure. Right? I went through the pain of running every Saturday morning for tens of miles to experience the pleasure of finishing a marathon. Well, in the process I had many benefits and truly enjoyed the journey but still felt the pain of party less Friday nights and early Saturday morning. You get the point.

Pain came first and pleasure came next, whenever the goal was achieved. I think, most of the things work in a similar way except for RELATIONSHIPS. It's so much of pleasure when a relationship is established but eventually it's going to break and there's going to be pain. Agree?
Well, you can argue that many relationships do not break. But I tend to disagree. Everything is destined to break. That's natures law. The time when things break and the way things break can vary.

EUREKA POINT: Relationships start with pleasure and end with pain. So stay away from them. Well, if you can. I can't.

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!

Hill or Hell? May be a Happy Hell!

Once in a while you need an eye opener. At least I do! An event that kind of throws the harsh reality at you and tells you that you have a long way to go. A really long way. Mt.Washington road race is one such event for me. I knew it was not going to be an easy race especially after hearing about it from our coach Jonathan who ran it in the past, but I was still surprised. To begin with, if it’s an easy race there would not be a lottery to get into it. Ironic. Isn’t it! It’s only a 7.6 mile road race. What’s so unique about it you may ask. Well, read on.

If you ever ran on a treadmill and played with the incline feature you know what the inclination percentage number is all about. I typically set it at 1 to 3 % when I train on treadmill. The Mt.Washington road race has an average inclination of 12 percent and the last stretch is around 22 percentage. I am not kidding! Doesn’t it sound brutal? Well it was. And that’s the whole point. Some treadmills don’t even have 12 percent option. They stop at 10 percent for inclination.

Even though the drive to the mountains was picturesque, waking up at 4AM and driving for 3 hours was a pain in itself. Especially if you are not used to seeing the sunrise! It’s been so long since I hit the road so early. The foggy roads and streaks of bright sun light through the trees was a thing to savor. My friend Mahesh (my ride) and I took a wrong turn somewhere in the route but managed to reach the base of Mt.Washington just in time. He was the last guy to be allowed to drive to the summit. He’s my ride (and for three other runners) downhill once the race is over.

It’s 20 minutes to the race and the green slopes, white and yellow daisies and almost clear blue sky were a true treat for any person, let alone a nature lover. Relishing the scenery, I did a quick 5 minute warm up flowed by 10 minutes stretching. Runners were all over the place looking at a Mt.Washington simulation video, stretching, and just relaxing before the race. We all gathered before the start line and the opening speech ended with “remember it’s just one hill!” and the canon went so loud that I kind of felt it in my heart. The echo from the mountains was very evident and the runners started the divine journey to the summit.

The first one mile was not very inclined but it’s the longest single hill stretch I ever ran until then. All I could hear was panting. All runners were panting so heavily that it sounded like I was in the middle of some sought of a tribal ritual. Mile one was cool and mile two was OK and then the game started to change. As I was approaching mile three I realized that I was not trained for such a mountain. My initial target for Mt.Washington was to finish the race in under 100 minutes (it’s just 7.6 miles!) or even better, under 90 minutes. Now the targets started to fade off.

Once I crossed mile mark three I was very eagerly looking for the half distance mark. I started taking many walk breaks, tried to talk myself to relax and enjoy the scenery and just keep covering the distance. My focus was to take small steps and just keep moving. Crossing the half mark at 50 minutes was quite a relief. I thought I could finish the race in under 100. Then I went through a very unique experience, something I never felt in the past. In my previous races, no matter how hard I was running my legs listened to my mind. I would order my legs to stop and they would. In this race it seemed as if my legs separated from my body and started to develop a mind of their own. As strange as it sounds, I did not want to stop running but my legs would almost cease and go into walking mode. I was just not able to control them. Period. Damn!



Instead of taking walking breaks during the run I felt like I was taking running breaks during the walk. Boy, the hill was steep! At mile 5 or so the temperature started to fall down. We were passing through clouds and I felt the chill deep in my bones. Then came the real test of the race. The clouds cleared and the visibility improved. All I could see was a long stretch of steep uphill. Just one hill and no relief in the vicinity. It was quite demoralizing and and my heart kind of collapsed and I asked "Why am I doing this again?" You know that feeling when you begin to question the very purpose of a journey. I just wanted to finish the race now. Timing and pace does not matter. Frankly, I do not even remember how I ran or walked from there to the end.

A runner was carrying a big US flag on his shoulder and I thought I should at least keep up with this guy running with such a weight. It was a liberation when I saw people on the side of the road cheering runners. It’s a sign that I am close to the finish line. I saw Mahesh with the camera and before I could enjoy the relief I saw the brutal 22 degree stretch. I wanted to run it without stopping but I was forced to walk for a few seconds. I some how managed to run the steep stretch and I was very glad to cross the finish line. My legs were in tears thanking me because I finally stopped the painful uphill conquest. The temperature was below 40 degrees and they covered me with a mylar space blanket and threw a medal around my neck. The race was over. Finally. What a relief and more than that, what an experience!

I walked around the summit, cheered runners trying to reach the finish line, and started our journey downhill once they opened the road for cars. One of the runners we offered a ride finished in 72 minutes and I did not even bother to ask the other two. We saw other runners walking and running the uphill and cheered them. One of them looked so old and beaten and that I thought he would collapse before the finish line. I checked later and he's 76 and finished the race. What can I say?
We finally reached the base camp to enjoy a massage, cold beer and hot soup. What a pleasure. Surprisingly my legs below the knees are super fine. They felt as fresh as ever and were ready to race a 10K. But the glutes, hamstrings and quads were aching. My butt never hurt so bad!

Takeaways and free suggestions:

1. More training for harder races.
2. Enjoy the 50 meters 3% uphill stretch during the race at mile 4. That's the flattest stretch in the entire race.
3. Do not run this race. Drink a beer in a bar instead :)

Would I do this again? May be yes. Only after lots of hill training or after smoking some good pot!

More pictures here.

How much power do data centers consume?

With all the green IT stuff going around I always wondered how much power all the data centers in the US consume annually and if this a significant number? We talk about virtualization, low power consuming processors and servers, energy efficient storage devices and the list is end less. What exactly is the impact? To answer this question I did some research and ended with a rather extensive number of blogs and articles. One highly reliable report is the one from US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Let's talk some numbers now.

The nations servers and data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours, a electricity cost of $4.5 billion in 2006. So the check to energy companies was $4.5B. Sounds like a big number. But comparing this to the total consumption of power in the country it accounts only to 1.5%.
The total consumption by servers and data centers has only doubled since 2000 to 2006 in spite of the multi fold increase the size and number of data centers. Things have certainly become more efficient than they were in 2006.

So even though we work a lot on improving the efficiencies of data centers, we end up saving the power bill for corporations but will not make a big impact in the big picture of the energy sector of the country. How significant is a 20% saving in 1.5% of total power consumption?

iFund

Was researching VC firms for IT investments and came across this rather surprising fund. KPCB (for starters, Kleiner Perkins is one the top VC firms that funded AOL, Google, Amazon and the like) has a new fund called iFund. Yes, it resonated with iPhone and iPod. And that's what they wanted. iFund invests in ideas and companies working on iPhone and iPod platforms. iPod/Phone truly created a economy of their own and it's only growing. There is Rajnikant and then there is Jobs.