Is travel worth it?

I caught the travel bug majorly because of my dad and his love of travel. He introduced me to the thrill of seeing a new place, something different than the regular. I am sure many others started the same way. But somewhere, slowly I am starting to notice that the world he introduced me to is not the same anymore. 

The word 'Over-tourism' was unheard of. The Icelands and the Fijis of the world were trying to attract people to come visit by aggressive tourism marketing. Tourism fueled businesses and provided good source of employments to people. Flying was still an exciting thing (and a luxury too!). Destination Guide books were a thing and Internet was slowly looking to spread the wealth, one bit at a time. 

Fast forward to now, technology did a great job in bringing the world closer together. Traveling is now much easier to plan and execute. Our social media and other influencers inspired us to go explore what's out there. The places, the food, the culture, experiences, photos and much more. Somewhere down the line, tourism became a victim of it's own success. There can only be one Machu Picchu, one Eiffel Tower, one Big Ben, one Sagrada Familia and each passing day, more and more people wanting to visit. This presents an interesting challenge, how do we keep these places accessible to the public, keep the visitor experience awesome and preserve it for generations to come. There is no easy solution. 

Maybe encouraging people to visit other ruins, perhaps not as old as Machu Picchu but pristine nevertheless. More shoulder season/off season travel perhaps, putting a cap on number of visitors to a place daily can be some alternatives. Citizens of Barcelona, Venice, Amsterdam alike are raising alarms of over-tourism citing tourists are making it difficult for locals to afford living in their cities. Housing is looked at as an investment for the wealthy, the hotels, the airbnbs alike who make way for making more accommodations available to the tourists while taking away the space from residents. 

Leaving that aside for a moment, are costs to travel really worth it? Monetary costs, time costs, planning and execution effort and many other such hidden costs. Maybe sometimes, but not always. Driving long hours on a busy weekend just to get to someplace for a short while and return. Waiting in the long lines of cars trying to enter a popular national park. Spending long times waiting at the airport security line to board a flight which has no better user experience than a crappy bus. Waiting in long lines at Temple entrances to see a 10 second glimpse of statue of God. I am sounding very negative, but when you start looking past these experiences, you start to see the positive side of travel. 

When you start to look at travel as a package things start to look different. Don't gauge the worth of travel based on the quality of your sunset photo. Don't let a rainy day affect your idea of perfect vacation. Things don't always go as planned and you will take some wonderful detours in the process. Enjoy every bit, just like everyday life. Sometimes we keep our expectations so high because of the money that is spent on trips. Remember, every trip is a chapter in a storybook. Some more interesting that the others. It takes us away from our everyday lives to give us a glimpse of other people's lives, an entry point to nature that is not present in our backyard. Just like our everyday life has it's ups and downs, so does travel life. Every once in a while, I am sure you will encounter moments that make travel worth it. Here's to one such moment. Northern Lights!!!

My consumption

One of the best things Internet has handed down to us is Awareness. Awareness about environment issues, about shrinking rainforests, water resources becoming more and more scarce. Plastics clogging our oceans while the oceans themselves running out of sealife, wildlife species getting extinct, climate change, ozone layer depletion. Soil, land and water pollution, increased carbon footprint, littering and landfill problems. Sounds a bit negative, but I assume at some point more people have to start talking about it, to try to make things a bit better.

"Am I stuck in traffic or am I the traffic?"

A question that I very often end up asking myself.

I am very much responsible just like the others around. For my own laziness, for my own convenience, I feel the need to make some lifestyle changes. Small things can make a huge difference. Only buying the things that I really need. Carrying a grocery bag to the supermarket instead of getting many plastic from them. Not using straws to drink beverages. Trying to recycle as many things as I can. Buying new clothes only when absolutely necessary. 

Trying to support organizations who do things more environment friendly than the others in similar categories. Trying to carpool whenever I can. Maybe buy a car that is electric or hybrid or fuel efficient. Using bicycle, public transport whenever possible. buying energy and water efficient appliances. Buying as little furniture as possible and using it over a long period of time. 

Make smart choices while buying. Use products that are environment friendly. buying unwashed jeans which consume much less water while making rather than the washed ones. Opt for eco-friendly packaged items. Staying in the outside aisles of the supermarket rather than the packaged middle aisles. Combine multiple errands in one trip. Print documents as little as possible. Try to opt-in for electronic mail options rather than paper mail. Trying to use reusable glass containers at home rather than the plastic ones that have to replaced often. 

Maybe some planning can help. Not using the plastic cup/spoon/ knife or disposable cutlery at work and trying to bring/keep reusable mugs and cutlery at work. There is always this feeling, do the actions of a single person matter? But then just as every vote counts in the final tally, maybe my actions will count. Maybe If more people start raising these concerns collectively, companies will start taking action. Like Levi's have started to make the water > less label Jeans, Nike using more recycled material in shoes , Ikea moving towards 100% renewable energy and many such examples. 

Maybe, If I pay attention to my consumption, things will change. 

< Just realized this is my 100th post. This is one of those posts I've been meaning to write for a long time, but was waiting for a lazy Sunday afternoon to pen it down>

Of region and religion

I usually shy away from writing or saying about religion, but I just could not resist this one!

Trips to India are very enlightening! With every trip, you learn new things. When you put an analytic hat, you end up discovering a lot of things. In my recent trips, I was thinking about the driving factors of our economy. Apart from agriculture, what drives our economic activities? Is it manufacturing, IT Industry, Outsourcing in general, new disruptive startup scene or something else. As I was thinking about this while riding in an auto, I saw a big Temple and a line of people standing outside. I said to myself that moment, this is it! Religion and God are the biggest drivers in our economy. It directly or indirectly impacts so many people. 

I started thinking of the people working in this eco-system. This is going to be a long list. Firstly the obvious one, lets start with the Temple, Church, Mosque or any other place of worship. The priests who perform prayers, the people who make idols, people who make/distribute the Prasad, the ones who deliver flowers and make flower malas. The vendors who sit outside the temple selling various things like prasad, idols, small toys, place to leave the footwear. The temple trustees and organization members, the people who work in managing orderliness and queue in some of the larger temples. 

There are the priests who come home and perform a variety of rituals and Poojas of Variety of Gods( Satyanarayan, Ganesh pooja, Lakshmi pooja, Housewarming pooja, Navagraha pooja and the list goes on...). Then there are the big religious gatherings where we invite guests and perform pooja and give a feast to hundreds of people which include Mundan (Munja) and Marriage and many others depending on caste and religion. 

Then there are religious festivals which generate a spend of several millions in the economy including Ganesh festival mandals, the Garba dandiya raas, Dahi handi, holi, diwali crackers and so on. The retail sector also takes full advantage of such festivals putting up big sales to attract customers. Religious days generate more sales of Silver, Gold and other precious things. Aaj Sona le lo, bahut shubh din hai (Buy Gold today, it is a very auspicious day).

Then there is God and Religion merchandise, the books, the texts, the saffron sticks, the haldi kumkum, the flowers and other things. Every god has their special day which generates more visits, Monday for Shiva, Tuesday for Ganpati, Thursday for Sai Baba, Friday for devi, Saturday for Hanuman and so on. Then the religious demi-gods who have millions of followers listening to their speeches. Then there is media which feeds on the stories and controversies that religious leaders generate. Everyday you read a newspaper, you will see atleast one religious article, I guarentee.

Plus we created these unwritten rules the religion which impact everything from real estate to our food habits. An east-west facing house is priced 5 lakhs more than the house exactly next to it facing south. You cannot sell or rent your house to people of other religions. Don't buy expensive things such as cars on Saturday, that is not an auspicious day. Aaj non-veg mat khana, navratri chal rahi hai (Do not eat meat, today is some festival). Don't get married in this month, this is not a festive month. Everything dwells on the fact that 'Log kya kahenge?' (What will others say?)

I always hear these stories of disruptions in Industry, like Uber replacing Taxis, Airbnb replacing Hotels, small startup companies challenging Technology giants. I seriously hope someday this industry gets its Uber and millennials embrace it. 

On missing out..

I have thing feeling that we have started to over-classify some things. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is one of those things. It's been talked about a lot recently, and whether we like it or not, it's very much real.

We can say any addiction is bad, why should we categorize addiction to social media, to electronic devices, to content driven media differently. I think there are a couple of differences in being addicted to things like cigarettes or alcohol or drugs than being addicted to electronic media. In the first case, it's very easy to identify yourself as an addict. In the second case, it's not.
You keep on saying to yourself, everyone's doing it, so am I. There's nothing going on. Another difference is, there are no noticeable side effects, like Alcohol for instance.

Often you would not even realize that you went from being on Facebook a few minutes a day to more than a hour. You wake up in the middle of the night to see if the photo you just posted has more likes. You keep checking the email app every 10 minutes or so, seeing if some important mail you were waiting on has arrived. Even if you are standing in front of one of the seven wonders of the world, your mind is constantly looking around for that perfect spot to take a cool snap to share with your friends. Or maybe yelling at someone for grabbing a bite from the dish that just arrived before you get a chance to photograph it and post it on Instagram. Watching live sport and something controversial happens, you instantly stop looking at the TV and start looking at twitter feed to see other's reactions to what happened.

I think we are in constant search for approval. From our friends, our society from peers from everyone. We want to go to places whenever we see pictures of our friends going and having fun. We want to see every good movie in the first week, or the first weekend itself. We don't want to be left out. We feel saddened if on a long weekend, we see posts of friends going places all over our Facebook feed and we are sitting at home catching up on an old Netfix serial.

Problem is we want to be a part of every glamorous that we see through the periscope of the lives of people we know. But, to be fair, social media is just the 'glamour' part of people's life. It's not the complete picture. Nobody puts out the ugly part of their life on the internet. You will see posts of people making it to the 'Top places to work' on linkedIn, but you don't really see their struggle of getting rejected by 10 others.

I think it's okay to miss out on certain occasions. I think there should be no fear of missing out really!! Anytime you are missing out on something, you can utilize that time to do things that you actually care for. I remember when i went to Bali a couple of years ago, I used internet only once a day just to check if everything is okay with friends and family and that nothing crazy has happened in this world. I did not feel like I missed out on anything. Ever since, I try to stay off my mobile every-time I go on a trip.

Response to an email can wait. Messaging to your friends on whatsapp/imessage/sms can wait. I am sure your genuine friends would understand if you wish them happy birthday a day after and have a meaningful conversation rather than staying up till midnight just to spend a minute wishing happy birthday. It's okay if you stay in a local AirBnB instead of a fancy beachside resort your friends stayed on and raved about. It is okay that the restaurant you ate at is not zagat rated or tripadvisor top 50. It doesn't matter. Until you start caring what the world cares.

Random musing

Right from childhood, it is ingrained in our thoughts that failure is a terrible thing. Failing a year in school is thought as wasting a year of life. Students on the borderline of academic pass/fail line have to deal with the constant stress of staying on the right side of this line. 

Most of them do! They come out of the system without facing failure. But the race isn't quite complete yet. It keeps getting tougher and tougher. There comes college, now the odds of survival are slightly tougher. The ones who passed out of school with flying colors are suddenly scrambling to pull things together to avoid another failure. Some of them succeed here too. 

But then here's the problem for people who come through this system without failure. Life is much more than standardized tests where where you are judged on memory/knowledge/aptitude et al. It has much more to it! Guess what, having never faced failure before is going to make it ever more difficult to face it when the time comes. 

It can come through variety of forms. Rejection from the girl you adored so much, failing the job interview of the company of your dreams, not getting the promotion you really worked hard for. As a child we learn to deal with so many things, anger, jealousy, frustration, peer pressure and many more. But we never had to deal with failure. This makes us react in mysterious ways. 

We start looking for faults within ourselves, faults within the system, start looking at inspirational quotes, motivational you tube videos(bring on Rocky speech!) and so on. We start believing in luck(good/bad), in superstition, in other things that take our mind away from failure. Gulp down a drink or two. 

But, we seldom think, is failure really that bad? It's just a phase! It happens to most of us. It gives us good advise for our future endeavors. It makes us aware of our capabilities. It gives us a chance to try again. It makes us humble. 

Maybe it's not such a bad thing! Maybe somebody should have told me this earlier!

Organic - the new premium

Organic!! The word that has been buzzing around us for past few years. It's all around us, so much that a lot more people are talking about it. It is like a premium grocery product. It begs the question, is it really worth paying the price difference? Can the regular stuff(non-organic) be that bad that you feel like moving to the organic section.

And why is it that we are hearing about it now more than ever? I did not know of organic grocery while growing up. It was all just grocery. What changed?

I think until some point, we were doing the right thing, in terms of produce, poultry and other groceries, but slowly we moved away from the best practices. We modified our crops to survive harsher climates, low rainfall. We stopped grazing cows on pastures and started feeding them in factories producing milk. We genetically modified stuff. Chicken that lay eggs for us were no longer cage free, farm fed. Slaughter houses were not kept up to standards. We started fish farming rather than wild caught fish. We kept producing only those varieties which had a bigger shelf life and could stay longer in the supermarket without going bad.

We made so many changes that hardly anything is seasonal anymore. Everything is available all the time. A mango in November was unthinkable in my childhood for me, but I can easily buy mangoes throughout the year at roughly the same price. same goes out for watermelons, strawberries and apples.

We did so many things to keep the produce prices low, deviated from so many good practices and all those changes were so gradual that people accepted them. The world population just keeps growing, our consumption keeps growing and yet we roughly use the same amount of land that we had before for farming.

While these changes were taking place, two kinds of people really stood up for a food revolution. Firstly, the farmers who did not want to get away from doing the right things stood their ground and refused to make these adjustments to maintain their product quality. Secondly, some of the consumers who had this awareness of benefits of these practices kept buying these things at the now changed prices.

This is the beginning of the the new 'organic' I think. Those were the people who did not ask the question, why is this stuff so expensive. They asked the question, why is that other stuff priced low. Where could they have cut corners. It is a shift in thinking that makes a difference. What we buy really indirectly sends the message. with more people starting to buy the right stuff, the big supermarkets will have no choice but to stock the right stuff more and more.

Supermarkets are a reflection of society's buying habits. We see so much canned food and frozen foods around us occupying more than half the shelves and the produce reduced to a single aisle in the supermarket with a division between a small organic section and the other regular stuff. It is a crazy world where a can of apple juice costs less than if you were to buy apples and make juice out of them.

I am not suggesting we all buy apples instead of apple juice or buy the fresh stuff instead of canned or buy organic instead of regular. The pace of modern life has changed our lifestyle which we have to live with. I understand that for some of the lower and middle incomes, grocery costs can constitute for up to 10 percent of their after tax income and for them to move to a costlier product is not always feasible. And the world's resources would be put to a lot of strain if every animal or animal product that we consume were to come from pasture raised, non gmo, no growth hormones, no stress environment.

I think this debate is endless. We can never have a definitive agreement on either side, but we can make an informed choice rather than our grocery store influencing us by putting a fancy label. If we don't we might end up with a 3 tier structure. Regular, premium and extra-premium. I hope that never happens with food.   

Luck by chance

I've been downplaying the role of words like 'luck','fate', 'chance', 'fortune' all my life. I always thought of them as something I would not associate with my successes or failures. Recently I saw a youtube clip of Harsha Bhogle about it in which he mentioned people start believing in these things more and more as they grow older. He couldn't have been more right. 

Most of the times, bad luck or misfortune can be wiped away by getting around it. A small inconvenience and pinch of hardwork will brush it aside. But I've learn't that's not always the case. Although the decisions we make are the biggest contributors to our destiny, we have to understand that there still are awful amount of things are beyond our control. 

We can buy a property at one of the most lucrative places and yet there is no guarantee that there is a price surge in the next couple of years. Agreed we have a lot of choices to make in most of our decisions and we could make our lives a whole lot better by making good choices. The same way bad choices can take us downhill. But not every bad choice will. If we ask ourselves, I am sure everybody will have gotten away with making bad choices every once in a while. 

Although, I have started to come to terms with luck, it still is unpredictable. You cannot base your decisions based on it being in your side. Heisenberg's uncertainty  principle also applies to real life. The difference being that uncertainty  is not a constant here, it's a variable. It affects some more than others. You cannot estimate it and try to tame it. Buying a car on a Tuesday or getting your name changed to certain numeric addition is not going to change it. Even if it does, you would never know what would have happened if you did not. 

I would like to end this post by a Donald Rumsfeld quote. 

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.