Last counted I spent about 6 months in Europe in last five years between work travel and vacation travel. But looks like I was still not done. So planned another trip to another part of Europe. We spent a week in Greece and then couple more weeks in central Europe — Spending 3 to 4 days each in Athens, Santorini, Vienna, Salzburg, Munich and ending with Prague. This was a rainbow of experiences from ancient city to modern city; extravagance of the post medieval time royals to the epicenter of the World War II horrors; from sea & beaches to the mountains & valleys; from relatively affordable to insanely expensive towns and from very cold to nice cool to almost unbearable heat.

But the beauty, character and passion of Europe was always there. Also was there was nice big collection of beer in the beer capitals of the world and fine affordable wine of yet new grape varieties! Almost all days there was something to treasure and create a life memory.

Many characters of Athens

This is the city we landed in and we stayed in the center of the city in the vicinity of the Acropolis. Of course the highlight of the city is the Acropolis hill with so many ruins on it reminding one of the once vibrant culture existing long before most cities of the world were cultured enough. My lasting memory is probably no different from anyone else visiting — the temple of Athena “Parthenon” at the top of the hill — even after its massive destruction in various conflicts it just draws you in. Once you understand the thinking behind it, the architecture and the belief with which it was constructed (do visit the Acropolis museum) — you cannot just look at it as an impressive ruin. Just like Rome it makes you think and wonder of the times that were.

The still functioning Amphitheatre “Herod Atticus Odeon” is another dominating structure on the hill. Believed to be constructed in the roman time around 160AD is still quite complete and holds live performances even today. Other ancient structures in the city are no less in their significance to an enthusiast but not in the same league — Ancient Agora, Roman Agora and Hadrian’s library just to mention a few.

Athens outside of the history is a wonderful city to spend time in. The flea market is nice — nothing much to buy — but the fruit vendors, the coffee shops and the waffles & pancakes were some of the best one can find. The real fun part of course is the Plaka district with so many amazing restaurants and lovely shops — just the atmosphere itself was energizing. We had some wonderful dinners but the favorite for us was a vegan place called Avocado — highly rated and rightly so.

We also took a day trip to Delphi — one of the many day trips one can take to see more ancient culture and ruins. Delphi is fascinating due to the misty stories of the Oracle of Apollo. It is a longish drive and has lot of bus tours to it from Athens. I was told and I think rightly so to either drive yourself or rent a private car — as you can work out the timing of visiting the site (avoiding crowd, which takes away from the stillness of the place). Often recommended to stay overnight in Delphi but I am not sure. For me the highlight was the small town of Leivadia, onwards we stopped over at a local bakery with some really fresh bread & wares and returning we bought wonderful feta cheese which we finished while roaming around in the town. It had a beautiful city center walk.

Picture perfect Santorini

Took a flight from Athens to this beautiful island — one of the decisions we made was to not do island hopping using boats and just visit Santorini or Thira as it is called locally. This crescent shaped landmass is around a volcano in its center — underwater Caldera (crater). We stayed on the foothills of Oia — smaller of the 2 famous towns, other being Fira. Oia is the picture perfect village — even more perfect in real life then all the pictures circulating. It is like a movie set with all the whitewashed buildings, blue domes of the churches & old style windmills. Overlooking the Caldera it is just a site you cannot get enough of.

The sunset here draws the crowd but is just ok — nothing different from any other good sunset place. But we were also lucky as the nice little house we stayed in had the perfect sunset view with pool chairs around a nice little swimming pool. We booked this place through Airbnb just like all the other apartments it was amazing as promised.

We used the bus to get around the island as the roads were just crazy for self driving; visited Imerovigli and Fira — partly walking on the trail along the shore and partly by bus. Fira is much busier & central with more shops & activity. but I would recommend to stay in Oia any day. The highlight for us was the day long sailing tour in the Caldera — luxurious yacht with few people; nice Thira local wine; and plenty of swimming in the blue beautiful Mediterranean water. Nothing can be better…

The one thing to warn about is the almost “to the breakpoint” state of the airport. Too many people, too many flights and no infrastructure. On top of it all our Air Berlin flight (no doubt the airline is in trouble now) time was changed to 1 am in the morning — meaning lot of coordination with hosts in Thira and hosts in Vienna where we were headed next. The good part — due to this change we had an extra day and we decided to go to the beach town of Kamari. This was a great decision as we just relaxed on the beach, with good food & wine and kids had fun. We decided to skip wine tour on the island or visit to Akrotiri (prehistoric ruins) — the other things people do on the island and something worth considering.

Vienna, the town of classical music & ballet

Gain of a day in Thira meant a loss of day in Vienna. Just 2 full days including our anniversary day is what we had here. In hindsight, I think it was a good thing. Vienna is much talked about online and city one cannot get enough of. But my emotional state post facto is that Vienna is more modern, with more new construction which makes it a bit dry and character gets a bit lost. It does not quite fit into the “get lost walking around” mold of European cities like Rome, Paris or Prague.

Firstly, we arrived at a ghastly post mid night hour and our Airbnb host was really helpful and arranged for a key. The apartment itself was very good with lot of space (again unlike other European cities — but this one is a good thing) and very well stocked. And it was in the middle of the city — 10 mins walking distance to the St Stephen’s cathedral. First day in the city was a Sunday so we were able to experience the Sunday prayers at the cathedral with a performance on the magnificent pipe organ, quite unique. The church itself was beautiful architecturally, a grand example of gothic style. Worth walking around it and taking lots of pictures. The old town area around the Church is wonderful to spend lot of leisurely time — food, coffee, shops and other historic buildings. St. Peter’s church is another interesting building. Hofburg palace complex is also in the vicinity. This is the one I felt was way too modern — it is royalty and all but to me it seemed a bit over sold from all perspectives. Same can be said about the Spanish riding school also. As we were there the horses from the show that day were being sent to their second home outside the city with open fields — some horse they were. The show itself had lot of mixed reviews and we decided to skip it mostly as the kids were not excited after watching some online clips.

Afternoon we spent at the Prater — open fair area in Vienna. This was wonderful for the kids with rides and food and open picnic kind of space. Good break I guess from lot history and architecture.

Next day morning we visited the Schönbrunn Palace. This is in a huge open area with big gardens and a zoo of its own. We took the palace tour which was interesting as it gives you a very good view of the royal history of Vienna and then we took a hop on train around the beautiful garden area. All good but again not something you should not miss. Then we rushed to get back in time for a tour of the famous Staatsoper, Vienna State Opera. We wanted to attend a show here but the show was a 3.5 hour long opera in French — decided to skip as we do not know French and we are not into opera. Instead we witnessed a Mozart styled show at probably the second best theatre in the city the Wiener Musikverein. Both the theatres are amazing to walk around and one can make out the amount of interest, passion, energy and love Austrians have for their ballet, opera and classical music. These theatres and a show are indeed must do’s in Vienna.

Next day morning we took the train to Salzburg. But an unfortunate incidence happened at the Vienna station. When we boarded the train we had 2 policeman walk through the coach. They just walked past all others but stopped for us and asked for our passports. Now firstly, it is a shame that the world has come to this. But then after checking the documents they continued to be rude — clearly a very racist attitude. Maybe selective attention but looks like there is more to this then one off in Austria/Vienna.

Sleepy Salzburg

This is a nice little quaint city with a beautiful Salzburg river running through the center of the city. Old town, or Altstadt, walking area with birthplace of Mozart, Mozart Gerburtshaus; nice churches, St. Peter the Franciscan church; with picturesque backdrop of the fort, Festung Hohensalzburg (Salzburg Fortress) on the mountain are the main attractions. Mirabell Garden on the other side of the river is certainly worth visiting. Sound of Music tour is the other popular attraction but we gave it a pass as not much into it.

Number of nice places to eat and drink beer. But the experience to remember was the old Augustiner Braustubl (Augustine Beer Garden) — This along with the other beer gardens in Salzburg, has an amazing lively atmosphere. There are food vendors, tons and tons of people and the beer is brewed by the monks! This is a must if you are looking for culture. Besides this there were also farmers stalls in day time in the old town — the cheese, strawberries and other fruits were as tasteful as it can get — we bought a few small packs of stuff and then sat on the grass next to the river, enjoying the picture perfect evening with backdrop of the fort.

Another interesting experience for the kids was being dressed in the traditional royal maiden dresses and getting their pictures clicked in both b&w and Eastman colors — really cute.

Besides Salzburg is a good starting point for a ton of mountain visits, valleys & lakes — basically the Alps experience just like Switzerland. We hired a taxi on one of days, driven by a Pakistan origin man — who was really helpful and we had a wonderful stop and go drive in the region. We spent time at St Gilgen and took a cable car up the Zwölferhorn mountain for some amazing views of the lake and towns in the valley. Later in the afternoon we reached Halstatt — it is called one of the most beautiful village in Europe for a reason. Just walking around the town and soaking in the scenery of this on the hill sleepy village next to a lake is a “cannot really be described” experience, which should not be missed by anyone in the area. We passed on the salt mine visit here, to do it the next day in another place. But this village history and it’s riches were built around the natural salt in the mountain — and there are many a stories about it.

Another day trip — we took a bus to Berchtesgaden in Germany primarily for the Eagle’s nest — the seat of Hitler’s power during WWII. This cannot be missed, even by those who are not history buffs. We started at Dokumentation Obersalzberg, a museum that gives an overview of Hitler’s life, vision, why the Nazi moment picked up, what was it’s message, what was it’s impact and eventual outcome. Most of the exhibits were in German with some English translations — but we took an English audio guide and that was quite helpful — it was fascinating for the kids and us alike even though some pictures were not appropriate for very young kids. Private buses run from the Dokumentation Center up to the Eagle’s Nest. These buses are the only way to get to the Eagle’s Nest; you are not permitted to drive if you have a car. The command post for Hitler’s elite was around the documentation center and Eagle’s nest was a gift to Hitler as a relaxation area. There is an very cold tunnel leading to a elevator to Eagle’s nest. The elevator itself is preserved from the time. The tunnel is said to have been used for storing wine bottles — living in luxury. This historical building is now used as a restaurant. The best part of visiting the Eagle’s Nest is getting a bird’s eye view over Germany and Austria. It is best to visit the Eagle’s Nest when the skies are clear and it was for our trip. Amazing views all around including that of the Königssee, king’s lake. Nestled in between several gorgeous Alpine mountains, the emerald green lake is the cleanest and deepest lake in Bavaria region. One can easily spend an entire day there also but we skipped it.

After the Eagle’s nest we visited the salt mine of this region, another unique experience for the kids. Very well conducted tour explaining how salt is made and there were some interesting exhibitions, best being the boat ride across a salty lake and a lug ride down the slope in a cave.

Vibrant and energetic Munich

Next stop was the Bavarian capital city of Munich. Again we stayed in apartment near the main city centre and used this to really experience the city in full. Bavarian local transport is very tourist friendly with fine tuned day passes for family which one can use to go anywhere in the Bavaria. The day we reached we took a bus to English garden and walked around — being a weekend it was full of people in beer gardens — large space, with live music, lot of food and of course lot of beer. One can only imagine the scenes during Octoberfest. After a brief stop, we strayed on to the portion of the garden which had a fast flowing river — where to our surprise we saw a bunch of people surfing and several folks just floating downriver. The current was fast and looked dangerous but apparently the river was not deep. It was quite an unusual and exciting sight for us.

We spent the evening walking around the Residenz (palace) area — famous for Hitler’s arrest and speech later. We wandered on to beautiful Marienplatz (square), with grand architecture of the municipal building and the vibrant energy of the people around. There were a number of street musicians some attracting more crowd then others. We stumbled on to a open air free annual classical concert being organized outside the Munich state concert hall. It was full of people with their beer, food baskets and sitting mats — quite enjoyed the experience.

Next day we took train to southern Bavaria on the foothills of Alps — the beautiful town of Garmish and the painted village Mittenwald; mountains all around and the beautiful scenery made for a very good day outing. In Mittenwald, Kids had fun at the violin museum while just walked around the quite streets. We finished with a good lunch & coffee at a small local restaurant. Lot of blog sites suggest to spend couple of days in this area and they are probably right. There are a number of hiking trails and internet is full of wonderful pictures of waterfalls and gorges. We missed those and also the Olympic village in Garmish.

What we did not miss was the famous Neuschwanstein Castle. This was the following day with a train to Fussen and well planned day in advance. It is advisable to get the palace visit tickets booked in advance as Neuschwanstein can get quite crowded. This castle is one of Germany’s or probably Europe’s most photographed icons — and Disney castle is modelled on it. Thousands of visitors flock here everyday to see this fairytale castle. Don’t miss the view from the Mary’s Bridge. This is the spot to take those iconic photographs you always see of Neuschwanstein. One can also cross the bridge and head up the hiking trails for views down to the castle. Approaching the castle itself looks less impressive — but it all changes when the inside tour begins. The opulence on display is breathtaking and unimaginable — the bedroom , the throne hall and the ball room are magnificent designed with lot of care & thought and executed with lot of money. Picture taking was not allowed but one can find some on the internet. King Ludwig II had some taste, though history will remember him for all the wrong reasons as the Mad King.

Our last day in Munich, morning we visited the infamous Dacau concentration camp. This should not be missed also — the whole camp is very well set up to give a good sense of the going from bad to worse state of people in these camps during the war — how people slept, how they worked, how they were treated and how many lives were ended. A must visit I would say for all to be reminded of evils of extreme views.

We spent afternoon and rest of the day in the old city just walking around and enjoying a) the Viktualienmarkt (open market) with tons of local produce contrasting with the high end grocery stores in the same area; b) Hofbräuhaus (marque beer house) has a character one can never forget — this is also suppose to be the place Hitler held number of political meetings; and c) St Peters Church. We gave the museums a miss as the open city was just itself very charming. Instead spent time in the charming shopping lanes around Marienplatz.

Romance with Prague

Onto the last stop of the trip. We took a train from Munich which was to be a direct train — but due to so some repair on the tracks we had to have a break journey with bus between two train segments. But it was kind of a good thing as gave us a good view of the czech countryside. We reached the apartment late afternoon and had to climb up 3 floors — located really nicely but an old apartment building (apparently with roman ruins in the basement) with no elevator. The hosts were really nice folk and the apartment itself was soooo cute — on the top floor with slanting roofs and most tastefully decorated & partitioned to create various living spaces.

We were planning day trips to small towns of Cesky Krimlov and/or Kutna Hora. But primarily the charm of Prague and also a bit of tiredness of so much travel gave us second thoughts. Then our host suggested that visiting these is lot of travel and not a whole lot more than Prague — so we just dropped the idea and spent the over 3 days we had in Prague itself.

Day one was walking around the famous old town with the clock tower — lots of people and lots of energy in a beautiful historic backdrop is all one needs to fall in love with Prague. Just like Paris and Rome every corner of the old town, Mala Strana across the river and even the modern town had something going on. Many wonderful buildings; lot of energy; and a number of bridges across the Prague river makes the city very charming. Just the walk along the river was mesmerizing with blue sky and the backdrop of the Prague castle, incredibly romantic. By the time we reached Charles Bridge it was dark — which gave us a chance to experience the bridge at night time.

Next day we again just strolled around the Old town visiting churches, spending time in Josefoy or the Jewish quarters with all its synagogues — especially the old-new synagogue. So many incredible buildings — Grand astronomical clock tower, National Theatre, Municipal House and the Dancing House. John Lennon wall is another quite popular spot — not very sure why it is so famous but the pictures came out really good. We spent lot of time in the Charles Bridge area eating, strolling and just sitting around.

Following day it was raining crazy and became really really cold. We decided to visit the Prague castle as we could spend time inside the buildings. Not sure it was the best idea — as this was quite impressive compound and maybe would have been enjoyed more on a clear day. St. Vitus Cathedral is an impressive church — the architecture grand and the royal entrance side with all the gold decorations was quite a view. We took the ticket for circuit B which covered things we wanted to see — St. Vitus Cathedral, Old Royal Palace, St. George’s Basilica, Golden Lane with Daliborka Tower. The golden lane was quite fascinating with the small quarters for various artisans — possibly started with goldsmiths living here. We took the steps to the town to get out of the castle — which themselves were worth visiting. Rest of the evening we stayed in Mala Strana area as the rain had stopped and the weather was now perfect to walk around the charming lanes.

Our last day on this trip was spent leisurely with morning half spent hiking up the Petrin Hill — with Eifflel tower modeled Observatory Tower. Nice views of the whole town from the upper floors of the tower. Evening we spent in Wenceslas Square area — visiting many of the branded showrooms — eating falafel, candies from Captain Candy stores and Trdlo on the streets. The Trdlo shop we went to is open 24 hours and is claimed to be the best one in town according to Google ratings. I also bought some Prague wine made from red Frankovka grapes from the Moravia wine region; and some amazing dark chocolates to take home from one of the many designer chocolate stores.

Another thing to mention, we had a large Tesco store near by and would be the source of good grocery allowing us to cook at the apartment half the time. Same pattern we followed in most of the cities. Being vegetarians and long periods of no home cooked Indian food can be painful on long trips. But we also made Thai and Italian. We had a afternoon 3 pm flight the next day, besides packing we went back to the old town region for the last soak in and had some more Trdlo.

Loosing ourselves to more Europe was originally published in World as it is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We spent about ten days with family in Bali this summer. I expected it to be a typical Indian Ocean beach vacation with some Hindu temples from the historic past. Well it was that but turned out to be surprisingly more than that. It is an island one can fall in love with and it seems people often do. Many folks from Australia, Europe, China and even as far as Canada have bought properties and settled in Bali their own resorts or other tourist centric establishments. Land is no longer easily available though and prices have shot up of course. Tourism is the main industry and credit to the government which seems to be doing plenty to support it, including extremely relaxed visa regulations.

It is a largish island amongst the many islands of Indonesia with more than 90% Hindu population unlike rest of Indonesia. Hindu culture from many centuries ago can be seen throughout the island with a daily routine of offerings to God and many ceremonies throughout the year. Homes may be small but each house has a proper temple and then there are several community temples throughout the island in all villages and towns. The daily offerings in a small bowl made of leaves is a sight one cannot miss wherever you go.

There are several temples from past centuries catering to the tourists and there are many online sites with suggestions on the best temples to visit. On the west side is Tanah Lot temple which is famous as it is in the sea, though it is closed for public to go in people flock to it for its famous sunset shots. Then on the south coast is the Uluwatu temple famous because it is on the edge of a high cliff but the interest is more because evening dance performance in the Kecak form depicting scenes from Ramayana in the backdrop of beautiful sunset.

In central Bali are Besakih Temple, largest and called the mother temple; Goa Gajah, more than 1000 years old cave temple; and Beratan temple, located on a lake. The one I liked the most though was Taman Ayun which is the royal temple for its cleanliness and beautiful setting with gardens and water body around it.

Another of the attractions of Bali are its beautiful terrace rice fields. The famous one for tourists to hike around and easier to reach to is the Tegalalang rice terrace in Ubud. But for me the one to not miss is the Jatiluwih rice terrace in Tabanan.

The view from the top is breathtaking with couple of different hills coming together, with long expanse of beautiful green carpet of rice plants dotted with little brown huts. These sites represent the way of life in Bali. I was told that even though Bali is producing so much rice it still has to import more of it due to its heavy usage in both food and Hindu ceremonies.

The most known and booked areas by tourists are Kuta and Seminyak in south westerly part of Bali. These are great for surfing enthusiasts but have become over crowded party places. There are more expensive, have too many buildings and are traffic nightmares. In contrast, Ubud in central Bali is a wonderful place to experience the culture and art of Bali. To me this region represents the soul of Bali. It feels like one is transported to a world thousand years ago with small temples, old buildings and lot of hand art around you. Ubud central and area around it has wonderful boutique hotels and homestays with a number of very nice restaurants. We stayed in a Komaneka property, and they have several in the region. This area is home to several Bali painters, silver work artists, wood work artists and stone work artists — hot bed to buy Bali art and also experience the famous Balinese massage. The temples and Ubud palace with daily dance performances, the monkey forest, and the lotus pond of the Saraswati temple are not to be missed. This area also has the elephant safari and rafting down the river which we did not do.

But of course it is not just about this rich culture and a treat of Asia’s serenity. It is also about the island in Indian ocean. Surfing, fishing, seafood, wonderful beaches, exotic resorts, snorkeling, diving and exhilarating water sports are all there in Bali. The east coast has calmer sea and better under water world. We decided to stay for two days at a homestay in a fisherman village on the beach in Amed. The beach was pebbly and sand was volcanic ash color, but the experience was first rate. Sitting outside and watching amazing both sunrise and sunset, fisherman taking their boats out to sea and coming back with their catch, a connected community with everyone helping everyone and amazing home-cooked food even for us vegetarians are lifelong memories we took away. Snorkeling in this area of course is wonderful but kids enjoyed kayaking and paddle boats equally.

Our final stay was at one of the many five star resorts in Nusa Dua in south part of the island. this are has been developed by the government with very nice roads, lots of green plantation and marketed as a top notch beach vacation or work conferences destination. The beach here was world class with fine golden sand and just the right kind of waves for enjoying beach play.

Besides the resorts themselves, the water sports are well organized as well and include anything one wants to do — jet ski, parasailing, banana boat rides, water ski, glass bottom boats, under sea walk etc etc. For food and shopping there is a nice little set up in a area called Bali Collections. One of the evenings can be spent in watching an hour and a half show on Indonesian dance styles and culture called Devadan.

I do not want to close without talking about the food, which was great & well priced even for the vegetarians like us and probably would be better if you enjoy seafood; Bentang the omnipresent Bali Beer; simple, helping and always smiling people everywhere; everything very conveniently set up for tourists including transport, money exchangers and the no visa needed for short stay; and the relaxing Balinese massage.

On our way to Bali we spent few days in Singapore with a close friend. Singapore is well known and marketed so I am not spending much time writing about it. But do want to mention that the Gardens by the Bay was a nice surprise especially with its evening light and music show. Another area to visit is the Dempsey Hills with wonderful restaurants and antique shops set up in beautiful green set up. It is indeed quite amazing how so much has been packed in such a small city.

Bali is a blast from the past was originally published in World as it is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Well this vacation was all about the celebrated big historic cities of Europe with lots of exposure to world famous art and day trips to small and contrasting rural towns/villages in different countries. We visited 4, actually technically 5, countries in about 3 weeks’ time — starting in London and ending in beautiful Nice on French Riviera with days spent in between in Netherlands, Belgium, Paris and Provence. As expected, everything about the trip was the classic heartwarming Europe vacation with only one stand out issue — dealing with an unusually hot weather in Europe this summer. So from timing perspective, maybe one to two months before in May/June or later in August/September may work better if you are looking for cooler days.

The trip did require fair amount of planning, pre-bookings etc. but there is not much I can tell which not already well written about on the net. Emirates and BA the 2 airlines we used are not exceptions in connecting very well to any of the cities you want to visit. In between cities trains are great if you do not want to deal with parking issues and lot of long distance driving (though many people do it). We used Thalys or TGV between all major cities — Amsterdam to Brussels; Brussels to Paris, Paris to Avignon and finally Avignon to Nice. I rented a car only in Provence where it is great to drive around the beautiful countryside visiting mostly small towns and villages separated by fair distance with little public transport. Rest of the places, public transport was wonderful, economical and hassle free.

From pre-planning perspective, it helps to pre-book popular tours like Van Gogh museum, Ann Frank Museum, Eiffel Tower Elevator tickets. For Louvre museum — we did not buy the tickets beforehand and it worked out fine as we were able to buy it in the Mall (instead of the museum entry) and then walked right in. For London, it may be useful to buy London Pass for one or two days and cover most of the paid attractions in those days with added advantage of quicker entries in lot of places.

It was a twenty five days long trip but there were really four or five overriding impressions I carried from the trip. First one being that the big cities in Europe all seem to be more or less similar in the experience they impart to a visitor outside of the major city attractions of course. The transport, the eating places, and the hotels all work fairly similarly. All the cities do have the city picture spots like Big Ben or London Bridge or Piccadilly or Trafalgar square or the Buckingham Palace in London; the beautiful canal network or the typical line of vertical buildings along the canals or the Ann Frank house or Dams square or the RLD in Amsterdam; the Grand Place in Brussels, the 13th century supposed Europe’s most beautiful square lined with guild houses.

But I would call out Paris being the most special city of these all. There is something special in the air. There are always some dominant thoughts or feelings making one happy and wanting to spend more time walking the streets or just sitting on the banks of Rhine and watching the scenes pass by. One moment there is a feeling of romance or then it changes to a feeling of lost in timeless history of medieval times or then the feeling of strong sense of a distinct culture or the sensual presence of the rich work of art around you in buildings, paintings, music or sculptures. The Marais district with world famous falafel sandwiches, Latin quarters with a bunch of creperies and Montmartre all have a character of their own. The bridges in Isle de la Cite have the unique look with thousands of locks hanging on them as a sign of love amongst couples and families. I could never get enough of the Eiffel tower from its top floors, or in the night when it was bathed in dazzling lighting display. Louvre museum of course is one of its kind and paralleled only by Vatican in its rich art collection. Notre Dame cathedral does not need me to mention — finest example of gothic architecture and place of coronation of French monarchs. For me personally, it seems Paris and Rome are cities one could keep coming back to and spend many days discovering something new all the time.

Another highlight from this time well spent is the fact that the rural side or small towns of any country seem to be the jewels. There is where one can also find unique cultural elements and real pride for the heritage. Around London, a day trip to Oxford is a must do and welcome change from the big city go down the list of things to do approach. You can lose yourself in the streets surrounded by beautiful architecture, book stores & libraries, hundred year old bars and world class learning centers. Bruges in Belgium is wonderful experience of numerous homemade chocolate shops, famous boutique Belgian beer, small museums including the display of Michelangelo’s “Madonna and the child” in the Church of our Lady.

Netherlands country side was also a revelation and surprisingly more than what it is talked about — biking culture, canals everywhere (I am told when frozen in winters these make excellent skating lanes), wonderful local cheese (Netherlands is in the top three dairy producers in the world), traditional wooden shoes meant for working in marshy farmlands, historic innovations of windmills for flour or oil are some of the exciting things to experience. Day trip from Amsterdam to Zaansche Schans is not to be missed. The Waterlands with the small nearby towns of Edam, Marken and Volendam is the other area worth visiting. In this season there were no Daffodils but those along with other flowers these also make Netherlands a dominant flowers producer & exporter.

And then there is the Provence area of France with wide spread numerous small towns. This is the region with fruit gardens and wonderful fresh alpine farm produce, sunflower farms, some of the smaller but wonderful wineries welcoming to visitors for memorable wine tasting experience, French olive farms (much smaller than Spain and Italy but really nice) & olive oil mills and also the sense teasing, both smell and sight, lavender plantations. This area is made famous by towns like Arles & Avignon with more than 2000 year old Roman construction. Caesar used this area as his base for Gaul invasion for many years. Van Gogh spent his last and most productive years as an artist in this area — one can experience the sites he captured on canvas in Arles, Saint-Remy-de-Provence, The Abbaye de Senanque (beautiful cathedral in background with lavender plantations) and the surrounding area. Besides these quaint little towns there is the spectacularly located alpine town of Les Baux with a stony castle and town with narrow pebbled pathways. The other must visit towns are The Perched Village of Gordes and Isle sur la Sorgue — home to markets of fresh produce, handicrafts and antiques in the backdrop of moss covered water wheels and soothing river. A unique feature of all these cities was the beautiful doors to the buildings — all different in designs and sizes but with each with a different character. In Provence we stayed in a B&B in small town of Graveson — which itself was an exciting stay with a very hospitable and nice French family.

Nice and the surrounding Riviera is where we spent the last five days of our trip. This is a world famous destination on the sea coast with beaches to soak in in the sun &water, lot of high end shopping districts in Cannes, Antibes, Monaco and Nice itself. The small hill town of Eze and the beach town of Villefranche-sur-mer are worth the trip. Bus services from Nice to any of these places is fabulous. The letdown place was really Monaco, seemed overly marketed with nothing much to offer — not much history or art, no major good eating place, nothing much to do except if you want to gamble in the Grand Casino — there are of course riches on display like Yachts and expensive cars.

This trip is also about visiting the chocolate capital of the world; the beer capital of the world (maybe region if we want to include Germany); the wine capital of the world; and the mecca of desserts, breads, cheese & olive oil. So every day was a day to savor something new and un-forgetful — the pralines in Bruges, the beer from micro/family-breweries in Brussels, the crepes in Paris Latin Quarters, the meringue in Paris pastry shops, the waffles in Brussels & Amsterdam, the stroopwaffles in Amsterdam, the large helpings of potato French fries topped with cheese in Amsterdam, the pastries and cakes almost in almost all these places, the macrons in Paris, the pesto flavored cheese in Amsterdam, the Pimms in London and the flat breads in London Pubs are only some of the things to mention and not to be missed on your next trip especially for the vegetarians like us.

I cannot feel complete without talking about the eye savoring and heartwarming pieces of art one gets to witness. I am of course not the first one to mention any of these world famous works but just putting in a small reminder for you to see these on your next trip to any of these places. To start with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has amazing collection of the Van Gogh’s self-portraits and largest collection of his paintings including the Potato Eaters, the Yellow House, the Sunflowers, the Blossoming Almond Tree (painted when his nephew was born), and his supposed last painting the Field with Crows. Rijksmuseum is large but I remember it most for the huge painting of the scene of Waterloo depicting the famous battle. Then there is work from the trio of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo in Louvre Museum to mention a few — Mona Lisa (L), the Virgin and child with St. Anne (L), Virgin of the Rocks (L), La Belle Jardiniere (R), the Portrait of Artist with a Friend (R), the Dying Slave (M). Louvre of course also has the huge majestic paintings leaving a haunting memory — The Wedding Feast at Cana, Liberty Leading the People, Raft of the Medusa, and Napoleon Coronation Josephine — and the Greek & Roman sculptures especially the Cupid and Psyche, Winged Lady and the Venus de Milo. Louvre also has the French royal jewels and the crowns, while Tower of London has the famous Kohinoor and even larger Cullinan diamond along with the various royal crowns. Besides these famous arts the cathedrals architecture, sculptures, nameless paintings and glass work especially in Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey are not to be missed. The sculpture beauty of Pieta in main sanctum of Notre Dame and the Michelangelo’s Madonna in the Church of our Lady (Bruges) are something to behold.

Finally, the most surprising thing for me was this strong feeling that somewhere the French people share a common inheritance to the Indians as the emotional and behavioral likeness is uncanny. Before the trip I thought people would be uptight but far from it — almost everyone was very warm and involved. There was not a town we did not meet people who are regular visitors to India, talked about Pondicherry like a French county in India. Then there were many shops in Paris, Nice etc. which carried Indian designs, patterns like block work etc. or work inspired by Indian culture. On a lighter note, there was also the Indian style attitude of not caring much about queues while getting on buses or sometimes even taking a leak on the street corners. Based on the few families we talked to or spent time with — there also seemed the strong appreciation of closely knit families, family values, deep emotional dependence and even living together or nearby as joint families. It felt home to us.

Big City Europe and French Riviera was originally published in World as it is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The most efficient workforce in software industry is one software engineer. As soon as this number changes to 2 or more people economies of dis-scale kicks in. What i mean by that is if one engineer working independently is able to produce y amount of work in a given period of time, 2 engineers working together will necessarily produce <2y amount of work over the same period of time. For argument sake we are assuming that all engineers are same and produce equally efficient software code working independently.

This is true because writing code which works together creates the need to coordinate when two or more people are involved and that creates the extra cost that creeps into the project. People have to talk, they have to explain and come to a common understanding of what needs to be coded, they have to divide the work and then have to integrate their individual pieces and make it work together. There is fundamentally a set of extra steps introduced which take away time and energy and makes the overall work less efficient.

As software products get shipped out by small or large companies, one can often see the organizational boundaries where one part of the software does not work well with the other part. Equally common issue is the performance of the software products. Performance suffer as the same person has not coded all the layers of the architecture and their are assumptions being made about each others work. The larger and more sophisticated the product is, more these seams are apparent and more the performance (defined a time it takes to complete one user interaction with the software being used) problems become dominant.

In general, the efficiency curve is somewhat like this, where team size represents the number of people deployed and efficiency is in terms of output for every additional person added to the team.

I am arguing that the efficiency curve is not asymptotic as the team size increases. In fact, it reaches a point where every additional person added produces negative output. This is the space where the much talked about “mythical man month” concept kicks in. What this means that when projects require more effort, the managers would throw in more resources but what they may find that this does not lead to reduction in time of delivery or increased net output.

Does this mean that we should not have teams at all and all projects should be just one person? Not really. There are 2 aspects to consider.

1. A large software project can be sub divided into logical, relatively independent pieces of work. Each divided piece can thus be treated as an independent efficiency curve. But there reaches a point where the division itself is not inefficient or the person responsible for this breaking down is not competent enough to break it well enough. Also, division does mean inefficiency only that the drop in efficiency is small enough if the breaking down is done properly.
2. If project timeline factor is critical, then even with less efficiency an addition to the team does reduces the time to complete the project. In other words, even if an additional person will only produce 50% value (of what that person can do completely independently) there is value in adding that person to the team as it reduces the overall time to complete the project.

The first aspect essentially determines the shape of the curve. Depending on the ability to break a project down into efficient sub parts, the drop in efficiency can be slowed down. If time of completing the project is critical, break down the project efficiently to reduce effect of dis-economies of scale but know that one cannot escape this drop in efficiency.

And when the project managers are trying to create teams to get work done early, what is important is the time and efficiency equation. What the real output of the team is the area under the efficiency curve:

Software engineers thus needs to be fully aware that the (x+1)th person will produce efficiency which is a fraction of the first person. And as stated in the previous curve there will be a point where the area will become negatively effected (mythical man months).

It can be argued that this is true for any service oriented industry but i am not sure if that is true. Some service industries have a nature where each piece of work is independent by nature (example a call center) and others where alternate opinions are critical for the overall success (example investing or lawyers).

This is a simple concept and maybe even obvious to lot of people but almost always forgotten in case of project resource allocations. But a thoughtful application of the concept can make teams more efficient and products & services that users experience better.

Software industry does not have economies of scale was originally published in Product Management Distilled on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An assertion — “human behavior and choices they make can be mapped to psychological and economic factors processed by them consciously or sub-consciously”. Well of course, Psychology and Economics have been the basic sciences for as long as we can remember for this very reason. Human mind processes information and creates action using complex computations. I am asserting that at the end, most of these computations can be categorized into psychological and economic factors. For different people the balance between these factors may be different, some may consider economic factors more (the realist maybe) and others the psychological factors ( the emotional ones), but at the end it is a concoction of these two type of factors which drives the choices, or decisions, human beings make in most situations.

If you agree to or at the least intrigued by this assertion, then let me take you to the next level of discussion. All situations where human beings are involved can be analyzed and handled by focusing on these basic factors. These situations could be as diverse as negotiations with extremists, complicated family discord, dealing with the first teenager in the family, and also a whole bunch of corporate situations like working with/in teams or making a pitch for a new proposal. What I am trying to get to is that a focus on these two factors can be powerful way to predict human reactions in a number of situations that corporate world cares for.

Take for example a car launch where the car maker is trying to predict the success of the car in terms of market take off. A new car with the right psychological appeal and a clear economic value would do well, of course obviously so. But often people get this wrong — take example of a car priced really really low and one would expect that this would be a great success in price conscious markets like India. But if the buyer thinks that he would be perceived as “cheap” car owner, he would prefer to spend more for a similar product or may not even buy the car if he/she cannot afford anything more expensive. So the car loses out on the psychological factors. Similarly a huge success this year is no longer selling the next year simply because everyone has it and so no “distinctiveness”, again psychological factor. Now this is what is understood and managed by advertisement companies and in branding exercises so nothing new perhaps.

My reason to write this piece is that I am from software industry and feel that somehow this concept is not applied well enough or not paid attention to enough in this industry. We are living in a fast changing and ever evolving technical world. There are new devices, new Internet services, and new applications being launched on a daily basis vying for user attention. But we know that an average user uses less than 10 applications on a daily basis and changes his/ her device once in 1 to 2 years only — meaning there is more coming out than what users can possibly consume.

If you are building a new application or as an investor looking to invest in a new idea you do not want to be left behind in this age of rapid innovation but at the same time there has to be some way to feel good about potential of success of a new product. I think that the investment discussions or start up discussions in technology sector to have far more reliance on hope / luck / throw it on the wall and see if it sticks factor / or simply put it is just a sense/opinion driven decision. Too many situations are gut call rather than a rational thesis. For this reason, investors often want to wait for “initial success” or “traction” before investing, in the process probably killing some great innovations too early. Of course this is a sweeping generalization as there are super smart people in this industry and a lot goes on before a product hits the market. But still even if one looks at only the successful ventures, it seems more of an accident than a reasonably confident plan or investment at the start.

So where i am going with this — the attempt is to remind that we probably need to apply the same psychological and economic scales to evaluate ides in software world also. The parameters themselves can be defined by individuals as their own IP or sense but these seem to be the key dimensions. Like for a new service or application the psychological factors are most of the time the simple to understand interaction model, the sleekness of experience & layouts. The economics is probably even more important — as an investor I would like to really have a measure of the economic value creation by the new offering as a primary factor for success. The larger the core sustainable economic value (distinct from any other thing in the market) larger are the chances of success. The other factors like network effect and unique IP are often sub-bullets of this aspect. Simply put after use if the user reaction is — feel good + save time / money then there is a potential business. Of course you would then need a good team to execute on the idea and there should be some unique defendable differentiation which gives sustainability against me too copies.

Another place where this can come of use is to figure out new business models for the software / service or application world. The traditional business models are breaking apart and users want everything “free” and then add funded seems to be the only recourse. Subscription models are also being experimented with but have seen limited success in consumer world. Enterprises or commercial buyers are still learning and are slower to change but will change in due course. If there is a clear articulation of the economic value creation, the creator will see economic returns flow back.

Technology industry in general has always been high pay offs industry when there is a hit. That is why so much money flows into the sector in “hope” for a success. Far too many “copy” ideas get funded in waves while at the same time a lot of great ideas die early due to inability to show early success without help — both in larger companies as well as in start up industry. This is just a small thought on the ever evolving frame of investing thinking in this wonderful game of technology sector. Thanks for reading thus far and look forward to hear your perspectives.

Psychology and Economics of all things was originally published in Product Management Distilled on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we first landed in Australia, though expected, what really struck me was the similarities with US. It seemed this is US with much fewer people — same brands, similar infrastructure, similar layouts, similar processes etc etc. Having traveled a lot in Asia, Europe and North America one can always find things which are similar but in general the pleasure of travel is to experience the unique things. I felt a bit sad to travel all the way and to find that we basically are in US.

But then as the trip shaped up, the spirit of Australia started to grow on us. For one, the people come across as full on an adventurous streak whether it was the boat crew in Cairns or Whale Watching trip or the Surfers on the beaches or our guide for the Blue Mountain trip — it was quite evident that Australians enjoy the thrill of risk taking. A typical experience was the sitting on the cliff of Blue Mountain valley with legs dangling down a steep steep fall. It was scary but the guide was encouraging all the tourists to do it and then take pictures. I cannot imagine something like this happening in US for instance. In addition to it, life does not seem too serious or problematic to folks in Australia. There seems to be a general sense of a relaxed approach to living life. Making jokes in almost any conversation was the norm, I do not think I met anyone who had any complaints from life. But this does not take away from the passion and hard work in whatever people were doing.

We made all our reservations ourselves — very easy to find your way around, very professional interactions and generally things were comfortable. Throughout the trip we had plenty of instances of wifi being much less reliable, closed receptions in late evenings, extra deposits for stays and generally things more expensive than US — but if you set your expectations and plan early, things are just fine. Currency exchanging was a little odd and for the most part we ended up using the credit card. Basically the direct USD to AUD conversion was much different from the INR to USD to AUD — to the tune of 7 to 8%.

From planning perspective, we decided to stay on the east side coastline — coming from India the Outback seemed not so attractive. As this was Australian winter — the plan was to do the water and beach stuff in Cairns and look for unique Australia experience in Gold Coast, Sydney and Melbourne. We used Singapore Airlines to fly into Brisbane — spent 5 days on Gold Coast; next 5 in Cairns and then 3 each in Sydney and Melbourne. This gave us sufficient down time in between activities to just relax. In between major cities we took flights (Jetstar worked just fine) and rented cars locally except in Sydney where you really do not need a car.

There are some really great things to do in Australia and depending on the age group and adventure streak one can plan several variety of things. But universally speaking some of the things which should not missed are as follows. The first striking thing for me was the Twelve Apostles — the sheer beauty and scale of these formations in South Australia is stunning. This a soft limestone coast and one can understand the formations process — but to see it is to believe it. The entire geography “coastal feature” chapters can be seen in action. The great ocean drive itself to get to this small town of Port Campbell is very nice and much talked about. But for me the inside drive through the farmlands, pastures and farm animals grazing was a surprise package.

Australia of course has a unique habitat of animals and plants which cannot be found in any other part of the world. The country is rich in its own variety of tropical forests. We all know it but when you see the unique aspects — it is some experience. Our children could not have enough of the Koalas and Kangaroo experiences — holding them, patting them, feeding them etc. I do not want to go into the long list of Wallabies, Dingoes, snake varieties etc. but I do want to mention the crocodile experience. There are enough crocodiles in India, Africa and we see them in other parts of the world also all the time. Initially in fact we did not plan to visit the Hartleys Crocodile Park — but when did go, i would say that the “Crocodile Attack show” there is something to be not missed.

While we are at it the sea animals cannot not be mentioned. The Humpback Whale migration on the eastern coast of Australia is a nice experience. But what took the breath away is the littlest Penguin parade on Phillip island near Melbourne. Hundreds of little penguin in small groups come to the shore at dusk and observing them come to shore in small groups, interacting with each other and finding their little resting places is something to be be cherished as an experience for animal lovers and even non animal lovers. It was like watching some animated movie. Cameras are not allowed to be used for this so we could not really capture this magical movement, but there are plenty of pictures on the web to get a perspective.

One cannot write about a tourist account of Australia without writing writing about the Great Barrier Reef. It is all worth the hype. We took the tour to the outer Reef from Port Douglas Marina — apparently the norther part of the reefs are better than the southern and so better to go from Port Douglas instead of Cairns. The sea water temperature was a nice 24–25 Celsius. when we headed out in the morning the sea was choppy and it was harder to snorkel at the first stop. But then the next two spots had the sea calm down and the tide was low and provided breathtaking view of the reef. I signed up for diving but from the first spot realized that snorkeling seem to provide a much better experience. The colors and formations of the corals, the variety of the fishes to see of different sizes is something to never forget. this was the first snorkel for my seven year old and what a place to start. We did see the clown fish but did not sea any turtles. But that got taken care of on our visit to the Palms Cove beach the next day — we got lucky to see two turtles very close to the shore. Cairns beaches are really nice village towns and wonderful to spend the afternoons in.

And then the cities of Australia. Australia has a population of 23mn with Sydney accounting for 5mn and Melbourne another 4mn. and even these are small in comparison to any of the mega cities in the world — especially India and China. Cities are laid out in the typical CBD and outward from there pattern. Given the relatively smaller sizes with good transport facilities, the cities are very easy to get around and enjoy the evening times with good restaurants and bars. Sydney harbor is one of those “symbol of your trip” locations which one must do. The best view though is from the cruises in the harbor. We managed to see a dance performance in the Sydney Opera House and loved it. Also, we were lucky to be in Melbourne during the ending of the winter festival as the city was alive with live performances and lots of people enjoying themselves. Weather was cool but nothing too uncomfortable.

Cairns and Gold Coast on the other hand were more laid back and yet very lively environments. The Cairns marina are had lot of very good restaurants and Gold Coast surfers Paradise is of course always a nice place to roam around. We did go to the different Gold Coast theme parks and family had an awesome time in all of them with different shows, rides and parades. We particularly enjoyed the Movie World rides and their new stunt show with bikes and cars.

Besides these tourist attractions, there were few other things I got fascinated by and cannot help but mention them. For one, I think the STOP sign on cross-ways is one of the simplest and most powerful traffic management solutions. But the disadvantage is the required stoppage and breaking of momentum for the vehicles. In a country like Australia with much thinner traffic, it is a true wastage. So the change to traffic roundabouts with simple right of way rules one gets the advantage of a stop sign and also the advantage of a thin traffic place. Another different thing was the quarantine rules for state to state movement of produce. Country to country custom regulations are there in other places but not state to state. In a situation where in Europe, these boundaries are being broken from country to country also, it was a different reality.

Another thing I noticed was a lot of emphasis on “Made in Australia” to counter the cheaper imports from China. One can see it in US, Europe, India etc also but not so apparent. This can be understood also in the context of the emphasis on preserving the aboriginal culture in the country. So in general pride for the nation and hanging onto the culture roots was quite evident. Australia with so few people also has the problem of lack of market for any business. One could go to small towns and see this US style malls, car lots, big farms etc and wonder who is buying these things and how can the economy sustain itself. My understanding (without much research admittedly) is the key is the rich mineral and rare metal deposits. Australia produces gold, diamond, precious stones like Opal and has large deposits of rare metals. Mining and exporting thus is the primary means of paying for the country’s bills — trade has been booming for example with China which is mineral hungry country due to all the manufacturing activity.

Let me close this write up with mentioning few interesting people we met. In Kuranda village (Cairns) we met Meg, a very affectionate lady whose passion is stones. As we are vegetarians one of our quick meal option was Subway — in Melbourne the Subway manager was a really nice person who started talking with us and made the day or our little one by giving her fresh out of oven cookies. then there was Marvin Young, an international celebrity hair stylist living in Palm Springs. It was our pleasure to have him as company for our day tour of Blue Mountain (Sydney). He is a charming personality with every happy positive attitude — something to learn from.

All in all a great trip with some unique and wonderful experiences.

Australia through a lens was originally published in World as it is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A number of management theories treat ambition as a competency. This thinking then finds place sometimes in interview or assessment processes where ambition is seen as a criteria for selection.

The point I want to argue is that ambition is not a competency but on the other hand one needs to be competent to deliver on his or her ambition. So ambition is on the other side of the competency equation.

Competency itself need not be measured as an individual’s competency but the competency of the team that is to deliver on a goal. The audacity of the goal itself is dependent on the ambition of the the person setting the goal.

Competences needed could be more generic, like leadership, resiliency, communication skills etc., or they could be more specific to the situation or industry. Like in software industry it is design, technical, coding skills. And competences could be inherent to an individual or could be something that can be developed through training & experience. For the purpose of this discussion though, the definition of competences is not important. A general sense is good enough.

A case where ambition is lower than the competency, one would find under achievement. That could be obvious but what is more relevant is what follows. I would argue in almost all such situation frustration or depression or cynicism would set into the individual. It is incredibly hard to find a situation of satisfaction, positive energies, general sense of achievement and happiness around such an individual. This negatively affects everyone around at both personal as well professional levels.

The opposite of this where ambition is more than the competency is also a common occurrence. In such cases the goals or responsibilities the person takes over are more than the person or his/her team can deliver. As the results start to be below the promise, a typical reaction is excessive aggression and placing of blames. It is never me who is the issue but the other person or the other team is not delivering or not cooperating. A cycle of bad decisions will start which will further deteriorates the situation. This creates bad environment in form of lack of teamwork, constantly changing plans and often strained relationships.

So the trick is to find the harmony and balance between ambition, responsibilities and competences. This may not be perfect all the time. The idea is to understand and recognize the patterns. With understanding comes the ability to make adjustments towards balance.

I also want to touch on few other related aspects. One is this phenomenon of “taking risk” by setting goals which seems out of reach to start with. This is not the same case as misplaced higher than competences ambition. Firstly, ambition has a very personal theme to it while taking risk for the team / or the organization / or greater good has a different context. Second, true leadership requires taking what is called calculated risk as that is driven by the sense of the personal or team competency which is more than what is apparent. In that sense it is really taking the position of creating balance between the goal and the competency that exists, moving it from the position of under achievement.

Second idea is the measuring success through lens of others. This is the case where you would find lot of folks around you or you yourself being driven by expectations others have of off you. These others could be your close family, friends, college mates, colleagues or in some cases just the rest of the faceless world. Just because you were born in some situation, or went to certain college or have some assets or had some success people just expect you to be doing / or going after things that you yourself may not necessarily be looking to do. This social expectation is hard to resist and one may just comply or rebel or just casually ignore depending on personality. I would say loudly that please let people be and let them make their choices in life as and individual rather than being a clone of previous choices. But this is not the topic of my writing today as this case should not be mistaken for high or low ambition.

Third is the case of satisfied living. This is not low ambition at all. Few among us are happy with the state of affairs in terms of career or money or such things. Others may just be prioritizing their lives in terms of more time for children at the cost of their career growth. This in my opinion is a case of different shade of ambition. Ambition here is expressed in terms of achieving balanced life or detached life or mindful life in spiritual terms or something else. I would impress upon you that to me this is in fact high ambition and requires a higher level of competency to get the balance.

My goal for writing this article at some level was to express my observation of struggle almost all people have including me in achieving this balance. Recognizing the imbalance is the first step to restore harmony. I may be oversimplifying the many nuanced situations people find themselves into and would be happy to get feedback to develop this idea further. But I do believe power lies in simple answers. If you have read so far than thanks for being with me and I am hoping you found something to think about.

The Competency and Ambition Equation was originally published in Product Management Distilled on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last 25 years for the software industry has created very large and successful companies. These companies have enjoyed very high operating margins, sometimes even as much as 70–80% for some products; have returned tremendous value to shareholders and thus resulted in getting into top market cap companies in relatively much shorter time than any other industry; have resulted in creating more billionaires and millionaires, not just the founders, than anything we have seen before. These companies have brands in top ten brands of the world and habitually show up in the list of best companies to work for.

IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple and related chip making companies like Intel or OEMs like Dell have all benefitted from this trend. This kind of results have to be due to a very large “Competitive Advantage” in technical IP (patented or otherwise), strong loyal technical staff and ecosystem which generates value through partnerships. There has also been network effects and switching costs in communication networks or proprietary formats.

But things seem to be changing in last 3–5 years. The pace of innovation has been unprecedented making Web or Service based offerings part of the daily life. Device innovations in UX design, SW & HW leaps like Touch while driving down prices (or at least a range of prices) have created very convenient form factors. This has put devices in hands of many more people with little to zero learning curves and they are spending increasingly more minutes on these devices making use of the services. I do not want to spend more time explaining this trend as it is well felt, we see it all around us and there are enough writings about it already. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Samsung are some examples of companies leading this phenomenon.

The point I want to get to is that even though the pace of innovation has been greater than ever, I feel we are not seeing and nor will see the same level of profitability curves / margins and stock price doubling every year kind of trend on a sustained basis. This does not mean we will not have large cap companies or there will not be stock price uptrend, sometimes even a triple digit growth for a year or two, but it not going to be for 10–15–20 years.

There are factors which are different. Firstly, an idea to implementation cycle has shortened due to all the work that has happened at platform level and the developers tools, infrastructure and help that is available. So if there is a great idea and shows traction, before one company could use first mover advantage for long enough time there are 10 new variations in the market in no time.

One could argue that the platform play may still create a sustained value but open source software provides a credible alternate which drives down the value of platform. Google has built out and caught up on 15 years of innovation on OS using Linux based open source as the core layer of the OS for Android and is driving down value of Windows or iOS. Amazon is using cost as the competitive advantage not deep rooted technology IP. This means profitability cannot be super high even for the platform providers. Good strategy with good execution will create good, large and growing companies like any other industry but not the unnatural profit margins of the fore.

Secondly, the distribution problem for applications & services has been effectively solved using the Web, Marketplaces and over the air installations. No more going to stores for buying software and a CD installation. This means as a developer one really does not have to worry about how to get the software out to the users to try out. And if a developer team wants to get it out as a service, there is enough infrastructure available for anyone to get a service up and running in no time. Amazon or Google and a whole lot of other providers provide all the infrastructure and tools to make this happen.

Thirdly, the distribution of critical technical talent in the industry is more uniform. In 80’s and 90’s a computer science grad would be looking to work in one of the large companies in US as the first choice and the best were chosen. It does not seem things are that simple anymore. Technical talent is distributed by geography, by companies and a large number is in startups. Technology startups are lot less capital intensive which means the barriers to start a company are much lessor and hence truly “garage” ready industry characteristics exist.

This lack of long term dominant profitability phenomenon shows up for example for Apple iPhones. It is a revolutionary product and changed the industry forever. But in less than 5 years lot of the pluses of iPhones show up in Samsung phones or HTC phones and a whole number of country specific companies in India and China. Micromax is an example in India. These companies have a good enough alternate with much lessor price and higher end devices which are as good. Apple is in the news always to be considering the cheaper devices to go beyond 20% marketshare (they have not done it though).

Even a long standing, and arguably one of the widest Moat in applications industry, Microsoft Office is facing a threat from a large number of me too offerings in this new environment. There are Google and Apple takes on it but that is strategic play to drive down value of MS Office in consumer mind. But more important are the large number of apps on marketplaces for addressing specific niche needs served traditionally by Word and PowerPoint. Excel is much harder to replicate but the competition there is from special purpose task applications. We could argue that this competitive pressure was always there but the changing conditions described above the changes the economics itself. It seems unlikely that MS can keep driving the same level of profitability as it has been enjoying in this space.

There is also a flip side of this phenomenon for new applications providers. It is hard to imagine that there ever will be a new offering (application) which can generate 1 bn users. If any new idea creates few million users, it is a big rage and talk of the town. That causes a whole number of new variations created due to easy tools and enough technical talent in the industry. Marketplaces allow these variations to show up in the face. User needs are never exactly the same and everyone downloads a different variation => no one app is able to even hit 30–40 million users. Now things are slightly different for network effect applications like in communications space. But not too different, just that the numbers are maybe couple of 100 million before the fragmentation happens. This is different than billion range for Office or Facebook.

So it seems, 100 million is the new billion — both for devices and applications or services. This seems definitely truly for startups and smaller companies.

Search for Google is another dominant play. But here also several phenomenon like social based search, task based apps (search fragmentation) and competing properties are driving down growth and profitability. The overall pie of course has lot of upside but it is hard to imagine the dominance & unbridled profitability of 90s and 2000s.

So it seems that the large companies will have to grapple with a move to a traditional model of developing advantage like Supply chain excellence (for HW companies), cost management (for running Services) and brand building. Technology innovations are table stakes for survival. This is closer to pharmaceuticals industry kind of model, where platform providers are the big drug manufacturers and app providers are like the commodity unpatented drug manufacturers. Although drugs industry patents are much different than software industry patents. Software industry patents are more in number but less potent as there is always another way to do the same thing in software — it is bits and bytes at the end of the day.

By no means this means there will not be a new technology which revolutionizes our lives again. There will more certainly will be, only that the competitive advantage it gives to the first mover is going to be shorter lived as new companies will come in to drive down value by creating a me too product lot sooner. Classic Micro-Economics takes over…

Micro Economics catching up with Software Industry. 100 million is the new billion. was originally published in Product Management Distilled on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Safari, which means long journey in Swahili, in East Africa is an experience which cannot really be described and can only be experienced.

Friends who have been to Kenya / Tanzania said that this is one vacation they cannot forget and would do it again as is. We can see most of the animals in Zoo or “managed” safaris in a Zoo, so what is different. Also, even in real jungle Safaris often the experience is to really see the regular antelope or deer in maybe groups of 5 to 10. If you really work hard you could see the head or the tail or just a brief glimpse of a cat at some distance. Due to these experiences, so far I was not a big Safari enthusiast as well. But I was intrigued and was not really sure what to expect. The traveler in me really wanted to find out. I am so glad I did as there probably is no place on Earth where one can witness such a high density of wild animals living in their most untouched natural environment in perfectly balanced eco system. To witness it is an unparalleled experience.

First up, I connected with Mike Toogood of www.africa-safari-direct.com. I got his reference from friends who used him in the past for this trip and we started with roughly the similar itinerary. Mike was professional and patient ant did several combinations to work out exactly what I wanted to do with my family. There was a sticker shock though and I was not sure why the trip comes out to be so expensive in Africa. I did do research on the web and looked at other companies — their itineraries and prices and found out that things are expensive. One could try to connect with one of the many local Safari companies to work out a better deal — Leopard Tours; Ranger Safari; KIBO Guides; Good Earth Tours are some of them in Tanzania. We stayed with Mike as it felt more comforting and professional.

Once you decide on who you want to use for your Safari arrangements, things are fairly straightforward in terms of itineraries. From time of the year perspective, June to September is perfect but people go throughout the year and experiences are somewhat different. Kenya or Tanzania or both is a question to answer. For me, we went in June and the migration effect causes much less animals in Kenya + Kenya has been open for tourist Safari for about 100 years vs. Tanzania been open for just about 20 years so is more preserved + Masai mara is special but size wise only about 10% of Serengeti, I decided to optimize for less travel between parks and focus largely on Tanzania. Also, another choice was to choose whether to fly into Nairobi or Dar-es-salaam. Nairobi meant two visas but is much closer to all the parks and so we chose to optimize travel time again.

Our itinerary plan was to spend 3–4 days in Serengeti including an extra day for Western Corridor. We chose this addition as Migrating herds at this time were expected to be in this region. Then the plan had 2 days for Ngorongoro with one full day of Crater safari and 2nd day for the things outside the Crater. We also added both sides a day each for Lake Manyara Park and Tarangire Park. The picture below form the web describes the plan, though the arrows are not quite the journey we took. For the last 3 days instead of going to Masai Mara we decided to fly from Arusha to Zanzibar and spend time unwinding on the beaches after 8–9 days of Safari drives.

We used Kenya Airways out of Mumbai and it was fine, but me being Emirates fan would probably choose Emirates if I were to repeat the trip. Visas can be done on arrival in both the countries. For hotels, the Safari part was completely taken care of by the travel agent including all meals. For Zanzibar bookings we used Booking.com and that worked fine. Travel to this part of the world does require Yellow Fever vaccination, these vaccines often run out and also needs to be taken at least 10 days before the travel so plan in advance. Malaria course is recommended, daily is what is common but we used the once in week one called Larimef.

Another aspect is to have enough US$ cash in smaller denominations for local use. US$ is almost the 2nd currency in most of Tanzania and credit card services charges are high. Also, hotel in Zanzibar refused to take US$ which were printed before 2002 which was rather inconvenient. Smaller denominations are needed for Tipping. Tipping is expected for porters, restaurant staff and Safari guides. There are norms on amount for each type of service and we stuck to those norms.

We landed in Nairobi early morning and drove to Arusha in Tanzania. The first thing that struck us as soon as we got out of the airport was the weather, it was perfect after the heat spell in India with slight overcast and temperatures around 20 Celsius. Our pre-arranged pick up showed up and we made it to the lovely little resort called Mount Meru Game Lodge in Arusha after a change of vehicles on the border. The painful part was the filling in of long forms to get into Nairobi, then filling another set to get out of Kenya and then fill yet another set to get into Tanzania.

As we drove into Tanzania, I realized that economically Tanzania may be behind Kenya but seemed more organized, people felt more at peace with themselves and in general the surroundings were clean and in harmony with nature. Over the course of our stay it struck me that Tanzania is a special country with so many distinctions:

1. Home to Mt. Kilimanjaro — highest peak of Africa.
2. Home to Lake Victoria — second largest lake in the world after Lake Superior in US.
3. Home to Lake Tahganyika — second deepest lake in the world after Lake Baikel In Russia.
4. Has 2nd largest gold reserve in the world after South Africa.
5. Home to Serengeti, the world’s largest concentration of wild animals in their TRUE natural habitat. It is the 2nd largest national park after Yellow Stone with an area of 14,700 sq km.
6. Cradle of origin of Human race at Olduvai Gorge.
7. Home of Masai tribe.

We got our briefing about the Safari at the Mount Meru Lodge and spent rest of the evening just unwinding. The vegetation of this place was rich with plants one would expect in deserts like Cactus to trees which looked more like they belong to Mountain areas. The giant cactus looking tree was unlike anything I had seen before. Another observation was the food — for vegetarians like us there was the localized Indian food with enough chapatti, rice, lentils and curries. This was true throughout our trip.

Next day morning we had our drivers show up with 2 land cruisers for the 2 families. These drivers were to stay with us through the Safari of 9 days and would be our guides as well. So it is very important that there is a connection and comfort with them. The vehicles themselves are powerful of course for the Safari but are also very comfortably equipped with a roof that can be raised for game viewing and photography. We drove out to arrive at Kirumuru Tented camp and had our lunch there. This is a beautiful facility near the Lake Manyara Park.

We had our first Safari that evening in the Lake Manyara Park. We saw our first Baboons and blue monkey, Giraffe, Zebras, Antelopes, different birds including the Hammer Corp (makes heavy nests) and lots of Elephants. The vegetation here was dense with lots of big trees like normal jungles one would expect. Most interesting episode was an Elephant running on the pathway right at us for 5–7 minutes and then it suddenly went into the jungle on one side.

We entered the Serengeti / Ngorongoro area next day morning and spent next 5 days in this region. The start was not the most promising as we had 2 flat tires in space of half hour but from then on it was pure magic. I cannot forget the endless grasslands which is where the name Serengeti comes from; the vast forest fires which are set by the forest rangers to clear off dry grass to make way for new green grass; thousands and literally thousands of animals, sometimes zebras and sometimes wilderbeasts, running in long never ending lines migrating to greener grass and water; the majestic lions; the mesmerizing yellow eyes of a leopard up close; the beautiful birds; the ideal family herds of elephants; ever elegant giraffes; and not to forget the school after school of hippos.

The Sopa lodge at the Ngorongoro crater and the M’balageti tented camp — owned by Indians, managed by South Africans — in the western corridor were just incredible. To be able to maintain such beautiful facilities right in the middle of the wild where you need escort in the night to go even within the resorts was something special.

I do not think I can describe or even remember all the exhilarating sitings we had of the wild. But to give you a glimpse of how special this journey was, let me start with first saying that it was satisfying to have seen all the big five — Lion; Leopard; Elephant; Buffalo; and Rhino — in their wild setting. We were really lucky to have seen lions on each of the days and all in very unique ways

• Day 1 — Two lioness on a big bolder pacing around; and then lioness panting after a zebra kill with pride of 10 lions along with her — the lioness was right in front of our jeep and a grown cub walked to her; and we were not done when we saw a lioness on a tree(which is not common I am told) with lion sitting underneath

• Day 2 — it was special as we saw mating of a male lion with 2 lioness in 10 min intervals. Our guide told us that the mating goes on for 5 days and this was likely the first day based on the intervals between encounters
• Day 3 — we saw 2 male lions with 2 lioness right next to the road. Male lions in full view truly looks like the King of the jungle; and the day was made special by a leopard with a cub in the tree- leopard carried a dead gazelle up the tree and then walked around on the tree branches and finally posed on the closest branch hardly 10 meters away from us; we were driving out of Serengeti and it was only appropriate that we saw a lioness sitting in a ditch towards the end of the park bidding us good bye.

• Day 4 — In the crater we saw a lioness walking past a herd of zebra and deer; and then the pride of 4 lionesses in the bushes.
• Day 5 — In Tarangire park we saw a pair of lion and lioness — lioness walked on the road in front and then walked and posed on side of the jeep, male lion walked in the bushes close by and then both sat down in tall grass hidden from site. It was a catwalk and we were really lucky as due to tall grasses in this park we could have only seen them if they were on the vehicle pathway.

How can I forget all the other animals. More of the unforgettable views:

1. School of maybe 100 Hippos — all in water once and all outside 2nd time. They stay where it is cooler as have no sweat glands. Oil from body makes parts of body look red/yellow. The yawning hippo is a picture to behold.
2. More than 1000 zebras migrating was breathtaking. Looked like a never ending line running from one side to other. There were of course 20 or 30 times we saw smaller groups scattered in regions close by the vehicle or drinking water with caution.
3. Migration at this time in June 2nd week is in western corridor close to lake Victoria. Saw literally 1000s and 1000’s of WilderBeasts running in long and narrow group- literally migrating. Saw them twice in the same patch. Zebra follow close behind apparently and so we had seen them a day earlier in the area before the corridor.
4. African elephants with their ears up is a picture perfect moment. We saw many herds with almost a few days old to big full grown males. A herd of literally 100 elephants coming to a small water body. Elephants having mud bath. And babies few days to few weeks.
5. Ostrich are actually quite big — bigger than zebras. Male is black and female white. They are 3rd fastest animals! Again we saw plenty to our heart content.
6. Giraffes always look the cool dudes! Saw groups of them running and crossing road, 3 of them in perfect erect and still pose, as one or 2 or family with small ones, eating from flat top or umbrella Acacia trees OR even grazing in groups of 10s and 20s.
7. I do not want to forget to mention Gazelle and antelopes of various size, mostly in big groups. Hopping, running, grazing. So much fun to just stop and see the various activities — drama unfolds every time in a different way.
8. There were also plenty of Buffaloes particularly in the Crater.
9. Birds were very interesting as well — Kori-heaviest bird to fly; Flamingos of two kinds lesser and greater in a small beautiful lake and also in Crater water body; Hammer Corp- bird with heaviest nest of 30 kgs or so; Tawny Eagle, white breasted eagles, fish Eagle, Butler Eagle; group of vultures, and many small birds like the beautiful blue birds; and the Secretary bird.
10. Also saw solitary spotted Hyenas many times, black back jackal, lots of baboons, lots of Worthog (same family as wild boars), crocodiles in river, guinea pig families; monitor lizard…

The only animal we saw once and that too at a distance is the endangered Black Rhinos. It is a shame that there are so few of them left due to poaching, so much so that they are under 24 hour watch by rangers. We did not see any Cheetahs, maybe next time.

I also want to mention the vegetation especially the Acacia trees both the flat top and umbrella top. They are known for their medicinal value among the Masai and great for Giraffes; the Sisal plants which were used for making ropes and its stem is used for making Tequila; and the really old Baobab trees. This is besides of course the grasses of various heights all over; cactuses and the long thorn trees.

On our way to the crater, we visited the famous Olduvai Gorge where there are active archeological work ongoing. There have been discoveries of homicides in this part from 2.5 million ago and then at least two later periods. This area is believed to be the cradle of origins of human race. The Safari companies have arrangements with the Masai villages where one can pay $50 per vehicle for a tour of the village and hear about the Masai culture.

Some fascinating facts about Masai:

1. Usually each village has one big family. Many wives to a male — wonder how all males find wives given natural ratio would be 50:50? Answer was that the wives can leave anytime to marry another and so move around. The village we visited had 3 families. One had 6 wives with 24 children and another with 8 wives and 32 children. Now a days children are going to primary schools. This requires money and so now there is shift to fewer wives and fewer children.
2. Live in small huts with 2 small beds covered with cow skin and a chula for making food. Each hut is for 1 wife. The village itself is surrounded by a fence around the settlement. Middle part is open area for dance and ceremonies.
3. Masai move from one to other settlement if lack of water and grass. They do not destroy the settlement instead would leave behind the huts for any other family to use.
4. They do not eat wild animals and live in harmony with them. Village is a self-sufficient economy — eat meat of own cattle, drink their cattle milk and blood. Make a daily soup of Acacia tree leaves which serves as the medicine which keeps them healthy. They eat no other vegetables.
5. Carry long sharp knives, mounted on long wood sticks. Also have short wooden bludgeons for protection. When meat is being eaten, without invitation (neither given), one uses his knife to start eating.
6. Have donkeys as beast of burden.

I do want to say though that the village did appear little made up and the folks were looking to extract money. There is government help for water, education and primary health like deliveries of babies. So I wonder how much of the original Masai culture is left and how much is a tourist set-up.

We spent the last day of Safari at Tarangire. We drove to Arusha for lunch and then took a flight to Zanzibar for 3 days of beach and sun. Zanzibar is an interesting island and unlike rest of Tanzania which is majority Christian population, is mostly Muslim population. It has lot of history as well:

1. Fishing village before Vasco Da Gama discovered the island and became a Portughese colony for about 150 years. Stone town was constructed using typical island stones. This construction is still a great tourist attraction. They also have the classic large carved doors, which I believe got added during the Arab rule.
2. Remained an Arab colony till 1964. Center of slave trade where slaves were brought chained from East Africa and auctioned to Arab buyers here.
3. Slavery was abolished officially due to efforts of an English Missionary in late 19th century who constructed a church at the site of the slave market. The altar is said to be in the exact place where the main “whipping post” of the market used to be.
4. Zanzibar merged with Tanzanica to be part of Tanzania but with a separate President and government.

All the history aside, Zanzibar is a beautiful island with white sandy beaches and emerald water. There is also a small island owned by Bill Gates in an effort for sea fauna conservation.

It was indeed a beautiful experience and I will not feel complete without a few word of Swahili which we picked up during our stay: Mazuri Sana- very good; Hakuna matata — no worries; Jumbo — hello; Asante Sana — thanks very much; Karibu — welcome; and Lala Salama — sleep well.

East Africa: Tanzania was originally published in World as it is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Man is or at the least supposed to be a social animal. There is a natural instinct to be in a group, seek out others of the same kind, spend time with others, do things with others. There is also the case of, when one does not find “others of same kind” then look for “others of different kind” like having pets — it is a matter of opinion whether that is a regression in social behavior or advancement of social behavior. But let me not digress as I was not intending to dwell on that distinction.

There is reward associated with this behavior pattern, of being with others, in terms of increased happiness quotient in general. Human beings feel more elevated, being farther away from the state of depression and experiencing different emotions both positive and negative. So over the long history of evolving human beings, man has become more social. Growth in social behavior has also by and large made man more socially developed. This distinction of being social vs. being socially developed is what I want to draw your attention to. Social simply means more than self in the physical sense — being with other, talking to others, doing things with other. On the other hand social development of a human being is more to do with the thinking and psychological makeup of a human being. It means thinking of collective good, collective advancement and would lead to sometimes sacrificing one’s interest on the altar of others good.

Over years man has developed socially and there are a number of institutionalized expression of this — the political systems like democracy where decisions are by majority and people in minority accept them; or other example is an army fighting for the nation’s security where individuals are making the supreme sacrifice.

I would also argue that the core of this behavior of acting for the larger good is really driven by the deep rooted survival instincts. The human mind realizes that short term sacrifice or small pains leads to a bigger overall gains for the self — something like a global maximization vs. local maximization leading to a higher gain for all. Over the last few thousand years this larger good was apparent to man more easily and the social growth kept pace with the increased social activity of human kind. I believe this lead to a harmonious development and growth of human kind.

The question I want to pose to myself and anyone who has read so far is — “has this linkage between social activity and social development broken in the near history?” In other words — the social development of human beings is not happening or regressing or at least not keeping pace with the increase in social activity of human beings.

We are living in the times where everything is social, increasingly electronically social. Aided by technology the pace of social activity is tremendous. Large number of social sites and social apps have come up in just the last decade. There is a race for number of “friends” I have on social sites; many of us seem to be living for creating a social post for everyone else who cares or not — lot of it in forms of pictures which often become more important than enjoying the moment itself; we feel obligated to want to be saying at least something about anything and everything around us. This is all great and it is a choice people are making — nothing wrong or right about it. It simply is a truth of current human behavior patterns. The only conclusion I want to draw, hopefully with your agreement, is that there is tremendous increase in human social activity.

Now for the distinction — Is this also leading to our social development? Where we strive for a broader good ahead of a me only acquisitions. I get a sense that the latest social activity increase in fact is making us aware of “my needs” more acutely and causing a regression in our thinking patterns as a whole towards self ahead of the collective self. Are we becoming increasingly sensitized to — if he has it, why not i? OR there is just one prize and I need to win against others? OR let me just get my bit and others can just fend for themselves, I do not care if there are children or elderly involved as long as my interest is met? Or my child must have all? As our means are increasing in general, and we see what others are doing with those means we do not want to be left behind — basically our survival instincts take over. On a side note, we may inadvertently be growing our kids into an increasingly less responsible generation and more closer to jungle behavior — but that for some other time.

There are a number of examples we see daily in front of us where we fall to this behavior. Take an example of a traffic deadlock. On a 4way with no lights or stop sign — with lot of traffic coming in, we often get into a situation where a blocks b, b blocks c, c blocks d and d blocks a. This is quite common in India where I live. Reason is simply the case of my maximization over global maximization. Also, I would argue that it may very well be that 3 out of those 4 people actually would have behaved differently had Mr a not decided to be “smart” and short change everyone. The point being that the situation becomes as good as the worst behavior in the set up — like in any racket sport the level of the game goes to the lowest common denominator of the 2 players involved.

This is evident in increasing growing number of different instances: Think about a crowded bus with elderly standing and you quickly grabbing the next seat that comes empty; think about the driving on the wrong side of the road to save 100 mts of extra driving for a u turn; think about all the plastic packing for a food item and its disposal right on the street after you are done; think about mixing different grade car fuels to save money without worrying about the gases it is throwing out in the air; think about your factory with disregards to industry standards for pollution control — cost matters for profit but we may not be able to breathe in few years is ok; think about when we clean our house perfectly and simply throw out the trash on the street outside our house; think about the case where you stopped the car right in the middle of the road without worrying about what happens to traffic behind you; think about cutting the queue for a movie ticket showing of your physical power and demonstrating your mental & social poverty; think about….I guess I made the point.

Also, it is not that the entire world is same. Different societies seem to be in a different stage of this social development. Lot of the examples I quoted above are from what I see around me in India — I am sure will be true in other countries also and maybe even worse in some cases. But let me take example of Japan where one can witness examples of more socially developed behavior. Population density is very high in a city like Tokyo, resources are limited in an island country, both politically and financially things have been difficult, the recent nuclear disaster did not help things. So it is not like things are exactly less stressful for people. But one would see things like — no mobile phone usage in public places like restaurants and trains (phones are kept on silent mode and people do not pick up calls to not disturb other people around); if one gets infection then people move around in public places with mouth covered with surgical masks to make sure they do not infect others; and even simple things like at the airport after all the bags are on the belt there would be a sign put saying this was the last bag without fail. The point is caring for others is a developed behavior in a society and shows how far a society is in terms of it social development.

Having said all this for me the biggest aspect of social development is how inequality is dealt with in a society. Inequality is inevitable in my personal opinion as differences are inevitable. Human beings are simply not made to be all same — there will always be some level of haves and have not’s; there is always genders; there is urban and rural; if nothing else we will find a way to find distinctions like I am from X school and you are not or I live in this part of the town and you do not etc. etc. We have a natural tendency to create a group of some kind which is distinct from “others”. In a foreign country one would seek out and create a group of — Indians or Desis in US; expats in India. In outer space we will be earthlings as opposed to some other planet inhabitants. We draw strength from being in a group again the same survival instinct. And once we have a group we work towards making that group feel “superior” or exclusive in some sense.

Coming at this issue from context of India (though this is applicable across societies) there are fairly ingrained differences in the society. Deep rooted long term inequalities in the form of castes and religion; Politically women in India enjoy equality but sadly Indian women suffer an incredible levels of social inequality in different forms; Then there is recent strong play of differences emerging due to language or political states. Let me take two examples of these inequalities and relate it to the topic of social development.

First let us look treatment of women in the country. I would claim at a strong indicator of social development or advancement of a society is how it treats its women. This gender difference is there and cannot be removed — we are a species which will always have male and female citizens. At a risk of broad generalization there are certain things women will be better at on an average and certain other things men will be better at. That of course does not make any one kind superior or inferior, just different. Drawing on this difference though, men in general are physically stronger — place where this is seen as a sign of superiority is in a ‘jungle” or in other words in a place where we are driven by thinking which is closer to animal thinking and away from a “socially developed” thinking. Hence in a society which condones or remains blind to or does not strongly corrects behaviors which showcase this animal instinct is backward and not socially developed. Essentially how a society treats its women is a good indicator of its social development.

What I mean is a society which not just tolerates but broadly participates in female child infanticide, boy and girl child discrimination in education, marriage time dowry system, domestic violence against women, workplace harassment, daily on the street & public transport eve teasing / harassment and increasing incidences of unpunished rape & abuse crimes is a under developed society. We may show GDP growth rates and boast to be in top 10 growing economies; showcase our youth strength but the fact remains we will remain closer to being animals than a socially developed human society. Paradoxically, this is against the very instinct of feeling superior (as men against women folks) and we essentially prove to be inferior beings.

Second example I want to draw your attention to is the attitude of the so defined privileged towards the relatively under privileged. Consider a posh high rise apartment owners and the folks who come to work in those apartments. One can see signs in some of these places that the main elevator is for the use of the owners only while the cleaners need to use stairs or some other goods elevator. Even if such a sign is not there one could find the privileged glare at the lowly ones when they find that the elevator is delayed because one of cleaning ladies was using it. This was codified in Indian social system in form of caste where road usage, well usage, temple usage etc. etc. were reserved for the upper castes. Today this caste based differences continues in some parts of the country but there is additional discrimination on the basis of economic ranking. In extreme cases one could find excessing shouting or even beating up the very people who make your life more comfortable. Again I would argue that how a society treats its under privileged is another good indicator of its social development.

The more gaudy form of this is evident in “trying to prove” that I am better within a rich class — in form of new clothes for every party, never to repeat jewelry, throwing a bigger party then all others. This reaches dizzying heights in marriage ceremonies — it is quite understandable that a couple of their marriage want to make it special for themselves but it is quite another thing to bend over back to “show” I can do better than you. So events change from being “for personal happiness” to “prove a point to others in society”. I would argue that this in reality creates stress and unhappiness for yourself in the end which is exactly what you set out to remove.

Circling back to the topic at hand, there seems to be much higher level of socially backward behavior as I see it in the age of unprecedented levels of social activity. It may very well be so that these things always existed and we are now becoming aware of these deep rooted behavior patterns due to the exposure through the social networks. If so this is a good start to be aware of the problems first. But I am not convinced — I still feel that things are taking a turn for the worse at least for now. I think we are becoming more aware of our rights and what others have (and so I should also have) through this social activity. Individual depression due to comparison / jealousy drive less friendliness. Different expressions of current society, like for example the current TV advertisements, are show casing a more brash self-centered behavior rather than a more concerned society. I am talking on an average as there are always outliers.

In closing, I am not trying to preach a solution. Just a food for reflection which can cause people to start thinking differently, thus raising the game slowly. Social networks are a hugely powerful tool and if used responsibly will not just keep us entertained & connected but will help us become more socially developed — increasing the harmony and happiness index of the society.