Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary Trek

Parambikulam wildlife sanctuary was the setting for 2 day trek / stay in the forests with my brother and cousins. The 2 day break was a great bonding / thrilling / interesting experience for all of us. (Thanks to Karthik for writing this blog :) )

Stats from the trek into the forest.

Most of the trek was on flat terrain, except for day 2. The steep incline can be seen from this map. Thanks to my garmin , for the stats :)


Route we followed : Coimbatore - Pollachi - Top Slip - Parambikulam. Except for 10-12 km just before top slip, the rest of the roads were in top condition, especially, the road between top slip and parambikulam.

Vishnu and Niranjan on the long straight section on the hills.

At a place we stopped by to have lunch..

Car parked, it is time to head into the forest...

Went past this dam, a km into the trek...

On our way to the forest stay..

Scenic, wooded pathway .. had elephant dung all over the route

It was an easy stroll all the way - the guide kept enthralling us with the stories of the forest

Tiger's pug mark that we came across , on the trek - apparently,28 tigers are found in the Parambikulam sanctuary. The place we were staying at night, was in the home territory of 2 tigers.

The Samba deer that we spotted on our trek in..

A massive tree that was on the way ..

Some more deer on the grasslands..

In front of the place we stayed at night - 6 km into the forest.

The view from the house...

Stay at the house was the scarriest experience in a long time - as the night enveloped all around us, with the guide taking us through the stories of the forest, we got increasingly nervous about staying outside the house.

With every movement around us being keenly observed by us, the wild cat droppings from the top of the tree was enough to get us running inside the house :)

With the doors closed tight, we had our dinner ( cooked by the guide , at a place with basic facilities ) and we resigned for the night.

Crossing a river, early next day, to reach a grassland..

We then returned to the base and drove 15 km to the parambikulam dam, to start the trek on day 2. We set out to climb the peak seen below , enveloped by the clouds ..

Thick wooded route -

There was thick vegetation all over and it was quite steep, going up the mountain ..

That was the steepest section - all of us struggling to go up...!!

A wild elephant had passed though this bush!!

And more climb!! There were leeches all over the place !!

Vishnu "skating" down - it was the best option given the steep inclines! All of us were struggling for foothold and stability. Coming downhill took almost twice the time of going uphill.

A leech on Ram - we burned the leech ( and his leg! )

Jam in the tubes came in very handy!!

More deer that we spotted on our drive back to the base camp.

This was the most thrilling moment during the entire trek - it was worth all the money and more. Vishnu was at the wheels and when we took a turn, we came right in front of a wild elephant crossing the road. After taking a few steps to cross the road, the elephant stopped and came charging at us.

I was sitting next to driver's seat and my heart almost skipped a few beats. Vishnu kept his cool and kept the car still. He switched to reverse but kept the car still / idle. Elephant took a long, hard look at us. That was probably the longest / scariest 5 minutes!!! No lights / flashes or anything to distract the elephant

Elephant slowly decided to move on - took a few steps to cross the road and waited to see our reaction. We stood still and the elephant moved into the forest and we went our way...

An awesome 2 day break - i hope to return to this place again and explore more. Next time, we will spot the tiger :)

2009 ! :)

2009 was fun filled and by far the most productive year for me personally and otherwise. Was it because of the fleeting nature of human memory or was I very lucky throughout the year! So I write this one just to recollect my small personal triumphs and failures.

1. I kick started 2009 in freezing cold with my best buddies at Manhattan watching the “Ball Drop” among million other people. It was madness to spend the night outdoors with the mercury hovering around -20deg C. But it was a truly amazing experience.

2. I spent the 2008 Christmas Eve on a low note after being fired by my old advisor (The recession ate away our research grants). To say disappointed was being very modest especially after putting in 16 hours a day for the previous 4 months. On the brighter side, he was a great mentor, learned a lot from him and I still look up to him.

3. I got a nice 2009 New Year present – a fully funded assistantship. My crazy ideas will henceforth be funded by the university. My previous advisor and a few of my PhD friends’ generous recommendation helped me out in getting me this financial assistantship. As a part of the assistantship I was supposed to teach budding engineers on how to use Matlab.

4. Teaching a class of 60 students was a great learning experience. It was scary and definitely challenging but it was also fun to teach kids, motivate them, and come up with new ways to explain the concepts. Many years from now, I want to be a teacher / lecturer, I feel it is the best profession to inspire and motivate children.

5. Joined a new research group, got an inspiring and deeply passionate advisor (friend?), opportunity to once again work on solar energy with new friends.

6. Washington DC Trip – White House, Independence Day fireworks, Black Bird and the drive to DC.

7. Awesome time at Six Flags with a gentle ‘Kiss’ from Giraffe.

8. New Hampshire Trip – the climb to Mt. Monadnock with Sriram and Kau helping me, pushing me, and in some places lifting me so I can reach the top – drive to Mt. Washington.

9. Listening to U2 concert in a fully packed NY Giants stadium.

10. Me and Brian coming up with a new idea of depositing thin film semiconductors for solar cells. Pitching the idea to Birnie, to mentor and fund the research work.

11. Spending many nights in university to bring the ideas to life and sleeping in the dept lounge.

12. The single biggest disappointment was giving up the ‘Asha’ running training mid way. Someday I would like to attempt that once again.

Facebook for school & college education

Software’s are driving and catalyzing innovations in all spheres of our daily lives. And as more and more ‘focused’ software’s are being developed, the impacts they create will also get bigger and bigger.

Four years back people could have never foreseen Facebook / Orkut creating such a big impact. It has become one of the most essential tools helping us ‘connect’ and ‘reach out’ to friends and family across the continents. All this and more in a single web page. It has changed the way as to how we build and grow our friendship.

This made me wonder if we were to develop software / software’s focused for our school and college education, how will that be? What features should it have? I decided I will make a go and list down things which I would have if I was the software architect (Software development and me are miles apart!).

I made 4 categories – Student Assist – Teacher / Professor Assist – Parents Assist – Career Assist. These are just to organize and list down the features but the final system should integrate and bring it in a single, simple and easy to use package. Also I think the final system should utilize multiple types of devices PC’s, mobile phones, PDA’s, Kindle’s and a lot more.

Cool Roofs

Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones, malls in US are in the vanguard of a movement embracing “cool roofs” as one of the most affordable weapons against climate change

Cool roofs reduce energy costs by as much as 20 percent in the tropics – these translate to lower CO2 emissions. In fact, Art Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission says that turning all of the world’s roofs white could save more than 24 billion tons of CO2 over the next 20 years.

What is more, a white roof can cost as little as 15 percent more than its dark counterpart, depending on the materials used. (Lawrence Berkley Labs). Also, in US the Cool roofs are eligible for federal stimulus dollars, low cost financing from major utilities and are also eligible for tax credits.

Wal-mart’s new stores in US for the past decade all have cool roofs with solar panels. But now the momentum is increasingly catching the home owners. This has prompted more business to come up and more research is going on across research labs towards highly reflective low cost paints

Earth Hour 2009

            It is story telling time - an inspiring story. In Mar 31^st 2007 one city took a stand on “Climate Change”. Australia’s largest city – Sydney was plunged into darkness for 1 hour. What began as one city taking a stand caught the attention of the world – EARTH HOUR went global. Over 50 million people in 35 countries & 400 cities came together for EARTH HOUR – 2008. Google’s home page went “Black”.

 And this year people in over 62 countries are coming together to support planet Earth and take action on “Climate Change”. My next door giant New York City will go dark for an hour to support Planet EARTH. Support Earth Hour – 2009. Switch of “NON ESSENTIAL” lights for an hour 8.30 pm – 9.30 pm on Mar 28^th, Saturday.

 For 1 hour, while working in your laptop – turn of the lights. For 1 hour, use lights only if it is absolutely necessary. For 1 hour, stand up against CLIMATE CHANGE. For 1 hour, celebrate EARTH HOUR.

Convergence of Crisis

For sometime now there was an item lingering on my to-do-list and finally have decided to get it done. I wanted to open a blog to share the ideas which are being talked within the environment, technology and entrepreneurship community to a much larger audience. I want to share that the fundamental design of our society has become unsustainable. Our food productions, water resource, energy, materials among others are so completely disconnected from our surroundings that have led to what we are facing today, a planetary crisis. Above all I want to share that it is still possible to design a sustainable society through our technology and entrepreneurial skills.

 We have created a global civilization by our intellectual brilliance & tenacity, a mind which has evolved to reflect back on ourselves; a mind which has the ability to peer into our DNA; a mind which was able to discover quantum physics explore outer space, but beyond our phenomenal intellectual and technological advances we would see large scale destruction of our home – Planet Earth. Our biosphere has become sick; it’s now behaving like an infected organism. Earth’s life support is damaged with large scale species extinctions. There were 5 mass extinctions before and as unbelievable as it may sound the 6^th mass extinction is in progress - a human induced mass extinction, with 30000 to 50000 species going extinct every year.

 Why is this mass extinction occurring now? For a vast majority of our human history we have lived of current sunlight. That is sun light falls on plants, plant grows and animals feed on plants and we feed on animals and plants. We were living of current sunlight; they were our food and clothes. The problem started when we began to discover pockets of ancient sun light and started using it to design our society. This has also caused rapid increase in our population, in 1800 the global population was 1bn; we reached 2bn in 1930, 3bn in 1960 and 6bn in 2000. We were able to sustain such exponential growth because this ancient sunlight allowed us to grow food in such large quantities through machines made of steel, fabricated in foundries built using cement. Our present day growth is subsidized by this ancient sunlight and so when we are buying a product, we are not paying the true cost for this ancient sunlight which was involved in making the product. All of these have accelerated our disconnection with nature and is causing an extensive damage to the climate and all other natural systems. Since we share a symbiotic relationship with life on planet, any damage to the ecosystem will cause a catastrophic damage to us.

 We have silently created a crisis of epic proportion. UN estimates by 2050 there will be 150 million refugees at any point of time due to rapid drying up rivers alone (Compared to 14 million now due to war and all other causes). NASA predicts that Katrina scale storm will be very frequent. 80% of our top soil is already under serious degradation raising the risk of severe loss in agriculture productivity. Cancers, Autisms, Asthma etc are much more frequent now than ever before. Large scale increase in the price of fossil fuels, food and other natural resources.

 We are now experiencing a Convergence of crisis – because every living system in the biosphere is in crisis and there is no one peer reviewed article (IPCC) which contradicts that. But all of these could be solvable and that too rapidly solvable. In my subsequent posts I will share with you my optimism stemming from the gutsy entrepreneurs and technologists who are lining up to fight this battle.