Our Farthest Round Trip on Bicycles - Mysore!

 Prelude:

A couple of successful short-distance cycle trips to Bannerghatta encouraged me and a few others to venture out on longer trips, and we thought of romancing with Mysore, which is a good 135 km southwest of Bengaluru. Preparations – what can we prepare for, considering we were all students and none of us were earning? Nevertheless, we chipped in with whatever we could. Packed a couple of sets of clothes for the trip, cycles checked (well, mine and Kishan's bicycles were of World War II vintage and mine still had the black colour throughout - without a hint of Chrome); oiling of crucial joints and ball bearings, brakes, tyres properly inflated, torches with a new set of batteries, and all these happened on the eve of our departure. We also had an AGFA Click III camera to pictorially immortalise our trip.

The Trip:

One fine day, in 1980, a couple of us decided on our trip, and I was the first to volunteer for this adventure. I was living in HAL quarters at Marathahalli (East of Bengaluru) those years (Circa 1975-1982) as my father worked in HAL, and as we had planned to start off very early in the morning (from N R Colony), I had to stay overnight at our friend Krishna’s house. His elder brother, Sheshagiri (Sheshi, as we all used to call him), was one of the cyclists, and Kishan (Srikishan – as he is officially known) completed the trio for this trip.

So, I started off expedition on my bicycle from Marathahalli, a good 20 km, well before sunset.

I had removed the mudguards of the vehicle beforehand for some repair and had to carry them unfitted, on the bicycle. I was the target of ridicule as my friends kept taunting me for my supposedly foolish behaviour (they thought that I had taken off the mudguards to reduce the weight of the bicycle, but it didn’t make sense as I tied it to the bicycle – I just let them enjoy their laugh). I got the mudguards fixed and got the final check done before we retired for the night.

The next morning, Sheshi and I left his house as soon as Kishan joined us. I still remember it was just around 03:30 am when we started off that morning to what was our first long-distance trip. We had our torches lit up as we pedalled our way through Bull Temple Road and took a left turn at the dead-end of that road to join Mysore Road.

So far, so good as we took it easy on this slightly nippy morning. In those days, Mysore Road was just a dual carriageway with no shoulder on either side of the road. The shoulder was a gravel one and left very little margin for manoeuvring error.

As we glided down Mysore Road, passing Remco (now BHEL) and a lot of other industries, the University campus, etc., we had the road for ourselves as we seldom crossed, or were overtaken by, any vehicle. Street lights were sparsely able to light up the path for us, and at times, we were totally blinded by the bright headlights of one of those rare vehicles that crossed us. This has been one of our first experiences as we had hitherto ridden only in the city limits on reasonably lit streets. Vary of the perils of ill-lumination on the roads, we pedalled cautiously ahead.

At one point, Sheshi, riding in the front, shouted us to ‘DUCK’ and in the nick of time Kishan and I ducked to below the level of the handle, to save ourselves from a tractor carrying hay with bamboos extending on both sides of the trailer almost covering the entire width of the road. The tractor was almost invisible in the darkness, as shockingly, there were no headlights. Jeez! That was a narrow, proverbial 'By the Skin of Our Teeth' miss, and we just counted our blessings while reminding ourselves to be a bit more careful and watchful for such surprises.

Taking a couple of breaks on the way for coffee and breakfast (oh! We had a lovely packed breakfast of Idlis and Vada by the roadside, probably near Maddur, and there was a canal—'Indvaal Pick-up' (if my co-cyclists remember it)) with flowing water where we washed our hands before resuming our journey, and reaching Mysore around 1:00 p.m. in time for a quick fresh-up in the room and lunch.

It was on returning to the room that I revealed my ‘shoestring budget’ position and shocked the other two. Had I mentioned that I needed money for my trip to Mysore, I knew I would be prevented from taking this trip by my parents, or at least to defer it to a future date. But I couldn’t miss this trip for the world, and there I was. I was nicknamed here by Sheshi, and that name was with me for a long time. Where could we source funds those days except beg, borrow, or steal small amounts from various hiding places of my mother? That was an eye-opener to me, and I decided thereafter not to venture out without adequate funds.

Post lunch, we returned to the room and were on our tummies in no time, to rest our aching and smoking bums that had been bearing the brunt over the last 10 hours or so of being plastered on the seats of our bicycles.

That evening, we took a bus to head out to the famed Brindavan Gardens and KRS Dam over the river Kaveri. The next day, we had a quick tour of the Mysore Zoo and the Palace from outside and a few other places. 

In the afternoon, we went to my uncle and aunt’s place while planning to return. My uncle was the then Superintendent of Police for Mysore. We stayed at their house on our second night in Mysore. A few more places were visited the next morning, and we started off on our return journey pretty early in the afternoon so that my uncle and aunt couldn’t suspect and prevent our plans to start later in the evening.

Our return plan was a two-stage one. Our intention was to have a pitstop at Mandya, watch a late-night movie, and pedal off throughout the night to reach Bengaluru early the next day. For the first leg, we pedalled our way to Mandya and had dinner before lining up at ‘Sanjay’ theatre for a late-night Kannada movie ‘Ravi Chandra’, a Dr. Rajkumar starrer in a dual role with two heroines – Lakshmi and Sumalatha.

After the movie, we started pedalling towards Bengaluru cautiously, to mitigate the risks we experienced on the onward journey. It was in the wee hours that Kishan’s bicycle had a puncture on the front tyre, and we had no way to fix this till the shops opened.

We came up with a plan to tow his cycle till we get to a shop that can fix the problem. Kishan rode with Sheshi while I towed his bicycle to Channapatna.

In between, we took a pitstop to relieve ourselves and clicked some pics, including the one lying on the railway track alongside the road.

We had to wait for quite some time in the morning, as the shops opened only after 9:00 am. Once we got the tube changed (instead of just fixing the puncture), we told Kishan to ride on while Sheshi and I pedalled leisurely to be a backup should any need arise.

We checked, after reaching our respective homes around 2:00 pm, that Kishan had already reached his place an hour or so before us. Relieved that all of us returned safely, I parked my bicycle for a couple of more days at my grandmother’s place till I embarked on my return journey to my home at Marathahalli.

Epilogue:

Three of us, for the next couple of days, were almost walking with our legs widespread as our bums were roasted with so much cycling. Nevertheless, we didn’t miss our evening walk to Gandhi Bazaar (a tradition we had adopted for years), even on the day of return.

Though we were not given a heroes' welcome, we had stories to tell about our experience right from the start till the end.

Naturally, I was the centrepiece of the discussions for my plight mentioned above. The nickname stuck with me for decades, and even today, after 45 years, whenever we discuss our Mysore trip on bicycles, friends in that group remember me for all the wrong reasons. Though I used to get embarrassed earlier, I took it in my stride as a lesson of life, and learnt it the hard way. 

My sincere gratitude to Kishan and Sheshi, as they had to chip in with additional funds for this trip. Thanks, Kishan and Sheshi, for bailing me out and for the memorable trip. I am sure Kishan and Sheshi would mull over the recollection of our trip by going through this article. Similarly, my other friends and people of my generation can relate to this article in their own way. 

Long after this trip, one of my second cousins (presently in Houston, USA), questioned me if we did find it a bit difficult on the return journey, as Bengaluru is at a higher altitude than Mysore. Intelligent guy! This concept of difference in altitude had never crossed my mind during the journey or later, till he raised the question.

A few of the readers may be surprised at my candid recollection and penning down of my/our experiences. Such trips have shaped our future and character.

Thereafter, we graduated to scooters and motorcycles and made a few trips to Mysore, but the bicycle trip stands out to date, and those are stories for a different day.

Some of the pictures (Courtesy - Kishan), taken during our trip:

       

            

        

                

My Experiments & Experiences with an Amazing Gadget – The Computer!

Prelude:

We can’t imagine a world without computers once they entered our lives about 40-45 years ago. The speed at which these machines have evolved over the last 4 decades is unimaginable. The first of the computers almost filled a mid-sized room, and a few simple calculations took almost forever, in today’s context.

From the Mainframes and Minis, to Desktops (also referred to as Personal Computers – PCs), Laptops and Handhelds, these computers have come a long way in reducing the size, weight, et al, while increasing the processing power in Geometric Progression.

This article of mine surrounds the time at which I got introduced to these lovely gadgets and my experiences thereafter. Self-taught, as the learning of computer operations was very expensive, more due to the novelty involved, it was an uphill task to upskill ourselves, as the means and opportunities to learn economically were very limited. The struggles with technology, which many of my generation may perfectly relate to, made us very adaptive as we learnt the ropes of newer things, albeit in a difficult way, though not systematically like a curriculum, but effectively enough to work with these computers.

My Experience:    

My first experience with this amazing gadget was in my erstwhile workplace at the Mafatlal Group, Thane, Near Mumbai. In those days, the personal computers (PCs as they came to be known as and Desktops now) were very few in numbers, and the offices and establishments that could afford it could be counted on the fingertips. We had an EDP (Electronic Data Processing) department that was instrumental in all computer-related activities, and our prized possession was the IBM Mainframe 1401 Machine.

That said, the data entry in those days was two in two stages. First, there was a ‘Punch Card’ with columns and rows that were punched using a card punch, and this was a prestigious function in the erstwhile days, resulting in a very high demand for Punch Card Operators.

These punched cards were run in the card processor, and each batch of punched cards was stored for posterity. It required a huge infrastructure to store these card batches safely.

Then came the floppy disks that were magnetically written by the disk reader/writer to store data. Incidentally, the first of the computers required to be started with these disks to activate the operating system, and only then run the other programs. These were of 640KB data capacity and were progressively sidelined by stiff 2½” diskettes (stiffy) that could hold a princely 1.44MB of data. CDs and DVDs entered the fray much later, let alone the memory cards and the pen drives.

On the RAM side of it, 640MB was the basic, and additional memory came in multiples of 1MB (1,024MB). Of course, many in Gen X and Millennials are unaware of any memory size below a gigabyte, while we had not even heard of this term. 

One of the earliest operating systems was MS or PC-DOS (Personal Computer – Disk Operating System) from Microsoft. There was a plethora of MS/PC-DOS versions before Windows came into being.

I restrict the discussion about the evolution of computers here, as this topic is too vast to comprehend in one go!

Thereafter, I moved to Chennai for a year or so, where our office had just two PCs dedicated to R&D and Operations. The accounting function was totally manual. In late 1990, I joined a major Alco-Bev Group in Bengaluru.

There was a time gap of a few months till I joined this Group in the late 1980s, when my good friend Srikishan ventured into the business of Computerised Horoscopes and Predictions. He had invested in a PC and I forcibly helped him out (?) with the data entry and printouts, heralding my first experiences of using a PC.

Joining this Group in the late 1990s, we had a limited number of PCs to use and had to wait for our turn. It was only when I was transferred to Goa to head the Finance Dept that I got a PC for my exclusive use. The price of this PC was a princely Rs.98,000, and it came equipped with a massive 2MB RAM, a 5¼” floppy drive, a 20MB Hard Drive with MS-DOS – one of the top-end machines those days, and included a soft-white monitor and a keyboard. Mouse, as an input device, was unheard of in those days.

It was here that I learnt the tricks of networking. I had visited D-Link’s (one of the leading networking hardware companies) manufacturing facility in Verna Industrial Estate to procure the requisite network cards to connect the PCs to the server. Installing the network cards on stand-alone PCs, connecting it using coaxial cables, and configuring it to access the server was a different ballgame altogether to me, as a professional Chartered Accountant. But I always had a flair to learn anything about computers and electronics, and therefore, this was a blessing to me. My colleagues in the EDP team were quite helpful in allowing me to experiment with the networking. In those days, we used the Novell NetWare operating system to connect to the server.

All the productivity applications like the erstwhile WordStar, Word-Pro, Lotus 123, Framework, and a plethora of different versions of the Microsoft Suite of products like Excel, Power Point, Word, etc., were learnt by us either by trial-and-error or referring it to friends, peers at work, etc., as was needed in discharging the daily routine in our work-lives. 

From here, my job took me to Mumbai, where in this greenfield brewery, I had to run, operate, and maintain the computer systems, including the network (excluding the Brewing process-related system). We were hit by the scare of Y2K (remember, the scare that ‘planes will fall off the sky at the stroke of midnight on 31^st December 1999’? Yes, it was this scare) and I had to be in the Brewery, a good 35 km away from our place and during the mid-night, ran the diagnostic program to enable all the computers (mainly the process related systems) to circumvent the crash due to Y2K, so that on dawn of 1^st January 2000, all computers were hunky-dory!

Well, I had been there and done that, too!

My next sojourn was in Kolkata, where I didn’t play any major role in computers as I didn’t want to disturb the setup, as the EDP department was quite capable of handling the software-related issues, and there weren’t any hardware-related issues.

Providence took me from here to Johannesburg, South Africa, in mid-February 2002, where I was supposed to be seconded on a two-year contract extendable by another two years. Instead, I ended up living at this lovely place and country for over 16 years (the longest two-year contract for anyone, I suppose).

Climbing the corporate ladder to head the Finance function, I was also the Administrative Head of the Info-Tech functions of the company. My learning about computers took a different turn here as the company had countrywide operations and we had to link with the system users across the country, online and on real real-time basis. Though not operationally educated on these terminologies, I kept abreast of the different topologies of networking, including the issues relating to switches, routers, and different types of other peripherals. Understanding the Spec-ing of required hardware, compliance, and governance of all licensed software was another soft learning for me, though I had my colleague, the IT Manager, to take care of all these.

Oh! I forgot to add that I did take my CISA exams in June 2005 and passed in my first attempt, as a challenge from my then-colleague and boss. That I didn’t pursue becoming a member of the Institute, ISACA – USA, is another story.

In between, we had hit a potential catastrophe of our legacy accounting system (Solution-6) being redundant and to facilitate the migration to an ERP, I was tasked to create a common Chart of Accounts (just to mention, we had over 12 breweries and 100 depots connected to it), so that the accounting stories of each of these breweries could be on the same page of reference. Needless to add, this exercise saved us substantially in audit fees. The liberty of adding more lines in the Chart of Accounts was restricted, and initially, I was sworn at by all the Accountants of the Breweries as their favourite toy (of opening line of accounts, at the drop of a hat) was snatched away by me. Once they saw the wisdom, they appreciated the way I handled the exercise in a very strict manner.

Thereafter, I was intensely involved in the selection of and implementation of AccPac (Now Sage 300) ERP, setting up with various parameters, accounting controls, migration of legacy data, et al.

Probably, my openness in accepting the changes and my flair to learn new things, as life threw at me, kept me in good standing.

I am sure there are many in my generation, or older/younger, who can relate to my story and draw parallels.

Epilogue:

Agnostic about Gen Z, our generation has the attitude of never say die in adapting to newer technologies, whether by design or default. From the point of running a totally manual environment, we progressed through the ages of Main Frames, Mini & Micro Computers, Laptops, and to Hand-Held devices. With a pittance of memory (both RAM and ROM) to unlimited Cloud-based applications and data storage, we were forced to adapt ourselves to the ever-changing technological advancements, learning on the job, and implementing our learnings to the actual requirements demanded by our lives.

Change is the only constant – so they say and to stay relevant, we have to adapt with the times and tides that are thrown at us. We, from our generation, are probably less stressed in our lives than the successive generations, and consequently, we have a better frame of mind in accepting and adapting to the changes life throws at us than the severely stressed-out Millennials and Gen Z.