Tag: travel

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Life and Personal

On Short Vacations

Europe, at large, entered the Coronavirus lockdowns in the middle of April. While a sizable number of well-read people knew that it would be a long road ahead, full of uncertainties and challenges, for policymakers, that was the time to expedite short-term action to sustain the livelihoods of vulnerable sections of society. As a result, tourism was completely shut down. Anything that involved the coming together of people face to face was deemed necessary to be shutdown in order to stop the virus’ spread.

Now that the numbers are starting to decrease and the caseload becoming manageable, countries are in a hurry to kickstart business as usual. This is driven by the need to get the situation back to normalcy, both in economic as well as social terms. Humans are social animals, after all. Just like we crave food for sustenance, we also long for social contact and cultural experiences for our well-being.

So, as restaurants and cafes are starting to reopen, albeit with distancing measures, travel is also beginning to slowly come up to speed. Airlines have been operating within European borders. People are starting to drive to and from neighboring countries. Combined with distancing measures, this influx of neighbors has actually led to crowding that’s very difficult to manage.

While a lot could be said about why tourism these days is not the same as back in the day when people took longer vacations and when travel was more expensive, this is not the post for that.

I am more curious about how the current technological state-of-the-art could be used to make short-term/weekend tourism unnecessary. After all, what is tourism that only lasts a long weekend? Is a vacation away in a different continent any better than staying home if most of it is spent traveling and sleeping? Is there a way to do away with this kind of tourism and leverage technology instead?

VR rings a bell. Surely, it would be great if we could live the moment in another city while not really going there. I think this would work for virtual travel to places that are otherwise bereft of experiences that trigger senses related to smell, taste, atmospheric changes, and other feelings that technology still cannot affect.

But, VR works great for creating entirely new kinds of experiences. It’s like video games. A holiday experience does not have to really replicate the real world — it is a kind of escape. It just so happens that traditionally a vacation involves secondary experiences related to lodging at a hotel, not having to cook, driving on new roads, etc. Instead of just changing a few hours of your daily life, a vacation is about making you live all your waking hours differently. And, since we are so busy, any respite from daily repetition is a good change.

Perhaps the answer is not in technology. Perhaps, it is about reconnecting with our cities and learning something new about it. Maybe, we ought to redefine a holiday getaway as more about the mind than physical presence. Instead of effecting a change in routine by forcing a physical movement, we should investigate the power of relaxation or indulging in exploration in our own vicinities.

This is something that has worked for me. Whereas previously we would often go on weekend getaways, the virus situation has forced us to spend more time in our city and nearby. Guess what! Even after having lived here for 10 years, we are still discovering nature so close to Amsterdam that we never knew existed. I often find myself exclaiming that this place looks like it belonged in a different continent.

Cycling has been wonderful, too. Weekends are now spent cycling to nearby nature parks rather than walking around in the city with other people at close proximity. Along with the health benefits, this helps in getting away from crowds, provides meditative effects, and also saves the planet from pollution that otherwise would have been released into the atmosphere. It’s a win-win.

So much of our holiday travel starts with anxiety around planning and delays and ends as such. Wouldn’t it be great if we focused more on well-being than checking off places to make it a vacation?

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Travel

A Travel Hack

The best way to travel is to travel light. And with the current heightened state of airport security you really don’t want to be caught in the discomforting web of special inspections just because you happen to be carrying gadgets that you might use on your trip.

I am surprised there haven’t been any real credible businesses set up to tackle this issue, yet. It sounds like an easy problem to fix – loan out laptops and digital cameras to people so that they don’t have to carry these with them on an airplane. I figure it would be difficult for corporate users owing to special software requirements and cloud use rules, but a vast majority of the ‘normal’ people should have absolutely no problems using loaner gadgets.

In fact, you could already do it – buy a new laptop whenever you travel, at the destination. Use it as much as you want, making sure you don’t abuse its condition. Depending on the return policy, return it before you leave your vacation destination. This works flawlessly if you use one of the many cloud services. iCloud will even restore your desktop and documents folders on any new laptop. It’s like you never changed your laptop.

This hack is a bit trickier for cameras as local retail establishments might have varying return policies for camera equipment.

 

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Life and Personal

2016 Report Card

2016 was quite an interesting year. While a lot of things happened over the course of the last 12 months, I will like to point out to only a few of these and specifically how I changed as a person.

The year started on a low note – instead of partying it up at some expensive hotel lounge or a bar, we decided to watch the fireworks from our study window. It turned out to be such a wonderful idea that we repeated it this NYE as well. There is something to be said about not having to spend €50-€60 on a bottle of Moët or not having to endure all the crowds. Besides, the view from our building is wonderful and the acoustics make it a wonderful experience.

We had a lot of family time this year. The highlight was the number of trips we made as a family with my parents. It began with a casual and spontaneous visit to Dubai, which was finalized over our daily FaceTime call on Christmas day. Then, after the birth of my niece in April, we flew to her home in Dallas over our summer holidays. After spending a couple weeks there, my parents flew with us to Amsterdam for a few weeks. Then, we made our annual Diwali trip to India about a month later. Then, my sister and her family visited us at Christmas. Fun times.

We also had other travels – the year started with a weekend visit to Berlin in the very first week. We went to Paris with my parents. We also drove to the Rhine river valley region, which seems to be becoming a yearly thing for us; it is just that beautiful and close to Amsterdam! We also spent my birthday in Paris, which was quite amazing as we did not use public transport at all during the entire trip and relied on walking everywhere.

That brings me to the second highlight of this year – health. I feel like I have become a completely different person compared to who I was even 2 years ago. Whereas once I was known in the family for being lazy and very ‘cool’ about everything, this year saw me transform into an energetic and rigorous personality. I can no longer sit around for more than a few minutes and can definitely not bear the pain of having to spend my weekend completely indoors. Daily morning and evening walks have become part of my daily routine, something for which I have to give the Apple Watch a lot of credit. Just this past month, I maintained my year-long streak of achieving my daily activity goals. This is amazing.

2016 also saw us go all in on exploring The Netherlands by cycles. We made a couple dozen weekend cycling trips all around the country. What started as a series of round trips from home to a nearby village called Monnickendam led us to waking up early every weekend and planning a cycling route that usually took the entire afternoon. While I joined a bike sharing plan, V resorted to buying her own bike that we took on the train. There were also unplanned adventures like flat tires in the middle of the forest that made the escapades all the more fun! There was a lot of scenery to be enjoyed along with good food, one of my favorite being this amazing ice cream shop right in the middle of nowhere.

Speaking of health, I also drastically cut down on alcohol.

I took a lot of pictures this year; about 4000. All those amazing cycling trips definitely helped. One of these days I’ll make them public, although you could still see a lot of them on Facebook.

Another big change was reading. Starting out as new habit in 2015, I currently subscribe to a few magazines and a daily business newspaper. The magazines I regularly read are The New Yorker, The Economist, and the Time magazine. Financial Times provides a good balance between general and business news from a global perspective, while not being too expensive. My daily morning routine now includes reading the daily front to back.

While I resolved to make long-form writing a persistent feature of my routine, I was unable to carry through with it. It is something that I need to ponder over a bit more as one of the motivations is to build a record and paper is not particularly a good way to attain that. On the other hand, there is a lot of credible research that ascribes mental health improvements to regularly writing your thoughts on paper.

This year, I aspired to spend a lot more time on calming down and enjoying everything the world has to offer by observing it, by zooming in and watching my world feel time’s impact. A quote from one of this year’s box office failures comes to mind –

“You’ve been given a gift, this profound connection to everything. Just look for it, and I promise you it’s there, the collateral beauty.”

V&I spent a lot of time together, from traveling to working at the same desk every day. A lot of time was spent on brainstorming new ideas, new goals in life, health, as well as the general goings on in the world. In 2016, we had crazy ideas like starting a company together to teaming up for product-market fit research work. While nothing has come out of this, yet, I think this is how good ideas and teams form.

We saw a lot of movies this year. Everything from Hollywood to Bollywood, English and Dutch, documentary to reality. There was a lot less live theater this year, something that I intend to improve in the new year.

2016 also saw V pass her Dutch integration (inburgering) exams. She is now ready to become a Dutch citizen if she chooses to go that route. What’s exceptional about this story is that she did it without taking any kind of professional classes or help, which is rare. I don’t know of anyone else who has managed to achieve this.

I made a lot of progress in simplifying my world, in getting a better understanding of how things work and how to keep myself motivated and on the path to achieving my goals. This was a year of relatively few ups and downs, and the stability helped in figuring out the changes needed to build better habits and get rid of some bad ones (carbs!).

There were a few losses and there were a few gains. The world and time plays out.

If I were to use 5 keywords for 2016, they would be:

family, travel, cycling, growth, health

The emoji for 2016 would be:

😎

My grade for 2016 is a solid A-.

Categories
Headline Life and Personal

Happiness

What is happiness? Some would argue that having access to food, drink, companionship is what makes someone happy. Some are happy by virtue of having access to wealth which makes the aforementioned readily available. Some gain happiness from being successful in whatever endeavors they undertake, irrespective of whatever their motivation. In essence, everyone has their own basis for defining happiness. Who are we to even begin a judgment on whether they are right or not. Bottom line is being happy.

But, I think it’s a bit more than that. Happiness is also about making sure your surroundings are happy. Sure, you can isolate yourself from all that mess, but sooner or later you will see that there’s only so far you can run before the reality of living in a social, well-connected, interdependent world bites you. But, I digress. So, then what is happiness? Is it dependent on others appearing happy? Is it just wealth? Is it just success? Being content?

I don’t know. But, that admitted, I can now say that there is one underlying factor I see in all people who are happy – they live, and I mean really live life without regrets. It’s really not easier said than done. We make mistakes all the time, but only the weak let themselves fall behind and repent all their life instead of picking up and making sure the mistake(s) of their life work for them in the long term. So that’s it – live life like you have no regrets and everything that makes you happy will casually follow.

Here’s how I keep myself happy, and everyone knows I am always cheerful and optimistic –

1. Be dreamy; imagine the good that has yet to come in your life.

2. Stop worrying and just do it. If something worries me a lot, be it whether injustice towards me or someone else, I try my best to take action at the right time.

3. Never say no to yourself.

4. Do unto others the way you would have them do to you. This is not just a biblical verse. It’s one of the first step towards being human. Is your selfish behavior making life worse for someone else? You will never be happy because guilt is subliminal and goes with you.

5. Keep yourself enlightened; Never stop learning. I could learn something new everyday and still know only so much about this wonderful world.

6. Don’t let negative energies or thoughts build up. This one is really hard to adhere to, and I fail often. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to be 100% happy! And no, this doesn’t fully conflict with being optimistic. You could be largely optimistic and still have negative ideas about something in your life.

7. Don’t let others rule over your life. The only person in control of your life should be you and a very very small group of really close family members. Everyone else doesn’t matter.

8. Be loyal to people you care about.

9. Don’t lie. This is easier done than said, actually.

10. Do whatever it takes to keep the important people in your life happy. If they’re unhappy, you’ll never be happy.

11. Money is immaterial. It’s all about your mind. If you are smart, money will come, if not now, then very soon.

12. Always always think about changing the world for the better with your actions. Everyone is capable of doing so. Just smiling at that person in the train could make their day better and lead them to do something nice for someone else.

13. Be largely immune to selfish thoughts. Avoid jealousy. If you’re happy you’d be more worried about making sure that other jealous people don’t infect you with negative vibes.

14. Travel whenever you get the chance. Embrace change in surroundings.

I think this is it. This is how I stay happy and continue loving my life.

You can, too!

PS: Plato was a genius. If you’re really interested in understanding humans around you on a more philosophical level, you owe it to yourself to read the Republic. I will do so soon, too.

Categories
Travel

Friendliest message to visitors – get rid of immigration lines

These are interesting times. While there are a couple, if not more, wars going on about protection of freedom(s), on America’s home turf, an organization known as the TSA has been given the legislative mandate to aggressively monitor every single person trying to get on an airplane.

People are being violated in public by these employees, threatened, humiliated, etc. etc. On last count, the TSA was successful in apprehending some drug abusers. But, that’s besides the point of this article.

Every country needs safeguards to make sure that air safety is not compromised by rogue elements. The easiest way to implement them is at the physical level right at the port of entry/departure. This is what the TSA seems to be doing. The reason this is inefficient is that in this day and age, there are more reasons to rely on intelligence and psychological analysis than the brute force method of X-Raying individuals or frisking them at the airports.

The problem isn’t just this frisking. When you take into account that pre-boarding security is often complemented by post-arrival immigration checks, the process is visitor unfriendly at best.

Why cannot intelligence be combined at all levels to make the process seamless? Surely, any country that would bar an individual from entry at the immigration post would like to do the same at the point where the individual tries to even get into a flight into the country. This is what is lacking in the current security regime in the US. It is like different organizations are running their own respective shows.

Compare this to traveling within European countries. There is freedom of movement and hence a lot of intelligence is (presumably) utilized to make the process hassle free for genuine travelers while at the same time keeping checks on shady individuals. When you travel from one country to another, you’re often not even forced to get into an immigration line, because there is no immigration! You just show your travel documentation briefly to the airline representative manning the gate at board time. This is convenience, and this truly signals ‘Welcome to our country’.