Amazon finally released Kindle in India (you can currently buy it from Croma in India) along with the Kindle Store. The Kindle store was a pleasant surprise, since it showed the price of books in INR. Also I found that a number of Indian titles were also present, including everyone’s favorite author – Chetan Bhagat !!!
This got me thinking on whether the skewed pricing that is often seen in e-book titles in the US also holds good here. To test this hypothesis, I chose a sample of 50 books from the bestseller list on Flipkart for both fiction and non-fiction titles. I noted the price for these titles for both Flipkart and Kindle. The idea was to see if the e-books were substantially cheaper than their dead tree counterparts. The summary of that analysis can be seen below:

Flipkart Vs Amazon

The chart plots the difference in price between Flipkart and Amazon Kindle. The Flipkart price is taken as the base and so a negative difference indicates that the Amazon price is more expensive than the Flipkart one. Click on the image above to open an interactive view. You can hover your mouse over each point to see details or select some points using the mouse and only see them to kind of zoom into the details.

What I noticed was that

• On an average, e-books were about 20% cheaper than the dead-tree counterparts
• The average savings that one would make by going the e-book route would be about INR 52
• The savings for a significant number of books, about 46% of the total, is negligible (INR 30 or less)
• There are outliers where the Kindle copy is substantially more expensive than the physical copy
• These outliers seem to be more prominent in case on Non-Fiction books
• A number of books, including popular ones like Ascent of Money, are not available on Kindle. Also a number of Indian authors were not to be found on the Amazon Kindle store.

So does buying e-books make sense, given that they are 20% cheaper on an average? I don’t think so, mainly because of the fact that the cost savings for a number of titles are not substantial, with the title being only a few rupees cheaper or in some case more expensive. Also given that one can’t lend or re-sell the e-book as yet like a physical copy, it does seem like a raw end of the deal to buy an e-book.
However, it’s great to note that the Kindle store seems to have a decent collection of Indian titles and might just make sense to use the Kindle for one-time reads.

Not too long ago, in a galaxy not too far away, a towing ship carrying mineral ore came across a “distress” beacon and decided to investigate. What they found became cinematic sci-fi history – a movie called “Alien”. The movie with its claustrophobic environment and acid-bleeding aliens became the rare blend of sci-fi and horror that actually worked on the big screen.
Since then the original has spawned many sequels, many of which just capitalized on the “Alien” franchise rather than adding anything new to the mix.

So when Ridley Scott, the director of the original Alien series, announced that he was returning to the Alien universe, fans around the globe rejoiced. At last we will have the answers that we wanted, like what on earth were those “Space Jockeys” in Alien, they said. Continue reading ‘Prometheus or why the movie is aptly titled’ »

Mt. Pulag

It had been almost a month since my last trekking trip and I was itching to go on another trek. A chance meeting with an old pal in Manila, put me onto a number of websites and groups based in Philippines that covered trekking and trails. One of these groups was Trail Adventours which happened to be doing an overnight camping trip to Mt. Pulag that weekend.
Mt. Pulag, at 2922m above sea level, is the highest peak in Luzon and the third highest in the Philippines. The climb to Mt. Pulag passes through some amazing trails that cut through the rainforest. Generally the dry months of March to May are the best time to go there, though the trails are open all year round.
Trail Adventours is one of the few groups that organize regular monthly trips up Mt. Pulag. Generally due to the time taken to get there, the trip is done with an overnight stay at one of the camp sites on the mountain.
We needed to actually get a lot of gear for the trip. I had unfortunately left a lot of my trekking gear back in India (bags, hydration bags, sleeping bags, trekking poles, mess kit etc) and so was faced with the prospect of buying everything anew here. Luckily however we could rent out most of stuff and we ended up renting sleeping bags and a tent for the trip. A second expense was getting some warm clothing for the cold up there. Since I had assumed that the climate in the Philippines would generally not be too cold, I hadn’t packed any warm clothes. So I ended up buying a few gloves, warm jacket etc for the trip. (Though word of advice, if you intend to go up Mt. Pulag you can buy all this at quite reasonable prices at the DENR centre)
So with all our gear bought and rented, we set off to the meeting point at the Pasay Victory Liner Station. There we met Ace, who would be one of our guides on the trip. The bus left from Manila for Baguio at about 10:30 PM. We reached Baguio at about 05:30 in the morning on Saturday. Here we met the rest of our group and our second guide for the trip, Bianca.
Continue reading ‘Of high mountains, cloud rats and freezing nights: Mt. Pulag’ »

Crater Lake at Mt. Pinatubo

I learned about Mt. Pinatubo soon after coming to the Philippines; however I couldn’t figure out how to get there easily. Mt. Pinatubo is one of the many active volcanoes in the Philippines that last erupted in a climatic eruption on June 15th 1991. The resulting eruption was the second largest terrestrial eruption of the 20th Century and resulted in the ejection of 10 cubic Km of magma. The eruption resulted in the formation of an enormous crater that soon filled with rain water forming a large crater lake. The lake has brilliant blue waters and is one of the tourist attractions of the region.
After much hunting online, we narrowed down on a travel group called Tripinas that did public group tours of Pinatubo. Most of the other groups did private tours which were quite unaffordable as it was just me and a colleague of mine on the trip. We paid the initial advance and got our instructions for the trip.
The trip began at about 02:00 AM early Saturday morning when we assembled at the McDonalds close to the Quezon Avenue MRT station. Here the balance amount was settled and we were allocated our vehicle for the trip. As planned we left at about 03:00 AM for the base camp. The journey took about 3 odd hours and by 6:00 in the morning we were at the base camp.

Continue reading ‘Of Ancient Volcanoes and desolate landscapes: Mt. Pinatubo’ »

Sometime back I came across promotions on Facebook for a new horror book called “The Mine” by Arnab Ray. For those who don’t know, Arnab writes the fabulous blog – “Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind” and has also authored the sublimely superb “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss”.

Since Arnab or Great Bong (as he is more popularly known) usually writes humor and satire, a horror novel written by him seemed like a huge deviation from the usual fare. Besides this the general plot of the book – “Experts/ Team sent in to a remote expedition to find out what went/ is going wrong” is pretty much my favorite kind of plot. Variations of the plot have given us such superb pieces like Jurassic Park, Sphere, Deep Storm and movies like Alien. So with somewhat tempered expectations I started reading the book.

The book follows a group of experts that are assembled in a highly secret mining facility under the Thar desert. The mine has uncovered an ancient structure with some disturbing carvings, deep underground. The experts are called in to make sense of this and the many maladies afflicting the miners. As usual things go wrong shortly after and that’s when the fun starts.

The book is fairly well written and the pace picks up after the initial slow start. It builds quite nicely on the claustrophobia of being trapped several kilometers under the surface of the earth. While there are number of gory scenes in the book, regular horror fans might find them a bit pedestrian. In addition to this while there are a number of innovative twists and turns in the book, most of them seem a bit derivative (Either that or I’ve seen / read way too much in that genre). Fans of other horror series like Saw, Hostel etc may be left with a sense of deja vu. In spite of these (imagined ??) shortcomings though, the author manages to keep the plot fairly taut and interesting.

While personally I was a tad disappointed (mainly cause it had a “been there done that” kind of feel to it), I would think its an excellent stab at the horror genre. If nothing else, its a welcome relief from the legions of “Chetan Bhagat” clones that have popped up all over. Definitely worth a try.

The View from Mullyangiri

I’ve been wanting to do the Mullyangiri – Bababudangiri trek since I heard about this scenic route. I had initially planned to do this in mid-late November with some friends. However, as best laid plans go, this one kind of unravelled as the date drew near. However, when I learned that Bangalore Ascenders would be also attempting the trail (with the added incentive of trekking all the way to Kemmangundi), I quickly signed up for the trek. The weekend before the trek was spent in getting the necessary supplies (food, sleeping mats etc.) as I didn’t want to leave anything to the last minute.
Continue reading ‘Mullyangiri to Kemmangundi – A walk through heaven’ »

The Hills in Kudremukh National Park

In 2007 on my way to Kemmangundi, I happened to glance upon an oddly shaped peak. The peak resembled a horse’s face from afar and thats what it was called – Kudremukha (literally meaning “horse-face”). Sometime this year, I learned that it was possible to trek up to this peak passing through the wildlife sanctuary that the peak was situated in. So I added this peak to my list of treks to do this year and patiently waited for one of the many trekking groups to announce a trip to this peak.

Soon enough, Bangalore Ascenders announced a trek to this peak. After some confusion (and help from Girish) I finally managed to register for the trek. The meeting point this time round was Majestic, and roughly 12-13 of us gathered at the meeting spot on time. As per the plan we left Bangalore on Friday night and traveled to Kudremukh over the night.

Continue reading ‘Walking up the horse faced peak’ »

Before you think that I spent the last one month in Singapore, let me say upfront that this post is about a little big data thought experiment involving Singapore  and a whole lot of tweets.
Some time back Eric Fischer posted some amazing maps on Flickr and elsewhere on the web visualizing tweets from Twitter and Flickr. He basically plotted locations from where people tweeted and posted photos to Flickr from. The result – a beautiful map of the area which looks more like a night time view of the area from space!!
Seeing this I was inspired to try the same. Initially I thought of trying it for Indian cities, however it seems that geographic co-ordinates are hard to come by for tweets from India. So then I randomly chose Singapore for this little experiment.
I set up a small Ruby script that polled Twitter’s search API once every few minutes and pulled tweets from Singapore. These were then logged and stored onto simple text files. I ran this script for little over a month (August to September) and managed to collect about 225,000 tweets. Plotting them using R (without any projections) gave rise to this beautiful visualization.

Singapore Twitter Map

Some interesting features immediately come to light here. For instance the two huge vacant holes on the plot correspond to the two large national parks in Singapore. Concentration of tweets in other places also brings to light roads and other transportation conduits.

I also did some analysis around tweets by hour and day of week and kind of reverse geo-coded popular locations to figure out where people were tweeting from on weekends. The result of that exercise gave this interesting tag cloud

Popular Places on the weekend

I’ve put all this together in one gorgeous infographic which you can see here.
PS: Many Thanks to good pal Jayaram for helping me put the map together in R

After the last two treks, here is what I learned (which I hope to use by the next one):

1. My current bag needs to be retired. It’s no longer rigid and does not distribute load properly, which leads to the straps painfully digging into my shoulders (in spite of the padding). Might still use it, but just to carry a smaller day pack and a change of clothes.
2. Hydration packs help. Definitely will reduce the need to stop just to take a sip of water, once I get one
3. I also need a new camera bag, preferably one with an all weather cover (like the splendid Lowepro AW series). My current shoulder bag is brilliant for sight-seeing trips etc. but tends to put me off balance while trekking (not to mention the constant swinging of the bag). Also given that I generally take along just the 18-55mm lens while trekking, for now I think taking along a top loading “V-style” bag would do the trick. Should get one.
4. A trekking pole will definitely help. Need to get one to take the pressure off the knees while climbing down steep sections.
5. While trekking down in the dark, realised the utility of a head lamp. A head lamp definitely helps keep the hands free while climbing down.
6. A leech bite ain’t the worse thing, it’s the aftermath that is. The bite keeps oozing blood for hours thanks to anti-coagulant in the leech saliva. Messes up clothes, socks and everything. Need to figure out someway to counteract this.
7. And the bite itches like crazy while healing. Calamine lotion helps.
8. “Moov” spray (heat rub spray) is surprisingly effective in getting rid of climbing leeches. Must be the eucalyptus oil and other herbs in it, or the propellant used in the spray. Spraying shoes with “Moov” before trekking into leech infested areas (and re-spraying frequently) seems to deter leeches from climbing onto the shoes.
9. Need to figure out an effective way to pull out an attached leech. Read a lot of contradicting advice on the net, so still not sure if popping the leech’s sucker is a good idea or just using salt/ “Moov”.
10. Need to find me a pair of Anti-Leech Socks. (If anyone knows where I can find one in Bangalore, please let me know)
11. It’s possible to wash away blood stains almost completely with just a detergent soak and a hand wash.
12. Action Trekkers are by far the most brilliant (and need I say cheapest) trekking shoes I’ve used to date. Excellent grip on all surfaces and not too heavy and relatively leech proof to boot as well (hardly any leeches got into my shoes).

Taking a break at Kumara Parvatha

After the last quick day trek, I felt it was time to try something a bit longer. Luckily for me, Bangalore Mountaineering Club (BMC) was organizing a trek to Kumara Parvatha. Since this was a two day trek, the plan was to leave on Friday night. As usual, I joined up at my Domlur pick up point. This time round there were around 25 odd people on the trek. We started pretty much on time, for which I was glad, because it started pouring soon after. Thanks to the rains, two of our fellow adventurers who were to come from Mysore, had a mini-trek of their own before we picked them up. Finally at about midnight we left Bangalore.

But before I get into the rest of the story, here is a bit about the mountain. Kumara Parvatha is a mountain that is about 13-15 Km away from the town of Subramanya, which is about 230 km from Bangalore. Subramanya is situated at the foothills of western ghats in Dakshin Kannad district, famous for the Kukke Subramanya temple. Kumara Parvatha is considered (arguably, and I’ll come to that a bit later) by many to be one of the more strenuous treks in Karnataka. The mountain stands at about a height of 1732m and is one of the tallest peaks in the region. The mountain is situated in the Pushpagiri wildlife sanctuary and to trek there one needs to take permission from the forest department.

Continue reading ‘Trekking to Kumara Parvatha’ »