Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

April 14, 2025

How would time travel work with conservation of mass and avoid the same matter occupying the same space?

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

I have been trying to write about my recent trip to Uzbekistan but that will take time (because there is a lot to type about and life is being hectic right now). So instead of writing about that I decided to procrastinate by writing another post which is about something that has been bouncing around in my head for the past few days.

I watched the latest episode of Dr Who over the weekend (It was awesome and I should do a post on that later) and in it one of the plot device is that the same matter can’t occupy the same space when time traveling as it would cause an explosion. (They use it to move the plot along, even though they have ignored it in previous episodes). That is not the interesting part, that came to me after I was done with the episode and kind of avoiding thinking about work (as I was working over the weekend).

Basically, the law of conservation of mass says that “for any system closed to all transfers of matter the mass of the system must remain constant over time.”, which implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form.

So over a period of time, atoms (or molecules) that were part of object A, could very well become part of object B. Now comes the interesting part: if the same matter can’t occupy the same space when time traveling (As per the new Cannon of the show) and over time matter from one object could very well end up in another object or just a stay molecule of gas then it is quite possible that when we time travel it would be quite possible to suddenly have an explosion for no apparent reason because one of the molecules in your body/clothing/air etc that you brought with you from the future is the same as a molecule in something you are touching. This would end up making time-travel extremely risky and destructive.

A possible way around would be to ensure you are traveling only to places very far from where you are coming from to reduce the probability of matter duplication across time. But that still wouldn’t be a certainty though.

Another problem would be that time travel by necessity introduce matter into the system which didn’t exist before… So would end up violating the law of conservation of mass. Unless the system is also including the 4th dimension (time) when considering the closed system.

What do you think? (I think that I need some sleep and less caffeine in my system)

– Suramya

February 25, 2025

India’s First Vertical Bi-Facial Solar Plant installed on the Delhi Metro

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Science Related — Suramya @ 9:46 PM

India is working hard towards reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and moving to alternative/renewable power source. As part of this effort we have been aggressively installing more and more solar plants across India. The Delhi Metro installed India’s First Vertical Bi-Facial Solar Plant last week. The new 50kW vertical solar plant at Okhla Vihar Metro Station features bi-facial panels that capture sunlight from both sides, enhancing energy generation efficiency.

India added a record 25 GW solar capacity in 2024 which is a 204% jump from previous year. Part of it was due to the commissioning of projects that supposed to go online in 2023 but got delayed and went live in 2024. Even with that being the case this is a great milestone and the total generation capacity for India has topped 100GW, putting India in the top 3 countries worldwide for Solar power production.

Solar and other green energy sources are awesome. They allow you to generate power without creating harmful byproducts like coal or petrol based energy generators do. Unfortunately this means that Coal and Oil industries are completely against them and constantly create posts, advertisements and ‘research’ that show how bad the renewable energy sources are. Basically it is a constant bombardment of FUD (Fear Uncertainty & Doubt) to cause people to distrust the technology.

The following comics keep showing up in my feed and it is typical of how people portray green power and electric vehicles. According to them there is no point in getting an electric car or a green power alternative because they all use coal/gas fueled power plants in the background and that can’t be further from the truth.

In fact, the main reason ‘people’ (read oil/coal companies) don’t want us to switch to renewable is explained very well by the following comic:

Solar Power isn't feasible because we can't own the sun
Solar Power isn’t feasible because we can’t own the sun

One (valid) cause for concern is that it is expensive to setup, which is true but not the whole story. We setup a solar power plant at my parents place in Delhi and while it does take up space it is not as bad as people make it sound. One set of panels actually makes a great share in front of the room on the roof, the other is on top of that room so helps keep the temperature in that room down and with the temperature in Delhi hitting 52.8 Deg C it is not a small consideration.

The setup we have is for a 10kwa solar panels and it costed us ~4,50,000 lac. Based on our regular usage we will recover the cost in about 4 1/2 years (its been almost 4 years since we set it up).

There is a pretty good subsidy for Solar being offered by the Indian government at the central level so it is a great time to setup a Solar power plan wherever you can. My cousin has also set it up in UP and it is a big help over there because they are no longer dependent on the power company for power.

With the new more powerful panels nowadays the time taken to recover the cost of the setup is down to a few years. To be fair, the process of generating the solar panel does create waste that is a pollutant but that is minuscule compared to the waste generated by a coal/gas power plant.

– Suramya

February 17, 2025

Some additional context around the 300km long traffic jam in India

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 2:13 AM

If you have been following the news I am sure you must have heard about the massive traffic jam that happened a few days ago on the way to Mahakumbh mela in Prayagraj, UP. Vehicles coming to Kumbh via Madhya Pradesh were stuck in a long traffic jam over 300kms long. This is a world record that beat the previous record holder (100kms) by a significant margin. This incident has caused a lot of people to raise questions about the arrangements and the usual suspects have started putting India down.

The previous record holder jam happened on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway where traffic was stalled for over 100 km due to roadwork heavy vehicle traffic, and breakdowns. It took China 12 Days to clear the jam with the folks stuck having to eat, sleep and manage in their vehicles. Contrast this with the Jam in India where the entire thing was cleared out in ~48 hours (2 days), The government made arrangements to provide food, water, and shelter for the affected pilgrims, according to a report by The Hindustan Times.

There are a lot of lessons to be learnt from this and how to avoid such situations in the future, but when pilgrims numbering more than 50 crore (500,000,000) have visited Prayagraj since Jan 13th and ~92 lakh (9,200,000) had taken a dip in just one day there are bound to be issues that show up. To give some context, this number is larger than the population of any country in the world except for India and China.

It is a massive achievement by the organizers that such a big event has been held with such good arrangement and a lot less issues than what I was expecting. Could we have done better? Of course. As I said earlier, there are some major issues that need to be addressed such as the stampede that caused multiple deaths. The root causes for those need to be identified and addressed going forward. The lessons learnt from this will also help with other large scale events and mobilizations (such as during emergency situations).

Press Release: Maha Kumbh 2025 Witnesses Record-Breaking Footfall

– Suramya

February 6, 2025

A Linux Distribution which runs directly within a PDF file

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Linux/Unix Related,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:01 PM

There is a semi-serious joke in the IT industry that anything that can compute is eventually used to play Doom and then run Linux. Now you can do both from inside a PDF file. Since the PDF specification supports Javascript a highschool student who goes by the handle ‘ading2210’ has implemented a RISC-V emulator in it which can run a barebones Linux distribution within the PDF file itself. This builds on top of the work done to get Doom to run inside the PDF file.

The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridiculous things like the ability to do 3D rendering, make HTTP requests, and detect every monitor connected to the user’s system. However, on Chromium and other browsers, only a tiny subset of this API was ever implemented, due to obvious security concerns. With this, we can do whatever computation we want, just with some very limited IO.

C code can be compiled to run within a PDF using an old version of Emscripten that targets asm.js instead of WebAssembly. With this, I can compile a modified version of the TinyEMU RISC-V emulator to asm.js, which can be run within the PDF. For the input and output, I reused the same display code that I used for DoomPDF. It works by using a separate text field for each row of pixels in the screen, whose contents are set to various ASCII characters. For inputs, there is a virtual keyboard implemented with a bunch of buttons, and a text box you can type in to send keystrokes to the VM.

The largest problem here is with the emulator’s performance. For example, the Linux kernel takes about 30-60 seconds to boot up within the PDF, which over 100x slower than normal. Unfortunately, there’s no way to fix this, since the version of V8 that Chrome’s PDF engine uses has its JIT compiler disabled, destroying its performance.

For the root filesystem, there are both 64 and 32 bit versions possible. The default is a 32 bit buildroot system (which was prebuilt and taken from the original TinyEMU examples), and also a 64 bit Alpine Linux system. The 64 bit emulator is about twice as slow however, so it’s normally not used.

You can try out the implementation of LinuxPDF here. More details of the project and the code used to create it is available on the project’s GitHub page.

– Suramya

February 4, 2025

India’s tiger population has grown by 30% in the last two decades

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 5:56 PM

India’s national animal is the Tiger, which made it even more unfortunate that the population of Tigers in India was at an all time low a couple of decades ago. To counter this the government of India started multiple programs to encourage the tiger population to grow. Now after two decades of effort India’s tiger population has grown by 30%, which is a pretty big deal.

Recovery of large yet ecologically important carnivores poses a formidable global challenge. Tiger (Panthera tigris) recovery in India, the world’s most populated region, offers a distinct opportunity to evaluate the socio-ecological drivers of megafauna recovery. Tiger occupancy increased by 30% (at 2929 square kilometers per year) over the past two decades, leading to the largest global population occupying ~138,200 square kilometers. Tigers persistently occupied human-free, prey-rich protected areas (35,255 square kilometers) but also colonized proximal connected habitats that were shared with ~60 million people. Tiger absence and extinction were characterized by armed conflict, poverty, and extensive land-use changes. Sparing land for tigers enabled land sharing, provided that socioeconomic prosperity and political stability prevailed. India’s tiger recovery offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.

In a research paper published in Science last week researchers discuss how “Tigers persistently occupied human-free, prey-rich protected areas (35,255 square kilometers) but also colonized proximal connected habitats that were shared with ~60 million people. Tiger absence and extinction were characterized by armed conflict, poverty, and extensive land-use changes. Sparing land for tigers enabled land sharing, provided that socioeconomic prosperity and political stability prevailed. India’s tiger recovery offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.”

Assuming this trend keeps up, we can look forward to having a stable Tiger population in India once again.

Source: bsky.app: samillingworth.com

– Suramya

January 24, 2025

Buying a Rolex for status when you can’t afford it is a bad idea

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:49 PM

There are folks who give advise on Twitter/X/Social Media who don’t seem to have the first clue about the real world and how it works. A lot of it is from folks who have a lot of money from inheritance/trust fund etc and are trying to pretend that they bootstrapped themselves into fame and money. I find their advice to be very amusing to read but there are times when it can be really bad advice (in my opinion).

Recently a tweet by Steven went viral (screenshot below) enough that it showed up in my Mastodon feed. Before I post my thoughts on it do read the tweet below (the text version is listed below the image).


Steven @StevenPulteFam
If you’re a guy in your early 20s, buy a Rolex.
Go into debt if you have to

Steven @StevenPulteFam
Replying to @StevenPulteFam
This is not satire. You can get a Rolex for 4 grand
Having a nice watch communicates status to women and business relationships
And if you buy it right it will hold its value if not appreciate

My first thought on reading this was that this guy is nuts, going into a 4 figure debt just to ‘communicate status’ is insane. Yes you are judged on the clothes you wear, the watch you have and the car you drive but getting a watch that you clearly can’t afford is not going to make you look successful, it is making you look like someone who doesn’t know how to prioritize. This is especially true for a person in their early 20’s who would be someone who has just finished college (or is still in one) and is working at a junior level job. I get that folks want to impress others and usually it is a good idea but as with everything else in life this is also a balance you need to maintain. If you are wearing a Rolex and still working as a low level intern or junior developer you will not show the image you think you are projecting.

If you have the excess money then go for it if you want, but taking a loan just for status makes no sense. According to Business Insider the average interest rates for someone with excellent credit score is 20.53% where as the maximum APR can go up to 275.85%. so keep that in mind as well when you are taking a loan just to look ‘cool’. This advice is very similar to the ones from the pick-artists who claim to know the secret to getting laid (which is to pay these guys insane amount of money).

Long story short, my advice to you is that you should spend within your budget. Stretch the budget as far as possible to get nice things but try not to go overboard. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take any loans ever (if that is possible then it is the best option) but rather take loans for stuff that matters like a house, a car (not a fancy one) etc. Once you start earning AND have a good amount saved for a rainy day then you can splurge. But all cases are different so your mileage may vary and you should take this advice with a pinch of salt.

– Suramya

January 22, 2025

ELIZA Resurrected using original code after 60 years

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Science Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:41 AM

If you have been following the AI chat bot news/world then you would have heard the name ELIZA come up. Eliza was the world’s first chatbot created over 60 years ago by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and was the first language model which a user could interact with. It had a significant impact on the AI world (Actual AI research not the LLM wanna be AI we have right now) and was the first to attempt the Turing test. It was originally written in a programming language invented by Weizenbaum called the Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP) and the pattern matching directives were provided as separate scripts. Shortly after the initial release it was rewritten in LISP which went viral. Unfortunately the original code in MAD-SLIP went missing till recently soon after that.

One of the most famous ELIZA scripts was called Doctor that emulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient’s words to the patient). Much to his surprise Weizenbaum found that folks attributed human-like feelings to the computer program. Wikipedia explains how the software worked:

ELIZA starts its process of responding to an input by a user by first examining the text input for a “keyword”.[5] A “keyword” is a word designated as important by the acting ELIZA script, which assigns to each keyword a precedence number, or a RANK, designed by the programmer.[15] If such words are found, they are put into a “keystack”, with the keyword of the highest RANK at the top. The input sentence is then manipulated and transformed as the rule associated with the keyword of the highest RANK directs.[20] For example, when the DOCTOR script encounters words such as “alike” or “same”, it would output a message pertaining to similarity, in this case “In what way?”,[4] as these words had high precedence number. This also demonstrates how certain words, as dictated by the script, can be manipulated regardless of contextual considerations, such as switching first-person pronouns and second-person pronouns and vice versa, as these too had high precedence numbers. Such words with high precedence numbers are deemed superior to conversational patterns and are treated independently of contextual patterns.[citation needed]

Following the first examination, the next step of the process is to apply an appropriate transformation rule, which includes two parts: the “decomposition rule” and the “reassembly rule”.[20] First, the input is reviewed for syntactical patterns in order to establish the minimal context necessary to respond. Using the keywords and other nearby words from the input, different disassembly rules are tested until an appropriate pattern is found. Using the script’s rules, the sentence is then “dismantled” and arranged into sections of the component parts as the “decomposition rule for the highest-ranking keyword” dictates. The example that Weizenbaum gives is the input “You are very helpful”, which is transformed to “I are very helpful”. This is then broken into (1) empty (2) “I” (3) “are” (4) “very helpful”. The decomposition rule has broken the phrase into four small segments that contain both the keywords and the information in the sentence.[20]

The decomposition rule then designates a particular reassembly rule, or set of reassembly rules, to follow when reconstructing the sentence.[5] The reassembly rule takes the fragments of the input that the decomposition rule had created, rearranges them, and adds in programmed words to create a response. Using Weizenbaum’s example previously stated, such a reassembly rule would take the fragments and apply them to the phrase “What makes you think I am (4)”, which would result in “What makes you think I am very helpful?”. This example is rather simple, since depending upon the disassembly rule, the output could be significantly more complex and use more of the input from the user. However, from this reassembly, ELIZA then sends the constructed sentence to the user in the form of text on the screen

Now after over 60 years the original code written in MAD-SLIP has been resurrected by Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley,an MIT archivist, who found it among Weizenbaum’s papers back in 2021. Which is when they started working on getting the code to run, which was a significant effort. They first created an emulator that approximated the computers available in the 1960’s and then cleaned up the original 420-line ELIZA code to get it to work. They published a paper: ELIZA Reanimated: The world’s first chatbot restored on the world’s first time sharing system on 12th Jan where they explain the whole process.

ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s, is usually considered the world’s first chatbot. It was developed in MAD-SLIP on MIT’s CTSS, the world’s first time-sharing system, on an IBM 7094. We discovered an original ELIZA printout in Prof. Weizenbaum’s archives at MIT, including an early version of the famous DOCTOR script, a nearly complete version of the MAD-SLIP code, and various support functions in MAD and FAP. Here we describe the reanimation of this original ELIZA on a restored CTSS, itself running on an emulated IBM 7094. The entire stack is open source, so that any user of a unix-like OS can run the world’s first chatbot on the world’s first time-sharing system.

You can try it out: here.

Source:

– Suramya

January 20, 2025

ISRO successfully docks two satellites with each other

Filed under: Astronomy / Space,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:25 AM

If you have been following my blog you know I love ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), they have been doing fantastic work at a fraction of the budget available to NASA and ESA. 3 days ago they made history again by becoming the 4th nation (after US, China and Russia) to successfully dock two satellites with each other. The mission was a Technology Demonstrator/Poof of Concept essential for India’s future space missions (which are quite ambitious). The mission parameters and Objectives were as follows:

SpaDeX mission is a cost-effective technology demonstrator mission for the demonstration of in-space docking using two small spacecraft launched by PSLV. This technology is essential for India’s space ambitions such as Indian on Moon, sample return from the Moon, the building and operation of Bharatiya Antariksh Station (BAS), etc. In-space docking technology is essential when multiple rocket launches are required to achieve common mission objectives. Through this mission, India is marching towards becoming the fourth country in the world to have space docking technology.

Objectives:

The primary objective of the SpaDeX mission is to develop and demonstrate the technology needed for rendezvous, docking, and undocking of two small spacecraft (SDX01, which is the Chaser, and SDX02, the Target, nominally) in a low-Earth circular orbit. Secondary objectives include:

  • Demonstration of the transfer of electric power between the docked spacecraft, which is essential for future applications such as in-space robotics,
  • Composite spacecraft control, and
  • Payload operations after undocking.

ISRO is also doing good marketing and publicizing of its mission to get get more kids interested in Space and ISRO’s missions and towards that aim they released a video of the successful docking of the twin SpaDeX (Space Docking Experiment) spacecraft on YouTube:



SPADEX Successful Docking Video

Congrats again on a successful mission ISRO, we are all proud of you.

– Suramya

January 2, 2025

Welcoming 2025 and looking back at 2024

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:37 PM

Happy New Year folks! 2024 was a pretty eventful year for me with a lot of things happening. I made some new friends, lost touch with a few, traveled to some pretty cool places and just overall had a blast. This year I thought it would be interesting to do a sort of recap with some numbers and data points.

Books Read

  • Read a total of 275 books in 2024, which is an average of 23 books a month
  • Max books read (32) was October and the least (10) was in May
  • Top 5 authors by no of books read by them was
    • Mercedes Lackey : 49
    • Kelley Armstrong : 30
    • Jim Butcher : 25
    • Elizabeth Moon : 25
    • Timothy Zahn : 18

Travel/Trips

  • Drove 8090 kilometers in India (excluding Cabs etc)
  • 7 Trips, Including 4 International destinations

Others

  • 2349 photos taken (After removing duplicates)
  • 80 Blog posts published

My goal was to read 365 books in a year but am happy with managing to read 275 books. Not that happy about only posting 80 blog posts last year… Will be aiming to post more regularly this year. It would have been interesting to count the number of words published, hours of music listened, the no of calls made and received and the time spent on calls (non-work related) but didn’t see an easy way to extract this data. If I do manage to get the data I will publish it. Maybe by the time the next years rolls up I will have gotten this worked out.

Well, this is all for now will post more later.

– Suramya

November 11, 2024

Some Tips to make your travels more fun and convenient

Filed under: My Thoughts,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 9:41 PM

Someone shared some tips in one of the Travel groups on what to do when traveling outside India and I didn’t agree with some of them so decided to make my own post on things you should do and not do when traveling. This is based on my personal experience and way of traveling and not everyone will agree with everything I say here just as I didn’t agree with everything in the post that inspired this one. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or via email.

Research the destination before you go

Sounds pretty obvious when you say it, but not everyone does it. When you research the destination beforehand you know what are the places to see, things to do, things not to do etc. It will also give you a good idea of local customs that you should be aware of. Things that are normal in one country might be the most offensive thing in another.

Forex/Money Conversion

I have found that if you are traveling to a country that is relatively less popular with tourists, it is cheaper to go to the country and then withdraw cash over there using the ATM instead of getting it converted in your home country. I have stopped converting money at home for the past 3-4 years and it does save money.

You do need to ensure that you have enabled international transactions & withdrawals on your Debit card. In addition, try to ensure you are using an ATM that is in a reputed place like a bank or hotel lobby or busy street etc instead of one that is in a shady shop somewhere. This is to avoid having your card copied/cloned. The following link has good advise on how to spot ATM skimmers. I have never found one in the wild but enough people have that I follow this checklist when I go to withdraw cash.

Another point to remember is that the bank (and potentially the ATM) might charge transaction fees so instead of making multiple small withdrawals do a single large withdrawal. That way you don’t end up paying too much in transaction fees.

Language

If the language spoken by majority of folks in your destination is not English then it is a good idea to learn basic phrases in the local language, especially please and thank you. We usually ask a local on how to say Thank you and they are happy to help with the pronunciation. You will see a remarkable difference in people when they see that you are trying to communicate in their language. Google Translate does work in a pinch but sometimes the translations can be a bit off. 🙂 Translate also works with images so you can take a photo of text or a menu and get it translated like that. This is pretty much what we did in Hong Kong & Macao as a lot of places didn’t have English menus. If you are in places like China, Vietnam etc then you might want to get a local guide that speaks English as That can save you some time and effort.

Keep in mind that if you can’t speak the local language don’t look down on the locals for not speaking English.

Food

One of the best parts of traveling is to explore the local food. Sometimes I do feel bad that I can’t explore the food as much as Jani does because I am a vegetarian. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try the local vegetarian options. You will not get the same food that you get at home as the dishes are as per the local palate. If you insist on getting the exact same taste and dishes as what you get at home you will be miserable and so will the folks traveling with you.

Things that are common at home might not be where you are traveling to. For example, in a recent trip I heard about one of the girls who had a screaming fit at a waiter because they didn’t make her ‘Filter coffee’ correctly. She literally yelled at them asking “How can you not know how to make filter coffee?”. My question to her if I was a local would have been do you know how to make egg coffee, because for them that is something everyone should know how to make. You are a guest in their place, you need to adjust to their way of doing things instead of expecting them to adjust to your way.

Another thing to remember is that the local version of a particular food might just be drastically different than what you are used to. When I was in Vietnam I ordered a margarita pizza. What I got was a square of bread (about 8 inches wide) with cheese slices (yes, like what you put on sandwiches) on it. Then a whole tomato was cut into four thick slices with a slice put in each quadrant of the ‘pizza’. It tasted ok but was definitely not what I expected. 🙂 Chinese food that you get in India tastes nothing like the actual Chinese food in China.

Some people recommend that you should carry food with you and I know people who will cook stuff like Puri & Aaloo for a week long trip and just eat that. Another person I know told me that they were in Boston for an year and survived on just French fries. I asked them that Boston has enough Indian restaurants and Vegetarian options so why not eat there and I was told that the food didn’t taste like food at home. So far I have traveled to all 7 continents but never felt like I should have carried food with me.

Transit

Use the local public transit when possible, especially Subway and Trams as they are a lot cheaper than Uber or Taxi’s. If you have to take a cab use the local app (if available) such as Grab in South East Asia instead of Uber.

Explore places other than the Tourist hotspots

Every location has places that are must see, for example Eiffel Tower in Paris, Qutub Minar in Delhi, Mysore Palace in Mysore etc. You should definitely visit these locations because they are famous for a reason. However, once you see the tourist traps explore other places which might not be that well known. By that I mean check out the local market instead of the mall and instead of the world famous beach check out the beach where locals hang out.

This is where the research you did before the trip will help. Another way to find off-beat places is to ask the locals (Hotel Staff, Local Tour companies etc) for advice on must see places. We (me and Jani) always do this and while we were in Hampi we ended up visiting a 3000 year old Megalithic site that hardly anyone knew about. This way you will see places that will blow your mind and are not super crowded. Obviously you need to ensure your safety before going off to someplace in the middle of nowhere, so take a judgement call before going anywhere.

Some folks prefer to have a fully planned itinerary for a trip with everything pre-booked but personally I prefer to have more flexibility. When we visited Sri Lanka we had booked hotel for only the first night, we had a list of places we wanted to cover but diverted quite a lot to cover other places that were recommended to us. Each evening we would get on Tripadvisor and search for places to stay within an hour of where we were and would book a place when we found something we liked. It did help that we were a group of 6 guys instead of a group of 6 girls.

Respect the local culture

This is a must as you are a guest in their country/town so please don’t act like idiots. I understand that you might want to get the perfect photo for Instagram but that doesn’t mean you can climb into restricted places, create a nuisance or block paths. Especially don’t insult local religious structures or deface property. There was a case few years ago where a tourist in Bhutan decided to climb the one of the Stupa’s for a photoshoot on top of it. (The stupas at Dochula are built in the memory of Bhutanese soldiers who died) and it became an international incident where the guys passport was confiscated and he got jailed. There are thousands more such examples and it is embarrassing when folks do this kind of nonsense.

Don’t make fun of local eating habits or way of life. Remember you are a guest there and they have no obligation to you. I once traveled with someone from Canada who kept complaining about having to climb steps to visit the temples. He said something to the effect of “Don’t Indians know how to put an Escalator and why can’t you Indians put escalators in these places so we don’t have to climb stairs.” (It was stated in a lot more obnoxious way) Had to tell him that the whole point of having the temple at the top was so that the devotees had to put in effort to pray, which is an integral part of the Hindu faith.

Travel Light

You should travel as lightly as possible, that way you don’t have to worry about how to carry your luggage. Jani and Me usually just take a backpack each (Unless I need to have formal clothes for meetings etc in which case I carry a suitcase), that way it is easy to carry and it leaves your hands free for other things. My rule of thumb is that in a pinch you should be able to carry all your luggage yourself.

Once we stayed at a home stay where the only way to get there was by a small path and we all had to carry our own luggage. Me and Jani didn’t have an issue because we both had backpacks but another person in the group had this massive suitcase that they couldn’t carry down. In the end a few of the others in the group had to carry it down (and then back up when returning). It was not fun for anyone.

Maps

Save offline copies of Goggle Maps on your phone so you don’t get stuck when you don’t have a signal.

Don’t worry about taking the perfect picture and just enjoy the moment

When traveling I have seen folks getting stressed about taking the perfect picture that they can post online to show folks how much fun they are having. They end up stressed out and miss out on all the fun and the beauty of the location. I have been guilty of that as well. When we visited Andaman & Nicobar a long time ago, we had just gotten a Camcorder (This was back in 1998) and instead of enjoying the spectacular views I spent most of the time looking at things through the viewfinder. One specific example I remember is when we were on a glass bottom boat and the entire time I was on the camcorder, since the internal display was black and white I didn’t even see any of the colorful fishes in the see. For me it was all black and white.

In my opinion, actually having fun is more important than showing others that you are having fun.

Well this is all now now, I am sure I will remember more tips once I publish this post and if I have enough additional topics I will create a follow up post.

– Suramya

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