Finding the right words by Amrita Das

[Amrita Das a travel blogger and a freelance travel writer. She quit her corporate job to travel and explore the world. She moves to any place that allows her to travel and explore the off-beat path, volunteers to understand the various ways of sustainable living, and loves outdoor adventure. She travels solo to meet strangers as friends.

She has travelled across twenty states in India and has briefly explored Nepal, Switzerland, Italy and Paris. She aims to "get as many stamps on my passport because life is too short and there are too many stories to hear!"

Hear what she has to say about the many vectors of search a traveler has to face, and how finding the right search engine is as important as enjoying your vacation itself!]

Planning the next travel is a big decision. Even a bigger one than ‘do you want to mortgage a house?’ Well, at least for me.

Once I have booked my transport to and from the place, my next step is usually to select an accommodation. Depending on what I will be doing in the destination, I prioritise my accommodation. For instance travelling to Coorg was synonymous to staying in a rainforest and here my place of stay had become a crucial part of my search. However, when looking at something Goa, I am more open to options. My search, hence, depends more on my focus on the activity.

And even though search engines like Google are great in showing up the best results, I suppose I have to be quite specific with my keywords. If I am looking at ‘restaurants in Panjim’, I must type those. As a traveller, it may work better for me if my search engine shows up customised searches by itself. With a variety of essential and basic keywords to choose from, planning and researching over a destination becomes more focussed and easier.

Take for example my recent visit to Darjeeling where I was solely researching on the Sandakphu Trek. I intended to do the trek all by myself and spent unnecessary hours examining through millions of words on cyberspace to check if this could be possible. Finding information such as ‘solo friendly’ or ‘travel alone’ should be viable options in today’s day and age. After all, travelling solo is a quick trend that’s catching up the travel industry already. Nonetheless, specific keywords like adventure, trek or geographic locations like Darjeeling, NorthEast India; only help minimise time and effort while putting together a good suitable travel plan.

As explorers, we’d rather be lost on unknown turns of physical space than feel hapless amidst unknown words of cyberspace.

Wildlife Photography: Chat with Anuroop Krishnan

[Anuroop Krishnan is a marketer by profession, who grew up in Bangalore and is currently based out of Gurgaon. He has traveled extensively across the country and has experienced wildlife through photography. He loves to document the not so well known forms of life, which exist in the same places as we do; or in the same places we travel to. He tries to depict subjects in their natural surroundings, in an endeavor to build the significance of habitats and their conservation among people who view his images.

Anuroop has been photographing wildlife for over eight years now. His photograph of the Chinkara (Indian Gazelle) was recently published on the cover of the Sanctuary Asia Cub magazine. An earlier image of a tigress was published on the back cover of the same magazine. He has also been featured in the Better Photography magazine’s expert panel, and has shared his views on wildlife photography.]

Imagine waking up to birds chirping, a stream gurgling and a thick cover of green enveloping you in its sweet embrace. If this scene intrigues you, then a wildlife reserve getaway is exactly what you need. While you're there, it is only natural that you want to capture this unending beauty on your camera lens, so that you can revisit this slice of heaven when city life wears you down the next time.

FMC is right here to help, read on as we chat with wildlife photographer Anuroop Krishnan as he shares insights into nature and photography. Appreciating natural history is the key to enjoying your visit to a wildlife reserve as well as capturing images to last a lifetime.

[FMC]: What are the national parks you have been to?
[Anuroop]: India wildlife reserves offers a wide range of experiences throughout the year. Winter is a great time for birds since it brings with it the large number of migratory visitors. The monsoons are a good time for amphibians and reptiles, and the summers are when you queue up to see the big cats. Some of the well-known parks in India which I love to visit are Corbett, Bharatpur, Tadoba, Gir, Rann of Kutch and Kabini. That apart, I love going to some of the place that aren’t very well known  such as Tal Chapar in Rajasthan, Agumbe in Karnataka and Rollapadu in AP.

[FMC]: Can you provide a glimpse into what treasures await us at these parks?
[Anuroop]:

• While Corbett is well known for its tigers, it is also one of the best places in India to photograph elephants which congregate at the Dhikala grassland in summer.
• Bharatpur is well known for its birds.
• Tadoba is well known for its tigers.
• Gir is the only place in the world for the Asiatic lion.
• Rann of Kutch has a variety of desert life such as the foxes, cats, the Indian wild ass, hyenas and a large number of birds.
• Kabini is well known for its leopards, and a boat ride in summer is a must to see large elephant congregations, otters and birds.

[FMC]: To be responsible travelers, what dos and don'ts should we follow when we visit these parks?
[Anuroop]: Firstly we need to understand and respect the fact that nature operates at its own will and pace. The fact that we have taken time off to visit a nature reserve means nothing to a tiger or an elephant in the reserve. We need to understand that us going to a place does not assure us of a sighting of what we want to see. That being said, there is always something on offer - birds, butterflies, a large number of amphibians and reptiles. While we head to a park to see a tiger or a leopard, we must also appreciate everything else that is on offer.

Secondly, we need to behave in a way that does not startle or scare animals. While in the park we must not make noise. We must also not leave behind anything more than our footsteps. We must allow the animals the space they need to  carry on with their lives, and be silent spectators.

[FMC]: To be responsible photographers, what dos and don'ts should we follow when we visit these reserves?
[Anuroop]: Lately, there seems to be a growing notion that photography in general is harmful to wildlife. The fact that a large number of photographers are worried about getting the shot alone, with a complete disregard for the animal they are shooting, has led to this belief. I think it is important to keep in mind that as photographers we are intruding into an animal's world, and therefore, we must give it the time and distance in needs to grow its tolerance towards us. A lot of times we try to go in too close too quickly, and end up stressing animals; which is why understanding all that you can about the animal you are shooting becomes important. Each species and every individual has its own  level of tolerance towards people.

[FMC]: What’s next on your agenda? Why?
[Anuroop]: I am headed to Valparai, near Coimbatore in October hoping to see the Lion-tailed macaques. This highly endangered species is endemic to the Western Ghats, and Valparai is one of the places where they are seen often.

Anuroop's recent achievements:
●        Photographer of the Year in the Macro category, (organized by the Better Photography Magazine) in 2012 for the Photographer of the Year title, travelled to Kenya for the final face-off round.
●        Finishing in top 50 in the Pixel Perfect competition by Saevus in 2013
●        Winner of Wildclicks in 2012, a live photography contest

Click HERE for Anuroop's website.
Follow Anuroop on Facebook HERE.

Darr ke aage, jeet hai

Translated verbatim, the title means Beyond fear, lies success.

When we started conceptualizing and working on FindMyCarrots, getting things to work in India for Indian locations was more than a pipe dream. We started off with the success of one query here, a second there. In between, were umpteen grimaces. I remember a few occasions, when one of us had passed out on our laptop thinking why a query failed, woke up with splitting headache and attributed the cause of the headache to wrong understanding of a query by the FmC engine running inside us.
When we started working on the US launch a month back and gave ourselves a couple months to complete, we were apprehensive, again. We were scared to try getting US online in such a short time.

But deep inside, we believed we had the building blocks to achieve it. So, when we started aiming for the 2 month period, and achieved significant success in the first week itself, we became bold. We started to look at what lay ahead of the fear - support of US information on FmC, something that could have only been referred to as fantasy when we started. This is what is so interesting in building FmC 1 small piece at a time. It takes you over, completely, to the point of becoming the cause for your physical pain in your mind. But beyond that pain lies ecstasy and beyond that, perhaps, success!!

Butterflies in our stomach...

It has been a long drawn week - the last one, as well. We have been trying to get everything in place for the forthcoming US launch. Testing and finding issues were, at times, getting under our skin. Getting fixes ready, telling the world that we will be serving information about places of interest in the USA is just the tip of the iceberg. There are umpteen other stuff that I cannot recollect that has been going on. All to make sure everything goes well as per plan. When you are at the eye of the storm, all seems peaceful, life moves in super slowmo and you tend to feel that sense of calm, because all that you can look at when you lift the head is more things to do.

Now that we are almost ready and are cleaning up after what was madness, the madness is starting to take hold of us. The uncertainty of what will happen when US destinations become available on FmC, is killing. It is like the night before your kid goes out to school for the first time. You are thrilled at the fact that she has grown up to go to school. But at the same time, there are umpteen things going through your mind that can go wrong. You run over everything that was to be done one last time every few minutes and still cannot get those butterflies out of your stomach.

This is the feeling that you look back to, fondly, when you are way past this stage. These are the small things that make this journey what it is - Enthralling. I hope you like the US carrots we bring to you, as much as we like bringing them.

The grass greener on the other side?..of the pond

A few days back, we made it public to whoever cared to listen, that we have set our sights on crossing the pond. Almost everyone wished us luck. A few expressed astonishment at what seemed audacious to them. Some of them put words to the question in their mind. Are we done with India? Why such a hurry to get to the USA? I believe we owe an answer to all of you.

We are NOT done creating information in India. On the contrary, we have begun a phase where the information creation graph in India is going to hit a plateau. There will be painstaking and time consuming machine training phases where, we will have to spend significant effort and will be able to show small, incremental but fine grained progress. But the learning that we have had so far in creating information out of data in India is now ready to be replicated. We want the machines to help create information in the USA while we spend time training it further up in India.  Hence, we have kicked off the information build up on the greener side of the pond. All that we do every hour we are awake counts for nothing if it is of no use to you, our beloved users. Hence, we have decided to bring FmC to USA to hear and learn from you, feed the learning back into FmC, so, our quest of a little learning every day makes us the automatic option when you want to Dream, Search and Experience your next vacation.

In search of liquid propulsion...

   We attend a few fun(d) raising events to pitch to Angels and early stage VCs, looking for liquid propulsion for our intergalactic launch. Most mortals refer to that as money. Guess what is the most popular rebut to FmC, from the money bags? Big daddies of travel with deep pockets will throw money and solve this problem in a few days and you will be left looking like the idiots that you already are. While we completely agree, that we are utter idiots, we tend to come back and sew together whatever is left of our tattered self-esteem and confidence with this 1 thread.

    There has been no dearth of money in online travel. There has been consistent research reports and opinions from the online travel industry leaders that this is precisely the problem to solve. Hell, some of the big daddies of investment have invested sizeable money into pumping out information from the depths of travel data through some well known startups, both in India and abroad. So, if we have not seen any movement after quite a few years of engine revving, FmC, perhaps, fails to reflect how big an idiot, we are. Perhaps we make this pipe-dream look so real and achievable, it seems money can be thrown to solve it in a few days!! 

There in lies our success, till we succeed in making that intergalactic trip on the spaceship named FmC.

Our Humpty-Dumpty days

Everyday, as we try and build up FmC, we are trying to scale a wall. The wall of our mind where we set limitations on ourselves - about what we can achieve. So, everyday we try to climb this wall, we sit on it for long, staring at what lies on the other side, tentatively, thinking if we can take a plunge. But as you might be expecting, more often than not, we have a great fall in this endeavor and, boy, does it hurt!

The sad part is, no horses or men from the King's cavalry come over to lift us up. Forget that, to add insult to injury, the naysayers and the enlightened of the world heap scorn explaining how stupid we must be to try such improbabilities. After all, who will want to use FmC when the Advisors and the Makers have Clearly won over the Yatra ecosystem of the travelers. But then, when you start digging the earth to mine, you are not expecting results before you started digging. Mining for Carrots is tough and we knew it from the moment we enlisted to go underground for your carrots. Therefore, the self conviction does not erode. The taste of dust in our mouth, we help each other up in the team, shouting out a curse here an expletive there, to give vent to our fury at not having succeeded, but doubling our resolution that the next leap will not be far off and success is just on the other side of the wall...

Proud to be Humpty Dumpty for 30 days of the month. Because we live for the 31st day of the next month, when the naysayers will hide their head in the sand. Let us change the rhyme to:

Humpty Dumpty got up from the fall.. 

Humpty Dumpty scaled the HUGE wall..

Getting the timing right.. Of our US launch..

Perfect timing! That is what transforms a good to sublime. A little too early and our Carrot dish will be under cooked, a little too late and we run the risk of burning up the taste. Hence, choosing when to launch FmC in the USofA is tricky.

As I write this, we are getting the first tastes of US Carrots in our kitchen. And boy, are we loving it! A couple days back, when the first few queries came online in our lab and we saw the map of  USA lit up with our custom pins, we were hyper. We wanted to bring those pins and queries to you, immediately. After all, who does not love a pat on the back? But then, slowly, reality set in. There were some queries that were failing, some information like "hill stations" showing up, which is not in the American vacation-dreaming vocabulary. So, we decided to give ourselves a little more time to scrub up the information and ensure that the learning we have had from query-fixing for Indian vacation-dreaming are used to add the final zing to the US dish. Our ovens are on the full blast and we can almost smell the final delicacy. Hope you love the taste of the readied FmC platter as much as we are loving cooking it.

Introducing the FmC Super Star

Luis Suarez... This goal scoring machine is dominating the World Cup 2014 news, today. And why not? He is the Super Star that transformed a listless Uruguay team that was drubbed by the CostaRicans, to a potent force that has almost ensured the exit of England from the biggest stage of the Beautiful game at such an early stage. Your FmC team boasts of a much bigger Super Star. But unfortunately, I do not have a picture to post for the introduction. And this definitely has nothing to do with hiding our trump card from the competition in the worry that they will offer an astronomical salary and steal our star.

As we get ready to launch FmC in the USofA in the next few days, we have to take our proverbial hats off to this member. We have been at work for this launch for the past fortnight and every day has been a revelation. The quantum of work and the massiveness of the data that we have to handle to bring FmC to USA cannot be fathomed. So, this member's ability to accomplish this herculean task in a matter of weeks, left us dumbstruck. Therefore, it is my pleasure and honor to unveil this star member of our team to the world. 

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the (Artificially) Intelligent Computing Resources of the FmC team. Some are as small as a laptop, while others come to us from the cloud. But whatever form they take, they are the force multipliers that make our dream of making FmC a world-wide phenomenon, a possibility and an unfolding reality.

Tiki-Taka?? Bring it on, says your team

Watching the Dutch team run circles around the Spanish football machine in the 2014 FIFA world cup was unbelievable. Most of the Spanish footballers are maestros, much better known in the footballing world than their Dutch counterparts. And yet, on the pitch, where it mattered, name counted for nothing, what mattered was thinking on feet, execution as a unit.

The FmC team has some of those Dutch traits. Thanks to the self confidence,faith in each other and determination, we do not get overwhelmed by the well known Indian travel giants. If we did, the team would never have started taking the sticks to find you your carrots. We know that the only currency that works in building something new, is if we build something useful that solves some problem.

Its the pride, fun and love for what we do, that ensures that we stick together as a unit to become the dutch team that can upset the tiki-taka of any travel behemoth.

The Days that keep us going..

Building a new product is painstaking even when you know that there is a sales and marketing corps to take it to the customers and help make revenue. If you have to build a product and sell it too, that increases the complication, exponentially. That is the reason, why a typical day in our lives consist of some pretty serious head-scratching sessions. But law-of-average applies to our lives too, and once in a while comes a day, like today, when, we take a break from trying to analyze every bit of south-pointing stats and soak in some happiness.

Telling enough people how FmC can help make discovering their next vacation destination, an experience to enjoy, is tough. We have been trying to tell this story with limited success, for the past few months. Therefore, we chase the master storytellers (the journalists) to tell our story in a way that grabs and keeps a reader's attention. We achieved a major milestone when the revered online journal TechInAsia featured us here: http://www.techinasia.com/findmycarrots/

We are elated, that we could make it to the feature. The number of startups are huge and space available on such journals, limited. That is why it brings a smile to our face. Days like this, shoot some vital energy into our system and keeps us going till we get another shot in the arm. 

We are loving it!!

Blogs... Our lifeline.

Reading, is a wonderful way to get back some sanity in life. So, is wandering to a destination that is "Just right". Without much of a plan, I have merged the two - reading about nice places and learning to identify the next "Just Right" destination for my family and me. Blogs from people, therefore, are godsend. But the reality is brutal. Reading blogs and daydreaming, in the process, can grow to fill our entire day and can bring in stress at having not worked much. How nice would it be, if someone could read up blogs for us and tell us which of the blogs provide the information that we are looking for. We then, can have our cake and eat it too.. The information we desire and the read of a few blogs in between work, to relax and refocus.

This is precisely what drove us. Desperate to make the right decision and still not wanting to spend the time that it required, made us turn to the only friend we know who could deliver - our computer. FindMyCarrots is all about making information from data - and that is exactly what we were looking at FmC to deliver from blogs. We were unsure, but gave it our first decent moonshot at the Tnooz hackathon. 2 days of mad coding later, the basic functionality of understanding blogs automatically, worked and we were happy. However, the training that our machines needed was big and the "quality control", we humans had to put the machines through was long and arduous. 

But as they say, good things happen to those who wait, but better things come to those who hustle. We hustled our machines through the learning process, and here we are today bringing you information gleaned from blogs that some of your fellow travelers write. We are eager to know what you think about this endeavor. Tell us. We are listening, intently... 

We fight, therefore we are... fanatics!!

Building FindMyCarrots one excruciatingly small step at a time, is painstaking. Behind every dragged circle to get more results, every blog that adds value to a destination, are countless hours of, well,  fights!! The 3 nuts that take all the sticks to find your carrots, are opinionated, to the point of being fanatics.

Well, that is to be expected. If we did not believe in our ideas, so overwhelmingly, a small whiff of doubt would have sent us back, packing to our day jobs. The reason, why we are still able to get up every morning, and believe we will turn the world of travel on its head, is because we are fanatics. And there is obvious fallout from it.. The FIGHTS!

These fights ensure, only the best of our umpteen ideas survive and see implementation. However, when there are no clear proof or overwhelmingly supportive data to go by, we iterate and try to look at data to define the direction of iteration. So far we have moved using each fight as the source of our inspiration. We love these mental and verbal duels. They keep us planted and focused. Be our referee. Tell us how you feel we are doing and help us decisively in these fights...

A Drive through Heaven

We approach the blue gate with sky high expectation. We have chosen the time with lots of care. Even then, the odds are pretty high that we might not see the Lord in his heaven.
The customary entry has to be made in the entry logs. We are asked to specify our source and destination, The sentinels of this heaven will NOT accept that this drive is indeed our ultimate destination and source of all the inspiration to wake up the 2 sleeping kids early in the morning, pack up and leave home. After understanding the futility of our effort at truth-speaking, we put in Hunsur as the source and Kutta as the destination - the 2 mortal habitats that lie at either ends of this heaven.
The gate opens and so do our bags. Cameras, binoculars on the ready, we slowly drive in. I even take the car key out of the key fob, so as to avoid the noise of the fob hitting the steering column. We are not about to give the Lord an alibi for a no-show. Not that he is answerable to us!!
We enter a completely dry paradise. What you would expect to see in extreme winters is what we see here in the middle of what has been a punishing summer. Trees standing tall and bald, bereft of any greenery. Stare at the woods for long and the subtle change of hue from bottom to top give the illusion of smoke rising up. Never before have I seen anything as brutally beautiful. To sink it all in, we stop the car. The silence around, is deafening! 4 pairs of eyes scan every visible part of the geography for any sign of the Lord. A deafening peafowl startles us out of our stupor. We start rolling again.
The road is poor! Broken surface and narrow. But instead of complaining, we thank our stars. We will be driving way below the 30kmph speed limit of the heaven, ensuring a longer passage and hopefully, a better shot at the moksha. Helping us immensely in our desire to kill the speed are umpteen adrenalin pumping blind turns. Nope! We are not taking them at full speed and coming out with a wide grin at having hit the apex. Instead, we approach each such turn with a wide grin and expectation that our Lord is waiting at the other side.
We have chosen this time of the year with great care. A very reliable source had counselled us on our last visit during the monsoons that the odds of seeing the Lord significantly improves during summer. Watering holes dry up deep inside. Therefore, His Highness descends down closer to mere mortals. The woods around, seem  to suggest that we have timed our visit to perfection.
We drive on for a couple of kms through this parched landscape. What started off as an elation at the realization that we have perhaps chosen the right time, was slowly giving way to frustration. We have not yet spotted even the pedestrians of the heaven - the Chitals (Spotted deer). All we have seen is lifelessness and heard is silence, broken by the occasional scream of a peafowl or chirping of an unknown bird.
With prayer on our lips and still some hope in our hearts we turn yet another blind corner and freeze. About 40 feet away on the side of the road is an elephant, busy plucking leaves from the nearby trees! Leaves!! In our single minded focus on spotting the lord, we have not noticed that the surroundings have become significantly more green. Close in a little more on the towering giant and we notice that its a tusker. We are about to stop next to it, when my navigator (our 8 year old son) reminds me of the jungle driving rule we had both learned from this wise man of the jungle. When you spot an elephant in the jungle never stop till you have crossed it. Ensures an easy getaway, if the giant decided to get irritated by your presence and reacted in any way other than melting into the forest. Thereafter, we get lost in what we get to see. Never before have we seen or heard about a tusker with opposite tusks. Normally, both the tusks point outwards. But for this giant, 1 tusk was pointing inwards towards itself. In between its leaf plucking, it turns towards us, and we are mesmerized by this majestic creature standing face to face about 10 feet away. While we were experiencing National Geographic in real life, I was entrusted with the responsibility of watching the other side of the road for other mates of this giant. Elephants are known to go around in herds and if there are other members on the other side, there is a possibility of getting into a sticky situation if we get too mesmerized with the unfolding prime-time show. We were just starting to whisper how lucky we have gotten, when I spot a movement in front from the corner of my eye. Oops! Its an oncoming vehicle, approaching pretty fast. Once it gets closer, its clear the driver was after something much more important than a real life TV show. The vehicle passes on through the blind turn and disappears, leaving us to continue our experience. After some flying kisses from the kids for having treated us to such a show, our giant friend decides, he has had enough of the homo sapians and starts to slowly walk into the jungle.
This was well beyond our imagination. If morning shows the day, the day holds major promise...

We never intended to take on the Big guns. The David can never take on the Goliath. Can we?

It has been a crazy few months!! We have been cooking all the dishes we promised. The flight semantic has been out for a few weeks now, and you seem to like what we do with your queries. Hotel semantics is also on the stove. Bottom line, we have had all of the cooks in the kitchen and the broth still looks amazingly carrot-y and definitely not spoilt.
So, what makes this cook drop the utensils and get back to the word processor, you may ask. Desire to atone for a HUGE mistake. Interesting? Well, for us, it is shattering.
The god of travel semantics in India has taken strong exception to us.
The following, was mentioned about us, the minnows, in comparison to the god in one of the story books that specializes on Pandas, the cuddly little mere mortal creature :
"<The God> which is partly managed by <The Even Bigger God> offers semantics but not at level which <the Minnows>  intends".
And the <Narad> had to take this statement out from this story as per the Gods' desire. Guess, the minnows, were asking for too much - a comparison to the Gods as the benchmark.
Here's our heartfelt apologies, for even aspiring to be compared to you, oh mighty lord!! We sinned. But we understand what we have done. And here is our atonement...
We promise to let the mortals treat you as the lords that you are. We will not aspire to use you as the benchmark, for the mortals already know the truth, that you are the lords. 
We will keep cooking awesome carrot dishes and serve it up as the best attraction of the festival where you, the gods, are prayed to..
Happy Carroting!!


--Enemy-Just-In-Time