Skip to main content

Stirling retreat


A well deserved outing out of Glasgow, after three and a half months here saw me and the mates going to Stirling, a city, well, a very small city an hours drive from here. Not that we could have chosen a better day for the trip, the mercury plummetted to a bone chilling -5C!
(Pic:In an animated discussion with his royal highness while the jester looks on)
The main attraction of Stirling, the Stirling Castle, the place of cornation of the legandary Queen of Scotts, and witness to the wars faught by the Scottish heros William Wallace and Robert the Bruce against their English counterparts. The scenic beauty of the palace took us a while to absorb, so did the entry fee to the castle (still not recovered from it)!

Well, it brings me back to our roots, as Indians. Not that we didn't build castles and forts similar to this one if not better, my point focusses on our stingy attitude. Having paid the amount for the castle entry, we cribbed on the fact whether we should pay an additional sum for taking an audio tour, which inevitably, we didn't. Then throughout the trip, we ate each others heads off going on whether it was actually William Wallace who was the king who poisoned his servant to check the authenticity of the mysterious unicorns tusk or someone else and why did he not use it as a battle sword in the first place against King George of England! I guess the audio extra would have put us out of our misery!


Anyways, the golden rule is that, you will find Indians all over the place, and even in the remote city of Stirling, we managed to find an Indian restraunt where we decided to lunch!


Back to Glasgow in the evening, I think it was a fair trip all things considered although I don't think I will ever visit a castle in the near future, not without an audio tour atleast!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Enterprise

The dictionary defines an Entrepreneur as one who undertakes innovations using business, technical and financial acumen to transform them into viable economic goods, or revitalizing and adding value to an organization. It has to be understood that each and every one has an entrepreneurial bent of mind embedded within us. Most of us do not realize that we unknowingly practice this in our day to day lives through finding an innovative solution at home thus saving time or money, or being 'Intrapreneurs' at work, constantly coming up with methods and processes which would be of benefit to the company and the client. I had the opportunity to attend TiECon-2012 (flagship event of the 'The Indus Entrepreneurs' group) held in the last week of September. The primary focus of the event was to bring together like minded individuals from a multitude of business, financial and technological backgrounds to network, share thoughts and ideologies, learn the art of pro-activeness, un...

Revisiting the blog-o-sphere

Its been a while since I logged on and updated my blog, you may say that for a while I almost forgot that I had one. Anyway, here I am, fit and well since my last post nearly half an year ago! What sparked me to put up an update today was a letter from Google which I received yesterday, BY POST. The weirdness of the fact that Google actually sends mails by post was somehow inconceivable to me! They are apparently offering me Rs.2500 worth of free advertising to make my blog more of a happening place in terms of number of viewers! As always, I have my reasons for not blogging as much as I should. Main reasons are my two recent purchases. A sudden attraction of technology made me go in for the iPod Touch 3G 32GB late last year and more recently an Android HTC Sense Hero. I attribute these devices to the gradual demise of my blog. So is the comfort of these devices that my overall usage of my laptop has gone down! Rolling out of bed in the morning, just press a wee key on the Touch, get m...

Understanding the job

Working with a product company, one of the bigger dilemmas facing the Product team is what to build based on the backlog of product items. Listening to a Harvard lecture podcast online recently, I came across a concept which helped me clear this dilemma. It simply asks a question- what is the job that your product is hired to perform? Ideas for the product you are building can come through various routes. We're going to lose this customer if we don't incorporate this now, this is something the CEO really wants to see in the product, it's been sitting in the backlog forever etc. But a very good way to go about prioritizing what goes into the product is to find the answer to the question- what is the job that your product is hired to perform? Imagine the product to be an employee who is hired for a particular profile. Now there are certain roles and responsibilities or KPI's which will define whether this employee is fit for the post. The same logic will apply to the p...