Things to Do in Hong Kong - A Guide

I recently visited Hong Kong and thought it will be helpful to share some of my learnings here for future visitors. Here goes:

Immigration:
I did not have a good time here and was called aside for questioning like many other Indians. It was also not a good idea to carry my old passport because that only made them do more checks and make me wait longer. But I guess they are doing their duty so would be best to be prepared with as many proofs as possible. So do carry print outs of your return ticket, hotel reservations, and even carrying your company ID might help since they want to know if you have a stable employment back home and less incentive to stay on there. They will ask in detail about your itinerary too....nothing to worry about though! It was visa on arrival for us but if you are an Indian going to HK after 23rd January then you need to apply for visa beforehand.

Local Travel:
This is one of the best parts of HK. They have a well connected Metro system and we did all our travelling through it. Just Google to find your nearest entry into the Metro system and once you get in, you will find maps which show you all the lines and how you can get to the station you want. Even travelling to and from airport can be done through Metro or bus. Get yourself an Octopus card at HK airport which you can swipe at the Metro, buses, and even shops. The people in HK are not very helpful with directions (probably also because of a language problem) so you will really need Google maps and I recommend getting a SIM card with a data plan, And Google has information on all the important places so no worries there.

Food:
Getting vegetarian food in HK is not impossible. You can research in advance about it since there are some Indian restaurants (like Sangeetha) and some local vegetarian restaurants (definitely try M-Garden which has very good food!). You can also get vegetarian pizza/ risotto in Pizza Hut or an egg and cheese burger/ mushroom and corn soup in McDonalds. Do try the milk tea in the small juice shops...they are pretty good. Also, it always helps to carry some snacks from India like cakes, biscuits, and cup noodles. I had even taken Tetley tea bags because no respectable Indian can live without kadak chai :D (branded sugar and milk powder packets can be carried along though would avoid loose ones)

Weather:
Winter in HK can be really cold, especially if you are visiting places at a height like Victoria Peak and Lantau Island Buddha. More than the temperature, it is the chilly winds so do be prepared with scarves in addition to a thick jacket.

Shopping:
HK is a shopper's paradise when it comes to chic and reasonably priced clothes :D Definitely visit the Ladies market which has a lot of variety of stuff at reasonable prices. But you need to really bargain there and you can start with 1/3rd of the initial price :D It starts closing after 10 so try to go before. Temple Street market is ok too and there were many small 50 HKD shops (where all items are priced at 50 HKD) in Mong Kok which had really nice tops, skirts, and sweaters. Skirts especially are really cute there and I got two for 50 HKD each which is great even by India standards! People there also specialize in cute animal printed clothes so I got a very very cute and kiddish teddy bear night suit :D

Places I Visited:

• Nan Lian Garden and Chi Lin Nunnery - It was a nice serene place with a well groomed garden.The nunnery itself is rather hidden behind a flight of stairs that don't look very important so don't end up missing it because it's really beautiful. The statues of God were beautiful and I really liked the inscriptions in front of the rocks which were profound and poetic. One of the highlights of this place is the vegetarian restaurant which has nice and mild vegetarian dishes (only they require each person to order for a minimum of 50 HKD)
• Victoria Peak - This is a high viewing point giving a great view of HK and its tall. shiny buildings. In this regard, Christmas and New Year are a great time to travel because everything is so lit up and decorated. You can totally experience the Christmassy feeling everywhere and they have lovely flavours like Gingerbread coffee in McDonalds and Starbucks at this time. You can take the tram to go up to the top but the queue was too much so we took a cab both ways which was only 50 HKD one way. And all cabs are supposed to run on meter so dont let any cab drivers fool you (one guy quoted 480 HKD one way for the cab -_-)
• Disneyland - This warrants a separate section by itself and will give the details there :)
• Lantau Island Buddha - This is also a must-go because I don't know of anything similar anywhere else in the world (except the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro). We took the crystal cable car which has a glass floor. It was totally, totally worth the extra price and to save a bit, you can just take it one-way and return by bus (bus no. 23 will take you from the hill top to the metro). The trip by cable car was beautiful with the serene mountains and water and the first view of the Buddha sitting towering on the hill top was almost surreal. The ride is approximately 30 mins and you can also view the airport on one side. This was one of the highlights of the trip for me.

Disneyland:

Disneyland was Disneyland and no more to be said! A long time dream fulfilled :) But if you really want to make the most of it, do plan your day in advance. Thanks to my friend delegating this task to me, I went through all the attractions and events and prioritized them based on our interest and their popularity. It is better to visit the popular rides like Hyperspace Mountain and Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars in the morning as queues grow long in the afternoon when more people arrive. You can buy the tickets online with a validity of 6 months. It would also be useful to download the HK Disneyland app as it has a more easy-to-read map than the one available there which is very confusing. The app will also give real-time updates on the estimated wait time for the different rides and which characters you can meet in the vicinity. 

There are mainly three things to do in Disneyland: visit the attractions, attend the events, and meet Disney characters. Below are the top attractions and events that are a must-visit (though this is not an exhaustive list and may differ based on your interests):

• Hyperspace Mountain - This is like a mini roller coaster ride through outer space. I enjoyed this the most and it is a must-go for space buffs!
• Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars - This is also a mini roller coaster with some wonderful surprises :) Apparently this Disneyland is meant mainly for kids so none of the rides are too scary or puky :D This and the previous ride are quite popular so definitely visit them as soon as possible
• Mystic Manor - This is a trackless ride with some wonderful illusions and creative surprises. One of the best rides there!
• Buzz Lightyear Astro Blaster - This is a fun ride with laser guns to shoot targets on the walls
• The Many Adventures of Winne the Pooh - A cute little ride which a simple story of Winne the Pooh and some 4D features
• Lion King Musical - I was going to skip this but thankfully we went. It was brilliantly done and the performers are very good. It is a re-telling of the first Lion King movie with human performers and some singing, dancing, and acrobatics. Definitely worth a watch and better to be there half an hour before it starts (shows are at 2 pm and 4.30 pm)
• Parachute Drop in Toy Story Land - This looked like fun but I didn't try it
• it's a small world - This is a very cute boat ride passing by toys of singing children from all over the world. Very colourful and must-go for the unique Disneyland feel! Less of a thrill ride and more for the colours.
• Disneyland parade - There is a parade at 3.00 pm and one at 7.30 pm. I attended the latter and it was really. That's where you really feel like Disneyland so definitely attend atleast one!
• Disney in the Stars Fireworks - This is a 15 min fireworks show at 9.00 pm and it takes place above the Sleeping Beauty Castle. To get a great view, try to find a spot straight ahead of the castle (on the street itself). We stood on the pavement to the right of the castle and some of the view was blocked by a tree!

Definitely do a thorough research of your own from the website on which attractions you want to visit. 

An Interesting Day

Today was a very interesting day because I got to witness two very low probability events:

(1) Me and my colleague had booked Uber to go home and the cab number was 7418. When we came outside, we found a car with the number 7419 waiting there and it was just a random private car that happened to have that number....what were the odds of that happening! Let's see, it would be 1/10000 (just read that P(B/A) = P(B) if events A and B are independent).

(2) During my morning walk today (which by itself is a low probability event), I came across this dog I see everyday and thought it was high time to name it. For some reason, I thought of the name Bonzo for it which surprised me that time too since it was not the kind of name I think of for dogs and didn't have any recent reference from where it could have popped up. Then later in office, when I opened the timepass walla paper to read today's Calvin & Hobbes, guess what I found (look at the last panel):

So cool, isn't it! :D


UPDATE: Today also I had two very low probability events happening around me! So I now have a new Douglas Adams-like scientific theory that there are sometimes ripples in the space-time 'fabric' which make it tilt in the favour of low probability events and so at such times, you see many low probability events happening ;)

What Matters Most to Me

I recently had a bit of a health scare (thanks mostly to my hyperactive imagination) and honestly thought this could be the twilight of my life (I love that phrase!). While my reports came all clear, I was really thankful for this experience because it gave me a chance to know in advance what things were likely to really bother me on my deathbed :D

Today I read this TED Talk by Ric Elias where he talks about how being in a near-fatal plane crash made him realize what was truly important to him. You can see the talk here and below is an excerpt from it:

"And I'm bawling, I'm crying, like a little kid. And it made all the sense in the world to me. I realized at that point, by connecting those two dots, that the only thing that matters in my life is being a great dad.Above all, above all, the only goal I have in life is to be a good dad.I was given the gift of a miracle, of not dying that day. I was given another gift, which was to be able to see into the future and come back and live differently."

I could totally, totally relate to everything he said. Feeling like you really don't have much time left in the world can give you astounding clarity on what matters most to you, though you may not have realized it!

Here are the two things that mattered most to me then:
(1) I wanted to be ok for my family and didn't want them to go through the physical, emotional and financial strain that any problem may bring on. I want to stick around at least till my brother becomes a famous author/filmmaker :D

(2) I want to make a difference to this world, even a tiny bit! That was the one very strong regret I felt then...like I had just squandered all the time given to me that could have been used to make a positive change to others. Apart from a brief volunteering stint with Akanksha which I really enjoyed, I have not done anything except monetary donations. I never thought this mattered to me so much but now I know it is going to: perhaps more than personal achievements or experiences even.

I am putting this down here because I don't want to forget it and go back to my old lazy, scared-to-get-out-of-comfort-zone-and-what-will-happen-to-me ways. I have registered to be a TFI volunteer and will follow up with them in the coming week. Hope I do make this a turning point that leads me to a fulfilling life! :)

My role models in this regard are:

• JRD Tata
• Shaheen Mistri, Founder of Akanksha and Teach for India
• Walt Disney

Especially the first two who have many similarities too: both are Parsis for one (a wonderful community who have done much for India); both had very privileged backgrounds and absolutely no need to care for others but chose to do so; both largely owe their foundations to other countries as they didn't spend much of their childhood in India and yet they had this strong drive to do something for this country; and finally, both represent this wonderful combination of excellence balanced with humanity. I love them both for how they have chosen to live their life and the example they have set for many, many people!

I also have a role model closer to my life: one of my best friends Janani! I know for sure I can never do the selfless and super-brave things she is doing but seeing her really helps me get a little more unselfish and braver every time :)

So let me take a leaf out of their books and begin some good work soon! God bless!

The Rationality Behind Rationality

It seems that science is the new religion that is to be followed by everyone in order to be considered educated and not to be questioned for fear of looking stupid. Though I have personally always liked this subject most, it is still just one of the many subjects of study and there is no reason why it should be held above the others (except medical science!). If anything, culinary science has done the most for the betterment of human life than any other kind of knowledge ;)

This supreme importance accorded to science and technology is largely a western notion that we have adopted blindly. We even define the countries of the world as 'developed' or 'developing' based on how industrialised they are. I don't agree with this though! Is the measure of humanity really how much we have progressed technologically? Why should that be so? Is purely being able to know more and do more important and not what you do with what you know? I say this is a western measure because it was only the West that had any real need for industrialisation because of the kind of climate they lived in. If the eastern civilisations did not make technological progress, it was because their climates were perfectly fine for a fairly decent lifestyle and they had the good sense not to shake things up unnecessarily :D Medical science I really respect and it is true that it would not be possible to this extent without the support of technology. But again, have we really solved more problems than we have created? If you ask me, the state of a civilization should be measured by its wisdom and not its knowledge because knowledge without wisdom just becomes the meaningless privilege of a few.

Another reason why I don't agree with confining oneself fully in the boundaries of science is because we have not really explored its full extent. It's perfectly ok if you wish to believe only in things that are scientifically proven but no one can confidently dismiss the rest as impossible because we really don't know. Proof of any sort is limited by our powers of perception and inference (as well pointed out in Sri Sai Satcharitra). A blind man may well mock at a person with sight for talking about colors; this is no different! 

Even what we are seeing of the universe may just be a portion of it viewed from limited dimensions. A person viewing a building from the top will see it very differently (a 2D version) than a person anywhere else who will see the real 3D version. So the universe we perceive may just be a 2D version for all we know. What I am trying to say here is, let's stop pretending we really have a clue about anything :D That is why it's also a little funny how we cling to present societal norms and standards as being the ultimate guidebook on how to be a proper human being. We confidently assert that by 30 you should get married and by 33 have kids because that is how it is done, when the fact is that not too far in the past, people practised polygamy and child marriage! It's ironical how we consider the present norms will last forever when the society is changing so drastically, so rapidly. It's also ironical how we think we or our identity and memory will last forever ;)

It is a similar irony that I see in the attempt to be rational. Sure, let's be rational and objective and believe only in things that can be verified through experiments and instruments. But do you wonder who is it that's being rational here? Can your consciousness and your untold thoughts ever be proved scientifically? Should we not disbelieve in them then? Yet you know they exist! The world sure is a strange place :)

The Information Age Paradox

While learning about a 'perfect market' during my MBA, I always thought of it as a distant ideal that will not likely materialize. But it seems that, in one aspect atleast, we are close to getting there: an almost complete information transparency and instant access to information anytime and anywhere (do check out the book Profit Power Economics by Mia de Kuijper where she talks about this).

However, the funny thing is that with all the unlimited information out there, we are now having to narrow our access to information ourselves, leading to a narrower view of the world in some ways. Take movies for example: the only access I had earlier was through the TV and was compelled to choose among the movies broadcast by the channels I had, which was a more heterogeneous set. This allowed me to stumble upon some really good movies which were not necessarily famous and ones I would look for. But now that we have so many channels and can access pretty much any movie made in the world, I end up looking for the more famous ones and my viewing has restricted to that. This homogeneity of information consumption is also aggravated by the personalization that websites are having to do to share material that is more relevant to you. While I might want to view perspectives on a topic from a different country or from all over the world, my Google search results will first show me what it thinks I would want based on who/where I am (and who has the patience to go pages 6,7 etc. :D).

Another way in which this era is restricting our world view is by slowly making our exposure to the social world primarily virtual, where we only have people like us to look at and compare with. My own life here in the newer part of the city is like living in one massive hotel full of young professionals and the people who enable their lives (maids, auto/cab drivers, supermarket assistants etc.). Though these other people are from different strata of society, we don't really get to see their human side, just their professional/service side. So my life is kind of restricted to a tunnel between home and office and then what I see of the world on social media once I am back home. This gives me a rather narrow view of the world and the range of things it contains (except for those nice articles people share many times :D). This is why a lot of people from my generation end up not realizing how really privileged we are and feel like they are not keeping up with all the awesome milestones of life that everyone else is achieving hehe. This is also why I like going to Mumbai and getting a good refresher now and then...there the city is not so different in different parts and I get to see all kinds of people and things everywhere!

Apart from information transparency, another trend seen in the Information Age is the democratization of information. History is no longer written only by the victors but by any person with a PC/tablet/mobile and a good internet connection :D I pity the future human civilizations who will have to sift through sooo much information and wonder what really happened in our time! This trend also makes it easy to 'create history'. After watching Conjuring 2, I immediately wanted to look up the Enfield hauntings and whether they really happened or not. All I used to make this judgement was if some 3-4 articles on it turned up on a Google search, irrespective of who the source was. So with some good planning, if a group of people post some 'news' at the appropriate dates and with some reasonably authentic-looking pictures, it wouldn't be hard for them to convince the masses like me that the event really happened (unless it can easily be proved otherwise).

This makes one wonder if more information is really getting us closer to truth or just further away from it! 

Learnings from the Satcharitra

Sri Sai Satcharitra is one of the most popular biographies of Sai Baba, written by Govind Raghunath Dabholkar ('Hemadpant'). People often do a 'Saptah' (reading within one week) of this book for special prayers or just because it is generally good. I had read the Satcharitra chapter-wise many times before but it was only during one Saptah I did that I realized that this book, very simply and beautifully, explains what I think is the crux of Hindu spiritual philosophy. I am summarizing what I learnt in three points below:

(I) In Hindu spiritual philosophy, it is said that there is one single, universal soul or Atma (called the 'Self') that exists in all beings. What is this Self? Barring your name and form, there exists a sense of being or consciousness of existence within you. This is the Self and once we realize it within ourselves, we can see it in other beings as well, eliminating all sense of differentiation (not so easy as it sounds! :D)

(2) So how do we know or realize this Self? What Sai Baba says is you already know it but this knowledge is buried deep within layers of ignorance accumulated over lifetimes. This ignorance exists in the form of the strong sense of identity or ego that we develop, which makes us think of ourselves as a feeble human being with limitations. We bind ourselves to the present identity we have taken birth in, give it a lot of importance, and take actions based on it, thus experiencing joy and sorrow etc. So what is needed is not gaining of any specific knowledge but rooting out of this ignorance that we are nothing but the identity of our present birth

(3) How do we go about destroying this ignorance? As said before, the ignorance arises from the strong sense of identity or ego we possess. So to root out this ignorance, we need to quell the ego. This can be done by surrendering our ego to our Guru or building your spirit consciousness. You see, we humans have two kinds of consciousness: sensual and spiritual. When our mind and senses meet the external sense objects, we experience the sensual consciousness which results in pleasure, pain etc. But when our mind and senses are withdrawn from the outside sense-objects, introverted, and fixed on the Self within, we experience spiritual consciousness. Through meditation on the Self, we can develop this spiritual consciousness over sensual consciousness. This will help us avoid forming more impressions through our actions that will add to the layers of ignorance that are clouding out our realization of the Self.

This is what I could understand from the English translation of the Satcharitra by N.V. Gunaji (a wonderful, must-read book!). I know this post kind of exposes me to the ridicule of people who are rationalists as well as spiritual people with far more knowledge on this topic than me :D It seems crazy to think that all that vast philosophy, on which thousands of books have been written, can be summarized into three points in a blog post! I don't pretend to know or understand it all but am just attempting to put down whatever understanding I got and think worth being shared.

Happy New Year, folks!

Now, there are two kinds of new year messages doing the rounds:
(a) The type that wishes that good things like prosperity etc come to you
(b) The type that motivates you to resolve to think positive and choose to be happy and productive

Being the fatalist that I am, I definitely wish you the first type but it's the second type that I liked more to see! Because I think it gets you closer to that happy new year we hope for at the start of every year :D Here are my pearls of wisdom for a happy new year: stop pursuing happiness and don't expect life to be happy. I know it sounds rather depressing but from my learning and experience, these are two things that can guarantee happiness. Otherwise, we spend way too much time wondering whether we are happy or not as defined by society/culture (and society/culture will always make you believe you are not!). We make happiness our obligation towards society and try to fit it in boxes shaped by them. Stop wasting time and start being happy! There is generally not much reason not to be happy so why put it off, eh?

I began my year on a good note with Umberto D. It's a very cute Italian movie from during the neo-realist movement in Italian cinema it seems. So the acting and drama was understated and closer to reality. And the lead actor was not a professional actor! :O He was just too good and so convincing with his despair and helplessness. I had watched it just for the dog but later came to know that the movie is critically acclaimed. The most touching moments in the movie were when Umberto tries to find a home for Flike before taking his own life: when he gives all his life's belongings at the dog boarding house knowing he's never going to need them, when he tries to quietly slip away as Flike starts playing with some children (the sorrow with which he looks at Flike then!his only family in the world) and when Flike comes searching after him. The lack of melodrama makes his love for the dog look a lot more genuine and touching. Absolute must-watch movie!This is why I miss TV...I would stumble upon some good movies and shows though they were not so popular(thanks to that UTV World Movies channel).

Anyway, have a fun year!