EY 26

You could call this an extraordinarily rich year.

First, as soon as I got my hands on my MTB, I decided I was never going to entrust it to the hands of an unskilled mechanic. It's been over a year since I bought the cycle, and I've kept my word. I've always been interested in bicycle repair -- my first Richard's was bought over a decade ago -- but this was the first time I decided to go beyond adjusting the brakes.

So I trawled the bicycle shops of Bangalore until I became a familiar face to the shopkeepers. I located tools that most current mechanics had faint recollections of and even some that they never knew existed! Toolkit assembled, I now had to find bicycles to practice on. Thankfully, the Institute is a great place to learn bicycle repair in that respect (among other things, of course!) -- there are tons of bicycles lying around. So not only did my bicycles end up getting completely overhauled, a large number of other bikes did too!

It has been great fun learning bicycle repair. The bicycle is a simple, yet non-trivial machine and the skill is immediately useful. Not to mention, of course, that even superheroes require bicycle repairmen!

Second, and this was even more fun, was when a friend and I decided that the swimming pool was in an incredibly bad state. In the next six months, we learnt everything there was to managing a swimming pool -- from the machinery to the chemicals -- and I'm willing to bet the pool has never seen more knowledgeable maintainers (or sadly, ever will). Our biggest success? Figuring out a chemical cure to fix the strange green colour of the water. No, it wasn't algae. And it wasn't Iron or Copper either. Unfortunately, this did not end happily, since it turned out that most of the problems were human errors and this larger problem remains unfixed.

This latter experience has, in many ways, given me an incredible insight into why we as a nation still remain poor and backward. But that for sometime later. Hint: When nearly 70% of a nation's unemployed are unskilled, we may not be going anywhere!

And, of course, I cycled. A lot. I've put in over 2000km between my two bicycles -- 1200km in the last four months alone! And unlike both running and swimming, I decided to treat cycling as a group activity and the institute's bicycling club rose fantastically to the occasion.

Yes, EY 26 was fun.