Saumil Bhukhanwala (@saumilzx) is a Computer Engineer (MS, Iowa State) and an avid travel photographer. He holds two patents in the USPTO and has specialised in Digital Imaging, implementing the Zone System of Ansel Adams. He is most thankful for a campus job at the Iowa State Daily, as a photographer, which helped him improve his core skills and technical/digital side of photography. He presently creates travel packages for SEAsia, an area where he has published photographic guides. He is finishing a travel app for the iPad, which will help travellers implement and track their day trips instantly.

Saumil believes that we must make the most of our free time – creatively or productively – in order to improve the fields we represent or areas of interest we follow. That is possible today with social media and the mobile revolution, as we can share ideas and stories – directly with other consumers and colleagues.

Steve Jobs once mentioned that the world around us has been changed by people like ‘you and me’. This mobile era offers enough for you and me to do our bit. Say hello to ebooks, videos, print on demand, and apps!

Here is what I hope to contribute in:

Technology:
Saumil has been using Apple products since 20 years, and loves discussing IP and interface/user experience of products and apps on the Mac/iOS . He is catching up with iOS programming (Swift UI!), to ensure that his travel apps are as good as his first hand experience. He also hopes to create tutorials for using Mac/iOS for various purposes, especially content creation.

Travel:
South Thailand (PhangNga bay), Angkor (Cambodia, Siem Reap), Bangkok, Singapore and Bali are his main areas. Magical experiences on your first trip is almost a given, even on a short holiday, with Saumil’s travel company BaanTerra Travel Hub Pvt. Ltd. Taken a bit longer, but the objective is to create an app which does the job in 3 taps. Editing 100,000 photos and getting the animations to snap in around GPS-maps, has been challenging but rewarding.

Sports:
Saumil has been a table tennis player during school and college days. He also studies chess, cricket and cue-sports but follows tennis, soccer when possible. We all watch sport in our free time. Might as well study it and see how we fell short in our early days! The most fascinating aspect of world sport is how great players ‘reply’ to opponents and situations. He is obsessed with many rivalries and fortunately, we can follow it all online and with videos replays. He keenly follows:

Jan Ove Waldner vs Chinese in table tennis
US (Earl Strickland etc) vs Filipinos (Reyes, Bustamante) in 9-ball pool
Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry eras (snooker)
Geet Sethi-Mike Russell (Billiards)
Federer vs Nadal (Tennis)
In chess, Capablanca and Nimzowitsch for theory, are timeless. But rivalries of Fischer-Russia, Karpov-Kasparov, Anand-Kramnik and now Carlsen (Spontaneous vs Computer preparation have been fascinating.

Coming from India, cricket is what many of us spend about 70% of our free time.

Saumil’s first sports book – Dot Chess, The Cricket in Between explores the chess in cricket.
His recent book: Lessons at Love All Play – Legend Tendulkar Matters! is about Indian legend Sachin Tendukar and his journey, as felt by the mind of the author. In cricket, Tendulkar, Lara, Wasim Akram, Ambrose, Shane Warne, Muralitharan and Adam Gilchrist, and recently Kallis and Dale Steyn are amongst the greatest of all time in the last two decades. Fortunately, we will have enough to study these legends for a decade or so, until the game of cricket shifts (evolves, ugghh) to something totally different.

Is there are unified way to assess and play sport? 
We all take examples from one sport and relate them to another sport. However, there are limitations to every analogy and we need to keep in mind each sport has its own playing format and scoring system. Once we take care of the differences, there is a lot of scope to learn from various sports and ‘apply’ one sport to another – for the purpose training, understanding the nuances of our own sport, exploring parallel ideas to improve performance and bring in innovation in shot making and strategy (and tactics!), and also to create future modifications and variants of a sport to modern age of live streaming technology.

Hopefully one day we can formalise a method to play one sport with the scoring format of another (with adjustments). I’ll give it a shot! Perhaps relaxing in one of the hongs in Thailand with Apple’s next generation iGizmos and some 3D selfie sticks.