The Land of Paddy Fields

It was almost there. We were doing the last minute purchases on Wednesday evening and one thing that we had to pick up was a cake for Bipin (it was his b’day the next day and we had decided to celebrate his b’day on the highway !!).

Thursday morning dawned and we were all at Doc’s place ready to hit the road. Two drivers were all set to set the street on fire with their machines (a silver grey Indica and an onyx blue Getz). Well, if you are still wondering what we were upto… Here you go.. We had planned to spend 4 full days in the forests of Waynad (one of the districts in Kerala famous for its greenery and loads of scenic locales).

Breakfast was at the usual adda, thatte idlis at Bidadi. After which, all the passengers got busy (now you have to guess.. busy doing what.. :)) and we went on and on. Reached Mysore, Gundulpet and entered the Kerala forests. I must admit the roads were awesome and a pleasure driving. It was around lunch by the time we reached the resort at Waynad (Hiliya resorts). After a sumptuous meal, we had the option of either hitting the bed or indulge in some outdoor activities and we decided to do the latter. There as a small stream that flowed through the resort and the walk to the stream was through plantations of coffee, vanilla, arcenut and elaichi (Killer Raj helped us in identifying each of these plants). The stream was not all that great and thanks to the rains, was not easy to get into the water. So the other options were cricket and badminton.

It was during cricket that we got to watch a great batsman in full flow (Kevin Pietersen aka Kumaran Neel). Well, his was the most stylish batting; it was a different story that none of the shots helped the team score runs and not to forget the neck to neck fight between Murali and Bipin. After cricket, was badminton and we not only had to play against the opponents but had stong winds as a major opponent.

Thursday evening, was mainly yummy snacks for the hard core non-veggies (the veggies had food cooked in coconut oil and green salad, the latter being a better choice), dance and come action from the T20 semis where South Africa yet again choked when they had to deliver.

At the crack of dawn on Friday, as planned set out to the all famous and not to be missed Kurva islands. There were a lot of mis-conceptions floating around that one had to cross seven streams to reach the island (thankfully was not seven seas .. :)) and there were seven islands, so on and so forth. We were accompanied by our tour guide, Aneesh who was not just a tour guide but a translator of sorts (none of us knew Malayalam and none of the locals knew anything other than Malayalam). Coming to Kurva, it was an island that could be reached by boat or by walking across the Kabini river. Due to monsoon and heavy currents, we took the boats and reached the island. It was indeed not a place to be missed. It was a typical forest where the sun rays failed to touch the earth in many places. Trees ranging from bamboo to teak to mahogany. Everything was there. Aneesh informed and showed us a tree , where the locals believed that ghosts resided in them. Interesting !!

After a fun filled time at the island, it was time to get back to the mainland and head back to the resort for lunch. Again, the quality of food exceeded our expectations and each of us ate like there was no tomorrow. And not to forget, a circle of banana peels created by Bipin.. :)

Evening, was time for some relaxation at the Pookkot lake. It was raining, inspite of that we, decided to do some boating.. in the rain. They were pedal boats and the first of the boats were steered by Bipin and Kumaran Neel and the second one by Malabar police (Mr Murali) and Killer Raj.. :). After boating, was time for some snacks and none of missed a chance to have an ice cream in the rain. What a combination, boating in the rain and ice creams immediately after, something you don’t get to do in Bangalore.

Next day, headed to another resort, Valley View avenue which was about 50 kms from Hiliya. The drive was again mind blowing, having to drive up the hills and through a thick mist cover. Even though we had a starter breakfast at Hilya (who can forget Vinaya gobbling up a whole idli) we were still longing for some snacks at Valley View after the fabulous drive. There were pooris for the second breakfast and I’m sure the care taker there was shocked by the amount of food we could consume.. :)

The whole day at Valley View was spent just lazing around and being a part of nature (the waterfalls, mist cover almost throughout the day, mountains and greenery). We did make a visit to the Kanthapura falls and not to forget Doc with his trademark umbrella where ever he went.. :)

Sunday morning and time to get back. It was hard to believe that we had spent 3 days in “The Land of Paddy Fields” (Wayanad comes from Vayal (paddy) and Naad (land)) and it seemed too short. End of it all, looks like even four full days was not enough for us to be completely satisfied, staying away from the mundane crowd at the Garden City.

What are you born to do?

The name itself sounds so curious. Afterall, you are here in this world to do what ?? So I decided to take up this little quiz and here's what I was born to do ---

I was born to be a "hero". Now we are not talkin bout becomin a super hero... but you were born to help others and put others infornt of your needs. You are caring and that is your biggest strength you will do really well in those field where you have to help others like social worker or doctor...options are many

Hmmm... sounds interesting. Hope I actually get to be someone's hero .. :)

What Kind of Smile Do You Have?

A list of questions to answer and click on the "Submit" button. And voila the result is there for everyone to see..

You have an Innocent Smile
Sweet and naïve, you have a smile that is full of genuine happiness. You have a pure heart and when you smile, you mean it and everyone around you knows you do. People are attracted to your sweetness and sincerity, and find your company refreshing and enjoyable. With your open and non-judgmental smile and personality, you will often find people confiding in you.

A very flattering result ... but others have to vouch for that.. i guess.. :)

Money !!

It is August. In a small town on the South Coast of France, holiday season is in full swing, but it is raining so there is not too much business happening. Everyone is heavily in debt. Luckily, a rich Russian tourist arrives in the foyer of the small local hotel. He asks for a room and puts a €100 note on the reception counter, takes a key and goes to inspect the room located up the stairs on the third floor.

The hotel owner takes the € 100 banknote in hurry and rushes to his meat supplier to whom he owes €100.

The butcher takes the money and races to his wholesale supplier to pay his debt.

The wholesaler rushes to the farmer to pay €100 for pigs he purchased some time ago.

The farmer triumphantly gives the €100 note to a local prostitute who gave him her services on credit.

The prostitute goes quickly to the hotel, as she owed the hotel for her hourly room use to entertain clients.

At that moment, the rich Russian is coming down to reception and informs the hotel owner that the proposed room is unsatisfactory and takes his €100 back and departs.

There was no profit or income. But everyone no longer has any debt and the small town people look optimistically towards their future.

COULD THIS BE THE SOLUTION TO THE Global Financial Crisis? Or, is there a catch here?

Maybe !!!

Swine flu

This was a forward I received today and was pretty funny !! Here it goes -

It was once said that US would have a black president when pigs fly

And now… pig flu

PS : If u did not laugh, I am not responsible .. ;)

IPL 2009 - a reshuffle !!

After the 1st round of matches in the IPL, in order to even out the “playing ground”, we decided each of us would offload one of our teams. The teams to be offloaded were to be written on separate chits of paper and the person with the least number of points would take a go at selecting the new team. And this would not be disclosed till each of us had picked our new teams.

So the process started with Bips taking the lead (he was at the end of the table) and selecting his team. Bips was followed by Gopal, myself and Kumz. Each of us were happy to have got any team other than KKR (Kolkata Knightriders) who have just not been able to take off this season.

After all the selections were done, it was time to disclose the new teams and here are the new teams that each of us own:

Gopal – retained Delhi, offloaded Mumbai and got Rajasthan. Two really strong teams;
Kumz – retained Chennai, offloaded Deccan and got Mumbai. A good combination of the teams. Chennai peaking at the right time and Mumbai too can bounce back anytime with Sachin and Jayasuriya.
Adi – retained Bangalore, offloaded Rajasthan and got Deccan. Currently own two of the worst performing teams of IPL 2008, but Bangalore seem to have found some momentum under their new captain and hope they continue to retain the same and Deccan are slightly going off track after the exit of their strike bowler Fidel Edwards but hope Symonds can weave some magic.
Bips – retained Punjab, offloaded Kolkata and got back Kolkata. Bips and Kolkata – an unbreakable bond !!

Its now time to see how the new teams perform and if they prove to be lucky to their owners !!

Share birthday with...

There is this application on one of the networking sites (FB) which gives info about "Which Famous people share birthday with you" and here are the results:

Gisele Bündchen - Brazilian model and occasional actress
Carlos Santana - Grammy Award-winning Mexican rock musician and guitarist
Chris Cornell - American rock musician
Kim Carnes - American singer-songwriter
Diana Rigg - English actress
Natalie Wood - American actress
Chuck Daly - former American basketball head coach
Sir Edmund Hillary - New Zealand mountaineer and explorer
Alberto Santos-Dumont - Early pioneer of aviation

There is one more person with whom I share my birthday but is surely not as famous as any of the persons mentioned above. And that special person is my dearest mom.. :)

IPL 2009 - The opening

The second version of the IPL is here … and to make it even more interesting .. we decided to have an interesting game called “The IPL Syndicate”. Here is how it works –
There are 4 owners taking part in “The IPL Syndicate” – Gopal, Kumz, Bips and Adi and each of them owning 2 teams each – a primary team and a secondary team. For every win, the owner stands to gain 50 points and for every loss he losses 50 points. At the start of the competition, everyone starts with 500 points to his credit.

The team selections happened on Friday (17th Apr) with Gopal choosing Delhi Daredevils, Bips opting for Kolkatta KnightRiders (more for Shahrukh than for the composition of the team), Kumz taking Chennai SuperKings and Adi going for Bangalore Royal Challengers (ever loyal to the RC and ‘Kumbls’) as their primary teams.

The secondary teams would be selected by the rest of the 3 owners and vested upon the 4th. So for Bips, the secondary team was Kings XI Punjab, Kumz was unanimously given Deccan Chargers, Adi got Rajasthan Royals and Gopal had to be content with Mumbai Indians.

After all the teams were selected, it is now for the games to begin and see who stands to gain from this tournament. Also, in order to level out the playing arena, after the first round of matches, each of the owners would have to drop one of their teams and choose a different one, basically a trading of teams between the owners.

May the best team win !!

Temple visiting...

One more long weekend and one more trip in the pipeline ?? Well.. yes you guessed it right .. Decided that this would be more of a pilgrimage trip rather than just the usual fun trip (not that there was no fun here.. )

We were 5 and 4 of them left on Wed evening to the small temple town of Tirvannamalai. Basically, this place is about 200 kms from Bangalore on the B'lore Pondy route. The residing diety here is Lord Shiva representing fire (one of the 5 elements of nature). The speciality of this place is a ritual called "Girivalam", wherein the devotees walk around the hill and cover a distance of about 14 kms. The other 4 in the grp would do the Girivalam on Wed evening and head to Pondy on Thu where I would meet them on Fri mornin.

The journey to Pondy was a decent one.. took about 8 hrs on road and reached there early Fri mornin. Fri we did Chidambaram which is one more temple town and the temple there dedicated to the dancing form of Lord Shiva, more popularly called Lord Nataraja. This is a temple which is centuries old and the feeling of being amidst the wonderful stone pillars and intricate carvings is just too good.

Got back to Pondy for lunch, which we would never have, since afternoon thru late evening we were all in the beach (which was more like a private beach with hardly any one around !!). After dinner, 3 of them were all too exhausted and hit the bed but me alongwith Paddhu decided to explore the (very well known) French colony at Pondy.. and in due course had some yumm ice creams and got back to rest for the day !! Wat a wonderful day it was .. temple, beaches and a walk by the sea in the French Colony !!

Saturday, decided to head back to Bangalore. On the way visited the world famous Auroville .. a universal town with people from varied countries and religions live together. Most of us did some shopping at the boutique there picking up clay mugs, candles, bags and not to forget some special eateries.

We got back to Bangalore in close to 6 hours thus ending a pilgrimage trip that had its share of fun and frolic !!

Women's day - Mar 09

International Women's day..

Internaional Women's day (IWD) is celebrated on March 8 of every year. It was first celebrated on 28th Feb 1909 in the United States (courtesy: wikipedia).

It is a major day of celebration for the economic, political and social empowerment of women. It is good to see, in a society that was dominated by men, women making a mark for themselves in every other field ranging from the the local bus driver/conductors to politics to various fields in art to ruling a nation. Some of the women who have etched their presence in Indian history are Rani Chenamma, Onake Obava, Rani of Jhansi and many more. And all of these women have outperformed their male counterparts to either save their state or country from foreign invaders.

On one hand there is a day dedicated to celebrate the success of women and on the other we still get to see cases of female foeticide, infanticide, eve teasing, molesting, rape, acid attacks, dowry harassments and deaths. The celebration of IWD is complete only when all of this is completely eradicated and we, especially the men, help in reporting such cases to the concered authorities and ensure the wrong doers are rightly punished (the killers of 14 year old Aarushi, are still at large !!)

One good thing that happened today (8 Mar 09) is that one of my classmates became a proud father of a cute little angel baby girl. God bless the angel and her parents.

Celebration means...

Celebration may mean a lot of things to a lot of people… Could range from a quiet dinner just between two souls to an extravagant event involving hundreds of people.. Recently got a forwarded mail with the subject “Celebration means…” and this is how it reads:



Celebration means......

You and mom.
A summer night.
A bottle of coconut oil.
A head massage.



Celebration means......

Bunch of friends; Rainy Day...
no raincoat, no umbrella!



Celebration means......

1.30 a. m … Hundred bucks of petrol; A Rusty old bike…
Triples…
And an open road!



Celebration means......

3 old friends; 3 separate cities; 3 coffee mugs.
1 internet messenger!



Celebration means......

Maggie noodles; At Friends place...
3.25 a. m!



Indeed… all of the above are celebrations …. no significant cost involved but loads of happiness...

Gift !!

If I search on the internet for what constitutes a gift, there are many things that come to mind. It can be a present, it can be something given without expecting anything in return, it can be something tangible or just a feeling of love and affection. Well, if you are wondering why we are discussing about gifts, here you go ..

One of the gifts I got recently was this beautiful coffee mug, which had all the facts about the letter “A” like the character of a person, the history of the letter A, future of the person whose name begins with A, meaning of the letter A (sounds interesting !!) and list of celebrities’ names beginning with A (unfortunately my name did not find a place on that list .. ;) ). This mug with loads of info was gifted by Paddy (occasion, gotta ask her...) and now this mug is proudly positioned on my desk.

Another gift that I received was from this very sweet and kind lady in Amsterdam, Emmy, my counterpart, colleague and now a good friend. To this day she addresses me as “geniee”. (that’s because she believes I have a solution for every problem like Aladdin’s geniee.. ).

The third of the gifts I got was from this very good friend of mine who’d been to Delhi. Out there she picked up a mariner’s compass that has a “real” antique feeling to it, has “Stanley London” inscribed on it. This compass is enclosed in a brass container and on the back side of the container it has one of my favorite poems by Robert Frost – “The road not taken”.

Now, it is my turn to start gifting, and I like it doing more than receiving them….

Trip to The Temple Town

One more weekend, and a very unique plan. We decided to make a trip to the temple town of Melkote, which is about 130 kms from Bangalore. We decided to drive down in my ME 8992 and there were 5 of us who were travelling.

As scheduled, we hit the roads early in the morning with the primary intention to avoid the weekend rush to Mysore and we did manage to avoid the maddening crowd. Our first stop was at Bidadi which is a place very famous for tatte idlis (idlis which are almost double the size of the normal idlis and softer as well). Bidadi is generally the ‘pit-stop’ for breakfast for people travelling to Mysore.

Post breakfast 3 of the 5 were fast asleep. So was left to the pilot (myself) and my co-pilot to steer the team to Melkote. Once we were off the highway into the village roads, there was a change of guards and the most latest driver in the group, Bipin, did a pretty decent job and even managed to steer the car thru a gap between the pavement and another car !!

Before we could reach Melkote, on the way we accidentally spotted a lake. It was pretty huge and very refreshing as well. Some of us actually got into the water just enough to get our feet wet and after the brief halt at this wonderful lake, we headed to the temple.

At Melkote, our first stop was the Cheluvanarayana Swamy temple. After the darshan, we decided to begin our ascend to the other temple – Yoga Narasimha temple which is situated on top of a hill. The distance to cover is not too much but the steps are a tad too steep.

After the darshan, we had a short photo session, taking snaps of the village from a bird’s eye view. On the way down we had some very fresh tender coconuts, the ones you don’t get in cities !!

By the time we left Melkote, it was time for lunch. We had decided to have it at one of the dhabas outside Mysore, till a huge billboard caught our eyes. This was a place called “Young Island”, just about half a km from the mainroad. Now, coming to the place “Young Island”, it is a private property with cottages and a huge common dining hall (with a pool table as well on the first floor). About a few hundred meters from the entrance, are some of the cottages and few steps to climb down … there’s a river .. This was indeed a great sight, the cottages were actually on the river bed and even though the main road was pretty much visible from the cottages, there was hardly any pollution and the sound of the river gushing down was clearly audible. After spending some moments in the river, we decided to have our lunch. It was a pretty lazed lunch that went on for about 2 hours.

We had one other small break for ‘chai’ at one of the local stalls on the highway. Actually, there were some eatables at that stall that were really colourful (all shades of brown and orange) but no one was courageous enough to even have a small bite of these.. ;)

It was then time to head back – after a hectic day of driving and shooting (pictures I mean.. ;)).

World of colours

One of the most famous parks here, Lalbagh Botanical gardens, have this great tradition of organising for a flower show twice a year, generally held for a couple of weeks in Jan and a couple of weeks in Aug. The flower show is at the Glass House and attracts people in huge numbers. Its always a major attraction and there is always something new every year. One of the major attractions this time was a huge globe with 2 white doves and a heart-shaped ring, all made of roses.

Its not every year that I make it to the flower show, but this year decided to make it for the flower show this time and rightly found one of my colleagues agreed to accompany me. So we were there at 6 in the morning all set to capture the "world of colours" in our cameras. It was still so dark and for the first time got to see the Glass House completely lit up. Was indeed a sight in itself.

It was a very cold and misty morning and all our plans to capture the sunrise and some beautiful pics of the sun and the lake could just not materialise. The Sun decided to be very lazy and would not come out till 8 AM. So we just went click, click n click all around the lake taking loads of pictures of the birds, mist and the lake in general. There were some pictures in black n white and sepia which have indeed come out really well and gives a sense of nostalgia.

After all this it was time for us to enter the Glass House (which is generally open for the public only from 8AM onwards). It was a great sight to see so many flowers in all possible colours, shapes and sizes. It had already started to get crowded but still managed to take some good close-up pictures of the flowers.

The flower show is now over but still plan to visit Lalbagh to complete the task that was left unaccomplished .. take pictures of the sunrise.