Gedanken und Ansichten zum Pallav Mishra

(Just Another) Inglourious Movee

2009-11-24T00:59:00.000-08:00

Saw The Inglourious Basterds yesterday. What a crappy movie!! I mean, what's wrong with Quentin Tarantino, post Kill Bill? No spoilers here, but its a kind of story we all wish we could do in reality - as an Indian, I would so wish we had a crack team of vigilante type commandos killing Aurangzeb or some of the terrible tyrants that ruled us. So much for wishful thinking, but wtf? A movie that shows the clinical, ruthless Nazis and Gestapos as clumsy duds who could not wipe out a rag-tag team of American soldiers? While its true that there were some serious security breaches during the final years of the Reich, they were carried out by some of the most trusted members of such organizations as the SS, the Abwehr and the like. During the War years, even his close confidantes could not access Hitler - he was always in one of his hideouts such as the Wolfsschanze. And here you have him moving around as if he was a puppet despot of a banana republic or more a mafiosi. A Nazi movie - and without some samples of their atrocities? Not done. You cannot help but think of the Nazi's as bumbling fools.

But Christoph Waltz is such a fine actor. Wow! The whole movie hinged on his character and he played it to the T, as Tarantino himself admitted. Diane Kruger looked strange - quite old, but could have been the make-up. Brad Pitt's role was fairly small. It is basically Waltz's movie through and through...hmm, a damp squib. Wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Back from the hiatus!..Lots of tooning these days..:)

2009-11-01T22:44:00.000-08:00

I am back after a two month break! Had been a rather busy time - moved to a new pad, got it painted and renovated, went to Delhi and bought some decorative stuff to spruce up the place. Thanks to Shveta, the place sure looks good! The last 10 days also saw Putun becoming a ma and we becoming uncles and aunts. While every married man automatically gets addressed as an uncle or an aunt in India (which is so irritating and unflattering), it feels rather nice to be a real uncle.

Nilu gave me an amazing dump of videos, games and utilities this time. I spent the last weekend watching some of those movies: a hilarious Will Ferrell starrer called the Land of the Lost made my day last Saturday. Very funny and also quite a fresh take on sci-fi concepts, with Mr Rick Marshall, the "quantum paleontologist" going places... a must watch! And then my favorite toons from the same Hanna Barbera - Iwao Takamoto stock: The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. With those rollicking Anthill Mob, their sidekick car Chuggaboom , the idiotic duo Bully brothers and one of the funniest villains in toon-dom, Sylvester Sneakley aka The Hooded Claw. Paul Lynde's dubbing of this funny guy is just too amazing. What actually puts these old cartoons in a very different league is that they used to tap the funnybone really well with the funny voices and really absurd storylines. So, be it the wheezy laughs of Muttley or the sniggers of the Hooded Claw, they made you laugh. Anime and Hentai/Manga toons are cool from a visual perspective - they are too smartly done and are serious, but there are times when you just want to put your brains to rest and become a kid - nothing beats the old Hanna Barbera stuff....hmm, back to work!

In a retro mood..

2009-08-02T23:04:00.000-07:00

Spent the last few days, among other things, digging up old Rafi songs. Got hooked on to Kahin Bekhayal Hokar (Teen Deviyan, Music:SD Burman) and some of his rare non-film ghazals - Do Ghadi Baitho, Shaam Ke Deepak Jale and Tum Saamne Baithi Raho..lovely tracks. I never thought I would ever find Shaam Ke Deepak and lo! stumbled upon it on Youtube. Picked up the lyrics and the tune and have been humming that, and Kahin Bekhayal Hokar since the weekend. Also listened to some old SDB composed tracks such as Tere Bin Soonay from Meri Surat Teri Aankhen...Rafi is just amazing..While the lyrics of most of the ghazals and songs could seem ordinary, if one could just focus on Rafi's voice and his style, it seems out of this world. It seems so tough emoting his voice or even his mood and energy - very upbeat even when singing ghazals...

Listened to some Mike and The Mechanics after ages

2009-07-06T21:49:00.000-07:00

Over this weekend, I was on a nostalgia trip, listening to all things old - soft ballads, rock anthems, the works...fished out two of the Mike and The Mechanics greatests - Living Years and All I need is a Miracle. Still sound so good and ofcourse, quite refreshing after listening to them after some 15-20 years. I also listened to a lot of Eagles and Don Henley in particular - Learn to be still, Tequila Sunrise (like Glen Frey too), Boys of Summer, End of Innocence, Love will keep us alive, New York Minute, among others..today I would download Mono (not the Japanese instrumental rock band but the british duo trip-hop act that churned out "Life in Mono" about 11 years back. I like trip-hop at times - used to listen to a lot of that when I was going through a rather depressive phase: Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack, Everything But the Girl, etc)....wish last.fm or Pandora could play their free radios this part of the world (sigh!)...

Lexulous is to Scrabble what Mafia Wars is to..Dope Wars?

2009-07-06T06:02:00.000-07:00

These days I play Mafia Wars off and on over FB (Facebook to the uninitiated) - a very addictive game involving various "mafia gangs" (basically your Facebook buddies who have also signed in into the game). That, and my favorite all-time game Lexulous (not over FB, but the game site www.lexulous.com. The FB version is not timed and can take ages to finish, esp. while playing across timezones) and therefore is not a lot of fun for people living outside the States. There are some truly cool features about the FB Lexulous though - stats, bingo history, personal scratchpad, graph, etc...but nothing like a short and sweet game on the original game site. Infact, I realized I was faring much better against strong FB players because of my "honed" gaming skills on lexulous.com.

So, coming straight to the point, Lexulous is the (in)famous variant of the classic board(and now also online) word game, Scrabble. I love both of these games. I also loved a nifty little app called Dope Wars ages back - where you "buy and sell" all kinds of drugs on the streets of NY, LA, London, etc, earn tons of dough, launder it, bank it and become a "rich ganglord". So when I got caught into the hype called Mafia Wars over FB, I was pleasantly surprised. Except for the bells and whistles (armors, vehicles, buying and selling properties to make more money),the feel of the game seems so similar to Dope Wars..Apparently there are other apps out there that are similar if not identical to these games. So....how does anyone guard oneself (one's intellectual property)in the world of games? A slight twist - cosmetic or added bells and whistles - seem to be all that you would need to launch your own little online game. Is that it? Well, not quite. Even when the net is crawling with millions of variants of tetris and pacman (there's a pacwoman variant too!), card games galore - and now classic board games like Scrabble, Monopoly, Battleship, etc, very few actually catch the attention of people in droves. Lexulous and Mafia Wars are some of the lucky ones. Lexulous has managed to outwit Scrabble online in terms of hits, while Mafia Wars claims to have 4 million users accessing it in a month (atleast in June'09)! Incredible! Ofcourse, its not just luck in the virtual world that makes you tick. The interface, the user-friendliness, and that x-factor that only an avid game enthusiast/designer can build in into the game. These are some of the things that separate the men from the boys I guess...

"Third World" Aviation risks

2009-07-02T22:38:00.000-07:00

Another plane crash in less than a month - again, with a French connection and involving an Airbus. Apparently the model A310 is banned in EU since 2007. What bugs me no end is that while everyone talked about the AF447 crash earlier this month purely from a scientific or humanitarian angle, leading papers immediately after the Yemenia A310 crash started commenting on the "risks that third world aviation poses". Why? Just because kins of the victims can rip off airlines for millions when its a "First World" aviation disaster like the one earlier last month, while the second one happened involving a plane belonging to a third world nation? Could someone please ask the kins of those who died whether it makes any difference to them or the dead? Is this truly the second decade of the 21st Century? Or perhaps we really are too prejudiced to realize that we have not changed much from our greatgrandparents...

MJ is dead!

2009-06-25T21:50:00.000-07:00

MJ is no more- no, its not Mary Jane of the Spiderman fame....kids of the current generation, in this age of the ubiquitous digital music and piracy, may not know who Michael Jackson was - but for those like me who grew in the '80s and '90s do not know of a bigger phenomemon in the world of pop than Wacko Jacko. I cannot forget how my sis used to drive us nuts day in and day out playing Bad all the time - Dirty Diana, The Way you Make Me Feel, Smooth Criminal..I hated those shrieks and grunts that she swore by. They, and George Michael's Faith were the flavor of the season in the summer of '87-88 in Delhi. We were after all a family raised on a staple of Indian classical, old Indian film music, western country (basically Jim Reeves, Glen Campbell, John Denver and Merle Haggard) and The Beatles, our musical gods. Every school used to have a Michael Jackson look-alike breaking into a breakdance in every Annual Competition those days. Later, through radio and hand-me-down cassettes, I got to hear some older Michael Jackson albums, and also some Jackson 5 numbers. And then I realised that this weird guy was a precocious kid who had thrilled the world many many times over than a lot of pop and rock icons before him. I loved Off the Wall and Thriller. It was such an original sound from the noise of punk rock that the early '80s was all about. That, or the spillover of the music of the '70s that passed as music of the early '80s - the Olivia Newton Johns, Sheena Eastons, ABBAs (though one of my faves), etc. MJ and Madonna were the colossi of the '80s. 41 million copies sold of Thriller - go eat your heart out!

MJ's '90s was not very hot. Dangerous, History, Blood on the Dance Floor...only the ardent MJ worshippers could take all that. It was not original. There were a lot of new genres available and thanks to the opening up of the music market in India, we could access a lot of world music. Even in his home turf, his heydays were all but over.

The last decade was very tragic indeed for the ageing celeb. It is something the kids of today's generation may be aware of. The notoriety, the shame, the fall. Allegations of pedophilia, of hideous facial transformations...everybody took potshots at the "King of Pop". His friends that pockmarked his Dangerous album jacket - Liz Taylor, Macaulay Culkin (who Macaulay, by the way?) - everyone knowing him started distancing himself or herself from him and his now infamous Neverland ranch. Then the once in a blue moon news of his trial, his selling his estates and moving over to Bahrain, his conversion to Islam, his n'th breakup/divorce.

The most tragic thing that I read today, as I read the numerous obits on the net singing paeans on that guy (after assassinating his character a zillion times over in the past few years), was that the poor ol' weird guy was living in a rented place. A person who was almost a billionaire a few years back had lost it all.

Its sad. But then, thats the way it is. RIP Wacko.

News of a plane crash: of fake photos and the net..

2009-06-16T23:23:00.000-07:00

Truly, while a lot of people including Thomas Friedman talk of the internet as a flattener, making the world a flat place where there is no First World and a Third World (well, that is a very contentious topic, since as long as there is civilization and humanity, I believe there would always be inequality. Some would always claim to be Ubermenschen and some would always be treated as subhumans), its very difficult to accept anything the net dishes out as truth. Again, there are forces and anti-forces at work to ensure no one gets to know what the real picture is - perhaps there are low profile sites that are struggling to keep themselves clean - but its really difficult. The other day, I received a chain mail on an Iranian kid being punished with amputation of his limbs for stealing something petty (very Oliver Twistian tale)...and on googling I found many sites debating on humanitarian grounds around those pictures. And then some sites unfolded the fraud - that the pictures propagated were actually just a few snapshots of a series of pictures covering a street act in Iran (or perhaps some other mid-eastern nation) and that the kid is actually a street actor...Then the latest pictures purportedly showing the last minutes of the ill-fated Air France 447 crash from the inside, taken by an intrepid photographer (turned out they were snapshots of an episode of the drama "Lost"). An LA Times front cover some time back had an Iraq photo that turned out to be fake later (the paper fired the photographer, perhaps because he was caught)..so, how much of genuine stuff are we really getting? A newspaper atleast retracts from an earlier publishing if people start questioning the content and tries to ensure it gets its facts "correct"...

These days, whenever I receive a mail with some weird looking photos, the first thing I do is google up the key words in the mail and the word "fake". Not surprisingly, I get a full page of Google results.

Hot sultry summer days and cricket mania

2009-06-14T10:41:00.001-07:00

Its almost 11PM and still feels like its noon! After spending the day sleeping and then going to the mall (a mall trip is oh so stressful with the roads choc-a-bloc with cars, humanity and cattle, and the building itself teeming with people more interested in windowshopping), I am playing scrabble online and watching the T20 World Cup match between India and England..even the AC refuses to cool the room in this heat..:"(

Interesting term I learned today: Parallel Computing

2009-05-17T23:06:00.000-07:00

Guess I must be sounding quite ignorant and stupid, but I had never realized the new challenges the software world is facing as the Intels and AMDs of the world move to a new paradigm (not new actually), of manycore processors. Apparently, Andy Grove had coined the term "Software Spiral" (didn't know he had coined any other famous term besides "Inflection Point"..:)) to explain the relationship between chip manufacturers and software writers - that as the processing power of chips goes on increasing, newer softwares are written to exploit the increased computational capabilities. However a few years back, that relationship gave way. Till then, the concept of computation was akin to a single lane road that was being widened by the chip makers to support higher processing demands. But apparently, they all realized that their chips were generating far too much heat - for all the transistors that they were trying to fit into a single piece of silicon - and even causing them to melt in certain cases (can imagine. My 256MB NVIDIA 8600 GT itself never stays below 67-70 deg Celsius at any time). The chip makers had reached a "Power Wall". So they started adding "lanes" to the highway - by adding multiple cores to a single block. And thats where the "Software Spiral" ended. Till date, major IT powerhouses are struggling to exploit the potential of manycore and have not been very effective. Apparently, by late 2010, the world of personal computing may see 8 core processors in the market (and I was surprised to know iPhone has 3 processors!) and therefore there is frantic race in the IT world these days to be a first mover in this area...

An amazing trip to Shirdi

2009-05-13T05:32:00.001-07:00

Two weeks back we had gone to Shirdi..took a sleeper "Volvo" and travelled overnight to the holy town..The trip was just amazing - we put up at a hotel called Kalpataru right infront of the gates of the Shrine. The 100 or so yard strip of road in front of the Shrine is the thoroughfare of Shirdi - choc-a-bloc with tourists, shop keepers, beggars and squatters. But the best part was that we were graced with two darshans to Sai Baba's samadhi, and multiple visits to other places in the complex, including the Chavadi, Dwarkamai Mosque, Lendi Baug and nearby buildings, etc.

We reached Shirdi on Saturday morning, at about 8.30AM. The journey was good - couldn't have asked for more. The bus was like a couple of double beds on wheels - very comfortable. And with multiple stops all the way, we couldn't have asked for more.

On reaching Shirdi, we took a rickshaw to Kalpataru, and waited for a few hours to check-in. Got to know that there are daily power outages of 6-7 hours there (and perhaps across most of Maharashtra). Anyhow, nothing could have been done, and we cared less. We left the confines of the hotel in a few hours and started for a darshan. I had been to Shirdi once before, but didn't remember much about it. So, we joined the long queue that crawled slowly through the large hall that has barricades to keep the queue in order, and that has episodes from Baba's life adorning the walls (everything in Marathi though). After about an hour, we reached the end-point of the hall, only to take a flight of stairs down to a basement and then a flight upstairs leading up to the Sanctum. The main hall housing Baba's samadhi is adorned with gold and silver, and in the middle of the wall on the opposite side of the entrance is Baba's majestic statue. In front of the statue is Baba's tomb, and then two priests chanting prayers as devotees pass by, touching Baba's tomb, offering their prashad or donating some money..the exit is quick. The best part is - you can feel His presence in the place, and infact in whole blessed town. After all, He took alms on the streets of Shirdi, watered the plants of Lendi Baug, leaned on the walls of Dwarkamai, slept in the Chavadi and died in Dikshit Wadi.

After the darshan, we went to the complex housing a museum (we saw the Kaafani and the kurta Baba wore that still has stains, some of his cheelums, a grindstone He used to make flour, and other objects of His daily use...amazing), went to a bookstore and bought some books (I bought Baba's biography in Urdu), went to Lendi Baug and to the well from which He used to draw water and water the flower plants and shrubs he had planted.

We stayed for much of Sunday as well - some of our friends were to join us that day - and then went for a darshan again (this time, there was no queue and it seemed as if Baba was beckoning us and cleared the entire path for us!).

We caught the bus back to Indore late Sunday night. The return was eventful as some of our reserved seats had been resold by some unscrupulous agent. Oh yes, that happens in India sometimes. But it was a blessed experience and we are thankful to God , to Baba for everything that we've got.

Losing weight at snail's pace..:-(

2009-05-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

It seems oh so easy - movie stars keep doing that all the time and Teleshopping folks keep showing those shapeless beings transforming into handsome men and women - but a 1.5 mile treadmill walk or a 2 mile cross-trainer trek burns only a 100 calories...that, and some diet control..and yet I have lost only 2 kilos in 11 days...:-(..drat, and double drat!

Joined a Fitness Club!

2009-04-22T23:02:00.000-07:00

Yeah, Yeah! Suddenly I have become a Weight Watcher, conscious of my sedentary life and a need to shape up! I have enrolled into a weight reduction program at a neighborhood gym that includes some power cardio exercises, sauna, physiotherapy and massaging. And ofcourse, a dietician who would be advising me on what to eat and not. For all the fatty food I had at the McD's, Chillies, Arby's, Papa Johns', etc, its taking quite a lot to get rid of the lard I collected. And to top it all, to sit infront of a computer 12 hours a day! Hope all that changes! Lets keep our fingers crossed for this guy..:-\

Twitter, Last.fm these days!

2009-04-20T03:04:00.000-07:00

Twitter has taken the world by storm - and I guess its for people who don't get time to personally interact or socialize a lot, are always on the move and could only thumb a line through their smartphones. I have started twitting too - downloaded this nifty app called Tweetdeck that runs on the ubersleek Adobe Internet Runtime (AIR). So, while thumbing even a line of message seems oh-so arduous to me, I did not mind keying in a few tweets through the web. Oh, and another category (thats growing by the day these days) of people would love the tool - those who do not have the patience to scour through pages of blogs..it is fun and worth checking out (I feel like an old man these days in anycase, catching on trends when they are already very commong, passe or sun-setting)..
And the other thing - Last.fm. Thanks to the app available for my Nokia N95, could try it first on the phone. Now, my notebook. Reminds me of Pandora. But Pandora's dead for me now - I loved it so and now it is confined only to the US..makes sense though. Through the weekend, I tried out a lot of new age artists similar to Sarah McLachlan, Hevia, Clannad, Loreena McKennitt and the likes. Turned out there are so many artists in quaint scandinavian and far-eastern locations producing such top class music. Nilu usually is on top of genres closer home such as Goa Trance, etc, but for me a lot of it is new. The radio picked up some cool Karunesh, Prem Joshua, etc too!..would try some of it this week too. Can do a lot of work with such relaxing music playing..

Saw a flag saying "Objectionable stuff" in my blog

2009-04-20T03:00:00.000-07:00

Whoa! Objectionable stuff? In my blog? Well, thats the hazard of using the net - you never know who hits you and why. Is it the talk about war-time Germany? Is it about a tainted company which was in the news recently?..Anyways, such flags make me wonder - how do journalists operate? Anyways, hope the good samaritan who marked that flag on my blog would be kind enough to step by and let me know, through a comment or a mail...

Ideas to Icons

2009-01-27T05:22:00.000-08:00

Got to know over the weekend that a colleague and good friend, Sajal, won the Young Manager's Award instituted by the Indore Management Association. The annual presentation competition had as its theme "Ideas to Icons" and Sajal made a very innovative pitch - coming out with his own model combining Innovation with Character and Trust. Among other stuff, the presentation talked about Satyam (Idea to Icon to (bad) Idea??), Mr Obama, etc. What really made me think about this presentation was my subsequent discussion with a friend today who still works for Satyam, as a senior executive. Obviously outraged and bitter about the whole scam that has so badly shaken up Corp India, esp. the Indian IT industry, some of these guys are contemplating switching tracks through higher education - getting another MBA degree - possibly from a good US school. Living and wading through the current morrass in the industry is quite painful, especially when you carry the baggage of a tainted company. Perhaps we could see a significant surge in MBA admissions this year. Who knows? I guess it is a good time to go back to school and look for ideas.

Trying out Adobe Contribute

2009-01-11T06:44:00.001-08:00

I am creating this blog using Adobe Contribute, an Adobe application that directly links to a blog or website server and lets you add images, flash files or Adobe pdfs to the page. A good way to spend the weekend. Its a little nippy today here and we just wrapped up a game of Lexulous, the Scrabble variant thats oh so addictive..

Diwali Exhibition time again!

2008-10-20T01:57:00.000-07:00

Shveta's been busy all through the month preparing for Deep'08, the annual pre-Diwali exhibition in Bhopal. What is absolutely incredible is the ability of this girl to manage so much. Ailing parents, me at Indore, the showroom at Metro Plaza, and her exhibition. Did I count the 60 people who work for her? I recall how she owned up and managed the entire kitchen during the wedding. And she is barely 30. If she works for any firm, she would be a senior exec in no time. Well, I am absolutely privileged to be her hubby, and to observe her do so much. I will post some of her exhibition pics soon. God bless her. I really really wish her so much of happiness and bliss, and yes, knock on wood!

Are we at a Global Financial Inflexion Point?

2008-09-23T21:59:00.000-07:00

The current global financial crisis rings a very strong bell for people who are aware of the 1929 Great Depression and the global socio-political and socio-economic climate then. The Great Depression was the lowest point for capitalism and preceded massive socialistic movements globally, including the rise of fascism. A major part of the world was still under imperial rule and was quite unaware of what was happening in the US and Europe. But the effect was there, and it changed the world significantly. It was certainly an Inflexion Point, using Andy Grove's term for a singular disrupting event that changes the rules of the game in business. It was not the first event that had repurcussions across the globe - the Great War, or the WWI as we know it, was the first one. And it led to major social upheavals and changes primarily in the participating nation-states. Turkey lost the Caliphate, blamed the Armenians for losses in Dardanelles and summarily executed hundreds of thousands in an uncannily similar fashion that the Nazis used decades later. USSR overthrew their Tsar and put in place the first Communist regime in the 20th century. European monarchies were abolished. Then in the '20s the Great Depression happened. Financial terms that were not very familiar the world over ,such as Inflation, became everyday household words. They led in a way to the coming to power of the NSDAP in Germany and the other fascist governments in Europe.

We all know our history. And thats the keyword today - knowledge. That is the biggest differentiator between all the major events that changed the world earlier and now. Every major crisis is preceded by a string of sub-events. The Holocaust was preceded by the Kristallnacht, the WWII by the rising unrest in Germany over the Versailles reparation terms, compounded by the Depression conditions. Today, in a complicated, globalized world, everyone is aware and impacted by any financial event. Ofcourse, in the early days of the US sub-prime crisis, laypeople across the world, even in the US, did not anticipate the turn of events that have ensued since, but analysts the world over could sense something amiss. Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, Merill Lynch, AIG, etc joined a host of names that are now familiar in even quaint, remote towns in India. The first reaction in many cases was, has Capitalism as a concept maxed out? Even before Bear Stearns happened, we have been witnessing various crises the world over - and all of us are quite aware of them. Some global - like the Iraq war, the War on Terror , Al Qaeda, and some local - our naxal situation, the Kashmir problem. But these have been largely chronic issues gripping economies and nations over longer duration. A financial crisis ofcourse poses a much clearer danger - in the past few days, in India, we have seen a few major problems already. The Tata-Singur crisis, for one. But a more sinister, ominous event that seems far more disturbing, something that one could perhaps expect in and around 1929 but not in 2008. A CEO of an Italian Multinational getting lynched by a mob of retrenched employees represents that fear. Is this a one off event or could this be a sign of more to come? Things are not so simple today as they were earlier. Events or causes in those times could be stemmed at one place because of lack of awareness. Today, radical extremist organizations only need to use the email or the ubiquitous cell phone to reach out to their recruits, quite like corporate organizations. Rising inflation, spiked up gas prices, exponential rise of consumerism with every individual aspiring to have a better lifestyle, increasing disparity between the rich and the poor have created a very dangerous cocktail that is laced with other myriad local and not-so-local issues such as ideological or communal differences. Any measure to bridge this apparent gap, by way of reduced/competitive pricing (an oversimplistic example), only results in reduced margins for organizations and further layoffs - like in the case of Granzino Transmissioni which saw the recent unfortunate incident. And that makes the current Global Financial crisis truly ominous. We can only wait and watch how this unfolds.

Won a medium AI skirmish in C&C3!!

2008-09-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

Played a C&C3 skirmish and defeated the GDI forces, playing as a Scrin unit...and that too in medium AI mode!! Finally!! Lots of learnings - moving the drone ship to the blue tiberium field early, creating multiple warp centers and producing multiple harvesters, and then queue up scores of vehicles - esp. anti-aircraft ones..Well, I still need to play and win a Kane's Wrath game though.
By the way, this is my 101st post! And to think I opened this blog in 2005/2006 - well, its been a slow start but a good one though. I love blogging now..:-\
Shveta's mom is recuperating, by god's grace. And I hope she really recovers fast. She has an indomitable willpower and she should sail through easily...

Delhi Trip

2008-09-16T01:15:00.000-07:00

Just returned from a great trip to Delhi. It was basically meant for my medical examinations at AIIMS and fortunately turned out good - no abnormal condition, but I guess I would need to reduce my weight fast. Nilu is around and we could spend some quality time together - talking, watching movies, playing C&C3-Kane's Wrath over the wi-fi LAN (and did I lose the games royally!), and ofcourse, sharing data with each other. Nilu has a very good repository of stuff and it was a pleasure checking it out. I also got to check out Bapa's new office - at the Bhikaji Cama Complex. A sea change from his earlier offices, the new office is located in a major market complex (which surely is also a matter of concern looking at the importance of his new post and the lack of security there). But what has been inspirational about Bapa always has been his taking everything in his stride without any apparent betrayal of emotions. Ma recently witnessed this oh so prestigious event where the National School of Drama staged one of her plays. Could anything be better than that??

And also could watch Buli mamu and his family for a whole week on TV. The last day was rather eventful - with the Delhi blasts. Bonnie apparently travelled that day via Barakhamba Road, one of the blast sites and we were naturally quite worried about her. My thoughts were also with Shveta and my mom-in-law, who still continues to be sick. I was constantly in touch with them. Bonnie landed up on the last day and spent a few hours with us. She is looking very sprightly and pretty now - which is a great thing. Hope she also manages to get a guy of her liking soon - which would be so much better for her, esp. because she is so well educated and smart....

I also got to show some of my Steven Seagal movies to Bapa and Ma, and also one of the gems of my prized collection - the World at War.

Lastly, our dear pets - Chaman and Godot - were looking their cutest best - playing around with their baby beanies and trying to hump each other (jeez!)..hope the horny Chaman gets a real mate before he dies humping an occasional human leg and a distraught US returned , male, Shih-tzu much older than himself...

I headed back to Bhopal on Sunday after having a rather good break. Wished my dear parents-in-law were better because I feel quite guilty thinking about all the good things as they suffer from ill-health.

Another Lazy Weekend

2008-09-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

Spent the weekend downloading Spore, watching TV, playing some Scrabulous and listening to some music..The speed of the net was so bad, I thought our broadband's Road Kill compared to the US' Road Runner. Anyways, as I posted earlier, the lowside was my mom-in-law's getting hospitalized. Got to know she threw up. Poor girl Shveta is all tied up and emotionally distraught right now - I guess a few diseases, such as coronary ailments, cancers and tumors, refuse to let go that easily. They almost always resurface after sometime. Perhaps its like an appliance or a product that - once it goes out of whack and gets repaired -never remains the same again and has something or the other cropping up that is in some ways related to that ailment. In anycase, the worst part about old people is that they don't stop worrying about their children.

Shveta's mom

2008-09-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

Today got to know that my mom-in-law had a relapse of the brain clot she had earlier. For the whole day today, as I was trying to divert my mind elsewhere, my thoughts were with them and I could not stop myself from calling Shveta again and again...I feel so so bad for her and imagine how difficult it is to see one's parents age and suffer from ailments...May God give them strength and quickly heal her..

Swamped with work today!

2008-09-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

The last two days have seen a frenetic time in the office, and am inundated with a lot of new projects getting set-up...would have 2-3 more projects setting up by next week and I would be ending up supporting at least 10 projects, and 5 teams besides them!..:((

Memento, Anterograde Amnesia...

2008-09-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

Today I saw Memento, another one of Christopher Nolan's psycho thrillers - the last I saw was the American Psycho. The great thing about this movie is its near accurate depiction of a person suffering from anterograde amnesia, a form of short-term memory loss, in a murder mystery setting. The end result is a confusing story that moves backward..I guess IMDB and Wikipedia contain enough spoilers and synopses so I would spare us the details, but it surely is a must see. Thanks, Betu, for recommending this one...

World At War IV

2008-09-02T03:36:00.000-07:00

Finally...wrapped up the last two episodes! Whew! I wonder what effort must have been invested in collecting all the information, editing all the footages, sewing all that together into a hell of a series! The advisor to the series was Noble Frankland, the then director of the Imperial War Museum. The last two episodes, though, were not that impressive. Ofcourse, there was no dearth of material, and the first 24 series talked in detail about various aspects of the war: for all the theaters, the scope of the series was covering the strategic, tactical and operational aspects of the war on land, air and at sea. Episode 25 dealt with the aftermath - the process of reconstruction in the devastated lands, the epicenter of all the battle. Huge swathes of refugees moved across continental Europe, quite like zombies. Permanently displaced even at home, since their homes were bombed out. The episode also talked about how other Asian nations, still under European colonial rule got inspired by Japan's exploits - Japan had routed the British out of Malaya , Singapore and many other places, restricting them to a few strongholds such as India. Nationalistic aspirations of many of these countries compounded by a weakened British/European presence made things easy for many to break free. The episodes show colored footages of celebrations across England and many other places, of the American homecoming. Absolutely invaluable stuff, this series. The last one talks about Remembering the Dead - 55 million died officially. Add to this figure the millions who died before the war in related events such as the Great Purge in USSR, the Japanese invasion of China, the partition of India in 1947. All within +/- 5 years of the war.
Back to life post World At War. Spent some time reading some books and playing Scrabulous before dozing off...

World At War - III

2008-08-31T22:06:00.000-07:00

Saw episodes through 24 since my last post on the subject. The episodes covered the genocide, the endloesung or the Final Solution to the Judenfrage, or the Jewish Question or Problem. In its distinct, crisp and accurate manner, the episode took us through Anne Frank's house in Holland, to the Nuremberg Laws of 1938, read out by Goering in the Reichstag, with Hitler and the NSDAP leadership looking over(the videos obviously accompanied by Laurence Olivier's baritone voice), the kristallnacht of November '38, then moving over to the rise of Himmler from a small time horticulturist to the earlier years of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, the formation of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and marginalization of the SA, the outbreak of the war and the commencement of the death machines - starting with the Dachau model camp, to other innumerable camps - each surrounded by ancilliary posts using forced labor to oil the war engine. Episode 20, the one focussing on the genocide, showed some morbid, graphic video clips of the camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and other places such as Mauthausen and Madjanek where initially the Einsatzgruppe shot their victims by the thousands. The video was peppered with interviews of Karl Wolff, Himmler's adjutant, many jewish survivors, other SS soldiers and leaders, some of Hitler's staff like Heinz Linge and Traudl Junge, etc... Particularly interesting was Wolff's witnessing Himmler's visit to Auschwitz and witnessing the slaughter of some of the jews. Apparently, a jewish shooting resulted in some of the brain matter getting splattered all over Himmler's coat, which made him turn all pale and green with sickness. Wolff tried to help keep his boss maintain his cool. Some of the subsequent measures to the Judenfrage included the Wannssee Conference - attended by the likes of Eichmann and Mengele and chaired by Heydrich to expedite the final solution, since each country acquired added to the count of jews and other "unlikeable" elements into the lebensraum, and also because extermination by shooting had its effect on the Waffen SS units and that it was not very efficient. And then came the Zyklon B enabled gas chambers - stills showing naked women and men lined up, children separated from their mothers, piles of belongings and personal effects - including prosthetics, wigs, actual hair, teeth...there was also a clip on the medical experiments.A very moving bit, something I was not aware of earlier, was that a number of the inmates, albeit a very small number, committed suicide by jumping onto the electric wires surrounding the camps. Pictures of some of those people was so moving, since it captured the expressions of helplessness and despair.. A very interesting bit was that most of the jews in the Occupied areas (Netherlands and other scandinavian areas) were told that they were being taken for resettlement to the east, and the video clips actually show a good number of affluent or middle class jews paying to be transported first!!! The very thought, the scenes and clips of the death camps, the death marches, still sends shivers down my spine - even after reading so much on the subject. To think that rational men, ably armed with the latest that technology, or science could offer, would be no different than the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi in their bestiality and hatred towards other "inferior" fellow human beings or the untermenschen. The episode ended with a scene of the dead and decomposing in the liberated camps, and a particularly stirring colored video clip of large bulldozers picking up piles of skeletal, naked bodies of jewish victims of the Holocaust. Apparently, post the surrender of Germany, civilians were forced to visit the camps and see for themselves how their beloved NSDAP resettled the jewish people. Some of the people are shown reacting to the sight with utter horror. Olivier says in the accompanied narration that apparently a mayor of a german town, and his wife, after going through such a visit, returned back to their place, and committed suicide - out of utter horror, disgust and shame. Its been about 63 years and already we are seeing a revival of neo-nationalistic and in some cases, anti-semitic sentiments in many parts of the world.
The other episodes dealt with the Pacific theater - something that I am not as interested as perhaps the Asian people of the South East must be - the Pacific theater and Imperial Japan's surrender. Episode 24 is on the Bomb. It has clips of Robert Oppenheimer giving his famous speech quoting the Gita - the "I am become Death, the destroyer of the world" one. Priceless video clips of the american operations across the Pacific islands including Saipan, Guam, Tawara, the Palau islands, Phillipines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and finally the Flying Fortresses flattening Japanese cities with tons and tons of bombs. Japan was almost at its knees and its envoys pleading in front of Molotov which was denied as Russia declared war on Japan over Manchuria in mid 1945. The West, after the German surrender, was increasingly scared and hostile towards the intentions of USSR, and rightly so. While the USSR justified its occupation of the "satellite" countries (many of whom, like Poland, felt betrayed by the Allies' not coming to their aid), its declaration of war on Japan must have rung alarm bells across the US, since wherever the USSR waged war, it occupied some or all the territories. And communism coming so close to the US would truly have been unsettling. It would also have given them unprecedented hold over a huge part of the globe, as the Japanese had occupied much of China and the Indo-China. Truman and Byrnes decided to drop the Bombs without informing any of their allies to gain greater bargaining power. The Cold War must have sent its first wave of chilly, cold winds across at this time, cold enough for the US to raise hell in Japan. Some of the Japanese ministers and policymakers interviewed in episodes 23 and 24 mention the sentiments in Japan even when everything was lost. Apparently, even after the two bombs were dropped, 99 of every 100 Japanese people wanted the war to continue, since they feared for their emperor and believed in fighting to the last man. Apparently, even a 1000 atomic bombs would not have shaken their resolve. But the emperor going on radio, informing the people of their decision to surrender to the Allies on Potsdam terms, really took the people aback. The video clips show people crying and the general reaction. What is ironic is the Japanese considering the Americans brutal - yes, 20th century warfare introduced a different kind of warfare unknown to the practitioners of conventional warfare of the preceding centuries - but the Japanese calling Americans brutal?? After Nanking? Just because it was mano-a-mano and not wholesale bombardment? Haven't people across ages realized what they ask for when they wage wars? ...What definitely was not excusable was the use of the atomic bombs...but I guess it was necessary for the world to realize what it could do and what the consequences of an atomic war could be. Had it not been, it would just have been a classified test in the Mojave desert unknown to people, who would have invented the bomb (and perhaps used it) anyways. The rest is history. But I believe, what is unnerving is that history repeats, and rather, has to repeat itself. People start forgetting the affects of war, death and destruction and are forced to experience it first hand when they reach their heights of hubris and arrogance, as the citizens of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany realized. I feel most for the victims of the warring nations - those who had nothing to do with things, but became unwilling parties. The Occupied countries in Europe and Asia. The Jews , gypsies, romas, poles..the Chinese, the Malayans and the Russians who must have died in such huge numbers. Somehow the feeling is not the same for the thousands of Indians who got killed when Islamic invaders came into the country through the ages - partly because we don't seem to be learning from anything. We still choose to be divided along caste and religious lines. Reading any journal or book on India in the 19th century or earliers seems as if it all happened only recently. Nothing like the homogenous people in other countries who atleast have some common beliefs, have some sense of integrity and propriety. We always remained vulnerable to attacks and reacted to each attack with emotion rather than as a cohesive force. We are a spiritual society, but there is nothing spiritual about being a divided lot...heard we may have an exclusive women-only IIT. Soon there could be a Muslim IIT, a Hindu IIT, etc..and then the communal riots across...hmmm....an endless debate, this.

Kidney woes...again...:(

2008-08-31T03:38:00.000-07:00

Its been ten years since I had my pelvic-ureteral junction obstruction operated upon, and more than five years since I last got a "DTPS test" done..and now seems like the old problem is surfacing again..heard that some kind of fibrosis sets in often after a PUJ obstruction surgery, which may result in a secondary obstruction , or the formation of stone, etc. In either case, it may lead to urinary tract infection and may damage the kidney (already distended by as much as 10mm)...:((

Busy being Scrabulous..

2008-08-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

Heck no - This is no take on The Eagles' latest hit, but of our getting hooked on to www.scrabulous.com, the addictive online Scrabble game. Too bad that it got pulled out of Facebook. Got to know scores of weird words such as kern, wert, qat, and tons of hours poured into innumerable matches with people across the globe. Scrabble couldn't have been more fun than this. Wish the Agarwalla bros were less greedy for the sake of the fans and sold it to Hasbro/Mattel in Jan when they offered them $10 mill....ah well...game on!

Max Mueller's Cambridge Lectures (late 19th cent.)

2008-08-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

Dug from Project Gutenburg, a collection of lectures delivered by Friedrich Max Mueller,the eminent 19th century philologist and indologist, to a class of young Cambridge students who had just passed their Indian Civil Services examinations, What I read was an eye-opener. And strangely, the books and accounts I have read of other "indophiles" and Raj writers often smack of racial prejudices that it seemed that this document was a modern work and not something written /delivered 120-130 odd years back. To quote a passage from his second lecture on the stereotypes westerners carried of Indians:
"I believe there is nothing more disheartening to any high-minded youngman than the idea that he will have to spend his life among humanbeings whom he can never respect or love--natives, as they are called,not to use even more offensive names--men whom he is taught toconsider as not amenable to the recognized principles of self-respect,uprightness, and veracity, and with whom therefore any community ofinterests and action, much more any real friendship, is supposed to beout of the question.
So often has that charge of untruthfulness been repeated, and sogenerally is it now accepted, that it seems almost Quixotic to try tofight against it.
Nor should I venture to fight this almost hopeless battle, if I werenot convinced that such a charge, like all charges brought against awhole nation, rests on the most flimsy induction, and that it hasdone, is doing, and will continue to do more mischief than anythingthat even the bitterest enemy of English dominion in India could haveinvented. If a young man who goes to India as a civil servant or as amilitary officer, goes there fully convinced that the people whom heis to meet with are all liars, liars by nature or by nationalinstinct, never restrained in their dealings by any regard for truth,never to be trusted on their word, need we wonder at the feelings ofdisgust with which he thinks of the Hindus, even before he has seenthem; the feelings of distrust with which he approaches them, and thecontemptuous way in which he treats them when brought into contactwith them for the transaction of public or private business? When suchtares have once been sown by the enemy, it will be difficult to gatherthem up. It has become almost an article of faith with every Indiancivil servant that all Indians are liars; nay, I know I shall never beforgiven for my heresy in venturing to doubt it."
The best passage of this lecture is this:
"Now, quite apart from India, I feel most strongly that every one ofthese international condemnations is to be deprecated, not only forthe sake of the self-conceited and uncharitable state of mind fromwhich they spring, and which they serve to strengthen and confirm, butfor purely logical reasons also, namely for the reckless and slovenlycharacter of the induction on which such conclusions rest. Because aman has travelled in Greece and has been cheated by his dragoman, orbeen carried off by brigands, does it follow that all Greeks, ancientas well as modern, are cheats and robbers, or that they approve ofcheating and robbery? And because in Calcutta, or Bombay, or Madras,Indians who are brought before judges, or who hang about thelaw-courts and the bazaars, are not distinguished by an unreasoningand uncompromising love of truth, is it not a very vicious inductionto say, in these days of careful reasoning, that all Hindus areliars--particularly if you bear in mind that, according to the latestcensus, the number of inhabitants of that vast country amounts to twohundred and fifty-three millions. Are all these two hundred andfifty-three millions of human beings to be set down as liars, becausesome hundreds, say even some thousands of Indians, when they arebrought to an English court of law, on suspicion of having committed atheft or a murder, do not speak the truth, the whole truth, andnothing but the truth? Would an English sailor, if brought before adark-skinned judge, who spoke English with a strange accent, bow downbefore him and confess at once any misdeed that he may have committed;and would all his mates rush forward and eagerly bear witness againsthim, when he had got himself into trouble?"
The last sentence, said almost 130 years back - how many times do we see this even today? How many times do we hear about a western nation insisting on extraditing a westerner commiting crime in a third-world country of dark-skinned people (and judges) to ensure a "fair" trial? (well, the pun obviously intended)...hmmm...guess somethings can never change. But I thank God that the world has its fair share of Max Muellers..

News of a Kidnapping

2008-08-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

Started reading Marquez's The News of a Kidnapping, a journalistic account (in Marquez's inimitable and magical style of narration) of a string of actual kidnappings of some journalists and high profile people in Colombia during the height of the Cartel menace there. I have just finished 45 odd pages of the almost 300 page book and have absolutely fallen in love with the gripping tale. Its a departure from the other books I have read of GGM - The General in his Labyrinth, Chronicles of a Death Foretold. But even then, you get a sense of the amazing interweaving of classic magic realism with a real life drama unfolding in the avenidos and casas of Bogota, The Extraditables (the body of drug dealers most prone to getting extradited to the US, headed by the one and only Pablo Escobar) who seek recourses such as kidnappings as a measure to weigh upon the political leadership headed by Gaviria to change the Extradition policies of Colombia. For me, the setting holds a special place in my heart since I was a part of the team working for an IT project for Banco Concasa spA, a Bogotan bank a long time back - in 1998-1999, and we were told that our onshore personnel were strictly instructed to use the shuttle provided to them from their hotel to the office premises and not venture anywhere else. Bogota was, like Manila and Baghdad, a dangerous place to be in during the Cali cartel menace. And we could easily have been mistaken for locals, with similar physical features....I though am quite intrigued by South America and would love to make a trip to all those exotic and esoteric places rich in Mayan, Aztec, Incan and the myriad other cultures that have formed the rather strange (and quite India like) culture there....coming back to the book, I guess through the writings of Borges, Marquez, Fuentes, Paz, and many others , we get to sneak into that unique culture with a lot more awe because through their eyes, it looks all the more magical...

Our final Olympic medal Tally for 2008

2008-08-22T11:59:00.001-07:00

Its finally over for us and the results are there for all of us - 1 Gold, 2 Bronzes. Thank you, so much, Abhinav, for atleast increasing viewership of the Games this part of the world. Hope we move from the All Limp Picks to some better picks next time (London,2012)...

Sun xVM Virtualization and Ubuntu Hardy Heron installation today

2008-08-21T22:13:00.000-07:00

Downloaded and installed the Sun xVM VirtualBox virtualization software today on my office machine and installed Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" on it. Working like a dream. I recall working on the Apple Mac OSX Tiger's terminal window and using the sudo bash commands (and that had actually taken me by surprise since I had never known earlier that the Mac is UNIX based or has a kernel support of some kind)...

December 21, 2012

2008-08-18T04:07:00.000-07:00

For the past few days, a lot of our news channels have been beaming all kinds of news stories into our homes. One of them is the alleged Doomsday forecast of the end of the world as we know it on December the 21st, 2012. I checked it on the net and found many sites, including Wikipedia entries on the subject. Apparently, this date is the last date of the Meso-american calendar that was used by the ancient Mayans. The end of the day does not indicate the end of the planet, but the end of a major epoch, and a major upheaval across civilizations, perhaps leading to major changes to life on Earth. However, seems like post Y2K, not many people are very serious about doomsday forecasts. But still, in many pockets of America, it seems, people have again started stocking food, duct tapes and what-not. As if these things could actually help people fight natural or climatic changes (as professed by the 12/21/12 followers, there would be major geological changes and some are even claiming polar reversal - without elaborating on the causes or the source of energy to effect such a radical change)....and as so common across the US, there are tons of merchandise available (really wonder what makes people buy such stuff - if they really believe in this stuff, its just 3-4 years for them (or us, rather) to live. What, therefore, is the big idea behind building a whole, new merchandise industry behind this date?)...

Delerium's You & I

2008-08-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

Been awake quite late today - to finish off a presentation (not quite finished, but I guess I would wrap it up tomorrow in office). Listened to some chill-out ambient tracks and absolutely fell in love with Delerium's You & I. The voice of Zoe Johnston is so captivating in this track. I am yet to hear the other Delerium tracks that I've got - just been hooked on to this one , and of course, Serenity..Listened to this number continuously for atleast 4-5 times before shutting off my laptop..

World At War - 2

2008-08-15T10:23:00.000-07:00

Saw a few more episodes this week of my favorite series of a long long time - World At War. At times I think that prior to the Internet age, the most intellectually stimulating things had invariably been created in the land of the Queen - be it the Oxford English Dictionary, or the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, or the Wisden Almanac, or this series...The episodes that I saw, post my last entry, included Germany's Unternehmen Barbarossa, the absolutely wonderful episode 10 - on the kriegesmarine's U-Boats. What has fascinated me so much has been the footages of some of the top Nazi and British characters and their interviews..be it Grossadmiral and subsequent Reichspraesident, Karl Doenitz, or the Reichsminister for Armaments, Albert Speer, or the last surviving awardee of the Knight's Cross with Oakleaves, Swords and Diamonds, Adolf Galland..I could continue writing pages after pages about the series, and about the absolutely impeccable quality of the documentary...

62nd Independence Day today

2008-08-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

Today is India's 62nd Independence Day - a day spent quite lazily at home - with some net browsing, some TV channel surfing and watching some movies. And ofcourse, talking with parents and mulling over the grim news of the past few weeks - of the untimely deaths of the sons of two of our close family friends...
All the news channels were busy debating about our political degeneration over the years - politicization of religion, the Kashmir crisis, Musharraf's imminent ouster and his probable options now. Michael Phelps' umpteenth Olympic gold and our umpteenth loss in Cricket (and our eternal optimism on the Olympics front...am I being too cynical? Oh no..I have been to some of our National sporting facilities and know for sure that anyone coming out of those places cannot even compete with our neighboring countries let alone qualify for the Olympics) constitutes our sports news. Still remember the 1988 exhibition soccer match between Mohun Bagan and Brazil's Sao Paolo that I happened to see from the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium stands in Delhi..did we lose 20-0, or was it 25-0?? The best part was that I was caught on the TV happily sleeping with my mouth gaping open and apparently the commentator said that my expression said it all about our state in soccer..:) Well, all this is still a much better option than listening to some inane celeb gossip that hogs our other channels. Fortunately, atleast for now, our entertainment channels haven't been able to create products like Britney or Paris Hilton yet..we still have much better things to do than to track the number of times any of our female celebs got pregnant..and I really dread that day when we have our own local versions of those bimbettes..Today's also Anup bhaisaab's birthday. Tomorrow is Rakhi and I'm waiting for Bonnie's rakhi to arrive. We may end up the day tomorrow at Ajay bhai's place...

The Muttley and Dastardly series over the weekend

2008-08-13T23:11:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I saw the Muttley and Dastardly series that Nilu shared with me a while back. Absolutely love this duo, especially Muttley (who also is/or bears a strong resemblance with Mumbly). He absolutely reminds me of our incorrigible Chaman, with the same shaggy look and the protruding lower canine teeth. I really wish at times that Chaman could snicker like Muttley - the trademark wheezy, asthmatic and vicious sounding laugh - or the trademark rashaffasharashaffasha grumble. And whenever Dastardly asks Muttley in the Stop the Pigeon series if he wanted a medal for his rescuing efforts, Muttley responds with an enthusiastic "Yeah Yeah Yeah" ..:)...hats off to Iwao Takamoto for creating these characters - and the other characters like Penelope Pitstop (I love the Hooded Claw and his "I'll get you Penelope")..:-\

India's first individual Olympic gold...finally!

2008-08-11T05:51:00.001-07:00

My early morning trip to work got started with a pleasant news - that Abhinav Bindra, one of our rifle shooters, bagged the first individual gold in the 108 years of India's tryst with Olympics. Finally! Someone! Our nation of a billion people now has someone to look up to. Anyways, I should not be talking all this. Sports as a profession is a tabooland for most of us Indians. We are trained to man the "Backoffice" of the world. And you can't be caught playing at work, can you? Well, there are exceptions - Rajyavardhan Rathore got us an individual Bronze last Olympics. So what if Jamaica's got more medals than us? Does Jamaica have the most expensive sporting federation on their soil (our Board of Control for Cricket in India)? Who cares about performance -who cares if we are a bunch of underachievers when it comes to team games? For us, it takes only one guy to do something - add more (even two doesn't help - look at our Tennis wunderkinds - Paes and Bhupathi), and we have squabbles, politics, tons of endorsements, aspirations to become cine-stars - anything but being good sportspersons. Our brightest stars are solo achievers - Vishy Anand in Chess (can't we have an Olympics Chess event ever??), Rathore and now Abhinav in rifle shooting, Sania in Tennis, Padukone in Badminton, Ramesh Krishnan in Tennis...(can't count many there too...ah well!!)..Hey, when would Age Of Empires get into the Olympics??

Syberia

2008-08-10T22:23:00.000-07:00

I played Benoit Sokal's eponymous Syberia. An epic of an Adventure game, its an absolute treat just to watch each frame of the game. The details are superb, and we travel from esoteric, sleepy alpine hamlets like Valadilene - ofcourse, after solving very complicated riddles that almost make us a part of those locales - to Barrockstadt, where I am currently at. You are Kate Walker, an American lawyer in the storyline. An acquisition bid by a toy company brings you to an Austrian town of Valadilene, the HQ of the Voralberg family. The town is a beautiful, sleepy town, but surprisingly has 2-3 visible inhabitants. The rest of the inhabitants are automatons - clockwork characters with a soul element added to them, thanks to the genius of Hans Voralberg, a mysterious member of the Voralberg empire. Kate's seemingly routine work gets murkier by the news of the death of Anna, the head of theVoralberg empire, the very day of her arrival at Valadilene (and this is almost where the storyline starts). Her boss, a ruthless Jay Jonah Jameson type character based out of NY, doesn't want her to return without closing the deal. And so, in the absence of Anna, Kate would have to find the mysterious brother, Hans, to complete the deal...and what follows is a very interesting process of clue-finding and investigating and solving, and traveling eastbound - from Valadilene, to Barrockstadt, to many other towns across Russia into Siberia...all amidst an incredibly beautiful setting. A must have game...I am enjoying it more than The Longest Journey and Riven. But I love this genre (not as much as I love RTS games though). I also have another of Benoit Sokal's titles - The Sinking Island..haven't played it much though...

Banzai!

2008-08-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

Today I saw the World At War episode 6 - the Pacific theater of the war. The episode beautifully elucidated the build up to the Japanese intrusions in Manchuria - including its quitting the League, its brushes with USSR for the huge coal deposits in Manchuria, and how the imperial army switched directions and moved along the Great Wall into mainland China. What was unique about this war, the Sino Japanese one, was the absolute ruthless and barbaric nature of it. Apparently, even the Nazis were taken aback by the nature of the war. Nanking is quite famous, or rather infamous for this. Apparently, there was this competition between two rival generals of the imperial army to behead as many people as possible and in one day each beheaded hundreds of Nankingians. Peking fell, Shanghai followed. Due to the presence of Europeans who were also there for material benefits, Japan got into the Axis alliance. The episode then took us to the Indo-china region and how they finally got into war with Britain for Malaya and Burma. Britain at that time was fighting on multiple fronts - in Egypt against Mussollini's forces and Rommel's Afrika Korps and also facing the Luftwaffe Blitz. The Japanese advances weaned the Africa units of some of their reinforcements. Rommel could therefore push Wavell's forces east to near Tobruk. The tug of war continued for a while (Episode 8 is about the African wars) in the Middle Eastern/Mediterranean theater. I often use words like "Ging Ming!" with Shveta - meaning "save us!" (or "save me"?)...seems like when little girls were being carted away for persecution in Nanking, some lady in the European occupation areas heard their cries and those cries haunted her for the rest of her life, after she knew what happened to the people there.
To think that all this happened 60-70 years back seems strange. USSR lost more than 25 million people, Germany about 7-8 million. Who does bodycount in poorer countries?...Globally some 40-50 million or more must have perished in those 5 years. And yet we are 7-8 billion people today!!...

Ye Olde Bayeux Tapestry...

2008-08-09T02:22:00.000-07:00

The Bayeux Tapestry is a historical artifact, commissioned by Odo de Bayeux ,the half-brother of William the Conqueror, one of the early Norman rulers of England (arguably the earliest)..its a large piece of woven cloth and kept in a museum in Bayeux, Normandy. It reveals a lot about the 11th century customs, and has many stories of bravado woven into the huge tapestry - including folklore, scandals of the time, tales of bravado, intrigue, coronations, whatnot....here's a sample..

World At War

2008-07-31T02:31:00.000-07:00

Today I saw the first two episodes of the definitive WWII series - the World At War. Directed by Jeremy Isaacs and narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier, the series set a trend for well researched documentaries. I had never before seen a video clip of Paul von Hindenburg going to the hustings, or those of people like Lord Halifax or the MPs in the House of Commons during the start of the WWII. The episodes talked about the causes that led to the war. Since the scope of the series was much larger, and included both the Pacific and the Atlantic theaters, the focus of the series was not as much about Hitler and the persecution of the Jews but the political situation in Europe, and mostly from the British perspective. The best part about old documentaries is that , while they are not as objective and clinical as the current lot, they could interview people who survived the war, or were key players during the war. That is not possible now. The series was produced during 1969-1974 : Churchill was dead already. But people like Sir John Colville (interviewed in episode 2: The Distant War) were still alive and discussed the political situation at the time Chamberlain stepped down (or rather, got unceremoniously booted out) and Churchill, the adventurer, stepped in. It discussed how Lord Halifax couldn't make it since no one from the House of the Lords had made it as a PM in 40 years! Anyways, the need of the hour then, in 1940, was to get an old military hand, not an ex Chancellor of the Exchequer. I really wonder what it would have been had the king okayed Halifax's nomination and rejected Churchill....the following year, Britain was to face the brunt of Luftwaffe's raids. Under Churchill's leadership, the Royal Navy and RAF could contain some damage.
The episodes also have clips from the private collections of people like Eva Braun (though this particular film that I am referring to, a short intimate color film short circa 1939, can be found on YouTube)..it looks quite strange to see a young, attractive girl trying to flirt with a man her father's age. And Hitler acts his Fuehrer image. His lackeys - Himmler and Heydrich are shown posing in front of some document - perhaps their "Die Endloesung der Judenfrage". I also read somewhere about the children of the Nazi leaders. While some were very repentent and disgusted and chose not to get married, like Niklas Frank, some like Himmler's daughter became the driving forces behind post war Nazi organizations such as Stille Hilfe, ODESSA, etc..
YouTube has its share of some real good videoclips - color and otherwise - of Nazi leaders including Heydrich, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels and others...Anyways, thats a digression. I would strongly recommend the World At War series to anyone interested in WWII history. I am adding other videos to my collection too - have Leni Raufenstahl's Triumph des Willens and Der Sieg des Glaubens..

The most outrageous cigarette

2008-07-31T02:17:00.000-07:00

Here in Indore, there is a cigarette shop (and I can bet there are others too) that "makes" some unique kinds of cigarette "garnishings"! Well, until now, I had only heard of people going to a cigarette shop and asking for their favorite brands, but here, according to a colleague of mine, you could also ask " Ek Classic bana do" (i.e., make me a Classic). The shopkeeper would promptly fish out a Classic cigarette stick and put it on his counter. Next, he would fish out some pastes, garnishings, spices, etc - roll the cigarette over the paste, sprinkle the garnishings all over it, insert a clove through the open end of the cigarette stick. The final output looks like a colorful cigar like contraption. I bet it must be interesting to smoke that, though it might be quite heavity nicotine laden. As such, Classic is a premium brand here, and the final output must be making the stick twice as expensive...:-) guess the people of Indore are not just crazy about food. Who thought of cigarette toppings and garnishings!!

Die Hochzeit -2

2008-07-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

Come 24th (and 25th), we were scouting for guesthouses, making trips to the jewellers (Lalchand Jewellers - a major jewellery house on the Janpath, right infront of the Ram Mandir), fixing the menu and hotel banquet halls for the groom's as well as for the bride's guests...what a pain, managing a marriage event is!!! I guess that made me stick to my resolution to not have kids . Also visited were places like Wood Art (written as "Ood Art" in Oriya). The stinkiest part of the day was getting grocery . There is a market managed by the Municipality corporation there that one needs to wade through to get to shops. I was reminded of my days as a kid going to Bhawanipatna and shop around - kids like Pablu were small and it usually was me, Reeti and Bonnie trudging to the shops...Reeti and Bonnie used to invariably get stuck at some trinket corner..gosh, some comparison. Anyhow, this was a trip made by dear old Bapa and me - and all through the way, Bapa was talking about how bad the idea was to go for our own pad instead of booking rooms at some guesthouse...
There were other problems around the house - the backyard had poor drainage and a lot of waterlogging...the shed had water logged in it, and no light or fan, and the cook and his apperentice were waiting at the verandah, grumbling away to glory. We had to fix Hotel New Marrion to provide us with some janitors and cleaners, and the day (or the next) was spent cleaning the place...Someone sent over a deep freezer to stock fish and meat for the meals planned for the next few days...the kitchen was eventually stocked...and various battles were being fought on various fronts...to think of it all now, the logistics involved was mindboggling...to ferry guests and relatives without getting them irate, providing a streaming supply of hot tea, jaljeera, snacks, etc or providing provisions for people to sleep...

The first among our relatives to come was Narayan mamu and maeen, early morning on the 25th..along with a girl who was his "jhiyaari" (niece). Looking at her, anyone could have written her off as a 7th or an 8th grad student - and she turned out to be a BA final year student!!! I guess Neutrogena and Oil of Olay should come and study our young town girls and try to learn the secrets behind their youthful looks...in our house, the ground-floor constitutes two rooms, a hall, a kitchen, the backyard, a loo, a living room and a stairway to the first floor. The guesthouse that has taken our place on rent had provided ACs in each room, and a TV with Tata Sky dish connection in the living room. That room, and the TV, were to become a centerpoint for the whole clan for the duration of stay....its amazing how people could watch TV during a marriage program but...guess anything can happen..
Nilu landed in the afternoon of the 25th and it was great to see him. Kumarmamu , maeen, Bonnie and Pablu also came that day, and we were also expecting Sangeeta "Baby" maeen , Pupul and Appu to come that day - the Howrah Puri express was 20 hours late due to flash floods and re-routing of trains..it was quite apparent that Kumarmamu and maeen had to parallely plan for Reeti's marriage - I guess all the girls are going to get married off between 2008 and 2010 - well, not all but the oldest 3. Pupul would be the endangered category person remaining in the clan.

Ahh..its 3 AM and I am still awake!!!...good nite, mates!!

Die Hochzeit von meiner schwester..

2008-07-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

Just returned from Bhubaneswar - its been a week already since we returned and what a whirlwind of a time it was. Things are still etched in my mind..It all started for us on the 20th - Shveta and I left via Bhopal to Delhi, where dad and my sis were waiting. Ma had already been in Bhubaneswar for a week or more, shuttling between Cuttack and the Palashpalli house. We were to fly over the weekend to the City of Temples and a lot had to be done. The issue was not just packing - it was a last moment change of decision from travelling by train to flying - and lugging in some 200 kgs of luggage. The idea seemed daunting, and yet - by the grace of Amma, we could manage to carry everything and reach BBSR. There were a few people waiting for us at the airport - to take us straight to the CRPF guest-house. (And at this time, we were to discover the depths of dumbness in the drivers of our cars, but thats wholly besides the point..)...it was quite ironical, and comical, that we, the outsiders, navigated our car drivers to some of the most well-known landmarks of their city, and landed up at the CRPF guesthouse. The guesthouse, located at the CRP Chhak near Nayapalli, is in the midst of a vast, highly secure campus. There were hardly any local personnel there. We were to unload, carry a box of mangos that we were carrying with ourselves (incidentally, the mangoes were from our trees at the Delhi home) to Cuttack..cutting to the chase, we soon left for Buli mamu's place in Cuttack...a sumptuous lunch awaited us - couldn't thank Mili maeen enough for the highly unusual and delectable tandoori chicken (marinated in coconut), sausages, fish, etc that constituted the spread...however, I have been watching over my weight - which is a legacy of my wanton days in the US, so I ate moderately less than what my belly permits. A lot of things were getting discussed - politics, jobs, Shveta's under-lip piercing, Putun's marriage, Reeti's impending marriage next year - before we headed back, alongwith ma, to the guesthouse...ah well, before we had even gone to the CRPF guesthouse after our landing, we had gone to pay a small visit to the Palashpalli house. Its truly amazing how fast things got done in those few days before our relatives started coming - there were tiles getting fixed and in many places there was hardly any flooring...ACs got mounted, etc!!...It seemed almost like building a house in 2 days!!.This was the 23rd, and the mamus and Nilu were expected on the 25th. We were also supposed to scour the town for good accos for a lot of our relatives coming from all parts of the state - all kinds of guesthouses. Got to see some really seedy and unmanaged places owned by some of the richest govt. departments..i guess I'd be lynched if I disclose about them here...also, we were to distribute some cards too..so, a lot of stuff was there in our plates already when we came into the town..I guess I would post some videos and pics in my subsequent posts...its 2.30AM and I am going off to sleep - very bored, sleepy, depressed and lonely right now...hope to complete the posts in the next day or two....keep watching this space (if you have any interest in knowing about the "monsoon wedding")

My name - in Egyptian Hieroglyphs

2008-06-13T01:49:00.001-07:00

I am back in India - and back to my old ways...I stumbled upon an interesting site today , hosted by University of Pennsylvania - called Write Like An Egyptian...so what the image on the left represents is my name, in the ancient pharaohic script...:)

New York,New York

2008-01-31T05:40:00.000-08:00

A lot of things kept me busy and away from my blogsite but here I am, back again..wanted to complete my log on my Washington-NY trip before I started forgetting the itsy-bitsy details..

We left Washington on the 23rd afternoon - in fact it was almost evening. Our vehicle, the Santa-Fe, had Furqan, Lalit and Amit, and we were closely following the Chevy Uplander belonging to Rakesh and Manish. Those guys started off from the Comfort Inn with such confidence, we thought we were all set to reach NJ in good time. I and Furqan were in no mood to get lost within the labyrinth called Washington streets again. But lo, within minutes of leaving the place, Rakesh lost the way and we were again heading towards the familiar territory - on the road next to the Arlington Cemetary, heading towards the Lyndon B Johnson park and again seeing the all too familiar DC skyline - the Washington Monument, the Capitol - all looming on the left. Actually we were still in the Arlington-Falls Church, Virginia area, which is like what Noida is to Delhi. In fact, much closer to that since DC is a very small area. But somehow, during the day, our instincts were much sharper and we could again get back to the route with some detour into a residential area, taking a reverse turn and catching the 395N. The road after that was very clear - catching the 95N till a particular exit (there is a fork from which 95N goes to Pittsburgh and then towards Boston and the other to the NJ Turnpike through Baltimore and the Delaware memorial bridge). The journey was really pleasant - Furqan was to drive for most of the journey and then Lalit to take over the last leg to the Best Western near Newark International in New Jersey, our destination. The road is a little confusing if you keep looking at it while driving - there are a lot of old streetmarks that have gone faint and have been replaced with new markings and that makes the road look like a mesh of dividers. To top it all, the speed limit mentioned was 50mph and everyone was shuttling at 80!. The familiar tunnel near Baltimore and the beautiful sky-line, the marina that was quite visible, and then the all-to-familiar overhead signs for Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland passed by. I so wished at that time that I could get admitted to one of those schools. I am truly in love with that entire area - Washington, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Richmond are all in about 80-100 mile radius and are loaded with historical places and hallowed names - quite like London. We passed by the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which looks quite the Brooklyn Bridge and is all covered with a bluish-green tinge that reminds you of the Statue of Liberty. We stopped at a rest area and did not take an exit - this one was like a mall, and very unlike all the rest areas we have seen in other states. This was on the Turnpike, at the NJ-Delaware state border or close to that.Icy cold and windy night, typical of north-east US - we relieved ourselves, grabbed a few packets of chips (I had a fag - couldn't help it), picked up a bottle of coke (yes, crazy us for not going for some hot cup of coffee!!) and then sped off. The entire journey between DC and NJ is dotted with tolls. People carry something called an EZPass, but typically for a non-pass holder, the one way trip would take you back by about 20 dollars give and take a few bucks. The traffic, the number of lanes, and the fact that it is close to sea and is difficult to maintain, justifies it.

The entire place between Washington and New Jersey seems like one single city in the night - all lighted up, and heavy traffic much through the night too, and the lanes. And the worst part - if you catch a lane and think the road signs would guide you through the whole journey like in the rest of the country, you are mighty mistaken - most of the exits have names instead of numbers, and there are "Exit Only" signs on multiple lanes. So if you don't stick to the right lanes in such high speeds, you can easily land up in some exit and get into a ride of a few miles to get back on track...

So we were happily going on on the NJ Turnpike, looking at our maps all the time to stay on course, until we started realizing we had overshot the right exit. We, naturally, took the next exit available, to a gas station, to ask for the Best Western near the Newark Liberty, our destination. The guy gave us a direction to catch the turnpike again and then take a particular exit. We did that, and were again heading towards New York - while we could see the Best Western, one of the tall buildings in that area, we were not sure of the exit to take, since most of the exits were for the Newark Liberty airport. We finally managed to reach the hotel after a few turns around that place. The hotel is owned by one Ravi Patel - real good, recommended to all. I could see the Manhattan skyline and Statue of Liberty clearly from my room window. It was about 10.30 in the night when we reached. Next to the reception, when the others were collecting our room keys, I noticed a flyer belonging to some muslim restaurant dishing out halal meat dishes. I showed it to Furqan and he went berserk - he had not had meat since ages since all meat available on retail is jhatka. We ordered a large chicken pizza just before things closed. Amit Lathiya was also famished and ordered a veggie. It was apparently the last order - as luck would have it - since other pizza joints like Domino's were closed by then. And was it tasty...We then went to sleep for the next day trip - which was Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in the morning, from the Newark station, to Central Park/Madison Square, Madame Tussauds, Time Square, Rockefeller, etc all through the day..

An interesting T-shirt I looked up on Amazon...

2008-01-11T11:52:00.000-08:00

What would you call this??...selling at 17.95 dollars on Amazon..

:))

Trip to Washington DC

2007-12-25T20:31:00.000-08:00

Returned today after a straight long drive from Newark today - via NJ turnpike, taking the I95 through Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Raleigh and a host of freeways, counties and parishes on the way. Being christmas, it was a day when seeing a cop on the interstate was a rarity and most surprisingly, seeing scores of closed departmental stores and food shops. But the trip, a tight 4 day tour of Washington,DC and NYC was truly amazing...We started off around 2PM from Columbia on the 21st. Our car (a Hyundai Santa Fe) had Vishal and his family, me and Furqan in it. There were two more vehicles - both 7 seater SUVs - going on the trip.

While filling in fuel for the trip at Kangaroo. we had already sensed what was coming - the entire Two-Notch was jam-packed with traffic and we knew we would not make it to Washington before 11 or 12. Anyhow, we started off - Furqan was driving and I was navigating him. He was to drive 200 miles, till we were near the North Carolina-Virginia border. The road was very busy and we passed through many exits with very funny and unusual names of counties and rivers etc: a town is called Local Traffic. Then there were the Great Pee Dee River, followed after some time by the Little Pee Dee River - both in our own South Carolina. Each state has its own traffic laws and we could distinctly feel the traffic getting a lot tamer as we entered Virginia (with a posted speed limit of 65 mph and enforced by aircraft). We stopped at a gas filling station after about 250-260 miles - somewhere in Virginia. Virginia is loaded with historical places - Mt Vernon, Washington's birth place and home to his estates, came on the way. Other names that people across the world know as the CIA's base - Langley - was also mentioned somewhere as we entered Washington. We reached the outer areas of Washington (close to the Pentagon ) around 9.15PM - a great feat considering we had left Two-Notch at around 2.30PM. It was very cold outside -which we could sense at the gas filling station. We decided to take our dinner at an exit after getting out of Washington and Baltimore. At night, it becomes very difficult to delineate any city in that area - we left Washington and , through a tunnel entered Maryland - saw hoardings that flashed some hallowed names such as University of Maryland at Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, etc., then through the Delaware Memorial Bridge to the name that was to become familiar throughout the journey, the spinal cord of the state of NJ - the New Jersey Turnpike - came along. We got out at an exit - Exit 74 - for our dinner. Furqan wanted to go to Pizza Hut but we had to settle for a place that had a chinese joint (called China Haste), a Sub Way, and a few other places. Vishal and I chose the chinese place to try out some chinese food - it turned out quite good - lobster fried rice and schzuan chicken. Nitu was on fast and Suchet and Furqan had tuna sub. The journey from our Washington hotel to the NJ Turnpike junction where we were to drop off Vishal was about 140 miles and it was about 11/11.30PM when we dropped them off. Then the most interesting thing was to happen for me and Furqan - getting lost in the capital of the United States. We drove off from the Turnpike point towards our destination - Comfort Inn, 6111, Arlington Blvd and were to take Exit 27- Silver Spring on I495S. We were told by Atul (Vishal's bro-in-law, who had come to pick him up at the Turnpike) to stick to the right as we neared the Silver Spring exit else we'd end up back in Richmond,Va. By the time we had reached that exit, it was about 1.30AM - we got a call from Puneet saying the rest of the gang had reached Comfort Inn and we told them we'd be joining them soon. That call was enough for us to miss the exit - Furqan, quite tired and sleepy due to driving 380 miles , got distracted by that call and as it happens on the free-ways, a small distraction could make you miss an exit. We thought to take the usual recourse - to take the next exit on the Richmond direction. However, we were to discover that its not the usual road system that we see in other American cities that we see in the DC area. The Interstate interchanges or feeder roads such as I395, I495, etc are like our Indian ring roads - they are circular roads on the periphery of the DC area, connecting DC to other Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania suburban towns. So we soon saw ourselves hurtling towards Langley and Richmond. We took the next exit and soon were moving towards the Dulles Internation Airport. The roads suddenly became one way and we were heading for a toll. We paid 75 cents and tried to move out - found ourselves moving towards some restricted administrative building and did a U turn on the one-way road to get out of it!!! Had it been an earthly hour, we would have been ticketed for sure. We suddenly saw an I-395N sign - by then we were already disoriented - and we thought we'd soon meet the exit we were looking for. At one point, we had landed next to Tysons Corner and later on we were to realize how close we were to our hotel from there! The place was really cool - there were huge corporate skyscrapers belonging to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Deloitte and the like. We however got out and then following our instincts which were all screwed up by then, took another road that took us to the Arlington Cemetary, to a huge wooded park (I was thinking about Chandra Levy as we moved around in that park - it was like driving through any national park)...As we continued moving, we however started seeing a more lighted, structured area approaching us - very beautiful baroque buildings, lovely streets...I soon spotted the US Capitol to our right!! We had spiralled from the outer roads to the inner DC area and we soon found ourselves driving on Pennsylvania Ave and Constitution Ave. I spotted the National Mall strip with the Washington Monument looming...the watch was screaming 3-30AM already as we were driving very carefully in that area, and both of us had lost any trace of sleep by then. After some talking to a cop at a gas station in the downtown DC area, we took the I395S and as told, decided to stick to that road. The road was not straight - it had a few roundabouts and we saw ourselves somewhere in Massachusetts Ave. It was 4.30 by then and we almost gave up and were quite panicky. Furqan had decided to camp somewhere there for the night instead of continuing struggling to find our way. We parked at a shopping area on the Massachusetts Avenue, next to an Exxon Service Center and called up Vishal/Atul. After a few missed calls, Atul picked up and it took some time for him to realize the situation. He couldn't see how we could get out of that area since it was some place in North-west DC and we were supposed to take some turns and lanes to reach our hotel. So we dropped the call and decided to take the Massachusetts Avenue right till the end and see where it went.. We finally reached a road sign that said I495 N and I495 S and then I called up Atul again. This time, knowing we were back on I 495, guided us - we took I495S, took exit 46A and reached Tysons Corner, then Atul guided us minute by minute and we got onto 50E that went straight to Comfort Inn. It was 5.30AM by then and we were tired and crashed on the bed.

We were to get up in an hours time, since the shuttle from the hotel to the nearest metro station (Ballston-MU) left at 9AM and then 10AM. With a sleep of just about an hour, we were up again, and after taking a shower and then breakfast, took the shuttle to Ballston-MU station. By the way, it was very very chilly and windy too.The group took a lot of snaps there itself - it was a beautiful place - looked very upmarket and refined. After taking the day tickets, we went downstairs to catch the Orange Line to Federal Triangle. The Federal Triangle station was truly amazing. It opened right into the courtyard of the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center, the second largest federal building after the Pentagon and what a building, truly. It is right on the Pennsylvania Avenue. After another round of photographs, we came out of the place and headed out on the Pennsylvania Ave towards the White House, our next destination. While on the street, I could easily sense that I was in the prettiest American city - even as I think of NYC now, the Time Square, the Manhattan area, I simply cannot find any other American city prettier than Washington - only the major European capitals could be rated equal or higher than DC. While walking down, a lot of our guys were taking snaps - posing next to statues and buildings. We were moving towards the Constitution Avenue and the National Mall strip - first we made our way into the White House Visiting Center that is housed inside the Department of Commerce building. There the entire place has White House memorabilia and movies on the history of the building running continuously. One exhibit was on the First Ladies and their cats, etc..We then came out and got out into the morning chill. God, whenever I think of those cities now, I can't get the chill out of the picture - it was so damn cold! We soon could see the huge obelisk, the Washington Monument and we slowly reached the hallowed gates of the White House..the entire place was crawling with Europeans, Chinese, Indians all taking pictures, posing infront of the gates to get the best view of the White House. Opposite the White House was a big Christmas Tree. Then there was a big slopy lawn that had the Washington Monument. It was quite late for us for the tickets up the Monument. Close to this area, on the green lawns, was a covered place where some people were playing Lennon-Yoko's Give Peace a Chance....We then walked by the Washington Monument after scores of photographs on the way. Around this time, our group also split too into people who were interested in going to the Capitol first and others who were walking towards the Smithsonian Institutions. We were earlier thinking of going to the Arlington Cemetary area or the Lincoln Memorial first, but then got our way into the Smithsonian buildings. Of all buildings, we could choose the Natural History Museum. The other buildings on that walk included the "Castle" - the beautiful red-stone cathedral like headquarters of the Smithsonian Institutions, the Freer Gallery, Air and Space museum, etc. One day seemed so less for everything, really. However, we managed to have a good trip inside the Natural History Museum. We were all quite famished too by then and the moment we got out, we pounced on the nearest hotdog place. I grabbed a Polish sausage hotdog and a usual hotdog. It was so cold that I had to huddle and eat them. We then moved towards the Capitol. Most of our time was spent on photography and therefore by the time we got to the Capitol, it was already about 4.30PM. We spent another hour on the reflecting pool infront of the Capitol, and then took the stairs. We I think didn't spare any statue on the way where we didn't take pics. After leaving the place, we walked down to the Lincoln Memorial - which was many blocks away - then to the World War II memorial and then back to the station. The plan for the next day was the Smithsonian National Zoo till about 1PM and then leaving for New York later..

Got my Sony Handycam!

2007-12-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

I got my Sony DCR-SR62 Handycam yesterday. Its such a cool, tiny thing - truly amazing how cool a gadget it is - its slightly bigger than the Olympus digital camera we have...couldn't have asked for more for a first camcorder. It is not very high-end - just has a 30GB Hard Disk storage space, a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens, 25x zoom and has come with a docking station for directly linking it to a DVD burner...so, I am all set for my Washington and NYC trip! I took a few video clips at home which I plan to upload. I also hope to shoot some films at Orlando - of Anup Bhaisab, bhabhi and kids and of beeji...

Christmas concert at the Forest Drive Baptist Church

2007-12-18T08:23:00.000-08:00

The last Sunday (December 16) we were all invited by Chris for a concert at the Baptist Church on Forest Drive, less than a mile from the Walmart and a mile away from our first acco in the US - Extended Stay Americas. It was our first chance to witness protestant Americans worship and was truly a delightful experience. The event was just for an hour - an auditorium with lots of worshippers in the pew area and on the stage there was the choir. Also there was an orchestra. There were many songs - gospels and hymns - including some rock type gospels in the agenda. Next to where the choir stood was a huge display with lyrics flashing for the audience to sing along with the choir. It was all about christmas - the birth of the Baby, the Magi, the gifts, the concept of giving gifts and of life and eternal life. The message sounded so similar to what we learn in Hinduism too - meaning that the essence of most of the world religions are more or less the same. When we left the place, it was very cold and around 8PM already...the next thing planned out was the Christmas drop-in at Chris' place. We (Shveta and me, Hemant and Sonia) had gone to the Forest Drive stores to hunt for the gift and finally after buying it and all the gift wrapping material - packed it then and there and put it in the car before leaving for the concert.
Chris and Sharon's house is quite close to the church - just a mile's drive from the place, on Percival Road. They had invited virtually every Indian staying at Windsors and some 30-40 people had turned up!..As a matter of fact, Sharon and Chris used their cars to guide all the cars to their home. And the entire place was jampacked with our people. There was some beautiful Christmas decorations in their living room and the table had some delectable dishes - samosas, pakoras, turkey wings in honey, and a very delicious dessert - pie kind of a dish. Chris gave a small introductory speech where he introduced his parents, his guests and after a prayer, we all started off on the snacks along with meeting and talking to Chris and Sharon. We talked on a range of topics, including the Bible, their family, his twin brother in Orlando (incidentally he is an identical twin and lives in Winter Park), about how frequently they visit Windsors and about sports, etc. Was a great, great experience for all of us - truly...

Plans for the Christmas Holidays

2007-12-13T08:05:00.000-08:00

I am planning to tag along with the bachelor folks here to go to Washington,D.C and NYC, if I get to travel with them, while Shveta would be off to Orlando this Christmas. I should be getting my Sony DCR-SR62 handycam sometime next week (got to read some glowing and not so glowing reviews about the camcorder before buying it. Its a budget Hard Disk Drive camcorder - with 25X optical zoom and 2000x digital zoom, and comes with 30GB of hard disk space. But I wanted a Sony and I wanted a state-of the art tech and this was the best bet for me. Mini-DVs and DVDs are passe now.). Vishal and Nitu are bound for NJ and Hemant, Sonia are planning another trip to Gatlinburg, TN and possibly to Biltmore House at Asheville,NC...Lets see how things turn up and we'd see some more posts on the Holidays in this blog. Watch this space!

Got my South Carolina License...

2007-12-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

Finally, Applied and got my SC License. The best part about the license is that it is used as a photo ID everywhere and you don't have to lug your passport everywhere. If you lose your license, its not as difficult as getting a duplicate passport. So, in so many places across America, for the period of my visa, I can now drive freely...what a relief!!!

World of Warcraft

2007-12-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

Hey..forgot to add..talking of being good kids...finally bought the first game here..all for just $3 thanks to the Google Checkout discount of $10 at Buy.com..World of Warcraft. The world's largest Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game, with some 9 million subscribers. I don't think I am going to pay the monthly subscription for this. I'd rather buy some interesting stuff for that money or save it than splurge on a virtual community. Truly, for the sake of experience and fun, one could pay and play..but no addiction. I also bought a teeny weeny Belkin FM tune transmitter for 6 dollars..connecting it to my laptop through the USB port, I can actually tune in to the FM radio in the Sony boombox lying at our home and play the music remotely. And it can be used with iPods and music players too in the car. Not bad, I should say..

Watching lots of movies these days...

2007-12-11T08:18:00.000-08:00

Got some good movies from the library - Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes, The Exorcist, Indiana Jones - The Temple of Doom, Gladiator, MI3, etc and a few from Hemant - The Transformers, Saving Private Ryan, etc. Read a Sidney Sheldon book - what a crappy book really - called Best Laid Plans...Shveta has picked up a few books on arts and crafts of the Americas and a few serious fiction literature - including Virginia Woolf..
So, all in all, we are now the good kids who don't play much but read and watch movies a lot..:-))

Biggest crap..!!

2007-12-02T20:32:00.000-08:00

Saw one of the most outrageously absurd video on Youtube, South Park - More Crap. Was in splits - if you, reading this, are familiar with South Park and not seen this - check this out!! its in 3 parts and it raises some stink...the featuring celeb is the lead man of the greatest rock act that ever happened - Bono of U2...Nilu, if you are reading this and I am sure you've seen it already, but if not - what are you doin' man? Here's the biggest crap you would have ever taken!!

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf2kAN2agys
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQJzKKVtK7E
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc5No8uelXs

Amma at Michigan

2007-12-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

Shveta's been giving reports from Dearborn,MI - seems like its snowing and Shveta is reminded of real christmas time weather - with all decked up Christmas trees..thats something one could see in my office too - with so many christmas trees at the lobby downstairs all decked up in lights, bulbs, gift packets, etc..

Shveta is so lucky to be attending the program there..it was just not possible for me to attend because of issues with leaves and the costs involved with taking an unplanned flight. Putun is there over the weekend, at the retreat. Apparently, Putun met a french man on her plan bound for France who talked with her, deferred his plans to go back to Paris and went with her to the retreat. He couldn't get the darshan but could see it from a distance and couldn't help crying before he left. I really think they are all blessed...I will get more information about Amma's darshan and her visit once Shveta's back from Detroit tommorrow...

Night of The Long Knives

2007-11-30T16:14:00.000-08:00

Saw a History Channel program the other day..The Night of the Long Knives...on June 30, 1934 occurred an event that in a way changed the course of German history and brought into absolute power that satanic force ..Hitler...the political intrigue, the plot to systematically eradicate all of Hitler's (and his cronies' - Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Bormann, Heydrich) enemies to pave the way for absolute power...so strange that the world played mute witness to such dramatic changes in Europe then..and so much of water flowed through before things changed...anyhow, the event saw the killing of Ernst Rohm at Bad Wiessee and the top leaders of the SA and the transformation of the SS - from a small regiment serving as bodyguards of Hitler (Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler)to the most feared body within Europe - headed by that small time, scheming ex-school teacher, chicken farm runner ..Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler and his man-at-arm, Reinhard Tristan Heydrich...coming to think of it, had Operation Anthropoid not been successful, had Heydrich continued to live on, unimaginable devastation would have occurred..perhaps it would have been endless Nights of Long Knives for all of us...

Finally, my house is wi-fi enabled...

2007-11-30T15:57:00.000-08:00

Got myself a wireless router and configured it today...its a powerful Linksys router and now I can access my internet connection from any part of my house..Didn't know that Linksys is actually part of Cisco until I got the package today..

Bhaisaab and Shveta at Bhaisaab's garage..spot the mango tree!!

2007-11-28T16:24:00.001-08:00

Mom and her two sons - Beeji, Anup and Gopal bhaisaab

2007-11-28T16:21:00.000-08:00

...With Beeji...

2007-11-28T16:18:00.000-08:00

Anup bhaisaab and Rekha bhabhi busy in their kitchen..

2007-11-28T16:12:00.000-08:00

Shveta in Michigan as I write this..

2007-11-28T14:54:00.000-08:00

Shveta would be landing right now at the Detroit-Wayne County airport as I write this. The outside temperature is 3 deg. celsius, though it "feels like -1 degrees" per the weather forecast there. The night temperature last night was -4 deg.cel., so its going to be very cold. Anyways, since she is going to meet Amma, she is very excited. Putun would be there on Saturday and both would return by end of day Monday next week.I hope and pray they have a safe and good journey...

Sunday at Daytona, FL

2007-11-26T08:53:00.000-08:00

Sunday ushered in the end of what was one of the most memorable days of my life - a complete pleasure stay at Anup Bhaisaab's place, getting completely pampered by bhaisaab and bhabhi and with the loving presence of Rahul and Chandni - to visiting the Disney World parks and especially witnessing some of the once in a lifetime moments - of watching the Thanksgiving electric parades and fireworks at the Cinderella castle. Sunday started off as a lazy morning - we got calls from Hemant at around 7.30AM and I woke up and got ready to go with bhaisaab to fetch the couple from their Knight's Inn, Maingate lodging in bhaisaab's merc. What a cool, imposing vehicle that is. Anyways, we all came home after the 20 mins each side ride, and had breakfast of idli and dosas. We stuffed ourselves really silly till about 11.30AM and then, after a short visit to the bada ghar to meet beeji, Gopal bhaisaab and Saroj bhabhi one last time (hope to meet all of bhaisaab's family again this christmas...), we set off towards Daytona. We expected to meet Manish and Richa there at the Neelam restaurant on South Atlantic Avenue. Must admit, gujjus have restaurants, shops and gas stations in some of the hottest areas in any american city. We reached Daytona around 1.30PM..its quite like Goa with a weather like Bhopal in Spring - very pleasant..there are 4-5 storey buildings lined up along the beachline which are primarily residential and tourist hotels. Life looks quite lazy except for the presence of bikers here and there - we also saw some real rich dudes on their Bugattis, and saw the NASCAR stadium from the outside. Unlike our seafront, there is a very thick hedge like divider separating the road from the seafront esplanade and that makes it not a very scenic drive. Anyways, we didn't have any mobile phone with us - ours was with Manish Sharma and we had to call Bhaisaab to inform them of our coordinates and plans. We finally got that near a beach walk-out. A walk-out is a wooden ramp that extends out into the sea till the edge of the land and looks quite like a peer or a gangway for boarding a ship or a vessel. There however is a toll-gate for that and we were charged 6 dollars for the four of us (all included) to go up the ramp. The entire ramp was full of anglers with their fishing poles and iceboxes. There was a small store nearby where one could buy fishing lines, baits, etc. The girls, being veggies, had a bad time with the all pervading smell of dried fish. Lots of people were surfing too - though it hardly looked like a surfable place - the water was very calm. The water looked quite dirty - it was all brown, perhaps due to the sand and the surfers. We just grabbed a few cans on coke and spent some time at the edge of the ramp, looking at the anglers patiently waiting for some fish to get hooked up. Reminded me so much of the idle Bhopalis who spend the whole days in and around the Bada Talaab. A japanese guy caught a small carp like fish and immediately rushed to his ice-box. I almost thought he'd eat sushi right there. But I guess he wanted to keep his prized catch a little longer...We left Daytona for Columbia at around 4PM...the road was long and the traffic was dense...we saw a car in flames on the right hand shoulder once - no one could have survived that kind of an accident on the interstate...We were back home at 10.30PM, driving at around 80mph (144 kmph)...

'Twas Truly Dreams coming True on Friday!!

2007-11-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

We came into the land of Mickey, Donald, Goofy and lots of those childhood characters that we saw and raved and dreamt about as kids at around 12PM. Thanks (so much! For what all can we thank you ??) to Anup Bhaisaab and Bhabhi, we started off with a sumptuous breakfast of aloo paratha- and a cool talking GPS device (a Garmin Nuvi) - and drove down to Disney World's Magic Kingdom. I was expecting the road to the amusement parks to be jampacked with cars, and police vehicles all around the place, but the journey was unusually smooth. Perhaps because it was noon and quite late in the day. We reached the Disney World area - its like a medium sized city - with its own vehicles, a huge open air parking lot that accommodates more than 65000 vehicles anytime, huge theme parks (besides the 4, there are places like Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon, etc)..the roads themselves are like freeways. We reached the place and then rushed to the tram that takes you from the parking lot to the ticketing area. Later, we were to realize what a mistake we made - by just parking our car and rushing to catch the tram.. We then caught the tram, a train rather of small coaches..and reached the ticketing area, where we got Shveta's ticket (I'd got mine the day before when I was at Epcot)...After getting Shveta's ticket from the counter, we boarded the monorail from the ticketing counter to the Disney Magic Kingdom - to describe even the monorail journey is an amazing experience by itself - its a smooth, bullet-train like vehicle that moves on a rail across lakes and forested areas into the Theme park. You suddenly start seeing the huge castle like landmark in the foreground, and many rides and entertainment areas from that place, and a huge lake with ferries coming and going ...the monorail stopped at the Disney World entrance, and boy, its a complete township by itself. The setting is quite like an old, European city - with narrow, cobble-stoned streets, beautiful buildings that are basically modern eateries, cafes, memorabilia stores, merchandise shops, etc...the entrance also has a station that has another train system - the Disney World railroad that leads you to another part of the huge village thats the Magic Kingdom theme park. The station reminded me of Euston or King's Cross St Pancras station in England - old victorian look blended with spanish thick walled architecture (a better example should be the kind of stations you see in old US civil war movies with the "Ye Olde.." prefix)...we walked down from that entranceway onto the Main Street towards the huge Cinderella's castle - the castle is the one you'd find in any Disney film logo..the crowd was overwhelming near that square - the weather couldn't have been better, warm, sunny weather as pleasant as a winter afternoon in India. We were armed with a map and a schedule of events at various places within the park, and ofcourse, our tickets..I had decided to first take the thrill rides..and we started towards one of the many "Lands"..they are - Adventure Land, Fantasy Land, Frontier Land, Tomorrow Land and Mickey Mouse's Toon Fair Land. The Frontier Land has some of the best thrill rides in Magic Kingdom - Splash Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, etc..we were still around the castle when we saw all the streets crowded and sealed, and all the people seemed to be standing along the sideways, waiting for something to happen. We tried to make our way, a little anxious since we had come so late in the day (the park opens at 9AM) - then we came to know the reason - there was a Dream Will Come True parade coming - first, we saw a vintage car with some Disney characters, followed by a group of boys and girls dressed in Disney costumes coming, dancing to the tune of a lovely song..followed by lots of floats of Disney characters and movies - Cinderella and the Seven Dwarves, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King, etc, then a float of all the villians - Cruella DeVil from 101 Dalmatians, etc - and at the end, the king himself, Mickey Mouse, along with Minnie, Pluto, Donald, etc. A long parade with lots of dancers it was..as it went passed us, the crowd was slowly getting dispersed to various destinations. We headed towards the FrontierLand. The first place - Splash Mountain. We went to the Fast Pass distribution area, put our tickets and got our Splash Mountain fast passes. I actually couldn't get one through my ticket and there was a small problem - Shveta got her pass. The time to enter Splash Mountain was 1.35PM so we thought of going to Big Thunder Mountain railroad and tried our luck with the fast passes there - the normal lines for most of the Thrill rides in Disney are so long during Thanksgiving that it makes sense to try the Fast Passes. These are free, timed entries to certain events which are a lot in demand within Disney, esp. the rides. But the timings that the Fast Passes show are quite spread out, and once you avail of a Fast Pass, you can't use your ticket for another Fast Pass in another ride till atleast an hour. So, I tried my ticket at Big Thunder and got a Fast Pass. So, we had a fast pass for Splash Mtn and one for Big Thunder, and therefore we went to the ticket counter of Splash and asked the guy there to help. He suggested us to surrender the Big Thunder and get a switch pass to Splash for both, and so we traded the Big Thunder one and went to Splash. Splash Mountain is based on a Disney character, Brer Rabbit - its a roller coaster ride that ends with a huge, almost vertical, fall from the top to a water body - the vehicle being a raft like structure, and end up with a splash - wow, we thought we'd die when we fell from there and it was really thrilling!..then we thought of going to Tomorrow Land, and see a few things since we were quite daunted by the sight of the queue infront of other rides. We went to an Indy car race there and I and Shveta "drove" an Indy car. A very kiddish thing. Took quite a while. We then tried our luck with Fast passes and got the fast pass of Space Mountain - a fastpaced rollercoaster ride in a sci-fi setting. We got the timing for 8.30PM!..our next destination? Stich's Great Escape - based on the Lilo & Stich character. Very stupid, but cute trip. A character's name was Commander Gantu, by the way :-)..we were quite tired of walking - the distances are huge across the different Lands. So we walked by and had some Mickey shaped cookie'n icecream sandwiches and tried our luck at the Small World in Fantasy Land - a musical journey on a boat through a cave that has some very interesting puppets of various cultures - European, Chinese, Arabic (India and Arabic, as always, clubbed together as bindi-adorned veiled girls dancing or playing the sitar), Hawaiian, Mexican, Japanese, etc. Seems like its a lot in demand too and took us a long time to actually get to it...then, we went to the Adventure Land and tried out the Pirates of the Caribbean, a very very long queue - but absolutely worth the visit - a journey very similar to the one in the movies where Orlando Bloom travels on the ship to find Jack Sparrow. Cannot describe it - its just mindblowingly awesome. After that, we had a few more icecream sandwiches and went back to Frontier Land to try Big Thunder. A hugely thrilling ride on a roller-coaster train travelling in break-neck speed. Disney roller-coasters however are not very long. But they are good, no doubt. It was already getting dark when we finished with Big Thunder. We didn't want to visit the kiddish places in Fantasyland, more because there was so much and so little time - Peter Pan's flight, Mickey Philharmagic 3D movie, Snow White's scary adventures, etc. We wanted to cover the thrill rides first.We then went to the Country Bear Jamboree - a cute little show of some bear - puppets singing some honky-tonk music and it was straight out of one of the 1940s-50s cartoon movies, with some wall animal trophies, like moose and deer and bisons also singing happily!!..by the time we got through it, we tried catching up with our colleagues Hemant, Sonia, Manish and Richa who were somewhere in Tomorrow Land. We decided to meet for the fireworks at Cinderella's castle scheduled at 9PM. Just before that, we had gone to Tomorrow Land to try our luck at Space Mountain as we had fast passes for that, but to our utter dismay, we were told it was closed for sometime. We then went with the group to the central plaza that was the castle area, and then started the most spectacular event I have ever witnessed in my life -the fireworks show!..With the castle changing colors from a deep florescent blue, to aquamarine, to coffee brown, etc, and all kinds of fireworks lighting up the skies to the tune of a lovely Disney song, it lasted many memorable minutes...we again dispersed - Hemant et al enroute to Peter Pan while we to try our luck at Space Mountain again before calling it a day. And to our luck it worked! We went it -and it happened to be one scary ride!!..At breakneck speed, we were travelling, nay zooming, across dark space, through wormholes lighted up in all kinds of psychedelic colored lights with sudden twists and turns, vertical falls, steep rises, etc - Shveta was screaming at the top of her voice!!!..We finally dragged our tired feet across the cold night to the exit gates when we again saw the oh so familiar crowd on the streets waiting for something to happen...and there it was, the legendary electric parade of Thanksgiving. Rekha bhabhi had told us it was once in a lifetime kind of thing and she was not wrong. The parade had everything in lights, all Disney characters in psychedelic lights walking past, singing and dancing etc..and then we finally bid Disney World goodbye, dead tired that we were by then..we caught the monorail, which took us through the inside of a huge Disney Contemporary Resort - a huge multistoreyed building through which the monorail passes. Imagine getting out of the monorail and finding yourself in a beautifully carpetted lobby of a swanky hotel, on the second or the third floor!!!..we finally reached the ticketing center and took a tram to the parking lot. And then we realized we didn't know where the car was parked!!!!..We had forgotten the parking lot number and there were 65000 cars parked!..Shveta called up bhaisaab and informed him and we all got really scared. Then I pieced up all my memories and thankfully after some walking got to our car. And then we just had enough energy to get into the vehicle and drive back home to Winter Park. As I recollect things we did on Thursday and Friday - at EPCOT and Magic Kingdom, I regret not having been able to cover all the attractions at either of the theme parks. But then they are so huge, with so much to see and relish, besides the landscape, the buildings,and all of this while wading through a huge ocean of humanity, all that we could cover was incredible. Anup bhaisaab told me that people in the US save money for a long time before coming to Orlando and going to all the theme parks. We couldn't buy any memorabilia - the entire exercise of looking at those stuff takes a lot of time, and then things are just prohibitively expensive. A tee that costs not more than 5 dollars at JCP or GAP would cost nothing less than 30-35 bucks in a theme park. Even a small keychain would take you back by 7-8 dollars. Its just plain and simple loot. Disney, Universal, etc must be raking in billions. But then, they have to continue running the show even during the lean periods - periods when Florida is hit by hurricanes or when its pouring cats and dogs. I saw people spending a couple of thousand dollars buying junk there!! Anyways, all I carry with me is tons of memories and some snaps - I would collect some of the snaps from Hemant and Manish Sharma later, to create a montage of pics we took there. For sure, the moments in some of those attractions, including the fireworks and the electric parade, were some of the best moments of my life..

Disney World EPCOT!!

2007-11-22T21:21:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is BIG in the US. Its more than just a holiday - and so it was for me. I kicked off my second trip to Orlando with a visit to Disney's EPCOT. The Disney World in Orlando consists of four theme parks - Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, EPCOT and MGM studios. EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tommorrow. True to its name, it has rides and themes based on futuristic stuff and was really really cool. The first place I went to in the park was the International Space Training Center. This was a very innovative place based on Gary Sinise's movie (and as in all movie based entertainment places, presented by the movie cast) on a trip to Mars. The idea was to subject "candidates" to advanced space training before taking off to Mars. The entire place looked so real - just like out of a movie. The entry lounge had a huge rotating space capsule..videos were running showing the insides of a space vehicle to be used for the take off. I unfortunately took the Green (less intensive) ticket (all tickets are obviously free, so that thing really pinched me a lot later as I really wanted the more intensive one) but anyways..we finally "boarded" the craft..teams were formed and my team (no. 1) had 3 people including me..we were supposed to be the crew manning the ship to Mars. I became the pilot and the navigator while the other two became the Commander and the Engineer...the rest was one heck of a ride to Mars!!...I will write more on my EPCOT trip later perhaps - about Finding Nemo, Soaring over California, about the World Showcase, about Ellen Degeneres' show on Energy, and the best thrill ride of 'em all - Test track (powered by GM)..I missed out Honey I shrunk the audience - guess the only one thing I missed and regret now..its quite late in the night as I write this and I am groggy - after all, I need to be in Disney's Magic Kingdom on time tommorrow and a lot more stuff to see...!..:-)

Fall colors next to our apartment

2007-11-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

America looks absolutely beautiful this time of the year - just outside our apartment, at the parking lot, one can't miss nature's resplendent beauty..

This is where we stayed when we set foot here in Columbia

2007-11-18T12:58:00.000-08:00

Extended Stay America at Forest Drive - Shveta took me here on Saturday. This is next to Walmart, Hobby Lobby, Conway, Payless Shoes, Shoe Carnival and a good number of places. We stayed here for 2 weeks before moving down to our apartments at Windsors...How time flies!!

Auntyji ki dukaan on Two-notch road

2007-11-18T12:53:00.001-08:00

How on earth could I not include a picture of the famed Indian grocery store on Two-notch, the nearest such place to our home. Auntyji, as the lady running the place is called, stocks all the parathas, spices, namkeens, masalas - not to mention - the vegetables, that the desi diaspora needs. The Walmarts, Targets and Publixes of the world do not cater to this demographic segment yet, and thanks to the gujju/Patel network across the US, this requirement is met quite well. Columbia has 2 or 3 such stores....

Shveta zipping on Interstate 77N from Exit 12 to Exit 17

2007-11-18T12:34:00.000-08:00

Got into a writer's block lately!

2007-11-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

Seems like I have hit a roadblock on my blogging journey - keep watching this space for new blogs. Lets see where Pallav and Shveta head to this weekend! Hope its Atlanta or Myrtle Beach! Or Savannah!

Michel Gondry

2007-11-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

I saw a couple of Michel Gondry videos on youtube.com and they are simply mindblowing. Is there anyone more creative than this guy out there? I mean Beck's "Cellphone's dead", Chemical Brothers' "Let Forever Be", the Levi's Commercials, the Paul McCartney video, not to speak of the HP ad...I would absolutely recommend the Beck number to anyone. Features quite close to another video (not Michel Gondry) - Free As a Bird (The Beatles) - that is mindblowingly cool (especially when you adore The Beatles)....

Sunday outings this week

2007-11-12T07:14:00.000-08:00

We went out yesterday to the Saluda Shoals Park on Bush River Road for a picnic and man, what a picnic it was - cricket, rumaal jhapatta, dodge ball, what have you! The place was teeming with most of the desis - barring a few of us who went to Gatlinburg on Saturday and were dead tired. We played a lot of games, ate Krispy Kreme donuts, Doritos nachos, Cheetos puffs and just enjoyed the place from 11.30AM through 3PM before we decided we had to go out. There were a lot of parents with kids and it was kind of growing on us - and then we decided to go to Charlotte to watch "Om Shanti Om". While returning from Saluda Shoals, we stopped by at Subway and I grabbed a Chicken Teriyaki sub with lots of sauces and pickles in it(yummy - just added this note so that it reminds me what is good at Subway that I could try again! If you happen to be in the US and reading this - try it out if you haven't already!). Then we went to Windsors, picked up some jackets and then went off to Charlotte. Reached Ayrsley at about 5.15PM and then got the tickets to Om Shanti Om. The movie is good - an out and out SRK movie and very entertaining. The most charming part of the movie was Deepika Padukone - she rocks! She is so cool looking in the movie. Hope she continues to get some more screen time in her movies. Her eyes and smile were very expressive indeed....Anyways, we then left the theater after taking some pictures next to a "Hitman" cutout. Our plan was to stop by Udipi - which is supposed to be one of the best Indian joints around (frankly, I have been really put off by the quality of stuff they dish out at other places here including Bombay Bistro - they ought to be taught how to make good Indian food!!) - sadly we were already quite late by the time we figured out how to reach Udipi - it was 9.30PM already and time for the place to close - so we caught the next exit and drove back home...

Gatlinburg, Tennessee - During peak of Fall in the Smokies

2007-11-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

A very unique car plate, at Bombay Bistro, Columbia

2007-11-09T18:08:00.000-08:00

Our desi colleagues (Hemant and Sonia and others), celebrating Karva Chauth in the chill of the night, at Windsors

2007-11-09T18:00:00.000-08:00

Our Nissan Sentra, parked near our apartment

2007-11-09T17:58:00.000-08:00

Windsor Shores Drive- Thats where we live!

2007-11-09T17:51:00.000-08:00

Interstate 77N in and around Charlotte, while going to Concord Mills - Fall colors

2007-11-09T17:39:00.000-08:00

Some of our Universal Studios Pics

2007-11-09T17:29:00.001-08:00

Rise of Nations series

2007-11-07T10:43:00.000-08:00

Have been playing Rise of Nations (RoN as its called everywhere) series for a few days now, ever since I got my new lappie - while I have been playing RoN for a while now, I had not played the Expansion version and the new Rise of Legends earlier. The Expansion version, Thrones and Patriots, adds some new campaigns and civilizations (including Indians). I have always loved real-time strategy games and still love Age of Empires I and II (simply hated III though - seems like the good guys moved to the RoN production studios, and never could relish the Civilization games (i.e. turn-based RTS games) a lot. But I think RON takes the cake when it comes to real uncomplicated RTS. I tried my luck with Medieval II - Total War. Hell, why do they make gameplay so complicated? Almost like the Hitman equivalent of an RTS game...The Legends gameplay in my new laptop revealed some of the most awesome video playing capabilities of the NVIDIA 8600M GT card - now I know what a good GPU is all about! Though I don't (and shouldn't) play much these days - leaving Shveta brooding alone, its Rise of Nations series that would remain the flavor of the season in our home for sometime...

Winter's set in now!

2007-11-07T10:11:00.000-08:00

The weather here has suddenly become so cold now - the temperature today is 12 deg.C as I write this mail and its only the first week of November. Lowest today is going to be 1 deg.C!!!! I really am scared thinking about going out of office at 6PM and suddenly a draft of icy cold wind as I walk up to my car....

News, News, News

2007-11-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

Got to know that Buli mamu has become the first commissioner of police of the twin cities of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, a major achievement. Bapa's becoming Secretary,DOPT was the best news for us from achievements point of view - one of the most powerful executive positions in the country that is - and then this news. Kudos to you, Buli mamu. Hope all of us continue breaking new ground ...May guruji and Amma continue to bless all of us...

Mundraguda Gatherations

2007-11-02T05:33:00.001-07:00

Got to know from Putun last night about the Yahoo group Budu mamu had created - Mundraguda Gatherations. The gathering has come of age - is on the internet now as a community. Saw the pics and felt kind of jealous - it looked absolute fun. The nostalgic feeling about the village - the memories of our childhood came rushing in. And everyone looks so grown up now - Bonnie and Buli mamu I keep meeting so often, so they don't seem a lot changed. K'mamu looks more like a member of the Mishra family now than ever (hey, I am hoping no one from the gatheration reads this blog!) , Pupul and Reeti look plump and older - it took me a hard observation to actually realize it was Pupul there in those pics with the specs, Romu looks like a man already - couldn't seem to recognize them at all! But one thing that looked constant was the smile in all faces. The glee doesn't seem to have changed at all. Somehow one really wishes we the next gen people were as close as they. But its been about 10 years now that I attended one such gathering - and the memories of those leisurely, lazy pleasant days seems replaced by very busy, career oriented faces. Still, finding time to be close to the roots is what living is all about. A real destressing therapy. Ma looks worried in the pics, as usual, with the thoughts of wedding arrangements, etc I am sure...
This weekend it would hopefully be a trip outside Columbia - Myrtle Beach? Charlotte? Atlanta? This small little couple from India would continue marching forward to explore newer territories!!

My new Dell Inspiron 1520 notebook

2007-10-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

Today I got my new notebook. I think its a good config though would like to paste it and try to gauge world opinion on how good it is -

Inspiron 1520, Intel Core 2 Duo T7250, 2.0GHz, 800Mhz 2M L2 Cache
Ruby Red Color with MicrosatinFinish
2GB, DDR2, 667MHz 2 Dimm
15.4 inch Wide Screen WXGA LCDTrueLife
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
160G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, English
Integrated 10/100 Network Cardand Modem, for Inspiron
8X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Drive
Integrated Sound Blaster Audigy
Intel 3945 WLAN (802.11a/g) Mini Card
Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam
56 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Prim
Dell Wirless 355 Bluetooth Mod
Dell Bluetooth Travel mouse

Orlando, Florida

2007-10-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

I left for Winter Park last week Friday night - catching the same south-bound Amtrak (the 91 Silver Star) that Shveta had caught two weeks earlier, and under similar circumstances - the train is scheduled at 1.44AM, but never quite makes it - not even an hour long delay. In fact, I left home, some 20 miles away from the Pulaski Street, Downtown Columbia located station at 2.00AM!! All through that evening, I was calling up Anup Bhaisaab and Shveta to know the status of the train, and finally, called the cab to go to the station. The train finally made it at about 3.30AM and I got to get my first experience of traveling long distance on train in the US. It was a comfortable journey, and in anycase I was traveling light so the journey as such was quite pleasant. The train coursed through South Carolina, Georgia and finally into Florida - I had slept a few hours during this 8 hour long journey but couldn't sleep through the whole of it, partly because I was not aware that we could ask for a blanket and it was quite chilly in there. However, in retrospect, it was a good thing for me to do...as we entered Florida, I could distinctly make out the changing landscape, the flora - which now seemed quite mediterranean and reminded me of my trip up the French Riviera. I reached Winter Park at about 11.30AM. Anup Bhaisaab and Shveta were there to pick me on bhaisaab's Merc. And as we left the station, I could quite put in place the merc in that setting. Winter Park is a very plush, rich town - with the entire road from the station up to a considerable distance lined up with some of the top-notch fashion labels one finds in good malls here. I was enjoying the scenery as well as narrating my tales of the journey - the shopping district made way to residential complexes - very very mediterranean in look (and aptly named "Casa" in many places). And as we were driving towards the Jessica Court area, I could also see how indistinguishable the city limits are between Winter Park and Orlando - just a road divides the two cities..Anyhow, we reached home, where Bhabhi had made some snacks - poha and fruits, etc. For a minute, I thought I was not in America but at home - with the home glowing with warmth and affection. The next two days were an extension of that, with an introduction of many other people whom I knew earlier and whom I'd known through Shveta but needed to put faces to names. But the most important of the people I had known and just had to meet were, besides Bhaisaab and his immediate family, Beeji (bhaisaab's mom), Gopal bhaisaab and Saroj Bhabhi. I also got to meet some amazing people in those two day's stay (I simply don't understand how we could have so much of stuff packed into 2 days) - Rajeev bhaisaab and Minna mausi, Prakash bhaisaab and his family. Rahul came down from Tampa over on Saturday evening. A great kid born and living here, but with very strong values. The weekend was jam-packed with very enjoyable get-togethers - meeting Beeji and talking to her (got a few snaps of her too - wish I had bought a handycam - will surely do that before my next trip in November, though), and of course, the Universal Studios visit. Can't thank Anup Bhaisaab and Rekha bhabhi enough. I would dare say they are as affectionate to us as they are to their own children. They also got us a car, a Nissan Sentra (another loong and very very eventful story my return trip would make. My debut road hike - a 440 mile journey to Columbia!!)...Guess when my new Dell laptop comes next week, I would do some real-time blogging and capture some interesting titbits of my visit to Orlando...

Concord Mills

2007-10-19T08:18:00.001-07:00

Got to know from Wikipedia that the Concord Mills at Concord, NC where we went last weekend is the largest tourist center of attraction in the whole of North Carolina, attracting close to 15 million people a year! Wow! And to think its just 75 miles away from here...

Funny morning show on the radio..

2007-10-17T05:41:00.000-07:00

Today I woke up early morning and lazily switched on the radio in my alarm radio as I was going for my morning rituals. And there was this show kind of a thing running where people could phone in and someone had called in to ask if the "Dally Lama" is some kind of an act like the "Pussycat Dolls", coz they sound so similar..and this show host says "Oh no, Dally Lama is a peace guy and a great man and he gives buddhist blessings with the tigers"..whatever that meant! This guy then replies, "Oh yeah, he gave me one of the those" and this guy says" the Dally Lama gave you a buddhist blessing with the tigers? What did he bless you with?"..this guy says "Oh he blessed me to become a sex machine"..and then our show host says "Wait a minute, Jeez..the Dally Lama gave you a buddhist blessing with the tigers to become a sex machine..what were the tigers doing?" and this went on and on...insanely surreal..though it sounds racist (and is racist), it sounded very funny...and to think such a show started off so early in the morning, some people have a lot of time for all kinds of things out here!! And then, soon after, the channel played Nickelback's Rockstar..

Visit to Charlotte, NC

2007-10-15T06:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went to see a movie, "Bhool Bhulaiya" to Charlotte, some 75 miles from Columbia. We started from Windsors at around 10.30AM and first went to Kangaroos for gas. We were a group of 3 SUVs, with about 6 guys in each vehicle. It was a pleasant, sunny morning which had gotten quite warm very soon after a nippy early morning. I had infact not been able to sleep much in our large two-bedroom apartment for the second straight day - perhaps spending the weekend without Shveta, and with no TV, phone, laptop becomes such a dull time unless one spends time with friends, that getting to sleep becomes an ordeal. Anyhow, seems like I was among the earliest to wake up in the neighborhood and then went to Jithesh's at around 9AM. Found him and his roomies still snoring happily, as did all others across Windsors. Weekends are surprisingly lazy days in the US. And yet, could be the most hectic too, if you are planning to go to cities afar. The Americans take things easy - they go hunting, boating, fishing, hiking, dirt-biking and what not during the weekends...while we plan (and accomplish) some impossible jaunts - such as driving down to the Niagaras, Orlando, NY, New Orleans, etc on a weekend - the only show of collective determination by us lot. Actually, to think of it, we are all business tourists and it makes sense to travel a lot...anyways, this was a usual lazy type of a weekend, and the Sunday morning was ideal for people who love to get snugged up in cozy comforters or quilts and wake up at noon..we finally left Kangaroo for Charlotte at around 10.45AM-11AM. The road looked really great, with the lane divider spruced up with autumn flowers. One cannot see the effect of fall yet on the roadside trees, but the flowers were distinctly the ones you get this time of the year. After crossing Exit 24 (our office way), we continued further and then decided to stop by a Rest Area. I was sitting in Jithesh's car and we had Jithesh, Devesh, Pratul, Harish, Kanthi and one more guy in this vehicle, besides me. A few hindi CDs were available, and even then people sitting at the back were snoring away to glory!..We finally reached a Rest Area, an open enclosure with a few shed like constructions, along with Rest Rooms..and after stretching our legs a bit (and relieving ourselves, of course) we left for Charlotte.
We reached Charlotte city limits by about 12 (noon). Our itinerary was to spend about 2-3 hours at the Concord Mills mall, a hell of a mall and my first big mall experience in the US, then to go the Grand Cinemas at Ayreton Road on Exit 3, have dinner and return.
Charlotte for sure is a big city - we could only see the downtown skyline from I77 - the Wachovia and BankAm buildings are like any skyscraper in any large city in the US. Suddenly, unlike in Columbia, the roads seemed much more widened with a few more lanes added. And as we approached Concord Mills, we realized that it is one of the focal points of the city, where the city and its nearby towns seem to converge into a huge fair like thing. And more so, it was a Sunday. After racking our brains and scanning the parking lot, we finally got a space and then went in. We decided to meet at Gate 2 (Book A Million store) and then dispersed. I was with Hardik, Hemant and Sonali. We first went to Sketchers to buy the oh so famous shoes that everyone in our company raves about. I found a cool pair for myself (priced at $59.95, got it for $45 after discount). Slowly we found the entire gang there in sketchers, and the noise levels had gone up, matching the desi effect that one finds in any mall in India. We obviously became the cynosure, rather nasty glare of some of the people, but who cared less? We bought our stuff and quickly got out - this time Hemant and Sonali headed for Burlington Coats, while I and Hardik went to Aeropostale, Ecko, Nascar (with all the possible Nascar memorabilia available)...I didn't find anything interesting here, and I guess Hardik didn't either, since most of the clothes we say and liked were "Made in India" or "Made in Bangladesh" and we didn't want to buy a $9.99 tee which no one could have believed was bought from US...we didn't realize it was already about 2.30PM. We were quite famished and rushed to the massive food court. Hardik told me about California Pizza Kitchen, a good pizza joint that serves authentic American (and not Italian) pizzas. Really good BBQ Chicken Pizza with Coke. Then we rushed to the other side of the food court for the Fashion area. Name the brand and it is there. From GAP to Liza Claiborne, Oakley to Fendi, Saks 5th to Ralph Lauren...I went to GAP and grabbed a wool cap and a pair of large bermudas. We checked out some shades at a store displaying everything from Armani, Rayban, Tommy, etc and found them way beyond our reach, so finally decided to go to a Perfume shop. I wanted to buy a good perfume for Shveta but its so hard to know!! and the best known brands one cannot just shop like that..they cost a good amount. The Poisons and Chanel No.5s would always be $75+. I was looking for Malachite by Banana Republic - really liked that smell. But they didn't keep BR there and it was already 3.30. So we rushed back to Gate 2. After sometime, we left for the movie hall. We reached at 4.45, about 15 minutes late. But after watching the movie, which except for the fact that we watched a hindi movie in a theater in US, realized we didn't miss anything when we missed the 15 minutes. Priyadarshan has lost his touch and has been dishing out really lame movie. We then came out by 7.30 and then went to an Indian restaurant, Jaipur, for a meal. After a few rounds of pani-puri and Mango Lassi, and then oodles of Tandoori chicken, chicken tikka (Pallav, watch your weight, man!), we came out and came to know we had to wait a few minutes for some guy to pick something from one of us. And that guy came some 20-25 minutes late. There was a police patrol doing its rounds and perhaps checking on us - such a huge crowd of desis sitting on the sidewalk infront of Jaipur...the guy, a techie working on H1 in Charlotte, came in good time, took his stuff and left. Our motorcade then sped off homeward bound...

Driving in Columbia

2007-10-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

Today was my first experience of driving on American roads. After some driving on Indian roads, one gets so daunted and shaken that to think of driving across to a nearby city, forget across a state, gets your nerves. But here, one is so tempted to just hit the gas and keep on drivin'. That temptation though one has to curb. I also saw a couple of car wrecks down on the Inter-state. Keeps happening on certain exit and entry junctions. I drove past a point called the Malfunction Junction. A unique point in Columbia - where 4 Inter-states meet. One would get bonkers if you just think of 18 wheelers whizzing past you at 70-75 mph across all sides. Today I also tested myself through a McDonald's Drive-Thru. Once I become a "primary" driver here in my car-pool, I would next plan to take long jaunts on the inter-state, going to Atlanta, Augusta, Charleston, Myrtle, Smokey..then to wee-bit farther places - Orlando, Tampa, Miami...perhaps Norfolk, VA and Washington...then it would be an ambitious NY, Niagara..who knows?..Once Vishal comes here, I guess it would be possible to take that long haul to even the north....Yeee Haw! Can't wait hittin' the road!

India Day at Columbia

2007-10-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

This Saturday (29th Sep) was an eventful day - my and Shveta's first hand experience with the Indian diaspora here in South Carolina's capital. The India Day event - an event spanning some 3-4 hours starting 6PM Eastern Time - though seemingly overhyped (all the drumming about Indian culture) and overpriced (at $5 per head) for an Indian visiting the US - is an important event for all Indians here. Its an attempt by the local community - to our surprise quite a large one considering about 200 people were there at the Moore Auditorium , the venue of the event - to connect with the Indian culture. Largely, the Indian diaspora constitutes of people of South Indian and Gujarati origin. Therefore, what is largely understood as Indian culture is basically South Indian (and Gujarati) culture. Bhangra, though so ubiquitous there in India, is conspicuous by its absence in such events, atleast in states such as South Carolina.

The venue: Moore School Auditorium, located somewhere near the Airport.

We all left Windsor Shores at about 6PM after a whirlwind shopping spree at the Indian Stores on Two-Notch Road. We all meaning most of the "interested" onshore janta at Columbia - took off in 3 SUVs and 2 Yahoo! Maps on I-77, to the Airport Boulevard and then scouring the place for landmarks and asking people, to the Moore Auditorium. At first, we overlooked the teaming parkway for that of some local sports event and then finally realized that it was actually the desi people flocking in there...Ah well! We were there at last.

On entering, a gentleman in Dhoti started rubber-stamping our hands, as if we were entering a bar and were entitled to some free drinks (sadly, we were not entitled to any eatable and everything was up for sale - like a typical mela in India). The place was teeming with second and third generation Indian americans, some local american Indophiles and curious onlookers - besides us. What I really miss here is pictures of some of the second/third generation PIOs (people of Indian Origin) - wouldn't call them ABCDs since - though they seem confused - are certainly quite proud of their roots..the attire bowled me and Shveta completely. Woow...in the name of ethnicity, I guess people just wear anything. Hello! We are in the 21st century. We have access to the Internet. Why can't we check out how a traditional tamil/telugu/gujarati person should look over the net?

The good part was the enthusiasm. The scale. The knowledge that there are schools in Columbia teaching Bharatnatyam, Garba, Bhangra (rather "two-step" bhangra on the beats of reggae beats and Punjabi MC dhols). The sad part - everyone wanted to be on the stage. No one missed out. The list of programs ran to 32 items. We guys had one of us, Devesh Padmey, participate in the event (turned out it was the best item of all!!! - it was an enactment of Amir and Gracy's role in the Lagaan song - Radha kaise na jale)...the rest were ill-choreographed skits and dance recitals in rather too garish attires for classical dance programs. Some, especially the ones choreographed and staged by one Ms Payal(?) Puri, were very good, but the rest were very mediocre indeed.

Anyways, came to know that a bulk of the diaspora works in places such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, some on H1B, some doctors, etc...in short, true to our image, a very knowledge centric crowd. Great! Really, to think how well we are doing for ourselves across the globe...Just that we have to be serious about organizing very professional events. I heard that some organizations are doing good work in propagating the India image here. Guess smaller states such as South Carolina are largely untouched..

We returned by about 9 PM - some 13-15 miles away to Windsor Shores and then to Forest Drive...crashed on our beds...Viva L'Inde! Jai Hind!!

Ahoy Columbia!

2007-09-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

This is my first week at work in the US. I am thoroughly enjoying Columbia, SC. Currently put up at a small acco near Fort Jackson, my workplace is some 15 miles from there, on the I-77. And truly, now I know what I had been missing all this while - working at the headquarters of my company, working with the bunch who get the bacon home.

Ah well, South Carolina is a pretty state It has its share of history and has contributed to the world of music - James Brown, Dizzy Gillespie come from South Carolina. Living is expensive though - from living and commuting standpoint. An apartment in the Irving/Austin area costs $500-$600 pm while here, its $600 plus. Also, like in most of America's smaller towns, there is no public transport...but that is fine..after all, its an experience working here and a rather good one.

I would now start writing about specific experiences of my life at Columbia, and hopefully add pics too....

kreative -ity

2007-09-12T11:49:00.000-07:00

If there ever was a contest in our clan on who is the most creative of the lot, it will be Pallav. Please draw, scan and upload your "Coconut Man" cartoons.

Coconut man with his distinct head has major scope, brilliant work sir!

How to survive 4 years in a comfort zone...

2007-09-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Whew...hard to believe that I have completed four years with my current company, having had worked in 4 organizations in my first 4 years as a professional. To think that I started off my innings here with no focus whatsoever, today I am blissfully wedded for more than 4 years, leading a fairly comfortable life in a small provincial town, working in a global organization that is growing exponentially across India as a manager with responsibilities and lots of expectations..one doesn't quite realize how difficult it gets to get out of such complacence until one is made to leave the city or the way of life..for now, such an unsettling moment seems to be dawning on our lives as we prepare to leave for US for sometime. Suddenly, one is filled with anxiety and excitement - of life without the comfort of a spacious house, servants, short distances to office, "desi" lifestyle - to a more organized and faster life, of living almost 12 hours behind your usual timezone..more so when you are taking your loved one along and have to think of her life too in a strange land..reminds me of The Namesake (the movie more than the book)..I think its gotta be a good experience. I guess I would like to consider this as an auspicious moment to resume blogging...

Birthday party at Ajaybhai's place

2006-12-11T05:27:00.000-08:00

Met the Bhatnagar couple last night at Ajay Bhai's place (occasion - little Sania's 7th birthday) and we discussed how well the musical night went on 25th November. He's promised me a cassette of the recording (I plan to take their CD and convert it into mp3)...seems it went off well..well, I sang the same number last night too and my inhibitions have (surprises me too!) gone down to a large extent..but it was a great event and I thanked Dr Bhatnagar for making that event happen..well, thankfully for the presence of Vicky and Betu, the party was fun - we even had some dances thrown in in good measure(Gudiya, Betu and Vicky danced over Beedi Jalai le - then there was this crazy chaotic dance where all the fat ladies and the not-so-fat men jumped in)...some event..wish I could start adding pics too and make this a better blog!..

Painkiller

2006-12-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

Just installed Painkiller and played it for the first time - whew! reminded me of Doom, Sanitarium and Diablo2 - with the same dark, gothic look. What really hooked me on was the simplicity and ease of play and the pace - it could scare the living daylights out of anyone and I was playing it in total darkness...a good thing (perhaps a bad thing too) is the gothic industrial metal rock that starts playing everytime a horde of zombies or those skeleton men emerge from tombs in the Cemetary.It, fortunately, doesn't make it that scary..Perhaps what could actually be scary would be a scratchy recording of a turn of the 19th Century recording...I don't know why they don't use that kind of music in horror games, but it can actually scare anyone (remember Mars Attacks!!..:-))...poor Mr Garner (protagonist in the game)...actually, I think hell is closer than we all think - we do not need to subject ourselves to this imagination...keep reading in the newspapers how badly many hostages get tortured before they are killed in Baghdad of today...and then when one sees pictures of holocaust victims...heaven and hell are all around us - its just our karma that decides when we assume the place of the victim and when that of a predator, or an onlooker...whatever...jeez...I am sleepy I think....Painkiller..woow..!!!....too much of gaming today C&C Renegade..then this..

Amma, Ramana Maharishi, Paramhansa Yogananda

2006-07-17T01:06:00.000-07:00

This seems like the best time to start blogging again - and I have resolved for the umpteenth time to continue blogging. Today, Swami Tapasyamrita Chaitanya arrived at our place - we went to pick him up from the station at around 5 - 5.30AM... a lot has happened between today and the last time I blogged - Amma came to Indore and went; Shveta, Swami Tapasyamrita, Br. Krishna and a lot many devotees and wellwishers helped make Amma's visit a possibility,Shveta's mom had a minor heart-attack and recovered, ma came to Indore and went, a lot of change happened at the workplace...I and Shveta decided to buy some property too (wow, we sure are going places!)... And now Tapasyamrita swamiji is back to help set up a school here. Swamiji got us a few interesting CDs and literature... The most interesting one was a film on Ramana Maharishi - a compilation of all the movie files shot of the great saint and soul. The movie starts with a 1935 clipping of Ramana Maharishi sitting in a chair, with a disciple standing next to him and Paramhansa Yogananda to his right, along with a westerner - Yoganandaji shaking hands with the westerner while Ramana Maharishi looking at the camera, leg folded, wearing nothing but a tiny loin-cloth. I never thought I would get to see the moving pictures of these realised souls - the movie then goes on to show a somewhat similar ritual - of swamiji (Ramana Maharishi) leaving his ashram for (possibly) a parikrama of the Mt Arunachala and returning back..repeated again and again - through short clips taken by various movie makers in the span of some 15 years. The movie ends with the Government of India newsreel of 1950 showing the Mahasamadhi of Ramana Maharishi. what struck me was the austere and yet so powerful figure of the Maharishi - always wearing nothing more than a loin-cloth, walking down the lanes of the ashram with devotees prostrating on the way...the movie doesn't capture anything of the guru except for his walks, an occassional close-up, affectionately patting a baby, or a cow...
We got to talk a lot today on various things - on the movie, on Lalithasahasranama, Sri Vidya, Amma's visit to the Yogoda Satsanga Society Ashram at Ranchi. It was very interesting. We also got to listen to a rendition of Aum Amriteshwariyae Namah by one Kathy, which was quite quite good - swamji has got a few CDs this time the way he got a few last time...we are truly blessed...I guess I would now start reading Ramana Maharishi's works and Autobiography of a Yogi...I am truly illiterate on this front.:-((

Trip to Delhi - Part 1

2005-11-22T03:11:00.000-08:00

This is the sequel to Bapa's cataract operation. I reached Delhi on Monday night - was a little pissed off with Putun. But found Putun quite sorry and that kindda brought me back to the kid-brother role that I and Nilu continue to essay. Shveta had visited the fairground earlier that day and was not very happy with the way things were managed by the MP Pavilion staff. The most interesting part of the trip was my alighting out of Shatabdi train at 10PM, carrying a suitcase and a very heavy duffelbag. I managed to drag myself up the overbridge to the Paharganj side of New Delhi station and with a couple of breaks and huffs and puffs reached the far end of the bridge when I was accosted by a couple of Taxi and AutoRickshaw drivers (not to mention the coolies who thought I was doing a grave sin carrying my own goods). While getting down the bridge and shooing away the drivers (not a good idea!) I fell down a couple of steps with the bags on top of me!...Couldn't help mutter a few of the choicest Hindi swear words at the Taxi driver who continued nonchalantly - "Sirji aap gaali de rahe hain?" ("Sirji, you're swearing at me?"). I was furious - about to blow my top - and then gave up and agreed to go with him for 80 bucks! (What a rip off!!).
Delhi looks pretty cool now - especially during cold, not-foggy November nights. Very soon, it would be cut off from the rest of the country and perhaps the world as it would be covered with thick smog through the rest of winter. But the best part is the cutting down of pollution - better traffic rules and hopefully better civic sense.
That bit of an episode at the New Delhi Railway station became a nice ice-breaker when I entered our home. The dogs Chaman and Godot had their coats trimmed and Putun continued playing them while talking (what is new? - Putun, hope you get to read this!) and laughing. Saw some TV (news mostly - Abu Salem, the dancing IG and his distraught wife, what else?)
Bapa came slightly later - he had collected his new specs (wth the right glass changed to a plain one) and I put the 5 eye-drops (still remember the names - Pedrone, Moxicip, Tobrine, Refresh Liquigel and Optilac) before going off to sleep. The two femme fatales of the house kept asking questions about our visit to Bhopal, etc. Don't remember much - guess was feeling groggy...

More later...watch this space!