The heightened sense of awareness might really just be your numb toe (at 15000 feet)

Back from a trip to Manali with the folks.They are right when they say that you need to be in the right mood to take a vacation and even though I tried switching off,it was not the most memorable of trips.Though really glad that there is one more state which goes off my list of 'not visited'.I now have 8 states( The Seven sisters and Madhya Pradesh) on my TODO plus throw in a few UTs (Andaman being a major one) :-)

Crossword was having a sale and there was an extra discount for StanChart Creditcard holders so couldn't resist (even though I prefer Landmark over its somewhat inadequate collection) and this:
was the end result of the major splurging which happened.The books are:
1.Pamuk's- Other Colours and Istanbul:memoirs of a city
2.Joseph O'Neill's- Netherland
3.The private Lives of the Mughals of India
4.The history of South India

Pamuk is fast rising up the ranks in the list of my favourite writers.Istanbul is definitely one of his finest works in my opinion. Reading books about cities gives me great pleasure even if it is only just a backdrop for the story ,Istanbul and The Black Book lionize the city to such an extent that now,I dream of walking the streets of that city some day,I dream of standing on The Galata Bridge and gazing at the Bosphorous ferries.
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After reading Cuckold,I have started liking the whole idea of the historical novel,very minimal effort is needed in holding up the plot as the reader is generally aware of the subject at hand, the writer is free to concentrate on certain specific characters and the general style of his writing,he generally doesn't need to bother himself too much with the authenticity of the setting as most of it is 'already out there'.

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It is really surprising but Delhi happens to be the only city where I see Hindi signs(which include traffic signs,building names,municipality signs etc) giving English signs some competition.(Somehow 'Bhoomigut Paarpath' for subway has got a nice ring to it )In Bangalore,the usual practice is to only have the English sign or the English Sign+the Kannada sign in a smaller font.The really frustrating thing is that the normal BMTC buses in Bangalore carry only Kannada signs indicating just the start point and the final destination.In Delhi,the stoppages along the route are mentioned on the sides of the buses which I think is a really prudent thing to do.In Jharkhand,you get to see very few bilingual signs and usually,the Hindi signs outnumber the English ones(though this is changing quite rapidly)

What have you been reading?

Brahmin's Coffee Bar

Inspired by Akhil's this post, I have finally decided to come out of the closet and declare my love for Bangalore's variegated South Indian eating joints.Bangalore has this concept of Darshinis-which are small eating joints where one would usually have a quick breakfast or a cup of coffee for very nominal prices.Darshinis are optimized for the morning rush hour crowd and you would usually find everyone from college students to Business execs jostling for a bite of that crisp Vada and a swig of that hot aromatic South Indian coffee.Because of the low cost model of such places,there are usually tables at which people stand and eat.You pay for your order beforehand.I have seen Darshinins only in South Indian cities and this is one 0f the things I would like to see in North Indian cities- a place where you could have breakfast on the fly without spending a lot of moolah and wasting a lot of time.

In my 5 years in Bangalore,I have been to numerous such places but my favourite would always be-Brahmin's Coffee Bar in Shankarapuram.This easily beats other also-rans in this category by a mile.BCB is basically a garage converted in to a kitchen at the back and an open area at the front with a counter just in front of the kitchen.It was started by two bored engineers in the 70's who realized that they could make a profitable business out of this sort of an enterprise.BCB opens at 7AM and closes at 12PM.It then again opens at 4PM and closes by 7PM.These are the timings from Monday to Saturday and BCB is ( very famously) closed on Sundays.So either you make BCB a part of your daily routine or you make time for it on Saturday evenings.BCB's menu consists of six items:
1.Idli
2.Vade/Vada
3.Kharabath
4.Kesaribath
5.Coffee
6.Tea
7.Butter(optional with your idlis)

Because it is usually very crowded,you have to make sure that you have made up your mind when you go up to the guy sitting just outside who hands out the tokens.Then you step inside the shop which would usually be choc-a-bloc with(if its in the morning)joggers,people carrying large bags for parcels,college students(usually NHS and Jain college students-who have deserted Food street in droves and chow down here these days) and lots of people in safari suits.I have seen many a swanky car parked near BCB-just gets to prove that BCB is popular not only among us lesser mortals but also among moneyed folks.When you reach the counter,you are supposed to state clearly what your order is when handing over the token to the guy over the counter.This is to make sure that the order is dispatched as quickly as possible and no time is wasted in reading and interpreting the order.As soon as you get your order,you trudge out carefully,trying not to spill the contents of your plate and go outside and set your plate on one of the tables or hold it in your hand.If you run out of chutney,you don't have to go back all the way to the counter again as there is 'uncle' with cups of chutney waiting for you under the tree near the shop.Once you are done with the mouth-watering idlis or whatever you are having,you go inside once again to get the coffee.The coffee is brewed from a copper decocotion filter which looks pretty antique but serves the purpose and you usually ask for two glasses as the glass is too hot to be held.You can have all kinds of combinations depending upon the number of people for whom the order is meant including the ubiquitous By-2(which literally means one standard size coffee in two glasses).I have heard pretty complicated orders like 4 by 7 and have never seen the coffee guy bat an eyelid!The only caveat is that BCB is priced a bit on the higher side,with one coffee costing Rs. 8 but in the end the taste just makes up for the assault on the pocket.I vouch that nobody can make Vadas like BCB.

I discovered BCB when I was in final year and the moment I tasted the idli,I was hooked.Usually BCB would be the first stop in the long rambling walks that I would take in college days.I would head out from college on KR Road and walk pass the BAC(Basvangudi Aquatic Centre) and reach BCB where I would have a leisurely coffee and finaces permitting,a plate of idli vada.Then I would take a walk around the shop lined with opulent houses and quiet streets that makes Shankarapuram one my favourite places in Bangalore.I would walk for about an hour and muse about a lot of things and many happy memories of college times are tied with these walks.Always used to give me a lot of solace.

So now you people know what you are missing if you are in Bangalore and what to look out for when you are next here.Here is a pic of the place on a very crowded Saturday morning.

RAGA:mixed up and indistiguishable

feeling sleepy and nursing bruises and feeling exhausted after the ordeal.Lilith has generally been very aggressive leaving me copies of extremely suggestive books which include Paradise Lost.old moulds crumble leaving behind more sinisterly seductive sensations. :-)

You don't think about it till it happens to you.All the pain and suffering seem distant-till you face it yourself.The first blast spot,the bus shelter is barely 300m from my house.I have walked past it hundreds of time.While driving through,I have seen friends standing there waiting for a bus and it sends a chill down my spine whenever I think what would have happened if the blasts were to happen in the morning.When the messages and the mails started coming in,it was unreal-the first reaction being that of denial-this couldn't be happening to us-in Bangalore-we are away from the epicenters of danger-and then it was frustration and anger at the ease with which the bombs were planted and the ease with which they could rattle us.The phone networks got jammed almost instantly after the first messages came through.Thank god for the internet.The feeling that it could have been any one of us instead of that unfortunate lady is very very disconcerting.It has been a depressing weekend.I hope that whoever is behind this and the Ahmedabad blasts is dealt with very severely.

An extremely hectic May it has been .First of all there is work which has been quite challenging lately with truckloads of responsibilities and endless sprints*.I want to go home so badly that my head aches every time I think of Jam and my trip is still a month away.Bangalore is unpleasantly cool this summer.It is extremely bright in the mornings with fuzzy sunlight around lunchtime and then around 3 in the afternoon,the light fades away-replaced by dark thunderous clouds and then inevitably-rain just when you have to leave office.innumerable bedraggled evenings-the most agonizing thing being standing at a traffic light with the rain slowly soaking through to your bones-drop by drop.I have always been a person who hates getting wet in the rain.What joy do people get out of dancing in the rain is something that I have not been able to fathom.Also there is this exam to be given and preparing for exams while working is so difficult-you only have the second rate hours of the day at hand not that any studying gets done on weekends.

Traffic in Bangalore is a funny thing.I wonder if it is the same in other places but there seem to be certain windows of time in which there is a lot of traffic on the roads and then there are lull periods in between.For e.g if I leave home at 8:30 then I am often caught in a mild rush on the road-these are mostly people trying to make it to work by 9 sharp but then unusually there is a lull in the traffic around 8:45-8:50 as most of these people would already be close to their respective destinations.but there is no 9:15-9:20 lull as people who have to reach work at 9:30 and also those wanting to reach by 10:00 are already out on the roads with the latter group out by this time in anticipation of heavy traffic!!

Now with Internet at home,blogging would be easier and more frequent(I hope).I am in the midst of a downloading frenzy but hardly have time to watch the movies I have already downloaded.I have a backlog of unfinished books too.There seem to be pending to-do lists everywhere.Work really squeezes the juice out of you.

* After singing paeans for Agile I sometimes do think that it might get difficult if you are the only one in a story point

Sick :(

I am not back as yet but have been terribly sick all this week ...in fact from last Friday.I was sick on my birthday too as many of you doubtless know.I still managed to cut a cake and my roommates managed to polish it off for me.It is a subtle kind of fever....my skin is not actually burning hot but the fever is there underneath...every time I think it is gone,it comes right back.I am depressed and tired.I sweat underneath my bedclothes and it goes away and then I start shivering because of the sweat.I have been taking antibiotics and have been thinking not so rosy thoughts.Not going to office for 5 days means I have lesser number of days of leave to go home which is again depressing.I will probably get a blood test done once the dosage of pills is exhausted.really depressing stuff.Everybody is sick in Bangalore.We almost had an epidemic in our team in office.On the friday of the Megadeth concert only 10 out of 23 turned up for work.Hi Denzyl if you are reading this :-) Leave a comment sometime to cheer me up.
I feel a bit like Rodya in Crime & Punishment not to say that I feel murderous but delirious.Rodya of part 1 and 2.The Wikipedia article on C&P is excellent by the way.I owe replies to some emails from some of you and this is my excuse for the delay.Till I am hale n' hearty again.

I have a sudden urge to eat Singhada with sauce.Not Samosas.Singhadas in all their crispy glory.

The ear yend post

Things have been so chaotic and crazy and I have been so insanely busy that I feel like screaming(almost)..Lots of things to do and err....forms to fill.Last( Xmas) weekend went river rafting/trekking in Dandeli.River rafting is certainly something that even the most faint-hearted should try out as it is unbelievable fun.Also a lot of friends are leaving Bangalore and going elsewhere. A left for Delhi,Mazum is going to the States and my college roommate would be going to Chennai.So ended up running all over the place trying to synchronize farewell schedules. It is kinda sad that people whom you know so well and whom you always assumed would be a part of your life are suddenly moving away - doing their own thing and all that would be left would be random impersonal scraps on Orkut. Anyway so this time I decided to do an year end post.Blogging wise this was a better year with more posts than last year and few more people in the comments section (A grand total of 6 people -yay!) but as compared to other bloggers I have too few posts.Its not the lack of ideas but sloth which is to blame.Also add to this spending 8 hours a day in front of the computer and you have the perfect excuse to avoid blogging. Anyway 2007 was an eventful year and lots of things happened.

had a crummy internship-a heartbreak- went on an amazing trip to Goa-two trips to Jam- had a great B.E project experience-read quite a lot-left college-started work-moved into a new house-went on some more trips-fell sick repeatedly-realized quite a few things about myself.It was an amazing year in short and though not always pleasant it was a kind of year I would want to live again.It was pretty roller-coasterish.and yeah some resolutions for 2008:

1. Blog more often
2. Lose weight
3.Learn French & Tamil (don't ask!)
4.Start playing tennis
5.Learn cooking
6.Be 'kind' to people
7.Read more
8.Stick to your beliefs and have 'simple' goals in life.*

The Jains have a very interesting festival of forgiveness called Paryushana in which people ask forgiveness for their misdeeds of the past year.I think its a great concept.So in the same vein- Micchami Dukkadam to all of you readers of the blog. May you have a fun filled 2008! here's wishing all of you a very Happy New Year!!


*sounds very BT-ish I know :-)

Recently....

Its been a crazy post Diwali November.Getting adjusted to the new house.Falling sick repeatedly due to diarrhea.Planning for January.Work getting a little hectic.This weekend I was completely engrossed in traveling and attending Grihapravesh-es.Have been listening to a lot of classic stuff-The Doors and Sabbath and esp Led Zep (OK what do call a Hippie's and a carpenter's ideal date?--- tripping on Doors ( apologies to Saanjh :-) ) ) .Also I am mostly dead on Orkut but pretty much there on Facebook ( due to company intranet filtering and 'coz I hate Powerscrap) with all its myriad applications which ask you to characterize people , poke your friends, put up your fav comic on your profile and do thousand more fun things.Really you should check it out.*

I have been buying books left right and center since the last five months and lately I have been able to catch up on reading instead of just admiring the bookshelf.

Books bought recently:

1.The diaries of Franz Kafka
2.Gravity's Rainbow
3.Madame Flaubert
4.A clockwork orange
5.Brave new World
6.Nirvana's Biography
7.Step across this line
8.The ground beneath her feet
9.A father and son
10.The code book
11.Dubliners
12.Above average

Among these I have only managed to read A father and son,Above average and Brave new world.All the rest are in unread or half-read stages.I was impressed by Brave new world and I would say it pretty much beats all other Dystopian themes by quite a margin.I like the irony and the grey ending of the book and they way that issues like purpose of life are explored without firmly sticking to one.Another post I did on Dystopia some time back here
Hopefully I would have something interesting to say next time around.Most probably I would be putting up some older posts which are in draft just 'coz I have put enough effort into them to delete them.

*I think that lately, all I have been doing is pimping various sites.I know people come to my blog just to navigate to other cooler pages but what to do, hardly anything interesting happens in my life. I have been told that everything that I do has an air of recklessness to it-including this blog.

The Diwali post

My first Diwali post in the three Novembers on Blogspot.Diwali being the most favourite festival of mine.Diwalis in Ranchi were always special.There would be that special chill in the air with the coming of winter and the days and the afternoons would be marvelously sunny and blue-skied.Invariably we would have a four day mini-vacation from school.I remember a lot of Diwalis-some pretty routine,some out of the ordinary.There was this Diwali when we went to wish a family friend of ours and came back to see that all of our diyas had disappeared.This being a house on the ground floor.Me and my sis had an argument whether the diyas were carried off when lighted on lots and lots of steel trays or the thieves had a well laid out plan of extinguishing the diyas,emptying the oil in a can,collecting the wicks together and then stuffing all the diyas in a huge boraa, this latter suggestion being from my sister.Then when we were living in Satellite colony,we had a gang of boys going from block to block blowing up all the letterboxes(made of wood).Their modus operandi was to go in two groups of two to blocks facing each other and blow up the boxes simultaneously using two aloo-bombs stringed together.This was to cause simultaneous pandemonium.Apparently they also gutted the insides of a post-box made of steel (as they could not blow it up-if they had succeeded,then they would have sent scraps of hot metal flying everywhere - a la Flak Cannon in Unreal Tournament 2000).

Then there was the usual pre-Diwali notorious cracker bursting in school.It was always a ritual in school eagerly anticipated by everyone.Whoever attended Shyamali in the 90's would surely remember the sudden sound of a bomb going off in some corner or toilet and the roar that would rise instantly-the roar of the students cheering.There were special fireworks when we were in class 9th.The Secondary building students had just assembled for the morning prayers and there was an ear-shattering explosion and smoke was visible from the corridor of 10th std(Some people recall that this was at exactly the moment the Princi had started pleading for the cause of a cracker free school-but that I think is just melodramatic trickery of memory) .The Princi was furious and ordered for an immediate round up of the 'culprits' which resulted in Modi lining up some random ppl(which included some hapless victims from the late line) and pushing them on to the podium.Then the Princi in an attempt to act 'tough' started roughing up the slimmest guy of the lot,shaking his collar in front of the whole secondary section.It was the most pathetic display of arrogance by the teachers I have ever seen.There was also the Diwali in which Aashu had burnt his hands and there was collective universal mourning in school what with all his Bhakt log falling over each other to convey their sorrow and all the teachers hearing out his tepid tale of woe with the utmost seriousness.(There is this interesting tale about of a follower of Aashu*- Bhakt Pandey) but pardon me I am slipping into Shyamali folklore again.

What was once fun turned into a boring ritual once I came to Bangalore.Routine trips to relatives place and bursting crackers with cousins much younger than you is no great fun.Also in the Hostel there were a lot of crackers burst but that satisfaction was not there.Today for the first time-I lit diyas and found it pretty enjoyable .This time I am down with food poisoning(yes, again) so can't gorge on the usual sweets and delicacies as I used to.Hope your Diwali was fun.

*Aashutosh-Aashu for short(yes the two a's are there to appear at the top of any list alphabetically) is a friend who was the 'star' of Shyamali and the apple of every teacher's eyes.The Maryada Purushottam Ram of the batch.

Yeah, back at the roadhouse they got some bungalows

"All right,all right,all right.Hey listen ,listen,listen man.I don't know how many you people believe in astrology.(to a woman in the crowd)Yeah that's right baby.I am a Sagittarius.The most philosophical of all the signs......But anyway I don't believe in it.I think it's a bunch of bullshit ma self. But I tell you this man.I tell you this-I don't know whats gonna happen man but I am gonna have my kicks before the whole shit-house goes up in flames!!"

--live in Boston '70

A life of unrestrained hedonism.The dream that was always there and now will see fruition.

When I woke up this morning, I got myself a beer
Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain, and the end is always near

Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, all night long

Yeah, I am gonna have my kicks before the whole shit-house goes up in flames.

A post a day.....

The folks at the office say that Agile is really the way to go but me being a newbie don't know really.We (the torch-bearers of hardware) never really had an exposure to Waterfall anyway,so can't really judge which is better.Life is increasingly spent at meetings,trainings and presentations which is fine as long as you can sit somewhere where you can become invisible and snatch a wink or two.My strategy is to go for a little behind the middle seat so that I can still be at the back if the back-benchers ( seaters?) get called to the front.I am slowly getting addicted to Excel and Confluence-the wiki they use in our place.Life's little achievements consist of avoiding the maximum number of traffic lights by choosing bizzare driving routes,buying novels from shady second-hand books stores and by trying to eke out the most tax benefits by investing (planning to invest rather) in schemes which make you feel like that masterji in some old Doordarshan era ad-"Samay samay par LIC ka premium bharna jaroori hai".I am really thinking of writing book reviews to make this mundane blog a little more exciting by posting scandalous ideas and in general antagonizing everyone.Yeah and book reviews are very subjective things(that's what writerscafe.org says about Book review guidelines)-so everything is an opinion and not fact.

If you think that you have a tech(or a science) bone in your body,
check out boiledbeans
A visual quiz a day complete with a scorecard .What fun! this is the first thing that I do in the morning at the office.