Kumara-parvatha trek

Saturday, December 27, 2008 5 Comments »
I am back from an amazing weekend trek (Dec 20-21) to Kumara parvatha. Kumara parvatha is on the border between Dakshina kannada and Kodagu districts, standing 1712 meters above sea level (also known as Pushpagiri). It is a well-known trekking spot and every serious trekker from South India aspires to scale its heights. We ascended from the Somwarpet side on saturday, stayed overnight on top of KP and descended the following day from the Kukke side (13 km of a heck of a descent that almost ripped my legs off ;-). Overall, it was an unforgettable and an exhilarating experience. The beauty of the Western ghat ranges is just beyond words. Though I wanted to blog about this trek, my friend and a fellow trekker Srikanth has already taken care of it. Click here to read his post.

Here is a photo chronology of this incredible adventure (Click the pics to see enlarged versions):


The gang of 10: From left - Shreyas, Shreyas-2, Karthik, Goutham, Avinash, Rajesh, Srikanth, Balu, Kiran and photographer Srivatsan. This is on way to the Malalli falls at around 7:00 in the morning on Saturday.


Malalli falls as seen from the bottom. We had bath here and did quite a bit of (mis)adventure.


At Ponappa's house. This is after we got back from the falls, had breakfast and now ready to leave for the trek.


Near the check post. We walked 5 km here from Ponappa's house and we were exhausted even before we started trekking!


The hanging bridge just after the checkpost. We filled all our water bottles in the stream below.


Finally, we started on our way to scale the mighty Kumara parvatha.


View from the spot known as "view point" midway in our trek.


One of the three steep 60 degree inclined rocks we climbed.




We reached the top at around 4 in the evening and started building our nests!



The campfire we lit. Wasn't that powerful but did sustain us until 8:30 by which time we decided to sleep.


Around 6:00 in the morning. Sunrise as viewed from the top of KP. An awe inspiring sight.


Sunday morning: we started descending from the Kukke side. You can see the foot-path in the background disappear beyond the mountain.


At Bhattra mane. We had lunch here. I liked the simple foods and especially the butter milk.


After a grueling 13 km hike down, we reached Kukke!




The Kukke Subhramanya temple.

Movies I watched recently

Tuesday, December 09, 2008 4 Comments »
To start with, I am not a movie buff. Not very long ago, I used to watch even a hyped up movie only when it hit the TV screens a year or so after its release - that was if I coincidentally switched on the TV at the right time and was in a mood to watch ;-) But somehow, in the past few months things have changed dramatically - I am usually ending up watching a lot of new Bollywood movies pretty soon after their releases - mostly in theaters/multiplexes with my friends - sometimes as part of treats and sometimes just to subjugate boredom. The purpose of this post is not to give a review but to give a snippet of my opinion about these movies. I will try my best to keep it very short and to the point.

Dostana - A gay comedy movie where John Abraham and Abhishek Bachchan are not exactly gay but circumstances make them act that way. Most of the movie is rib tickling comedy with gay jokes and comedy-wrapped sentimental scenes. All in all, good movie to watch for some fun and entertainment.

1920 - A horror movie directed by Vikram Bhatt. A girl possessed by the ghost of her pichle janm ka ashish gets exorcised with Hanuman chalisa in the end. The plot, the story line, the screenplay were pretty intriguing. And most fascinating for me was Adah Sharma's antics as the possessed girl - quite scary stuff. I definitely recommend watching this one.

Yuvvraaj - Music was too good - it was from A R Rehman after all. Everything else was far below average. Story was very mediocre. I cannot even comprehend what was the point of such a story, so I won't even begin to talk about it. Location was very cinematic - somewhere in Austria. All in all, a pretty lame story line with some solid music and songs but still not a worthy entertainer.

Dasvidaniya - Here the lead actor, after coming to know about his apparently incurable stomach cancer, goes on to fulfill his dreams - buying new car, foreign trip, saying I love you to a childhood crush (who is now having 2 kids), etc. Nice movie to watch. Very good direction. Sentiments tied up in a manner that doesn't make you cry but subtly makes you feel the pain of the guy about to die.

Oye lucky, lucky Oye! - A movie about a thief who, since childhood does nothing but rob other people's stuff. Badly written story line, bad direction, lack of any intellectual or sentimental content that can keep you interested - I can go on. Overall the movie was quite stupid and I don't recommend it.

The US visit

Saturday, November 22, 2008 1 Comment »
In April-May 2008, I visited USA for about 40 days on work. It was one of those rare moments of my life which I would probably never forget - my first US visit, in fact my first visit to any country outside of India. Here is a snippet of those memories.

To talk a bit about feelings before I left to US - though it was going to be a unique moment and first-time experience, it did not make me feel too elated. At home and in our family/friend circles, I was about to join the league of the people who are deemed as america return; not to mention that nowadays every other guy remotely connected with software industry seems to be in the same league (and with the recent economic crisis, I have heard that this title has lost the lusture that it once had). I was more apprehensive than excited - thinking more on lines of how will I manage myself in an alien country with a totally different culture, food habits and most importantly people. More than this, deep inside, I think I was afraid of being left lonely in a far-away land, away from my parents and friends.

Luckily enough, I had an old friend, Prithvi, who lived pretty close to the place where I was landing and he offered to pick me up from San Francisco airport which, more than me, relieved my parents who were afraid of me getting lost ;-).

I boarded the Singapore airlines flight on the morning of 19th Apr. In Singapore I did not get a chance to venture out of airport as the transit time was pretty short but I was impressed by the airport, the vastness, the infrastructure, the colors - even today I think is the best airport I have been. After another brief landing in Hong Kong, I boarded the plane back for one final 11 hour flight over Pacific ocean that terminated at SFO.

Mountain View, CA where I stayed was unusually quiet and calm, like some place of meditation with hardly any people to be seen on streets and mostly devoid of any kind of noise. It was clean and exceptionally beautiful. Though during the first few days, it was chilly cold, the weather improved and in fact on some days it became rather horribly hot - the reason for this absurd variation I don't know yet but thankfully it became normal afterward. Few of my colleagues there helped me in getting acquainted with the place. I learned that there were lot of Indian restaurants around - 4 of them within walking distance while others within few kilometers - some in Mountain View while others a little further away in Sunnyvale, Palo Alto or other nearby places.

Things I noticed in the first few days of my stay there (some of them I had expected anyways):
  • Incredible and huge freeways, very well planned towns, well organized roads with people following lane discipline strictly. Honking was considered rude. Driving was enjoyable experience - atleast for a newcomer like me.
  • People were warm and kind hearted. From my perspective, the culture there seemed to be more introvertish in nature and personal freedom was given a lot of importance.
  • The sheer number of Indians living in California was just amazing. I got to know that Indians were the second highest group of Asians - after Chinese in California.
  • I could easily get a rental car at Avis by just showing my Indian driving license and company id - no questions asked. I thought the guy was more than glad to rent me a car (of course the money would be sponsored by my company).
  • When I fell sick once, I had to wait 2 hours in the hospital before I could get to see a doc. The health care system seemed to be not as efficient as other things in the US.
  • There were atleast two occasions I witnessed where white guys abused a group of Indians - all in a matter of split seconds. It happened this way - there would be a group of Indians on the side-walk generally around the Indian restaurants and someone would swear loudly from inside a passing car.
Toyota Yaris - rental car that I used for 27 days

Apartment complex where I stayed

Visits to San Fransico and other places:

Near the end of my stay, I visited San Francisco, Santa Cruz beach and Bonny Doon beach with some of my colleagues. San Francisco seemed radically different - with more people, closely spaced buildings and roads though good seemed less organized and not-so-well-layed-out unlike Mountain View and other Suburban areas. There were more people to be seen on streets, a more urban lifestyle. Also noticeable were beggars (who are generally called homeless people) who were virtually absent in wealthy Mountain View and other suburbs.


We went to the famous crooked street:



We later visited the piers, there were artists on the streets near the piers - painters, dancers and unusual artists:



After spending some time in Pier 39, we visited the Golden Gate Bridge - probably the most renowned bridge in the world.



passing over the bridge



Golden gate bridge from a distance


Another day, we went to Santa Cruz and Bonny doon beaches. The Santa cruz beach was pretty crowded as it was a weekend. Bonny doon beach was very quiet and devoid of people.



Santa cruz beach


On a roller coaster


The quiet Bonny doon beach


So, I had a nice time there though I could not visit as many places as I would have liked to. And of course, I was there on work and not on a picnic so my schedule usually was to go to office in the mornings and come back in the evenings.

On 1st June, I boarded the flight back to India. This time I got 8 hours in Singapore and so I got the transit visa to go out of airport and visited a couple of places - the free tour by Singapore tourism board that took us to Suntec city, a big shopping center. Merlion statue was at a walking distance from here. Overall, I was impressed by Singapore's tremendously sophisticated infrastructure, which was even better than San Francisco but the weather was hot and humid which made me a bit uncomfortable. Singapore has so many Indians that it almost felt like I was back in India. Some memorable pics:

Fountain of wealth, Suntec city, Singapore

Sky scrapers in Suntec city as captured from inside the fountain of wealth


Merlion statue, Singapore


Singapore

And then in few hours I was back in namma Bengaluru :-)

"People pushed around like pawns" - DH 21 Nov

Saturday, November 22, 2008 0 Comments »
I read an excellent article in Deccan Herald (21st Nov) that clearly described the agony faced by the people who were struck in the massive traffic jam that was caused by the JD(S) rally on Monday the 17th. This article was by Sakuntala Narasimhan who herself was caught up in this chaos. Here is the article (copied from DH website)...

Much has already been published about the infamous rally organised by the Janata Dal (S) on Monday but here are some updates, based on my personal experience of being stranded between Majestic and Sanjaynagar for five hours that evening.

Around 5.50 pm an ambulance rushing an emergency case to hospital was wailing its head off, for all of 20 minutes while it was held up in front of the Indian Institute of Science, unable to move an inch because the road was choked, end to end, kerb to kerb, with a long line of buses festooned with the JD(S) flag. In emergency cases, even three minutes delay makes all the difference between life and death. How much was the life of the patient in that ambulance worth, in terms of votes for your party, Mr Kumaraswamy?

On the bus I finally managed to get on to, after a wait of one and a half hours at Majestic, there were three schoolgirls aged 10-11. They had been waiting since 3.15 pm. At 5.45 pm when the bus was still stranded near Malleswaram 18th cross, unable to move because buses strung with your party flags appropriated all approach roads disregarding traffic rules and signals, one of the girls wet her uniform, unable to control herself. (She had tried to get off the bus and couldn’t make her way to the exit due to the crush of commuters). She began sobbing with embarrassment and distress while a group of young boys sniggered. When you went for village darshans, Mr Kumaraswamy, your minions carried portable toilets for your convenience. One has to be a VIP even to ease oneself without humiliation, in our kind of democracy, right?

You and your father have apologised for the inconvenience caused but have quickly and unrepentantly added that urban citizens do not understand the problems of the rural people who walk farther than what school children had to, during the chaos your meeting caused. You’re right. Shall we say, you should stay in a mud hut without electricity because that is how millions of rural people live?

It was the ineptness of the authorities, not your party that caused the chaos, your father has argued. No Sir, I can vouch for what I saw and experienced personally. At Majestic terminus, when no buses turned up from the north for over an hour, the milling crowd was several hundred strong. As soon as a north-bound bus hove in sight, hordes of lumpen rowdy youth ran alongside and boarded the buses even before they stopped. I saw three elderly men being thrown to the ground in the melee, shoved aside by your supporters. One old man got trampled.

I saw one large bus festooned with your party flag at CNR Rao circle block traffic in all directions by stopping in the middle of the circle while a youth standing by the door of the bus argued with another who was trying to clamber on, causing a 20-minute snarl. Policemen can handle goondas but not goons enjoying political backing. The driver of the bus I was on stopped the vehicle at the Indian Institute of Science signal, jumped off and disappeared because the police could not let him turn right towards BEL road, and the busload of harassed commuters began shouting menacingly when the vehicle was forced to go towards Yeshwantpur.

It was your party buses laden with ‘supporters’ that took the law into their own hands, disregarding traffic signals and right of way norms, forcing public buses to take arbitrary detours, holding the city to ransom. Since when has disruption of citizens’ normal life to this extent, for flexing party muscles — that too, of a party whose leaders claim to be ‘mannina makkalu’ (sons of the soil) been acceptable as part of democratic governance?

In another country, citizens would have claimed hefty compensation from the party for distress and inconvenience caused. I am a senior citizen with a limp but I had to hop off at Yeshwantpur, walk back to the Institute — there was no alternative — and call for a taxi to get home. It took me five hours to cover 14 km, Jayanagar to Sanjaynagar. You can get from Bangalore to Mysore, or Mumbai to Pune in less. One middle aged working woman has an arrangement with an autorickshaw driver who usually waits for her at her office gate every evening. She did not know what to do because the auto driver called her on his mobile to say he could not reach the gate due to traffic blockage. She could not have walked the distance to her home, it was already dark at 6.30 pm, there were no other autos, no taxis, no buses, nothing. She was one of thousands similarly stranded that evening.

I thought political parties are meant to serve the people, not the other way round. Here were people, commandeered instead to serve a party bash. Couldn’t the crores of rupees spent on this show have gone instead on helping the poor in some way? Or, does offering free food and transport for party supporters count as ‘helping the poor?’


Thoughts?

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