Of Geese and G-Strings

Just stumbled upon this after a long while.

http://mandolini.blogspot.com/2005/03/of-geese-and-g-strings.html

(Sigh!) Those were the good ol' days!

Weekend at Kodai

A couple of weeks back a few friends and moi had taken a trip to Kodaikanal at the insistence of the duck, who was having his house-warming ceremony there. Well, I was under the impression that wetlands and marshes were the ideal habitat for wild ducks, but then this one seemed to be a bit different. Anyway, lucky for him. From Himachal to Kodaikanal... most of us can only dream of living in such places.

Coming back to the trip. There was Rajiv, myself and the Chennai gang ( that included Baby, Kakkad, Heera and Santy). Vaidya was supposed to join us, but he never made it while I was there . Rajiv and I managed to reach half a day before the rest after a tough ride in a KSRTC Mayura whose AC just refused to work for a good stretch of the journey.

After a nice Thambi meal at the local mess (it happened to be the Tamil new year that day) we decided to go out on a trek, with the man himself . Starting from the backyard of his newly finished house we proceeded to the nearby fields from where we intended to move on to a forest in the vicinity. The forest which seemed pretty promising from some distance turned out to be a veritable haven for thorny bushes. Aftere negotiating our way through some rather inhospitable terrain we came across a clump of seabuckthorn shrubs, or at least that's what Ravi claimed them to be. We were a bit tentative at first, but watching Ravi pick out those wild yellow berries and toss them into his mouth, we decided to throw caution to the wind. They actually turned out to be quite tasty in the end. After walking on for a little while longer we came to the end of the forest (if you could call it that), signalled by a long wall. What's more, we found a bunch ok kids playing cricket there. So much for the forest. That completed we decided to go down to the lake from there. This was pretty tricky since it involved climbing down a pretty steep slope. Once we reached the lake we decided to kill some time by walking around the lake till we met up with the Chennai gabng. Anyway, what seemed like a pretty small lake from the hill-top didn't seem that way once we started walking around it. We did manage to complete one lap around the lake after what seemed like an eternity and met up with the Chennai guys who'd just arrived.

The following day the duck was eager to take us on this trek across some Shola forests. Even Heera seemed pretty enthusiastic about the idea. Unlike the previous day we were now trekking through some real forests. Kakkad had his brand new Nikon DSLR camera (the same one as mota) with him. The trek was pretty good, especially the last stretch where we had to climb this steep hill-side through a narrow muddy path. Heera did quite well but Santy had a couple of slips on the way. And of course, the trek was all the more enjoyable thanks to those home-made chocolates we had on the way.

Those were the fields where we started our first trek.
















Rajiv negotiating a rough patch.
















Seabuckthorn
















Ducky seems pretty animated about something.















This is where we started off on the second day.
















The Fellowship!















Ducky though he was doing some cool photography when he took this one (a la Schindler's List). Anyway that's Kakkad with much talked about camera.

A Credit Card....Finally!!!

Perseverance does pay. Learning the lesson did indeed take some persistence on my part. A few days back I finally managed to get myself a credit card on my tenth attempt. That's right. The tenth attempt! This again after a lot of phone calls and a million other hassles during which my documents were misplaced and I had to go through the entire process all over again. But then when I saw the package from Citibank waiting for me at the company reception counter I was finally relieved to say the least. Heck, atleast the buggers had given me a gold card.

I guess people who've heard about my experience with credit card applications would have sympathzied with me. Alas...this still remains one of the biggest mysteries of the 21st century. To have applied for and been rejected nine times would have been beyond anyone's wildest imagination. In fact I was beginning to wonder If they had taken me for the local Al Qaeda agent in Bangalore. If that was the case then there was plenty more to worry about. For instance I could have been whisked away while on my morning walk to the office, charged under some obscure section of the TADA/POTA or something of the sort and unceremoniously thrown into one of those shady dungeon-like places. Well, looks like I dont have anything of that sort to worry about. At least I'd like to think of it that way.

Actually, it seems like my friend Vaidya has much more cause to be concerned about. The poor guy' s visa application was returned to him for the secound time, on account of him having been born in the Emirates, or so I believe. Moreover he's even had his citibank account terminated because of the receipt of large sums of money from abroad. ( A cheque from his dad it seems). To be honest my problems pale in comparison with his. Anyway here's wishing him all the best with his visa and everything else.

Hurray! I won an iPod!

Yeah...I actually did! There was this TI Developers Conference which was going on in NIMHANS convention center here in Bangalore. Few of us from the company decided to pay it a visit on Thursday.

Right at the entrance was a stall by a company called TES electronics, one of TI's many partners. It was Harsh who drew my attention to the fact that they had some sort of a Q&A form which was being used for a lucky dip. Luckily there were just four questions, mostly about TI's new Da Vinci platform, and most importantly they were all MCQs. Well...I had nothing to lose really. So I casually filled up my form and dropped it into the box, not even bothering to find out what was on offer.

The conference as such was not all that great. This is some sort of a forum where TI and its allied companies (including Ittiam) display some of their latest products. The first item that actually caught my attention was the Slingbox, a product by SlingMedia. This is a device that allows the user to stream media from his TV set at home to his PC/laptop anywhere in the world over the internet. They had now come out with a new version called the Slingbox pro which was capable of streaming HD content. The best part of it was the demo where they showed some TV content being received on a mobile phone. The slingbox seems to be doing really well in the US, a fact that has been confirmed by many gadget sites. Quite a great achievement for a company whose entire design team is based in Bangalore. Later on I happened to meet Bull (Shubhamsh) who is a part of the very same team.

Anyway, it was on the next day while I was in the office that I get a call from Ameya who was attending the conference informing me that I had won the prize. Well...I got to admit it, this came as quite a surprise to me. Based on my previous experiece with lucky draws (think I might have won a Reynolds pen or two) I wasn't really expecting to win anything of note in the next 100 years or so. I now had to go and attend this official ceremony where some of the big shots from TI would be giving away the prizes. Sadly I had to drag my poor friend Viswa along with me since I did not have any means of transport. Later on, in the evening I happened to attend this play called 'The Confessions' which was part of this entire Thespo competition/festival that was taking place in Rangashankara. The play was pretty decent considering that it was an amateur troupe, but the story was a little bit of a drag.

Got back home pretty late that night and tried loading some songs into the iPod (a 2GB nano). Got to admit that Stevie J and the folks at Apple didn't really put user-friendliness up at the top of their agenda. Took me a good half an hour atleast to figure out how to load the songs into the pod. But then of course, I ain't complaining. The sound quality was pretty good. (as expected from Apple I guess)

By the way if you have any time to kill please feel free to try out this sports quiz.

Bangalored as usual!

Today's Deepawali, but I'm stuck in Bangy as usual on a long weekend. Met up with Abesh and PGK after a long time. Well, there's nothing much to look forward to this weekend, except football tomorrow morning. Talking of football, 'El-Clasico' takes place this Sunday night. With Juve out of the top flight I have sort of pinned my hopes on Barca to do the double, once again. Thank god I dozed off by half time this Wednesday. Saved me from seeing Barca going down to Chelsea, that too on a Drogba goal.

Besides that, finally thinking of doing something on the theatre front. Formed a theatre group here with a few friends. Haven't really started on anything but we've chalked out a plan. Seems promising. Atleast somthing to save us from the grasps of my mundane existance these days.

Onam

Hah!!! Finally managed go home to Kerala for Onam. It was great. Got a four day break from the usual life here in Bangalore. The only bad part was having to spend close to 30 hours in the bus to and fro. But then that was made up for. I finally got to meet my cousins after a really long time...and of course had my fill of nice mallu food.

Anyway, now that I'm in Bangalore it's back to the grind.

Teenage Wasteland

No need to delve too deep into the title of this post. Just been listening to 'Baba O'Riley' by The Who. The phrase keeps popping up in the song and hence the title. 'Teenage wasteland'....interesting phrase actually. Just sets me wondering....Did I really make the best out of my teen years? Anyway, I guess that really doesn't matter anymore. Pete Townshend must have been thinking of something deep and profound when he wrote the song which really isn't my concern now.

Things just the usual, except that I played a lot more TT than usual today...and as has been the case for the past few days I was royally screwing up my shots.

I really wonder... when o when am I going to learn to sit down and work, and stop wandering off!