At this room, time enters a no-passing zone

And we interrupt the silence to moan some more...

2009-08-15T19:11:26Z

The gist of it is – about a week and a half ago, I had a fall while cycling, landed on my right knee and may have suffered what the doctor calls minor ligament damage.

This implies, in the doc's own words - no running, cycling, or window shopping for a few weeks.

Argh.

In the process one managed to postpone a not yet planned holiday.

I think my brain is beginning to rust.

This week...

2009-07-11T14:18:05Z

Monday: I hated where I work. Note: where I work, not my job.
Tuesday: I reconciled myself to where I work, because I realised I actually like my job.
Wednesday: Same as above
Thursday: More of the same
Friday: I hated where I work. I realised it's where I was going to spend most of the weekend.
Saturday: Guess where I am, doing anything but work, mostly a lot of hating, and thinking up nasty curses aimed at other people who work where I work.
Sunday: Let's see, but prolly more of the above.

Next week:
Monday or maybe Tuesday: I think I'll stay away from where I work, it might help reduce the nasty thoughts.

Tuesdays again

2009-07-07T05:58:35Z

I think I may have been wrong. Tuesday needn’t worry. It comes after Monday. On Tuesday, the world seems just a little better.

Or maybe it's the weather.

In lieu of the mountains, towards the sea

2009-06-29T11:03:49Z

It started off as the famed beach trek. The 'beach trek' is a couple of days’ hike along the beaches and hills that line part of the western coast of India. You start off from Gokarna (or sometimes further north) and go on south to Kumta (about 25kms down) or Honavar, or further south. Essentially, you climb up a hill or two, stop and admire the sea down below at spots, walk down the hill wherever you see a beach, walk across the beach to the cliffs at its end, climb them, traverse another hill or two, go down to the next beach and so on... you cover quite a few beaches that way:)

It didn't go quite as planned, but it was still a good weekend!

A couple of friends and I shamelessly invited ourselves into an already planned weekend trek, taking their count up to 15 (and I’m sorry to say I can remember the names of barely 6 or 7 of them now) and causing much discussion on extra tents, sleeping bags, and provisions. For once, we weren’t trekking with an organized thingy, like the youth hostel guys. So we actually spent time buying provisions and stuff:) And carrying all that along with us, to cook on the beach:o

Anyway, the plan was to trek from Gokarna to Kumta, with a stopover at a beach called Sangama, where we’d camp for the night and cook dinner and stuff.

We started off at Gokarna, trekked up a hillock or two and hit the first beach – Kudle. We crossed that and hit Om beach.

And then the monsoon which had been playing hide and seek decided to join our party.

We abandoned the trek after that – the cliff paths that lead on from Om to the next two beaches – Half moon and Paradise, apparently get fairly slippery and it turned out to be quite a rainy day.

Om being the most touristy beach on the path had enough by way of accommodation for us. And enough space considering the weather! It wasn’t too crowded and we had almost the entire beach to ourselves for large parts of time. So we had lunch, pitched tents, made tea, made dinner, started a campfire, got rained down on, scrambled into the tents and had dinner by torchlight.

We did have an awesome time that day at the beach though and even the next morning. Om is as pretty as everyone will tell you it is. And at off-season, i.e. monsoon time, it is emptier than usual, so you can have a really great time. Swimming is tough, but just being watching the sea in itself is amazing.

As it turned out, the next day was clear, but we couldn’t have completed the trek, so we spent the morning there too.

Then we bus-ed it down to Kumta, and spent an hour at the beach there, and then bus-ed our way back.

Oh, and I built 3 sand castles – 1 more of a multi-tiered city fortress with moat and the other 2 were well, forts!

It was all really a lot more exciting than the description, but the pics should say that well enough!:)

pinkoliphaunt @ 2009-06-16T15:30:00

2009-06-16T13:09:49Z

Well, I might get a holiday after all starting in 2 days, or I may not - we're still trying to figure it out. Judging by the way things have been so far - *fingers still crossed*

Anyway - pics from a weekend trip, last month to the Periyar Tiger Reserve in Thekkady, Kerala. The reserve runs a couple of programmes, of which is titled, rather splendidly, The Tiger Trail. the Periyar Reserve is part of Project Tiger and has about 80 of them.

None of those deigned to give us a glimpse though:(

The Tiger Trail itself thought is a lovely programme. They equip you with leech socks (!), guides, and a gunman, guide you on a trek into the forest, set up a camp for you, feed you awesome food, take you on a bamboo raft and then further into the forest, and basically ensure you have a nice time away from civilisation. It's supposed to be rough, and manages to be to some extent:). I got invited by a friend who was planning it with other friends and got my aye in, just in time. They cap the number of people at 5:o

You get to see animals running away from you [we saw bison, wild boar (they look exactly like they do in Asterix comics:)) and sambar deer running away and two elephant families, not running away since we were fairly far from them], pretty flowers, fungii, and a lot of the Periyar reservoir. The reservoir itself makes for an interesting picture - the tree trunks still poke out of the water!

Things to do in jungle <table>

Bamboo raft in the lake

Entry to the reserve

Pretty flowers

Into the forests we go

Bisons...

There's a Sambar deer somewhere there...

Elephants!

The lake!!!

Fungii

Wild guava flowers

The library has been throwing up some interesting stuff...

2009-04-06T12:20:10Z

It’s still a lousy year, but the foodiness has been decent and the reading, for a chnage, has been good. I particularly liked The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet and other stories by Vandana Singh.

I thought the title was brilliant. It’s simplistic yet manages to scream ‘read me’. And read I did.

It’s a collection of short stories, and I liked most of them.

The title story, the one with that fascinating name, was decent. It doesn’t quite live up to its name, but it has rather good characterisation. There’s also a vague-ish story about a mathematician in search of answers, which rambled a bit. But the rest of the stories were pretty good. Like all good short pieces, they are neat and succinct and leave very few loose ends. Plus they're mostly fairly uncomplicated.

2009 update, so far…

2009-01-12T13:42:02Z

If January is any indication of how this year is going to be, I don’t think I want any part of it:(

I’m not saying there isn’t a mix of the happies (new shoes, nice little relay thingy that a bunch of us ran, a lot of long weekends ahead, a promise of company for two mountainous trips which may or may not happen, but at least the thought is there), and the sadnesses but somehow the negatives right now (workplace angsts that are surprisingly unrelated to the R-word, and therefore completely unempathised with by others, cancelled wildlife holidays, ailing family and the ilk) seem to outweigh the positives so much that it’s all really very, very non-happy.

*sighs and whines needily and pathetically for hugs and chocolate:o*

Shillong!

2008-12-08T11:09:36Z

I’ve wanted to go to Shillong for a very long time now. Well I wanted to go when we’d done the family holiday in Assam, and places like Shillong were not as crowded as they are now, and (since that was in May), would have been awesomely cloudy and damp and all:o but that didn't happen. so, when work came up there, I jumped:)

Anyway, finally landed there for a day last week. It’s a nice little town, albeit a little crowded as hill towns tend to be. But it's very pretty and green and full of little waterfalls everywhere and a lake and a botanical garden and flowers.

I also managed to squeeze in a trip to Cherrapunji. It’s known to be one of the wettest places on earth, but it’s rather dry this time of the year.

The road en route is pretty though probably much greener during the rains.

The place to be is at these awesome cliffs. During the monsoons, the water falls all the way down these cliffs into a river at the bottom of the valley:o

There’s spelunking to be done too. The state of Meghalaya has a 1000+ caves. The Mawsmai cave at Cherapunji is just one of them. It’s all lit up inside, a nice yellow light that makes the whole picture look very Alan Lee-ish.

And what I loved the most...

Enroute to Shillong falls Umiam Lake, also known as Barapani. When I was a kid I'd read Lila Majumdar's Barapani, about a little boy who lives with his mother and his granduncle in a small village in the hills. his ftaher is a forester in the western himalayas I think. It was a lovely story and full of these nature facts kind of things – all about trees and animals and a picnic at a forest department thingy where they’re taught all about forest fires, and all through the story the kids keep eating! The name comes from the granduncle wishing to go down to Barapani for something. I’m not entirely sure whether it had a symbolic meaning or not, but the book was really, really good.

So I was pretty excited to actually see the lake. It’s amazingly beautiful, and as the wikimapia link shows, it’s HUGE!

Tram ride! And a river

2008-12-08T10:13:45Z

I spent a day in Kolkata last month. Not long enough to have any real fun but just about long enough to eat egg rolls at a street corner, desserts at Flury’s, work(!), and squeeze in a joyride on a tram!

Kolkata is one of the few cities that still has trams. They run on very limited routes now, though, and in a lot of places, while you have the tracks on the road, the service has been discontinued. It took a bunch of phone calls to Mumbai (old Kolkata hands residing there), a few random conversations with taxi drivers, hotel staff, random passengers on the metro, a little badgering of the people at work – till we finally found a small tramable section between the workplace and the airport. It was a ten minute stretch, no more, but ooh so much fun! It’s ridiculously economical too!

Kolkata itself was awesome as ever.

And then sometime later last month, I hopped over to Guwahati. Been there before and had only a day, so didn’t do much, apart from stop and stare at the Brahmaputra a bit.

And just so we get the Mighty aspect of this river clear, here's how it looks like from the sky

Purpleness / pinkness!!!

2008-11-24T12:52:47Z

I did actually have other stuff to post - pics from tram ride in Kolkata, rivers pics from Assam, and some nice pics of a marathon trail

But I’m too lazy for the accompanying ‘prose’, so here goes instead...

Every November or thereabouts Bangalore turns a nice pinkish purplish shade for a few weeks, because of the Tabebuia avellanedae. One of the best places to catch that is the ole favourite run site - Cubbon Park. I hopped over a little later than the usual morning run time and just before the Sunday morning traffic time and managed to get a few pics…

More here

I once wanted to run a confectionery, with a coffee shop in a portico and throw in a bookshop there

2008-10-06T21:21:57Z

... with big beanbags to sit and read on:o

I have after all these years finally figured out what I should have wanted to be when I grew up, while growing up.

I should have wanted to host travel plus food shows on TV. I can travel, and I can say nice things some times... especially about places that somebody else is paying me to eat in. And I can rate restaurants out of 10 too.

And I'm sure I can say stuff like I love Belgian whatevers or the world is my osyter, blah blah or recite extempore poems about obscure highway towns or just sit back and eat and let the finished plates do the talking

*sighs over lost opportunity*

5730ft to the clouds

2008-09-22T18:57:42Z

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now – pics from a monsoon trek to Tadiyandamol in Coorg way back in August, but then I seem to have spent most of the last few weeks hopping all over the western part of the country, and not on holiday. This resulted in solemn resolutions on holidays, and peace and calm and the like, but that’s about all:)

Back to the pics...

This really was a monsoon trek. Not only was it during the monsoon season, it actually was rainy, alternating between a drizzle and a downpour.

In normal non-monsoon weather, there are supposed to be some fairly spectacular views from here because Tadiyandamol is the highest peak in Coorg at 5730ft. But then... not normal. So what we got most of the time wasn’t much of a view in terms of the panorama, apart from clouds and mist, but it had its own charm:)

We did an overnight very bumpy road journey to the start point. There are a couple of routes; the one we did is called the Palace Estates route - they grow coffee up there:o. We set off from a homestay a little way up a hill. I’ve no clue who runs it, since they decided to spend the rainy day indoors instead of chatting up weird guests. They did provide good food though, the usual idli, upma, coffee / tea sort of brekkie, at obscenely early hour.

And then we squelched off into the wetness.

It’s a fairly easy trek, and not very steep. The route is mostly trail, although the initial stages do have a narrow tar road.

The trail is mostly grassland; it winds through coffee estates, over a couple of streams, bypasses a shola forest, and in this case, passes under a huge cloud or two. We got some nice views too, though.

In about four hours you’re at the top. That’s the top, though we weren’t quite sure when we reached it, given the fog all around.

Apart from clouds and mist there was lots of greenery, mud and the old favourite leeches. I got lucky again and suffered very little, two pinpricks was all.

Took us a couple of hours to get back to the homestay, mud, rainwater, lunch break in empty forest department shelter and all. They gave us hot tea and coffee:) And I still didn’t know who they were.:o

Hinterlander me

2008-08-21T13:20:15Z

The workplace has moved to boondocks from central location close to lots of eating and shopping. I am still sulking.

Food means potatoes

2008-08-04T11:47:42Z

As part of the we must cover every eating joint within a walkable distance of the workplace, at least twice, and in case of the cheesecake place at least five times (once for each flavour), before the workplace moves away from this awesome foodie and shopper-friendly location in heart of city to the back of the urban woods exercise, India Coffee House has been covered twice.

Primarily, for the sake of the masala dosas. Awesomeness. Thin, crisp, good stuffing, and if you’re an optimist, you could always consider the lack of the sambar a plus, since it prevents them serving you some brown watery liquid.

The ICH menu is a work of art. It's a single sheet of A4 size paper, with a nice typewriten list of items. part of the aesthetic appeal lies in the right hand price column, which looks like a relic of bygone days. No complaints here at all:)

Among other words guaranteed to make one jump for joy are ‘potato finger chips’. Potato finger chips, note, not Fries. Now, we're talking good ole finger chips here, not fries. These are those fat, thick, pieces of potato, dripping in oil, sprinkled with some indiscernible combination of spices and / or black salt, served with unbranded vegetable ketchup, purchased wholesale. The ones in which the taste of the potato actually survives because it’s so thick. This is of course completely unrelated to those golden-yellow slender thingies that get sprinkled only with a teensy measure of white salt and are served with all the oil gently patted away, and accompanied by a Re.1 pouch of branded tomato ketchup. Good enough, but not the same:o

The arghness though, and there invariably is one, is that these potato finger chips on the menu, on all two recent occasions, have stayed solely on the menu. Each attempt at ordering is met with a firm Not there!

Siiighhh...no fair:(

I think I'll get me an imginary dog

2008-07-01T06:57:27Z

Friends are people who accompany you to the cobbler when your footwear falls apart and you don’t keep alternate footwear at work, so that you have support when you stand one-legged, methinks :o. No one at work would accompany me to the cobbler's today.:(

Hmm...

2008-06-18T12:46:48Z

If corporate HR has a one on one session with you - a fairly peaceful, 2-way 25 minute conversation on the reasons for the much higher dissatisfaction (as compared to the other cities / divisions, since dissatisfaction always rife) among your colleagues (and you, but it’s so much easier to operate in a collective than get individualistic when you’re trying to discuss cribs subtly), and at the end of it you are thanked in a slightly surprised tone for your frankness, is it good or bad?

The Great Cheesecake Hunt

2008-05-21T10:54:08Z

I might have mentioned it in the past - I love cheesecake (the desserts and other food albums in facebook, et al consist predominantly of pics of cheesecakes in various places:)). It’s often a toss up between chocolate brownies and cheesecake but while you get brownies nearly anywhere (although of varying quality), cheesecakes are an entirely different story.

I usually start jumping the moment I see cheesecake on the menu, but more often than not, they don’t quite meet expectation - there’s the rather awful orange cheesecake at Sweet Chariot, and then the Irish Cream cheesecake at Ice n Spice which does not have an Irish Cream flavour but does taste like a vanilla mousse with chocolate swirls on top. Infinitea and Daily Bread have decent enough cheesecakes but from what I recall nothing to go screaming to town over.

But one keeps trying, so when we went out for lunch to a place we hadn’t tried before, and saw cheesecakes in the display, and since fellow cheesecake aficionados were around, there was some collective jumping.

I’m glad to proclaim that one bite into the kiwi cheesecake at La Patisserie off St. Mark’s Road and the world was suddenly a better place to live in.

This is one of the few places where the crust melts in your mouth, and it has just the right amount of sweetness and flavour. There’s that teensy layer of cake in the middle of the topping which adds an awesome touch, because the topping has soaked it through. And the topping itself just melts in your mouth too. It’s a little too sweet and so the kiwi flavour gets slightly overrun but that’s actually okay.

The rest of their food (predominantly sandwiches, pizzas, quiches and pies) is very nice too It’s one of those tiny places with a wood flooring and hacky chairs, and all white patterned cutlery, an open view to the side street it’s in. And they serve you flavoured water… the water jugs are stuffed with mint leaves and lemons. The other desserts are nice too, there was a chocolate thingy that was quite yummy.

But the cheesecakes remain to die for.

Continuing on from the postbox whine…

2008-05-19T12:33:27Z

Hopscotch lines. I haven’t seen them in ages but didn’t realise it of course, until now. It started with a bunch of kids at the climbing wall in the stadium trying to warm up by jumping on and off a step continuously. They got a little antsy about doing it, so some us relatively ancienter ones decided very virtuously to encourage them a bit (I think it rubs off from the coaches and trainers there). Pointed out that it was very simple really... just like hopscotch.

Turns out they didn’t know hopscotch. It could be a guy thing of course, so checked with some of the female kids. Turns out they don’t know hopscotch either.

Saddening:o

Bloom time

2008-05-05T12:57:36Z

It's flowering season for the gulmohar! Yippee!

On Hayes Road, under the baleful eyes of couple of motorists. Hayes Road is one of the tiny one-way-ed lanes that connects the equally one-wayed although larger Richmond and Residency Roads.

On Airport Road, somewhere around Domlur.

On 100 ft road in Indiranagar

Where have all the post boxes gone?

2008-04-29T05:06:15Z

I had to send some papers to Chennai. Nothing massively urgent, but I ended up couriering them anyway. I’d ideally have preferred to post it because the courier companies get all antsy about delivering out of city limits and you need someone to be available to sign for receipt.

But then I realised I didn’t have stamps. And I don’t know where the nearest post office is - nearest to home or work. A little discussion at the workplace did jig the memory a bit, and I now remember a post office near home. I vaguely recollect one somewhere near the workplace also but I can’t quite place it (I’m horribly afraid now that it might be just two buildings away).

But I still don’t remember seeing a post box either near the workplace or anywhere near home, and now I think about it, I can’t remember seeing a post box recently anywhere in Bangalore.

I am now contemplating wallowing in nostalgia over the one red and the bigger green (for parcels or some other such different thing?) post boxes that used to stand near the old house in Delhi.

Shiny new things

2008-04-09T10:56:35Z

I got me a new phone last week. It’s one of those terribly pretty looking slim and sleek bar ones with all the usual fun stuff.

And I’m proud to say that an entire week went by before I dropped it for the firstest time ever. Face down too, right onto the still plastic film covered screen. It slipped out of the equally slim and sleek and terribly pretty pouch I picked up for it. Exactly one week! The second fall happened today, although within pouch.

Life is clearly back to normal.:o

Still on the weather

2008-03-25T16:59:27Z

The double rainbow yesterday - from the terrace of the ugly green building. It was huge and very, very clear. We could see almost every colour from the window.

And then up on the terrace, we realised we could see the entire arc.

Check out the secondary rainbow on the right.

Somewhere after getting drenched in Bangalore one weekend, and then in Chennai the next…

2008-03-24T12:35:40Z

The sun finally showed up in Chennai yesterday, and then promptly started to set.

Dusty skies give good sunsets as anyone who has witnessed a Delhi summer would tell you. Cloudy skies also give you decent sunsets though...

And in Bangalore today, there is a double rainbow:)

Back to the seaside...:)

2008-02-22T12:59:56Z

Last weekend before the world got a little crazier, as it often does, at far too regular intervals, there was weekend in Auroville and Pondicherry. As usual there was food, surprisingly unphotographed (may I never commit such a slight again) and pretty sights. And I ran my first ever half marathon on a lovely trail inside Auroville (also unphotographed) :o)

'The lousiness of the workplace' rant

2008-02-12T07:23:01Z

I finally did something that I’ve often thought of doing at work.

After listening to another lot of inane conversation from the ‘boys’ on my floor, I finally went and gave the HR guy an earful today. My floor’s a pretty rotten place to sit. It’s dominated by men, rather unusual in the industry I work in, where you end to have more women. Most of the guys are okay but a few of them are plain idiots, and they really ruin everything. In the last year I’ve put up with increasing levels of crap, listened to more double meaning-ed sentences to wonder if some of them don’t have third meaning, and got to know far more then I care about the personal lives of my colleagues (including the women).

The guy who heads HR here used to sit with us earlier, so I figured he had an idea of the amount of crap that flies around every day. This morning began with a conversation in the morning that involved the worst of the offenders as well as the big boss (I actually had to ask him why that guy was being allowed to speak like that – not that it made an impact; this is the man who cracked bedroom jokes as part of his speech in a conference!). It sunk to really low levels though and I became really annoyed, so I went to the other floor, ranted to a gal pal in a position of some seniority, partook of sympathy and empathy both, and then finally went to the HR guy.

I figured I don’t care if I come off as a rat or even if this is not appreciated by the higher-ups, but there’s only so much I can endure. I’m really not interested in a daily dose of idiotic jokes on the other women in this office, stupid remarks about women in general, and general locker room conversation, including my neighbour’s favoured genre of movies before he got married!!!

Someone had to protest because no one is pulling them up, and I think everyone then begins to think its okay to continue the entendres. It’s been getting worse every day to the point where the jokes are actually aimed at people at work. I’d have spoken to my boss first but I don’t think he’ll pull up the main offender in question plus he wasn’t there. I don’t think HR will do anything anyway, even if he did listen patiently enough to me, but I think they need to be aware there’s a cause of concern. And I've never faced this issue anywhere else I've worked.

The HR guy’s smart enough to have picked up the undercurrents while he sat here though. The one humorous moment in the entire conversation with him being when he wanted to know if I wanted one of the female boss types to stop discussing her personal life in public and rather lurid detail.

And seeing all this in writing makes my workplace seem such a den of insanity and depravity, I’m surprised I’ve survived this long here! *sigh*