The ends The means

Today is my last working day at my current workplace and I would be moving to Hyderabad on sunday. Though i leave people over here infinite reasons to miss me .. the following 5 reasons top the list.

loud sneezes
they made many people shake off the afternoon laziness and get back to work .. reassured of my comforting presence around.

my penchant for playing around with my hairstyle
trust me .. one can manage to have a hairstyle even with the meager bunch that one is left with. the frequent changes brought a sense of dynamism in the lives of everyone around.

shayari and the PJs
would tickle the funny bone of everyone around mimicking the popular figures in office. the jokes and the quips would often make sidhuisms seem rather mundane and boring.

a ready reference when it came to food
be it the alphabetical list of offerings at haldiram , the special indian menu at pizza hut, the list of kebabs at the kebab factory or the offerings at the food court of a local mall .. i would handle quite a few queries on a daily basis.

an epitome of courage and motivation
single, dysfunctional personal life and yet a smiling face .. i wonder if there would ever be an alternate role-model for everyone around to draw inspiration from.

Labels: lists, me

poet1 : आप तो कटाक्ष करते हैं समाज कि बुराइयों पर ओर जिस व्यंग्य के साथ वाकयी में सराहनीय है ..... मेरी नई कविता .....

poet2 : (abrupting him in the middle) : आपके बारे में भी बहुत सुना है, जिस तरह आप इन नेतायों की पोल खोलते हैं, आपके हास्य का जो अंदाज़ है ... काबिले तारीफ है ... लीजिये चार पंक्तियां मेरी ओर से (goes on for the next 15 minutes) ..

poet1 : बहुत बढ़िया चार पंक्तियाँ .... वाकयी में बहुत ही उम्दा .... लीजिये आठ पंक्तियाँ मेरी ओर से ... (goes on for the next .. you know how many minutes) ..

blogger 1: Hey you got a cool blog there .. read my extremely humorous post here .. leave a comment and subscribe to it if you like it and pls link to it from your blog ..
blogger 2: I liked your post .. you write really well .. pls join my community on mybloglog ...
blogger 1: Great that you liked my post .. digg it or vote for it on stumble-upon and ask all your community members to do it if you can ..

Be it a poet, hungry for appreciation or a professional blogger trying to increase his page view per month, everyone likes to be taken notice of.

Well, I just like to be read, but I guess my means to popularise my blog are far too subtle (putting it on orkut, sending the url to some of my friends, pointing my gtalk status to my latest post for a couple of days) to register themselves with anyone. Being bullishly conspicuous kills the whole fun of it.

Google can't come to the rescue for i hardly write about current affairs. The Google Analytics report tells me that the only case where the search engine has been of any help is the query for kerala+sexy+beauty, that points to one of my posts about my kerala trip where infact the sexy refers to the boat I took in the kerala backwaters.
(..stifled laughter..)

But then again i have been infrequent and irregular with my posts, cardinal sins for a blogger. Spent the latter half of the last year in US (a post coming) entangled in work and of late was in a job hunt and moving to Hyderabad next month (another post coming).

Let's just hope for now that I would manage to post more frequently and save this blog from obscurity and oblivion.

Labels: funny, me

1) "Har kisi ko nahin milta yahan pyaar zindagi main" figures among your top five favourite songs.
2) "Yeh dil na hota bechara .. kadam na hote awara" figures among your top ten favourite songs.
3) You watch couples coo-chi-cooing; give a long, broad smile and then an even longer sigh.
4) You sit sulking while you flat-mate prattles non-stop with his girlfriend on the phone.
5) You chuckle (wanting to holler hip-hip-hurray) when your flat-mate tells the tale of his recent break-up.
6) When a friend invites you on his marriage/engagement .. after an animated congrats .. you reply "might be difficult .. work you know .." even if all you are doing at work is expanding you social network on orkut, myspace, friendster, facebook, linkedin, 360, hi5, tagged, twitter, ning and mybloglog.
7) "Obsessed with career"|"Freedom is the mantra" are the answers you have memorized in case someone queries about your status.
8) You keep a confident "can't-find-my-type" as back-up, in case the earlier two answers fail.
9) In case even that fails .. you let out a painful "better be single than heart-broken" using all your acting prowess.. suggesting not to be reminded of the break-up that never happened!!
10) You have an email alias named *potential-list*, containing the ids of all your (seemingly single) acquaintances of the superior sex, that you send all the funny forwards to.
11) You had already planned a trip to home when your team comes up with a you-and-your-better-halves outing plan on the weekend.
12) You had already planned a trip to home when your team comes up with a you-and-your-better-halves outing plan on the weekend again .. and you laugh off the situation as height-of-coincidence.

Labels: funny, lists

She threw a furtive look towards this guy and wondered what was keeping him glued to his seat. Repeatedly brushing her fingers through her hair and turning her wrist to confirm the time she eagerly waited for him to make the move.

Acting like a coffee addict this guy got up and moved to the coffee room. She followed after a span of time that they had so atomically mastered in maintaining, as both of them went on realizing yet another meeting masqueraded as a co-incidence.

This had been happening for few months now but still this moment was far from being treated as routine and whispers were exchanged each time, for she was such a celebrity. What often boggled people was as to why would she choose this guy. "Love indeed is blind. It has to be for this to happen", some would say.
Her twinkling eyes, her perennial smile, her special-effect hi and her special-effects bye never ceased to charm people. And this guy, crude, artificial, with his vain attempts of sounding sugary, was so repulsive.

She indeed was classy. Simple yet dashing. Humble yet dominating. Her mind a precious bundle of beautiful thoughts and yet skilled in the art of handling people. Letting a guy, smitten by her charms, know his limit with conscious and repeated use of the word friend in phrases like Cheers for friends like you.

But was she naive or even foolish enough in assuming that her secret is unknown to anyone around ? Perhaps she knew that this protocol of unbroken silence would never be breached by a confronting question. She so resembled the subject of Billy Joel's classic she is always a woman to me

She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child
But she's always a woman to me
...
She can do as she pleases
She's nobody's fool
And she can't be convicted
She's earned her degree
And the most she will do
Is throw shadows at you
But she's always a woman to me

Earlier posts in this series :
kerala-and-the-romantic-rains,
kerala-and-the-mystical-mists,
kerala-and-the-sexy-beauty

I suddenly woke up with the noise of someone approaching me and found that the train had been at Trivandrum for the last half hour with both of us fast asleep. We sighted some funny looking posters of malyali movies as we started yet another hunt for some place to sleep. Our two stops here, the Padmanabhaswamy temple and the Trivandrum zoo were very near to the station as the sign boards told us. Most of the hotels were full and we took up a rather cheap place and slept. We had to start early tomorrow as we had plans to pack Trivandrum, Kovalam and Kanyakumari within one day itself.


Trivandrum is a beautiful city and boasts of some real nice architecture . Traffic policemen in nice crisp white uniforms can be found at each intersection. It seems that the city has a fetish for Ambassadors cars .. they are everywhere .. and no surprise we ended up hiring up one for the day. To enter the Padmanabhaswamy temple you have to wear the traditional Mundu, it was fun prancing around the temple premises in the Mundu. After a small trip to the Trivandrum zoo we headed towards Kovalam, some 16 Km away from Trivandrum.


Kovalam's beaches are one of the most popular in Kerala. The three beaches named LightHouse, Hawa and Samudra attract lot of foreign tourists every year. Met this cute little girl , the miss universe to be, at the LightHouse beach. We tried to be in time for a visit to the Padmanabhapuram wooden palace en route to Kanyakumari, but we were a bit late and the palace was closed for lunch hours.


Kanyakumari was fun. Took a ferry ride to the Vivekananda Rock Memorial and the Tiruvalluvar(a celebrated Tamil poet) statue. At the Triveni Point (here you can see the three colours of the three oceans merging) we had mirchi ka pakora, the kela pakora and several cups of tea. They have a rather unique way of preparing tea, a cup at a time, and the whole process is very interesting to watch. This was the most picturesque place in Kanyakumari .. the rocky beach with the violent sea and the two monuments in sight on the left.

The 7'o clock bus to Rameshwaram was late and we set out to catch the night view of the monuments and we sighted this Vivekananda museum just next to the bus stand. The beautiful red building with "the wandering monk" etched out in white just next to the entrance. We rushed inside to see that it was full of insights in to various phases of his life. We rushed back, gave the STD guy next to the bus station our number, asked him to call us up when the bus arrives and rushed back in to the museum. We saw this rare photograph of the two rocks in the sea prior to the setting up of the memorial and the statue. It had just been 10 minutes when the phone rang and we had to leave unfinished.


The overnight journey to Rameshwaram was bumpy. Yes that would be right word to describe it. Every now and then, we jumped, not with joy, but courtesy the puddles in the road. As we saw village after village we could visualise the bus on the map crawling along the east coast. We reached Rameshwaram at 5 am and got to the Ramanathaswamy temple at 6am.

Its huge huge temple and one of the chaar dhaams (Badrinath, Dwarka and Puri being the other three). Legend says that Sri Ram built a bridge from here across the sea to rescue Sita. After the pooja we went to Danukshodi, 8Km from Rameshwaram .. walked along the bare sea bed and swam a little. It was the the west coast at Kovalam the previous day and now the east coast at Dhanukshodi.


We had booked our train tickets from Madurai to Chennai from where i was to catch a flight back to Delhi. We made our way to Madurai in a bus from Rameshwaram and managed to visit the Meenakshi temple at Madurai in the little time we had there. Meenakshi temple, dedicated to Lord Shiva and Paarvati, is the hub of religious and cultural life of the city.
We were completely tapped out of cash by this time and didn't have much time to locate an ATM. Somehow convinced the pooja thaali walah to give the thaali for 10 rupees we had. Inside also urged the pundit to give the coconut prasad to offer for free.
I was trying to capture the night view of the temple when this handicraft shopkeeper told me i could go to the rooftop from their shop and click some photos from there. We literally ran our way upstairs .. train departure was less than an hour away.

Got to the railway station in time only to know that the train was a little late. It gave us enough time to devour some idlis and dosas at a nearby shop. Aditya came to know during the day that he would have to go to Delhi himself for some official work(he was to get off at Pondicherry earlier). Later he knew that he would be going by the same flight that i was to catch. It was a nice thing to happen .. a nice co-incidence. We got to Chennai at 7 am in the morning and the flight was at 10.30 am. We caught an auto for the Marina beach. Marina beach is a real long beach and stretches for some 12 Km. A stroll along the beach and we started looking for a bus or an auto to the airport. We were having a hard time knowing nothing about the route and no autos in sight when this elderly couple sitting nearby in their jogging shoes called us .. they tried to tell us which bus to catch .. but realizing that we were short of time .. offered us a ride .. called for their driver who came along in their mercedes. The couple shared the story of their success and offered us some tea on the way .. another of the nice experiences that made this trip unforgettable in every sense of the word ...

Labels: me, travel

Earlier posts in this series :
kerala-and-the-romantic-rains,
kerala-and-the-mystical-mists

The bus I boarded from Munnar reached Kottayam at 1 am and I took up a room in a hotel near the railway station. Aditya's train, that he boarded from Palakkad, got there at about 4 in the morning. We had a long chat, i showed him all the photos and videos from the previous two days as we got ready to sleep. I had not really slept for some 40 hours now and the extensive travelling had left me exhausted. At 10 we started for Kumarakoam in an auto and got off to a speed boat ride from there to Alleppey, called the Venice Of The East. On our way were some amazing sights of backwaters in Kerala, the lush green paddy fields at R block. Its the only place in the world where cultivation is done below sea level. We sighted a lot of locals on our way engaged in their daily chores.


Just on the entrance to the Vembanad lake we stopped at a point as our boatman sighted rains coming from some distance. His was a trained eye. About 10 minutes later we could indeed see that rains were approaching us from Alleppey side and it would not be safe to continue. The locals sold Todi here. Some kind of alcoholic drink made from coconut. I simply avoided it and opted for simple coconut water instead. This Todi is big time popular among the locals as we saw lot of people buying it in big bottles. There were other boats approaching at this point, house boats, kevalluyams, ferries with lots of people but i kinda liked the fact that we took a separate boat for ourselves.

On getting to Alleppey(also known as Allapuzzha) we were roaming around the market and saw this really beautiful boat, newly made .. unlike all the other ones in sight nearby.. standing out .. a sexy beauty. We gave in to temptation and hired the boat for two hours and went boating around Allepey. I tried to negotiate with a foreigner to share the boat with us for the ride ... but even the shared price seemed too much to him and we took that boat all to ourselves and i would say for the better as we would not have enjoyed that much if he and his family would have been on board too.

We played around the boat a lot, leaving no angle for taking pictures unexplored. And even Aditya, with his fear of water, turned out to be quite a sport at this. After starting from Alleppey our boat stopped at a place near Alleppy Lake Resort to take some petrol and some Dhanoj joined our boatman Vinod. He knew a bit of Hindi and English and it was a big relief. As it turned out this ride was real fun. We went through narrow canals around Alleppey and even got down from the boat, forcing our boatman to stop, when we sighted a Vinji (a real narrow boat meant for only 2 people) and with the help of a local started rowing and filmed it much to the dislike of our boatman as he had to take the boat back in time. It was awesome. Seeing all this sporty stuff, running in and around the boat exploring camera angles, the boat man smiled and remarked something that Dhanoj translated as "Pagal hai kya yeh dono" and we all burst in to laughter. We got back at around 6 and then clicked this photo with Dhanoj(to my left) and Vinod. Dhanoj infact tried to give us his address to post the photo to but it was so damn complex .. you know how South Indian names are...



Me and Aditya in the Vinji. Well to help you with the conversation .. in the first one he is marvelling at my gut because i insisted on this and he was in constant fear that the Vinji would capsize .. and in the second one he is boasting that even he can be daring.. and its not just me who is adventurous ..

We went to this Royal Park Hotel for dinner and it turned out be a real treat with amazing amazing food and that too at pretty cheap prices. We struck up a conversation about common friends as we started savouring the delicacies. After some 200 photos and 10 videos , Aditya's Sony had run out of memory and we transferred all the photos and videos to his laptop that he had brought along while were dining there. We had already enquired about the 8.15 pm train to Trivandrum and left for the railway station nearby after finishing our dinner. The train was rather empty and we perched ourselves comfortable in the sleeper compartment .. both of us dozed soon after .. ending a crazy crazy day of fun and laughter ..

Labels: me, travel

Earlier post in this series :
kerala-and-the-romantic-rains

Munnar
After the bus that i took from Calicut stranded me in a dark spooky crossway in the middle of the night amidst heavy rains... i had almost given up on the thought that i will get to roam around Munnar and enjoy its beauty, but luckily i got a bus from Perambavoor to Kothamangalam and then a connecting one to Munnar soon after, and i got there around 8 am in the morning. If it was the romantic rains that accompanied in Waynad, it seemed like mystical mists would be my companion here.


The Tea Plantations
The tea planted hills were simply amazing to watch. All these patterns on them seemed like a decoration to greet tourists like me. Tea harvesting is the main occupation with a large chunk of the Munnar's population.

The Lakes
On my way to Top Station, a high scenic point near the Tamil Nadu border, i had some great time at Madupatty Lake and Kundale Lake, two of the best tourist spots in Munnar.

Madupatty Lake : Had a speed-boat ride in the Madupatty Lake and it was so much fun. The mists were finally clearing up and the slight drizzle was also dying away. The whole look of abounding greenery and the whole make up of the entire surroundings was so fresh and so amazing.
Kundale Lake : Kundale Lake is a popular tourist spot among the locals as one gets to pedal-boat here. I strolled around the lake for quite long and went quite far from the rest of the people at the lake and came at a point where the lake bifurcated. A perfect view for a panorama.

Labels: me, travel