A revisit and a year end thought

I was travelling to Hampi again. This time with M. My last visit to the place was almost 2 years back , with two close friends from Mumbai who also got me my Canon 40D from Pune. It was a second time for M too , who had equally exercised her traveling options during her Bangalore stint. So why did we choose to go again? Hmm. No, not the irresistible charm of the bizarrely splendid Hampi architecture and ruins. M and I are no connoisseurs of architecture , the charm of Mango Tree would be more closer to the truth.Lack of adequate time for travel planning ? Yes. M does her classic vanishing act like always. I usually pride myself on my last minute planning,but a week before Christmas weekend and work to juggle with was difficult to beat. Also,the nonchalance towards the choice of the destination when you are looking forward to holiday with an old friend and catching up with each other's lives away from the busy schedules. Happens when you have been friends since kindergarten.

We board the Hampi express from the Bangalore city junction on Wednesday night. A peaceful overnight train journey reaching Hampi early morning the next day. Co passenger gentleman visibly impressed with M's D school pedigree strikes a conversation “ Do you know Swaminathan?”. “Swaminathan , who?”. M's brain is not known to respond well before breakfast. Especially when Swaminathans abound in plenty south of the Vindhyas. I shield myself against M,strategically positioning myself to vent my fits of laughter. Not polite , you see. An offer to be dropped to the bus stand is on stake.

“ You bongs are very intellectual , no? Also you travel a lot”." You also like music"
“ Who was that lady who won the Magsaysay award?”
M is fighting a lonely battle.If only looks could kill.Fortunately, the train halts at the Hospet station and we get a drop till the bus stand. A Paramvir Chakra for the woman.

Our first day is a quick tour of Hampi. A repeat for both of us. We spend more time at some of the places, especially Vitthala , the iconic Hampi temple, before sunset. Hampi ruins are spellbinding , even for a repeat visit. We head off for Badami the next day. Built somewhere around 550 A.D, the rock cut cave temples built by the Chalukyas are carved out of sandstone on the precipice of a hill. There are four cave temples dedicated to Shiva ,Vishnu and Mahavira-each with a huge verandah and vertical columns leading to an inner sanctum where the main sculpture is housed. Exquisitely carved murals.The fact that the temples were built somewhere in the first century and still survive almost unscathed is quite amazing.I wonder if I have seen anything older than these first century temples.Yes. Giza. 2500 B.C. After Badami,we head off for Aihole and Pattadakal , again Chalukyan temples dating back to the sixth/seventh centuries.

We check out of our resort the next day but are pretty much unoccupied before our train back to Bangalore in the evening. Our driver for the Badami trip enthusiastically suggests watching Don 2 at Hospet.We choose to settle instead with cups of coffee at a shack in Hampi Bazaar and spending time by the banks of the Tungabhadra over King Khan .The river looks serene, quite contrasting to the gushing torrent I remember last time when flash floods had the Tungabhadra overflowing it's banks. A friend from Hyderabad is also visiting Hampi , but luck plays spoilsport and we miss meeting him by a whisker.

We also  notice a lot of school children in Hampi and the nearby places,visiting as part of excursions, before their Christmas holidays. A school excursion group possibly from Bangalore, was booked in the same KSTDC resort that we were staying at. In striking contrast we notice, school children from the excursion groups coming from the nearby areas, did not have their basic school uniforms, a lot of of them barefooted. One of them also tried selling us his Hampi guide. Glaring disparities in school education in India? A parting thought as we packed our bags back to Bangalore.

*A travelogue on the first Hampi visit here

The making of a Goddess

The making of a Goddess a set on Flickr.

Images , some holy , some macabre.. from a carefully crafted process of idol making to celebrate the victory of Goddess Durga over the evil demon Mahisasura

Aaschey Bochor Abar hobey!

“You girls should finish the sari shopping in the next two days, shops will close down for Pujo”- my mom suggested as we settled down after dinner. My heart skipped a beat. My dear friend from Delhi who had come down to Kolkata for Pujo was gearing up with plans of shopping for exquisite saris.As the hostess, I (obviously) was entreated with the responsibility of escorting her. Coupled with my generic ignorance on matters related to the divine six yards of cloth (although I do maintain that nothing can do justice to a woman's elegance the way a sari can), my infamously short attention span when it comes to shopping and my friend's reputation of being a very..ahem..discerning shopper, the plan was ambitious to say the least. Not to mention the prospect of pre Pujo evening traffic.What followed in the next two days was a whirlwind treasure hunt- South to North Kolkata, discourses on saris from the most expert of salesmen (and women) (my respects to all of you),networking with sari merchants in Central Avenue (huge bargaining notwithstanding, we were also served coke..heh!), moments of complete misery (“Dude, just buy one!") and rare,unbelievable glory (“I think I will take this” (mental somersault)). Perks of the shopping marathon included a trip to College street, a quick tour of Mohammed Ali park and College square Pujo, taking her around the college campus and sitting in the crowded Paramount shop introducing her to Kolkata's famous sherbet and our favourite watering hole during Presidency days.

My first Pujo in Kolkata was splendid to say the least - a warm homecoming and time with family and closest of friends. Catching up with friends over breakfast at Flurys' where our unstoppable giggles invited glares from all over and clocking hours of adda at a Park street coffee shop. Gorging over fish and meals at the apartment Pujo celebrations. Catching the latest Bengali movie in town ; only to be nudged by my mom sitting beside me - “Bujhte parchish? (can you understand?)". A half day tour of the Ganges – crossing below the Howrah bridge and some of the oldest ghats in the city to Belur and back . A tour I would want to do again , after sunset. A vacation which just left me asking for more. Maybe just like the devotees bidding the Goddess goodbye as they immerse her in the Ganges -“Aschey bochor abar hobe (It'll happen again next year!)". And a strange melancholy as I packed my bags back to Bangalore. Like the lilting tune of a Tagore song I had heard as we crossed the Belur Math:

In god we trust , everyone else please bring data!

The office bay post 10 p.m is a crucible of random conversations. Or to 'ideate' as they say. Like when you are finishing up some last minute number crunching for the final presentation, and the joke doing the rounds is “ So what is your favourite proc?”. “Proc delete”. Guffaws. Do analytics folks have a skewed sense of humour? Probable topic of academic research in social psychology.

Or like Sid walking up to discuss “Hey, so we should have a victory flag when we climb upto 6000m+ in Ladakh this time”.  “Sounds cool , like what?” “Umm..a math geek with oversized glasses climbing up, and the flag says–In god we trust, everyone else please bring data." I am speechless. These are the 'engineer' kinds. And trust me not to initiate conversations on the 'engineering jokes from school' , they can destroy sanity.

Speaking of data , a new report from the Mckinsey Global Institute discusses how the scale and scope of companies' access to data is changing the way they do business. Interesting read for anyone in the analytics space. The report covers five domains in detail - health care,retailing,the public sector, manufacturing and personal-location data. Surprisingly not financial services, given the scale and complexity of information management and analytics in financial services.

The camera-phone-elation in office is a sentiment-high right now. Launch the people survey now I say!! (teehehe). Interestingly, none of the folks I spoke to about getting the new smartphone are thinking about the blackberry. On a seperate note, RIM has warned of Blackberry blues, slicing it's earnings outlook for the year and said it would start laying off employees as rivals like Apple eat away it's once dominant smartphone market share.

The office photography club went for an early morning photo walk at the Bangalore K.R Market, after a long hiatus. Hiatus, especially true for the master (respect \m/) who came along. I, for myself, managed to wake up at 5 a.m , drove all the way to K.R Market , then to Church Street for breakfast and back home without so much as a scratch (somersault!). Abuzz with activity even in the early morning hours, the market is a melting pot offering everything from still life to people photography. Managed to get some decent shots.

We landed up in Koshy's for breakfast after the shoot. My first breakfast in Koshy's. Disappointing (in capital letters). Bangaloreans, beat me up, but I would not go to Koshy's either for the food or the ambience. If it is the classic english breakfast,Bangalore has better places to offer for sure. And if I am looking for old world charm , I would pay for my south Indian breakfast and filter coffee at MTR. Thank you.

Bangalore-ed!

My resolution to be more dilligent with blogging doesn't seem to be working well. Ditto for weekend travels and photo shoots for atleast the first half of the year. Except for a late night shoot on Bangalore roads from 11 p.m after a half day team outing where super enthusiastic office folks insisted on playing a knock out cricket tournament. Times like this I wonder if I were a sadist.

Work on weekdays more than compensates for the lack of significant activity over the weekends though. Of all the quirky emoticons on Sametime messenger, I particularly fell for this one:

What I did manage to do,however,is to plan my trip of the year. I am off to Ladakh again in August, this time for a trek to Chamser Kangri situated near Tso Moriri coupled with plans to do a Leh Manali roadtrip. Didn't imagine I would be going back to Ladakh again this soon!

Also, gradually realizing I am pretty hooked to Bangalore.Love the superb weather, the prospective eating out options (several of them still remain unexplored) and the general enthusiastic junta up for travel or photography. Great options to catch up with theater at Rangashankara. I did manage to catch a play -The interview; well executed with brilliant comic timing.

Traffic is bad, but so is the story for every other Indian city. Staying close to office helps.I am generally flummoxed with a lot of Bangalore traffic signals at crossings though, or maybe it is just the naivette of a novice driver speaking.I also managed to lose my way driving back from Forum to home (eeks! horrid sense of direction). Absolutely hate the night curfew, what with pubs and restaurants closing down at 11 p.m. Also, the perils of going through the breathalyzer test if you are driving back at night forced me to settle for a single pina colada when I caught up with a friend at a nice pub over the weekend .Reasons why I prefer my house serving up as the team party place on occasional weekends:-)!

The good life

“Wine is bottled poetry” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. The Bangalore International Wine festival seemed like it chose to differ. A couple of us dropped by at the wine festival on an unusually hot Sunday afternoon hoping to catch some interesting photo ops. The “eclectic” event was a mish mash of food stalls (the ubiquitous CCD kinds),wine sampling events (where some sloshed visitors looked like they would leave no stone unturned in extracting the last penny of their visitor passes) and a.. err.. rock music show. Now I love rock, but a wine festival and rock music? Or maybe that was eclectic.

The British government added sparkling wine to it’s Consumer Price Index market basket of goods this month. “Sparkling wines are also being added due to their increased consumption” – added an official note. A case of a luxury good becoming a normal good? Flummoxed…eh? Rare occasions when I would want to gloat about the economist in me but shall spare you in peace. A luxury good, non technically speaking is what the poor cannot have and only the elite can. The funny thing about a luxury good is however, once it gets increasingly democratised, it ceases being one. Technology is a very good example. Even before you know it, that hottest gadget you got for yourself becomes a normal good. So much for social signalling!

So what does it take to know how hard it is to be immensely rich these days? Check out the Forbes' "Cost of Living Extremely Well Index". Its components include: Gucci loafers, one year at Harvard University, a night at a one-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons in New York, 1oz of Joy (a perfume by Jean Patou), Davidoff cigars, a Hermès calfskin bag and much more. Also, what matters is not just the good itself but under what brand it is being sold.

Recent research also suggests that luxury brands act like marketing placebos and could improve human performance! Think your photography ain’t good enough…maybe you should get the Canon EOS 5D Mark II!! (macro man fits the bill , Alleppey fellow travellers would agree:-0)). For those not so inflicted by such fallacies of human thought, there is always the inhouse photography expert..or better..a pirated version of photoshop:D. Okay photographers,we will debate on the “moralities” of photo editing next time!

Photo credits:Shireen

Of Milieu and Music

The Flying Bulls aerobatic team whizzed overhead in their ZLIN 50 LX aircrafts , did a dare devilish looping in an inverted G, leaving the crowd below gasping in awe. The sun was beating upon us harshly. The breathtaking aerobatic antics nothwitstanding , Aneesha and I were still wondering if the largest Aero show in Asia was worth it's salt. The brave woman also stood in a queue for 3 hours to sit in the cockpit of an Eurofighter typhoon. I had already given up by then. We had started early in the morning to reach the Yelahanka Air force station. Even discounting for the heavy weekend traffic towards the air force station, the parking arrangements were a mess. The “shuttles” supposed to transfer visitors from the parking lot to the aero show venue were nowhere to be seen. Unlike more dilligent visitors like us who read through the aero show website clearly laying down instructions not to carry handbags for security reasons, the milling crowd around us ( a lot of them who later gatecrashed without a valid pass!) were let through with all kinds of bags with a cursory check. Inside the venue itself, the organisers definitely had civilian convenience at the bottom of their list , or maybe in an asterisk somewhere.My two cents on the whole circus affair:

1. Anyone coming to the largest aero show in Asia would expect a minimum standard of organizing, not childhood nostalgia of visiting town fairs ( the latter also had cheap food by the way)
2. If you do not want civilians to come, please say so.Don't ask us to pay for “business visitor” passes (what were they exactly?), lay down a whole lot of rules starting from what to carry and what to wear and make a sham of it at the end of the day.
3. Yes I liked your aircrafts, their antics and the men in jumpsuits ( Oh and the top gun music). Next time, I will watch your trapeze acts on TV (and suggest everyone do).

The Bryan Adams concert at the Palace Grounds was a relief in comparison. Long queues, huge crowds, but well managed and no unpleasant surprises. Adams's voice, age nothwitstanding and his guitarist Keith Scott had the crowds up on their feet to every number they belted out. The fledgling rockstars in my team gave tough competition, crooning away to glory untill we asked them to shut up. Completely loved the pulsating vibes of a 90 minutes high octane performance, definitely worth the wait and the money. The only glitch for the evening was lack of dinner options post 11 p.m in the city and hence a mad dash to catch the last order at McDonalds on the way back home. Thank God for the little mercies of Mcgrills!!:)

A night on the rocks

The lights of the town below were lit up like a giant UFO.We stood resting against one of the rocks. The climb was steep and the maze of shrubs and the boulder like walls were intriguing in the flickering light of our torches. The trek started in the night much later than anticipated, thanks to the cops who refused to let us proceed to Papagni Mutt (the trekking base) despite much haggling. My attempts to find an alternative route on google only revealed that post 12 is a bad time to proceed to the base because of the patrolling cops, inviting groans of disappointment from my team.We had reluctantly turned around but bumped into a guide who agreed to take us via an alternative route. We left our bus asking the driver to pick us up in the morning from the base and left off silently with the guide through the fields.

Skandagiri, also known as Kalavar Betta is an ancient mountain fortress located near Bangalore at an altitude of 1350m. Dilapidated remains of Tipu's fort can be found on the top. History says this was a small but strong hill fort. It surrendered to British troops in 1791 and remained in British hands until the peace treaty of 1792, which ended the third Anglo-Mysore war.

The trek is a literal teaser. Just when you think you have reached the top, there is another stone wall towering just beyond. Short but exciting,we had to stop occassionally against the rock ledges (not to mention my shameless dumping over the tripod to Karteek and the undesirable effects of mixing drinks on our young intern).

We reached the summit at around 4 a.m,two hours after we started the trek. The wind was blowing relentlessly and the bone chilling cold left us shivering for cover.Luckily for the trekkers, there is a small shop which sells hot chai and maggi and arranges for a bonfire as well, predictably doing brisk business.We gathered around the bonfire to beat the cold, waiting for the sunrise. Around dawn, a few mist covered peaks in the distance come into view. Like piles of cotton candy the clouds play with the wind, finally giving way to the small orange ball in the horizon. The magical view lasts for sometime before the fog clears up for a bright day.We descended soon after and left back for Bangalore. My first trek of the year was over,hoping to catch up with some more before it ends!

Written in Stone

Folk legend has it that a giant named Hidimbasura lived on the Chitradurga hills. When the Pandavas came with their mother Kunti during their exile, Bhima had a duel with Hidimba who was slain and peace returned to the area. Located amidst these hills is the Chitradurga fort . Built by the feudal lords of the Vijaynagar empire and later captured by Hyder Ali in 1779, the fort stands as a grand stone edifice encircled by seven circular walls.

It was a November morning and unlike most weekends I had to drag myself out of bed a tad too early. The photography clubs from B1 and B2 were off for a day trip to the Chitradurga fort. After the cursory delay of getting all the half awake photographers together, both the buses left the city and sped off on the Bangalore Pune highway. Save a few stops on the way to catch breakfast , and to pick up a lens from Sid (not to mention the attempt to abduct him) , the journey was uneventful. The more awake B1 folks managed to entertain themselves through the bus journey,while the B2 bus was a sleeping graveyard.

We reached Chitradurga around noon and made our way through the fort. The guide we had (unfortunately) hired turned out to be a dictator of some sorts, insisting on undivided attention leaving us running for cover.The boulder strewn landscape around Chitradurga is embellished with watchtowers, temples,bastions and fortifications all around. No wonder that the fort is also known as “Kallina Kote” or the “Place of stone fort”. There are 28 entrances, a palace, 19 gateways, granaries,50 warehouses and water tanks inside the fort.

An interesting story surrounds a small opening in the rocks in the fort. During the siege of the fort , Hyder Ali came upon a clever plan to send his soldiers through the opening in the rocks. The guard on duty near the hole had gone home for lunch and his wife,Obawa,noticed the soldiers emerging out of the opening. She killed the soldiers one by one with her wooden club (“Onake”). In the ensuing battle , the fort of Chitradurga was lost to Hyder Ali , but the opening in the rocks still remains a witness to the legend of ‘Onake Obawa’.

The temples served up as interesting photo-ops for the photographers. Puja is still conducted at some of these ancient temples. The bored priests break off into a smile as we tried to click them. We also hiked around in groups to the hilltops which provide a stunning view of the surrounding area. By evening , we had finished off our tour and boarded our buses to return to Bangalore. The 15th century fortress lay behind , seeped in stories and legends of it’s own.

Not to miss at the Chitradurga fort:
Watch the ‘monkey man’ Jyothi Raja scale the fort walls with effortless ease. A passionate rock climber, Raja is a regular at the fort precincts and has garnered a huge fan following for his unique rock climbing skills