Bangalore'd

Imagine a pleasant Saturday morning and you are driving at 7 AM and tuned in to Time Tunnel on Radio Indigo.Happily listening to Freddie Mercury singing "Those were the days of our lives..." in his magnificiently operatic voice .Eager to drive along picturesque Golf Course Road.A road which instantly makes you feel as though you are passing through a sleepy village in Europe.The golf greens, the tall trees and the first rays of sun trying to make their way through the fog, just make one feel lucky to be in the place called Bangalore. But when I drove past this road a few weeks back, I was aghast to see that all that remained were uprooted tree stumps.The whole road seemed to look like a place which was ravaged by a hurricane.Apparently the civic authorities wanted to build a 6 lane access road to the new international airport and decided to cut a few hundred trees and widen the road.This sight just made me wonder, "Is this the price we have to pay for development?"
For a long while I wanted to get up early on a Saturday morning, drive upto the Golf Course road and take some photos of that beautiful stretch of road.But now I'm too late for that.Driving on that road will never be the same.

So I thought I shall post this one taken inside Cubbon Park, before someone decided to turn it into a concrete jungle.This photo was taken by my good friend Vishal Jogi, who won an award at the Bangalore Photography Exhibition for this photo.

He also gave me this pic of BRV on Cubbon Road. This place was used by the army to screen movies over the weekends right from the days of the British Raj. Who knows, in some days' time this beautiful building might give way to a state of the art Metro railway station for trains to the new International Airport.

Over the last 10 years Bangalore has grown at a rate faster than anybody could imagineAt a rate even it was not ready to cope up with.A lot of things have changed during this time, some for good, some for bad.And a lot many things have remained the same.

Previously Bangalore was known as the Garden City of India.But now it has become the Park City of India.Parks as in Bagmane tech Park, Manyata Tech Park, Embassy Tech Park and so on.Bangalore also had atleast a hundred fresh water lakes in the early 1900s.Some of these lakes were encroached to form areas like Koramangala.And some other lakes were filled with tonnes and tonnes of landfill to form large IT tech parks.So the next time it rains heavily and the place you live or work goes underwater, you probably know why.

Bangalore was also known as the pensioners' paradise. Evidence of that could be seen whenever you spotted a Premier Padmini being driven by a senior citizen in the exact centre of the road at a leisurely speed of 20 kmph. Today, this has been replaced by powerful bikes and sleek cars which have the highest acceleration after the signal goes red.Their shrill horns could even wake up the dead.They can also cut through lanes faster than I can cut an apple into two halves.
In those days when I was a kid, a Sunday would mean a family picnic to Cubbon Park or Lalbagh, where kids played at Bal Bhavan or go on a ride on Putani Express.Now times have changed.Come Sunday and you can see almost all of the public getting compulsively settled in one of the many crowded shopping malls.Probably that explains why one ends up paying fifty rupees for a popcorn at Forum mall. And you can also see everyone from papa, mama and the kids gleefully digging into burgers and pizzas.
Bangalore was known for its pleasant weather all round the year.Summers were mild, with a bit of rain every afternoon to cool things down.Most parts of the year we never needed a fan.Winters were pleasant, and the monsoon always extended from June to November. But now it can rain even in February.
Thanks to the phenomenon of global warming, and also due to rampant urbanisation,pollution and cutting down of trees, there are extremities in weather patterns.Every time it rains, I feel that the best mode of transport in the city is using boats. But I'm a lot relieved that this year its already started raining, and its still April. The only downside about these rains is that it makes commuting a miserable experience, unless one is going by a gondola.

There were two aspects about yesteryear Bangalore that need a mention here.Something that not many people talk about.One, is the defence and space research related setup. Bangalore has been a key centre for the army, airforce, HAL, DRDO,ISRO and so on.Other than their contribution towards India's defence needs, their other major contribution is that they have preserved most of the green cover inside the city. If not for them, probably a lot of defence land would be encroached by the powerful land mafia for commercial purposes.
The second reason is the educational institutions in Bangalore. Institutions like IISc, more popularly known at Tata Institute and National Law School are rated amongst the best in the world. And if that's not enough,there were a lot of top notch engineering and medical colleges setup in the the 60s, 70s through the 90s.Unfortunately, many politicians saw this as a business oppurtunity. As a result, one could see medical and engineering colleges mushrooming out from places like factory sheds.
Companies like Infosys, Wipro and others made it big and in the process helped in putting Bangalore on the IT map of the world. But the civic authorities were not alert to the situation, and never planned for the years to come. They were callous then, and they are the same even today.If that was not enough then gross political apathy and mismanagement has brought Bangalore to a state that it is in today. Thanks to the Son of the Soil, we are getting an International Airport in some months from now. Had it not been them we would have had one by 1998 itself.
Many of you might be relatively new to this city, and maybe from other states too. Many might have been living in Bangalore for 4-5 years now, and still not have found it necessary to learn Kannada, because most of the people here try to talk to you in the language you know.Be it English,Hindi, Tamil or Telugu.Well, I'm not a jingoist who'd insist that everyone who lives in Bangalore learns Kannada.But I would definetely admire a person who would want to learn the language of the land in which he is staying. The people are good, friendly, amicable but that won't be the same forever.
Had I been in a place like Chennai or Cochin, then I would be compelled to learn Tamil or Malayalam.Going by the current trends, the day isn't far when some Kannada activist group would enforce that everyone living in Bangalore should learn Kannada, and maybe blackout all other language channels in Bangalore.
Areas in old Bangalore like Basavanagudi, Malleshwaram still have that old world charm in them. You can still find a lot of elderly people sitting around in small eateries, sipping their favourite filter coffee. A lot of men and women walking around in beautiful parks like Lalbagh and Cubbon Park.
A lot of us including me who work in hi- fi offices would be happy to spend 5000 Rupees at a swanky restaurant on a meal for two. But it still can't match the joy and satisfaction of a Masala Dosa at CTR or Vidyarthi Bhavan.It still cannot match the taste of Halli Mane's akki rotti ,or the jolada rotti oota at Kamath Yatri Nivas. And all this for under three hundred rupees for a family of four, tax and tips included.
Everybody loves many things about Bangalore.And everybody cribs about the traffic here.Gone are those days when areas in and around Majestic were considered to be the traffic hotspots of the city. The traffic in the rest of the city has multiplied tenfold, while the traffic in Central Business District has multiplied only twofold. People suddenly seemed to have become more competitive. And they want to show off this competence on the roads too, by breaking signals, honking another vehicle into submission and racing on the opposite direction of a one way. While the policmen try to control their ever enlarging beer bellies, and satiate their greedy pockets.

Some things still remain the same.Even as kids, we were told to be careful of going out of home after 7 PM. Now the time limit has moved to 9 PM, especially if its for ladies.I wouldn't let any lady I know to travel by auto rickshaw after dark.Especially if she has to travel in and around the outer ring road, KR Puram, Marathhalli area. Some people might think I'm paranoid. Ask my sister, and she'll confirm that I am.
I wouldn't ever want to pick up a quarrel on the road with an autorickshaw driver or a cabbie.I once did and nearly got beaten to death. It was not so safe a city then, its not so safe a place even today.
In all this, I could see a sea of change in the people, our attitudes, our ways of life.
Money has been devalued like anything. For instance, a 50 rupee tip at a restaurant is more than the daily wage of many housmaids in Bangalore. Scruples seem to have no place anymore.I read someone having this sticker on the back of his bike, "Yes, its my dad's road!" But then I thought his dad bought the road and got the footpath for free, when I saw this fellow riding on the footpath to escape a traffic jam.

Sometimes I wonder, what's wrong with me? Why am I complaining?
No offence intended to anyone. But a lot of people in Bangalore, especially those working in IT, see this city as nothing more than a H1B/HSMP launchpad, from where they can go to the first world and never turn back to India.
I wonder, do such people really care a damn about Bangalore at all?
I don't expect the bureaucrats or the government to do anything about this. I feel the onus is on all of us, people who feel they are proud Bangaloreans, to change things. At this moment I'm clueless about how I can contribute in a big way to this. But atleast I've made a start by trying to be a responsible citizen to a great extent. Trying to respect the traffic laws even when there's no policeman around, paying my taxes on time, and of course, trying to pen my thoughts in this post.

How things work?

Appraisals are due for me shortly, and by the time I complete this post I'm pretty sure the annual story telling competition in my project shall be over.Whether or not my story impresses my manager is yet to be seen.But after spending close to 5 years in the IT industry, I have some views about our industry in general, that I felt like sharing. Let me try to be different.Instead of being a software engineer, I shall be the layman whose primary job is to put some bricks together, in the form of writing code.And the whole process can be compared to putting those bricks together to form a wall.
The wall building business in India is a service industry that runs on the man * month model. Now lets see what it is...
Say a large American building company Behemoth Inc wants to get a wall built from India, as they dont have enough people to build walls.Maybe that they simply don't want to waste time on mundane things like building walls, as they want to focus their efforts on bigger edifices instead.The marketing division of the Indian company, Patents Unlimited(PUN) somehow finds out about Behemoth's plan and now wants to take up the project.

Surya who is a manager from PUN's R&D group, alongwith the marketing team unit is rushed to meet Dave at Behemoth's center in the USA to bid for the project.Behemoth Inc is primarily interested in getting the work done at the lowest cost possible.
Their discussion goes something like this.
Dave:"If 10 resources working 8 hours a day can build a wall 300m long in 20 days, how many men and how many days will you need to build a wall 600 m long in 25 days?"
Surya:"We shall need 16 resources." (after making some bizarre calculations)
Dave: "But your competitor quoted 12 resources."
Surya:"On second thoughts, we also need 12 resources. We had not accounted for the fact that you already built 300 m of the wall.We just need to extend its length and paint it in the colour you want. And we have experts in our team for all that."
And after many such discussions, PUN somehow gets the project.If that was the manager and the marketing team, then lets see who these "experts" that Surya was talking about : The Team Structure.
Surya himself is a very ambitious manager who has a very clear agenda : Maximise profits, extract the most by investing the least.He wants every member in his team to work only between 9 AM and 6 PM.But is actually a hypocrite when he insists that work is finished even if someone has to sit late.
Moreover, he knows as much about wall building, as much as you and I would know about the moons of Mercury.
In their recent campus hiring spree PUN hired a lot of trainee artistes from the top art colleges in the country, of which Anil and Sunil are alloted to work on the Behemoth project.In their pre placement talk, the HR makes them believe that their work is very similar to that of Pablo Picasso.So these two enthusiastic but gullible chaps are blissfully unaware that their artistic painting skills shall be put to use to paint a brick wall.
Ajay, Vijay and Sujay are three good friends who have about three years experience in the company. They're almost always found together. They come in at their own convenient time, take three leisured thirty minute coffee breaks apart from the lunch break in which they spend in the cafetaria discussing about politics, economic,sports, and of course, ornithology. They also know the golden rule,"Meetings - the best alternative to work." So they make it a point to schedule one meeting everyday in between the breaks.
How could team be complete without some girls in it. So there comes Charitha.Smart, intelligent, good looking but supremely lazy. Every twenty minutes she's on her seat, she takes a break lasting forty minutes, in which she has a cup of coffee and reads two sections from the newspaper.Everybody in the team thinks that she's superhuman, primarily because she makes even the impossible look trivial with her smooth talk.On her part Charitha knows that nothing's impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it.
If that was about Charitha then here comes Sunitha. A nice smile greets you everytime you meet her. A simple girls who minds her work, and doesn't mind going the extra mile now and then, even if means that she is doing Charitha's work.But Surya is oblivious of Sunitha's existence, mainly because Charitha succesfully takes all of the credit for what Sunitha did.
Then there is Anitha.Not a girl anymore.Approaching thirty, happily married and with a three year old kid. Nice lady, but has her own family priorities, and family problems too.Inspite of all these, she manages to do a decent job.
There's also Murali,the seniormost layman in the team.Vastly experienced and is very methodical in his approach, and of course as calm as a lake placid.Focussed and an expert on his job, but has a problem expressing his expertise because he's excessively laconic.He could be the next project leader in the making, only if Surya knew that he was so good.
Just as other Indian companies that build up several layers of redundancy, by way of heirachical designations.This project has a project leader in it, in the form of Sachin. A shrewd guy stuck in between the manager and the team. Leader of a team which he has no idea or intent to handle.That's mostly because he has applied for his H1 visa and is dreaming of settling down in the "first world".
This team also has a new joinee in Sameer who had a lengthy three hour interview, and a fruitful compensation discussion. He came into the team only because Surya supposedly committed him an onsite opportunity, to work at Behemoth center during the integration stage and also was given a handsome joining bonus.
Every now and then Sachin goes to Surya asking him for more resources as he doesn't have enough entry level brick layers.People who can get down to work and get their hands dirty.He also knows that to build a wall of that size in the time alloted he needs 15 resources.
Surya has a well rehearsed answer for this,"As you know we have already made some offers.Now, if the HR is able to convince them, we might have some new joinees within the next week or so."
But deep inside Surya has this devious thought..."The customer is paying for 12 resources.Now if I save on these new joinees, I might as well boost my profits. I can always rip off the customer with my itemised bills, in the form of weekly status reports."
So the project kickoff takes place and the entire team goes for a lavish buffet lunch at the Grand Ashok. Ajay, Vijay and Sujay even arranged a cab for this, ofcourse at the company cost. Except the freshers and the new joinee, everyone in the team is well aware that when working with Surya free lunches are found only in a mousetrap.
And then everybody starts off with their work.
Sachin makes a plan for all the members in his team, putting unrealistic dates for each activity, in such a way that it fits into Surya's plans. But then he totally forgets about the actual blueprint for the wall, the height, the length,the quality of bricks,cement,etc.He knows that the customer had specified how long the wall should be,but not how high it should be. But now he's too scared to ask, as feels he's a bit too late for that .
Murli did everything that Surya and Sachin had missed out in their plans.But he didn't know how much time he had at hand.So he sets about doing a very methodical and correct job, but at his own pace.
Anitha and Sunitha know that Murli is a good guide and take his help to get started. But since they are not as experienced they take their own time, as they had to rework on some sections of the wall every alternate day.
The three musketeers Ajay, Vijay and Sujay lend their hand whenever they get time off from their breaks and of course, their meetings.But the progress is too slow.They even meet Sachin asking him for some training on building such walls.
Sameer is good at what he does, but is eagerly the infrastructure team to deliver his toolkit.They even called him saying they have placed an order with the purchase department, and that it shall take a while before its procured.
The two freshers are full of enthusiasm, but don't know a thing about how to paint a wall. So they start off with building a small wall, on which they plan to try their painting skills. But in the process use up quite a lot of precious bricks,cement and paint too.That's something that Surya has noticed.
Did I forget Charitha here? No I did'nt. Actually she's been very busy working on a patent on a new WOW technique.She convinces everyone that this technique will make them the industry leaders in the wall building business.
Everybody keeps working on their part of the wall for some days when Surya decides to check out the wall.He announces that the CEO of PUN shall be visiting in three days for a demo. This is like setting the cat amongst the pigeons.Everyone starts working like never before. Ajay, Sujay and Vijay start working late nights,and also order pizzas for everyone while Murli quietly murmurs, "Any Time Demo!!!"
After three days, Sachin walks in to find that the wall, is like anything but a wall, and realises that he's in trouble with his boss, the quality asssurance guys and of course, the customer too.In panic mode, he asks Sachin to get the blueprint and the plans of the wall to his office immediately. Sachin smartly says,"How can I have a blueprint before we complete the construction? We are an R & D unit.Even we don't know what the outcome will be."
The deadline has come and gone, but the wall is anything but complete.Sachin meekly prepares an email to Dave which goes something like this...
"We, at PUN are almost through with building the wall that you had asked for. However during integration and internal strength testing we found some loose bricks in the wall. We are working on it and trying to fix these issues. We shall have WOW inbuilt in the wall by version 1.2."
Dave waits for a while before he runs out of patience and decides to send his team from Behemoth to inspect the wall.Ajay, Vijay and Sujay play the perfect hosts and organise a grand party for the visiting customers.Only when the team gets back from their pleasurable "Indian trip" the truth dawns on Dave...."When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys" .He immediately decides to stop the funding for the project.Sameer's hopes of an onsite opportunity came down crashing down with it.
But still he has to pay for the man*month that PUN had worked for.That's where Sachin's good. But he ends up losing the customer, not just for himself, but for PUN too.
If you thought the story ended here, then you forgot the appraisals part of the story, where everyone was rated on a scale of 5.This is how each one fared.
Anil got a 3 because he was upto expectations.Sunil got a 2 even though he did the same work as Anil. If you think Sunil took more initiative, then you are wrong.Actually Sunil had a better rapport with Surya than Anil, and also he had used a bit lesser paint and cement.
Surya felt that Sameer had a lot of potential and gave him a 3,more so because he was a newcomer and couldn't give him anything better.Moreover, he had to help the HR in normalising his inflated pay package and also recover the joining bonus covertly.
Anitha got a 3 because Surya's opinion on her was that she spent more time on sorting out her son's preschool issues, than on building the wall. He even had the audacity to tell her to maintain a schedule for the 3 year old child.
Murli got a 2.When he told Surya that he made the blueprint and also did as much work as two people, Surya replied "We do appreciate that.But that's your job. If you had too much work, you should have asked for one more resource.I would have provided you with that."
The 3 musketeers all got a 3.It was split up as 1 point each for their cab and pizza ordering skills,customer focus during customer visits and of course, their competence at handling meetings.
Sunitha too got a 3 because Surya felt she didn't even exist.
Charitha got a 1.After all someone had to take credit for Anitha and Sunitha's work, and also for the patent on WOW.
Sachin got a 1 only because every manager has to give this for one of his leads, who is there to take all the blame and give all the credit.
As for Surya himself, the senior management felt that he had done a tremendous job at generating income and motivating the rest of the team.So he was given a 1, a promotion and also a new car as rewards.

Don't you think the Indian industry works similar to this? In most aspects All companies are equal, while some are more equal.Don't we see one of us in the characters above? No one's a hero, no one's a villian.But we could do better. If only we knew how to. If only we knew what to set right.If only we knew how NOT to work...If only we knew how to stop worrying and start living.


DISCLAIMER : Characters that appeared in the above post are purely real and many of the events are not at all coincidental.
Oops, I think I jumbled up some words in the disclaimer. You'll figure out the right words anyway.

Comfortably Numb or Romantically Challenged?

Quite a lot of my friends must have read my post on crushes.I got the maximum number of comments on that.Some said it took them down memory lane, and for some it was something that they could relate to.Something that might have happened in their lives too.

Five months after I posted that, I thought let me write something more about things similar to that.I must have had a few more crushes during these five months, but I don't want to make this one a Part 2 of that post.That's because I hate sequels, unless the movie is Godfather ,and the director is Francis Ford Coppola.

Recently, I was having a coffee time chat with a close friend of mine at a corner of the pantry. He announced that he'd be getting married soon. And he did ask me one simple question,

"Why did we try to desperately have a girlfriend all our lives, there can be love in an arranged marriage too?"

The discussion went on quite intensely till our cups of coffee got over. After that it was back to R&D(Regression and Debugging) at work, and we conveniently forgot all about that topic.

And this friend's atleast a hundred times more emotional than I am.I'm sure he must have had something in his mind when he said that. And this thought of his made me think what's wrong with guys like us.A lot of girls might get offended by what's written in this post, but I wish to clarify that this post's not against girls.I'm pretty sure that 'Very few girls' too think like this about guys .

In my last post on crushes, I came up with Sudipi's theory of crushes,

"From all these crushes, I am able to conclude that every girl that I'm interested in, is one of older than me,married,committed or all of these.If its none of these, then definetely that girl's not interested in me."

In reply, my buddies at office promptly came up with their own GOF (Gang of Five) theory.
"Any girl who is decently good enough and is of our age group, and is not yet married, is always committed."


That's the reason why I typed the words 'Very Few Girls' in bold in the paragraphs before that.

For the uninitiated, Gang of Five here refers to Joshi,Manju,Shivaji,Chethan and me. People who take the tables on the far end of the cafetaria during lunchtime. And by the way, Shivaji is a married bachelor, for he thinks like us, and Chethan is planning to buy a few sites in Suwon, South Korea.

There's a funny thing that I noticed.Suppose a guy has a crush on a girl.When a girl says that a guy is behind her, it means she doesn't like him.But she'd proudly declare that a guy is in love with him if she liked him too.

A close friend of mine whom I was "behind" for five long years told me that I was a very intense and emotional person, for someone to fall in love with me.Maybe she was right about me.For, the effect of my five year misadventure was so profound that, amongst other things I gave up all kinds of creative writing for five years.Till one fine day when sheer inspiration from the Deep Blue Sea made me start blogging.

Being single all my life till now, I had to ask myself ,"Why don't any girls fall for guys like us?"

Maybe we're too dumb to steal, and too proud to beg.

Maybe most girls prefer much more jovial, flirtful guys who would ask the girl out the second time they meet, but would hardly give a second thought to hurt in more than one ways that they could.I got so more rejections for an offer of a date in those five years that that I decided that I've completed my quota for a lifetime. Taking a girl out for a date is a far off thing considering that I have to muster courage to ask a girl for a harmless cup of coffee with me.

I don't have great pickup lines too.And having those military draftee like looks;a short haircut and a prominent moustache don't add to a lot of charm either.And perhaps the fact that I dont smoke, drink or socialise in pubs and discos, or even frequent perfectly decent places like Forum mall add up to the negative score.

Maybe its written somewhere on my face, that guys like me are best kept at a distance.Or maybe a lot of girls are subscribed to alerts on their cellphone that sounds an alarm whenever guys like me talk to them.

From experience I figured out that understanding what girls think about guys like me,is a lot more tougher than rocket science.An old time proverb has it that Experience is the comb that life gives when you got no hair on your head left. As of now, I got as far as having a few grey hair on my head.And not willing to risk baldness, I recently gave up most of my rights to find a life partner to my parents.

I even figured out that I could not even manage having a good friend who is a girl in recent times.I thought, "Hello, hi, how do you do ? Isse kabhi aage badh saktha hoon?" suits me aptly in my case.But I must admit, I didn't try really very hard too.And being an overly committed workaholic who spends a good part of twelve hours a day in office, doesn't exactly give me a lot of time for making friends either.Though while in office I share a good rapport with most of my female colleagues,most of whom might be trying to run away from my next PJ, a caustic comment or one liner that they might be coming their way. If having a good rapport is one thing, then making good friends is entirely another.Somehow I tend to think that we are professionals at a workplace and not classmates in college, so maintaining distance becomes second nature.

Over the years, I've found that I'm very slow to lend my hand out in friendship to anyone, more so if its to girls.But I'm very quick to take it back too, if my handshake's not properly acknowledged.Maybe the past history of facing rejections makes me do that.I'm only as interested in a girl, as interested as she is, in knowing me.So if any girls think that I'm giving a lot of bhaav, not speaking to them properly, chances are very high that,I'm also giving back the what I got, with interest though.

All these thoughts made me think that belong to a big group of people called "The Romantically Challenged". Its just that not many are as hypercritical and overanalytical as I am.

Maybe a community on Orkut with that name will show how many more of those exist in this wide world.Members anyone?

When I posted this, I also thought of putting this song from Aerosmith. The song is a story in itself.I loved everything about it.

Are We Any Different?

I was searching the internet for some old funny animation strips. Thanks to Youtube,I found two of my old time favourites.One was about how not to drive.


Bruno Bozetto, the Italian cartoonist must have done this keeping in mind how driving's done in Italy. The first 60 seconds of the animation were enough for me to ask,"...as Indians, are we any different?"

The most striking part of the animation read something like this, "Show me how you drive, and I'll tell you what kind of an idiot you are!"

And there was another animation strip, which was titled "Italians vs Europeans".


If the first animation strip made me ask the question, the second one answered my question quite emphatically.

Italians are perceived to be different from the rest of Europe.While we Indians perceive ourselves to be different from the rest of the world though.

Practically every example in the animations hold good in the Indian context.Not following traffic rules,the highly imaginative queue system we follow, the scant respect we show to pedestrian safety, not respecting No Smoking boards, all are just examples that we are just Same same no Different.

All that I wanted to say, was very well animated in those strips, so I shall spare everyone the ignominy of going through hundreds of lines of pedestrian prose.

Life's a journey, enjoy the drive!

Every year, we, as a family somehow find time to go off on a vacation.And the most likely place that we visit is Melpal.For the uninitiated, Melpal happens to be my mom's hometown.Or rather,its a small village in the midst of the western ghats of Chickmagalur district.
This time, we planned to do a bit more than just laze around in the midst of nowhere, far away from the din of city life. So we decided to go on a small tour from there, using Melpal as a base camp for our adventures.This time around there was a lot more exictement for me, for more than one reason.First, it was my first really long drive in my adorable red car.And second, this time I had decided to take dad's good old Pentax film SLR.At the end of the trip I was thoroughly impressed by the performance of the car, as well as that of the Pentax.
But post film development, I was a lot disappointed by the dullness of the photos when they were converted from film to digital format.But on paper, the photos looked really crisp and neat.

To get a good photo of nature, I didn't have to look around more than 200 metres radius of my grandmom's house.And this shot, of a rose just exemplifies it



We had planned a pligrimage of sorts and hence,set out to Dharmasthala, which has a very famous temple, about 3 hours drive from Melpal.The roads were twisty and ocassionally bumpy too. In some places the acclivity of the slope never seemed to end. As we reached Charmadi Ghats, the roads seems to disappear all of a sudden.In that part of the world, I figured out that they built roads in the middle of potholes.The pots being bigger than the wheel that makes it.If the roads were bad, the scenery and grenery around made up with their picturesque beauty. The only trouble was, I wasn't allowed to get down or stop the car as mom's absolutely terrified of heights and wouldnt want to look down at the deep valleys around.

From there we went to Karkala, to visit my good old friend Sunil and his family. Then I remembered that he's so fond of birds, even of the winged variety.I managed to get a good shot of one perched like this.



From there on, we went to see his family owned cashewnut factory.This, I was reliably informed by his dad, as the largest in Karnataka.I was simply awestruck to know that a single cashewnut goes through a process lasting seven hard days, before it gets to satiate our tastebuds.

The next place on our route map was Kundapur, via Manipal and Udipi.If I was simply astounded by the town of Karkala, which had a lot of shopping mall like complexes,I was even more impressed by Manipal. It looked just like another upper middle class cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Bangalore. I also got to spot a sleek Porsche Cayenne on the road too, something which is extremely rare even in Bangalore city.

Around Kundapur, we visited a couple or more temples and also got to meet some really old relatives. During this time, we went through one of the best roads and as well as one of worst too.I was surprised and very happy to see a small village road laid out with grand prix circuit like bitumen under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana.At the same time was disgusted to drive through what they called National Highway, where it was the car's underbody getting scraped at 20 kmph.I guessed they must have built that highway under the National Highway Ka Paisa Khao Yojana.

Nevertheless, we also got to enjoy a nice sunset that evening by the Arabian sea on one side and the Souparnika river on the other.


Souparnika river looked so calm and serene, giving little idea that it once used to be the habitat for huge wild crocodiles, a hundred or more years back.

We then got back to our base camp Melpal via the Agumbe route. Though the distance was just 135 kms, it was very challenging, as the slopes were so steep at 2 of the hairpin bends, that they had caused the axles of 2 jeeps to break.We also got some time to spend around in the midst of the tea estates close to Melpal, doing photoshoots at will and parking the car at will in the middle of the road.Something like this...




And I also managed to get a pretty decent photo of the coffee beans too...




The next day we had to return back to Bangalore.In 6 days' time, we had covered 1200 kilometres.Each and every mile presented its own challenge, its own pleasures.As I approached Bangalore I was saying to myself that I could do another 300 kilometres in the twisted roads of the Agumbe Ghats, but not many more on the chaotic roads that led to Bangalore.