Category: Travel

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Travel

On female drivers in Bangalore

Two accidents involving women driving the car and men on the two wheelers who were the receiving end of the damage.

One happened on last Saturday – around 10:30-ish in the morning; and the other, this morning (10:20-ish).

The woman doesn’t look who’s closing in along with her and takes blind or uninformed turns to the right/left. In both the cases the men who drove the bikes had their bikes on the floor. Fallen. Today’s case was most likely a high velocity impact! The glass of the windows of the car had shattered. Poor guy couldn’t really fight back at the woman. Things like these reinforce popular stereotypes such as “women can’t drive”. Come on! How can someone who’s driving a car not pay attention to who’s driving around the car? Huh?

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Updates as of 23rd July, ’09

It’s been a long time since my long post and unsurpisingly, I’ve hardly had anyone enquire about my blogging status – barring a workmate who told me I should continue blogging. I was going to anyway. It’s just that the sweet pleasures of having a 1Gbps internet connection isn’t available anymore.

I landed in Bengaluru on 2nd June. For about a two weeks there was no internet. I looked into the various options that were available – the usual ADSL connections from BSNL, Airtel, TATA or the CDMA datacards from TATA, Reliance. I signed up for TATA’s ADSL and after getting a demo on TATA’s Photon+ (CDMA datacard), I decided to cancel the ADSL connection and go with Photon+. Pros: Good speeds for the price, cons: no scheme with unlimited downloads available.

Anyway. On 18th Jun Tirupam and I left Bengaluru for Thrissur. The occasion being Vishnu’s marriage! It was good to see familiar faces in a setting such as this. Lalit, Mitesh, Ankit: it was good to see you all again. Thrissur, as a place, wasn’t half as bad. Kerala as a state seems to be gifted with plenty of natural resources – the greenery, water, weather. Given such naturally endowed excesses, it probably makes the society somewhat mature and financially pretty well off compared to the neighbouring state – Tamil Nadu – which continues to be a large exporter of ground-level labourers (I realise that it’s not that simple, but, yes, Keralites are lucky).

Moving back to Bengaluru now, I’m still identity-less. My College’s I-card has expired, and more importantly is of no use here. I have no driving license yet. No PAN card or any of those fancy things yet. Recently, Nilekani has taken up a role in the Indian government to work on an nationwide ID card for all. I wish him all the luck and I hope I get one soon. I’ve even postponed buying that TATA DoCoMo SIM for that!

Oh, and, I’ve started working in a Free Software company now. I’ve still got a long way to go before I shed my lazy lifestyle that I had so gotten used to in college. Work needs to be done.

Lately, my blog posts have become less technical. Those Howtos and whinefests have seen a decline. I’m hoping to fix that soon as I can. I’ve been looking at how Kerberos, LDAP and ejabberd are expected to work together and since it’s taken me more than a week I think it deserves a blog post. Well, Kerberos is optional at the moment, but it’s something I’m hoping to understand why and where it’d be useful. Makes me miss Gentoo now – where I’d know exactly what’s changing. dpkg-reconfigure, although friendly, does things and assumes certain defaults which I have no idea if they’re sane or not. More on that later.

Work place is a really cool place. I had an image of cubicles and serious faces but this is kind of homely and somewhat relaxed. We even play some football on the rooftop once in a while. I miss some good folks whom I spent a lot of time with during the last few months at college – Settem, Basit, and co. and Shanks.

Last Saturday, I caught up with Tirupam and we went to visit UB City. It’s a fabulous, albeit affluent, supermall. We looked around, window shopping mostly and settled with having a close-to-authentic pizza at an Italian restaurant up there. As it turned dark, some live music lightened up the place. It’s good to see Bengaluru getting more and more musical.

A couple of days before that meet, I was looking for a music store that dealt with double bass. Lucky me. There was a place right behind my work place. Unlucky me. It costs quite a bit (he quoted 16K – which by international standards is very cheap and probably not even worth it; but I’m just a beginner – and I told him that I’d be back when I had the money). I’m having trouble deciding if I should go with a modern bass guitar or with a somewhat large and bulky double bass. Bengaluru is kind of crowded too, moving around with such a thing, in a bus, would be interesting, if not dangerous. Oh, and boo at all the affluent folk who travel alone in their cars on every-busy streets of the city.

Must get back to work.

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Travel

An afternoon in ISKCON

Three days ago my parents brought up the idea of visiting the ISKCON temple just beyond Yeshwantpur in Bangalore. Apparently, neither of them had seen it before and we had to take two U-turns on a pretty long road (that God this was a two-way) to climb up the hill and park the car. Yes, this temple is on a hill and it overlooks the Bangalore beyond Yeshwantpur and it looked really cool.

This is a new temple. Built in the late 90’s. NRI-funded, I heard. As it appears, a *lot* of money is spent purely on the building itself. I though gone were the days when kings foolishly spent on temples when they could’ve done a better job with providing civil-amenities. I remember having a somewhat heated discussion on the IITK newsgroups during my second year. That was fun 🙂

There were two ways to get the darshan:  either we stand in the long winding queue chanting hare krishna hare krishna hare rama hare rama hare hare on each step or pay 150 Rs. and get an instant entry (good if you’re running out of time or don’t like the people in the queue or want instant attention from Lord Krishna). Once we entered the first check-point, we saw the venkatEShwara avatAra. We were given some bUndi to eat and had to return our recitation card which had that “hare krishna” chant in 6 languages relevant to Bangalore – English, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil. (We don’t need a *single* national language for this country, please) – I’m glad ISKCON sees what’s right 🙂

The next check-point we saw the vamana avatara and another idol. It looked almost like the on at Tirupati. So much for plagiarism 😛

The final check-point was the main area itself where Krishna, Balarama, Radha et al stood tirelessly. For the prasAda right there an amount had to be paid, we hardly saw anyone do that. This particular area didn’t look too much like a real temple for some reason, the architecture I mean. It looked more like some Roman chapel with paintings on the ceiling and stuff. I’ve been told that Krishna is an extremely dark-skinned dude. I’ve heard of people naming their dark skinned kid “Krishna” (or “Krisna” rather :P). Except one portrait the rest were all Hellenic and light blue-faced. Next we were presented with an array of books about Krishna in various Indian langauges – for a sum, of course. We didn’t buy any. We stepped down to the next “floor” (this is a hill), and there were all sorts of stuff my mother would’ve like to buy for the dEvara mane which made my father stand a furlong away and call us away using sign language from the items we pondered on buying. There were numerous items on sale. It looked like a holy market. I wondered where the money would go or if any part of the profits went anywhere at all. We did come across a section which explicitly mentioned that the money we put in this particular hunDi (cash-pot) would go to a mid-day meal scheme for public schools children.

Finally we entered this food area where food of all types that would cater to most Indians were there. Again, for a fine-sum 🙂  I enjoyed the best puLiyOgare in a long time. We even bought two laddus part of which still lies besides me (my sister doesn’t seem to eat much (sweets) these days, dieting?) Was this all about money? What about the poor people who come here? I took the safer path and assumed that the profits went in to help the poor in some way – the haves would spend money here which I assumed would somehow reach the havenots. And we stepped down to another floor and guess what? There was the prasAda I was expecting! It was probably some sort of hot pongal. Took a couple of pictures and got into the car. It got dark soon. Did we spend almost three hours looking at things we didn’t want to buy?