Etc from Mulshi

A bunch of random pictures from the Mulshi ride we took last weekend.

You can see the road leading into the greenness. Also note the misty clouds at the top of the hill. This is point where civilization ends and Mulshi dam area begins. After this point the closest town is more than 75 KMs down the road. So, this is the point where the drive starts to get most interesting.


Thats my bike at the bottom of that piece of rock with all the green stuff growing on it:


And here's the road leading into the Tamhini ghat. This part of the road, apart from the waterfalls, also has lots of bamboo trees growing quite high into the air (see the left side of the road).

Waterfalls on the Road

After you are done going around the Mulshi dam waters (20-25 KMs), the road starts climbing into the Tamhini ghat, which is full of small waterfalls. Many of these empty onto the road itself and its a real treat driving through the beautiful scene. You can stop randomly at any of the falls and have a cold bath. If you are lucky, you can find a private fall for yourself somewhere on the hills.

The road then moves down and enters Konkan, the coastland of the state. Konkan should make many appearances in these pages, or so we hope :-).

All Things Dark

Many people think dark things are kool and that they rock [maan!]. Why? They don't have a clue. And as I have seen in last 7-8 years, the more urban you get, the more educated, the more online, the more americanized, the more you post on newsgroups ... you start leaning left ... towards darker things. You find the darkness in the whole Iraq affair blacker than the space, or the dark in the "Dark Knight" (aka Batman) more intersting than the absense of light in million homes, or Internet underground more chilling than when a lightning crack in a whoozing thunderstorm raises your hair few inches high.

Dark things are in. Dark things are critcally acclaimed. Left is the place to be and darkness is what should be seen from inside. Its time to look into your dark side and explore it to the end. From Alan Moore to Ramgopal Varma, from Harry Potter to Dilbert, from Kyoki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi to Sarkar ... everything is getting darker. We live in dark times.

So, here are a few [literally] dark pictures. We hope they too get critically acclaimed :-).


The Mulshi dam has a power generation plant, so that many homes should not keep in dark, and you can see the outgoing high tension wires hanging above the lake in the picture above. Making the scene darker is the thought that, if the wires break and fall into the lake below ... there are so many people taking a dip on the weekends! ;-)


And we, by the way, believe in the way of the Buddha ... the middle path :-) ;-).

Paddy Paddy Everywhere

All along the road to Mulshi we could see farmers going about their businesses. Since its the early part of monsoon, the crops was still tender and green (the rectangular light green patches in pic below). Some were still ploughing (below), while some were ready to re-sow.


The main crop around here is rice ... and so all we could see for miles was paddy. Many of the folks were re-sowing, the process where the paddy is first seeded in crowded rectangular patches (like in above pic) while the field is made ready and filled with rain water, and few weeks later the paddy croplings are plucked from their patches and re-sown sparsely into the fields (below).


And as you can see from the pictures above, most of the process is manual. The ploughing etc is done by bulls and re-sowing is done mostly by women.

Lost Hobby

Sanju revived her long (~15 years) lost hobby of collecting rocks when we visited Mulshi this weekend. Even before we could reach the waters, she had her hand full of rocks that to start with looked quite normal to me ... but later I was also looking more at the ground and less at the river or the hills ... and I don't know why.

And here's a portion of our catch:


In retrospect, I guess some of the stones were really beautiful. Some were like eggs which when broken were like flowers from inside, some were like crystals (and I thought I had hit upon a diamond mine), some were like fossils of dead plants and flowers and sponges, and some were brightly green which we later found out was nothing but hardened algae. Weird stuff. And we bought home few kilos of it :-).

Sanju wants to put the colorful ones at the base of vases and all those shiny ones arranged in a plate in the showcase. I guess that makes sense since that is the best utility I can see of them.

How Green Is My Valley

Monsoon started last month and according to the mets its progressing normally. Time dimension is always ignored: in Gujarat normal progress happened in 2 days and people had to make boats out of frying pans. While here around Pune, its really been normal and we have greenness all around. This is the best season to be around here, when valleys are lush, weather is rainily cold, light is dim and weekends are spent in greenness.

We went for a long bike ride to Mulshi dam this weekend. Although the monsoon will keep making things still green and greener, the whole view is almost green by this time. The rains have sort of stopped since the last week or so, but it started drizzling when we started climbing up. Driving in a drizzle with so much greenness around is always a pleasure.


Mulshi is also sort of different from other dams around here in the sense you can stop anywhere on the road around it, walk down a bit and take a dip in the dam waters. The road just goes on and on, and you just can't catch a break from the greening beauty around you.

Big Fool

Hot summer days, when the mercury is boiling and there's no traffic on the roads, or rainy nights, when floods are forming and there again is no traffic on the roads, its time to sit inside, sip some steaming tea/coffee, eat bhujiyas and ... play cards lying on the bed. And when there are many, you play Big Fool (aka Badaam-Saat) and Rummy and Coat and Gulam-chor and 5-3-2 and so on.

While You Were Meeting...

When you are in a meeting that is boring you to no end (especially if its full of management BS like "policies", "values" and stuff), you go into a different world and start deriving enjoyment from mundane things. Like...

... thinking about multi-colored multi-flavored ice-cream ...


... or, thinking how the reflection of your own hand on glazed tiles could be serious abstract art ...


... or, how there are subtle patterns in overhead tubelights.




Sigh. Do managers seriously think that engineers under them are seriously stupid to take them seriously?

And on that other note ... we were busy with the rain, an exam and a long long-deserved vacation.