Batmobile!

IMG_0292, originally uploaded by Ankur P.

This is the Batmobile. From Batman Begins. Up close.

This picture was taken in one of the back lots of the Warner Bro studio in LA. This place houses all the "kewl" vehicles used in recent Warner movies. Like, the futurustic car from Minority Report, the flying car from Harry Potter 2, the Mystery Machine from Scooby Doo, Batmobile from Batman Forever and this awesome hunk of a car in the picture.

On this studio tour, we were accompanied by two dudes who were totally crazy about Batman ... or Batman movies. The whole time (around 4 hours) they were just going on and on and on about Batman (our guide was pissed off by the end). And the only things they were interested in the whole thousand acre complex were the things that had to do something with ... yup, Batman.

BTW, I am also a Batman fan ... but the movies somehow don't match up to the books (or comics, or graphic novels). Still, looking forward to The Dark Knight:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/
http://slashfilm.com/2007/05/19/the-joker-revealed/

Trekking in Monsoon

F1220016, originally uploaded by Ankur P.

This is a photo taken 4 years back during a trek up the Lohgad fort. Those were the days when we could afford to make a plan in a minute, pick up a bag, kick up the bikes and go trekking in the mountains around Pune. In pouring rains, in misty places, in screaming winds ... we used to trek almost every weekend. Those were the days ... when we were not married :-). Now, you have to see if the vehicle will go up to the top of the place, if there'll anything decent place to eat and drink, if there'll be a loo around and so on. Sigh ;-).

Anyway, this photo was taken during June 2003. Beginning of the monsoon. The whole place, from the bottom of the climb to the top of the fort was covered in thick mist. Although for sightseeing, that is bad .. but it somehow added an element of beauty and mystery to the whole place.

Lohgad is an easy trek. It is located just off the Pune-Mumbai expressway, near the town of Malavali. You can also go there by local train. There's also the Karla and Bhaja Buddhist caves in the vicinity and so is another fort: Visapur (tougher climb). The vehicle can drive up to almost half of the route ... and from there its a simple, not so steep but a bit long climb. The fort itself is in a good condition, probably one of the best preserved ones. On the top, its quite big and you'll need almost half the day to explore it completely.

Red Hot Empire State Building

IMG_0734, originally uploaded by Ankur P.

This is a shot of the Empire State Building in New York during early winter of 2006. The whole of New York was under a think fog that day. We could not go to the top of the building because "the visibility would be zero". But from down below it looked really beautiful. It looked like one of those big candles glowing in the haze in one of those old churches. The lights they have put up on the few top floors of the building make it look glowing red hot.

This picture has also become one of the most popular pictures on my Flickr.

Back! With more randomness.

Before concerned people start thinking that we have stopped maintaining this blog or we are done with the randomness ... here is a big update on a very random thing that happened in the last few months. (As some of you may know) I had a big viral attack in August and was bed-ridden for 15 days or so. Once that got over, I started having totally random symptoms, like pains in random places in the body, fatigue, loss of breath, weak muscles, blurred vision, bad stomach, funny nose and so on. Although (I know now that) it is nothing life threatening, I have not been 100% for more than 3 months now. We went around consulting all sorts of doctors, from neurologists to gastroenterologists, cardiologists to pulmonologists, ... and nothing was clear. But somewhere in the middle, a noted neurologist noted that I may have "post-viral asthenia". Asthenia is clinical weakness and he said it happens mainly to workaholics (like doctors and not me). It goes up down and goes up; for a month I am feeling 95% and then suddenly for the next I am less than 75%. And thats how it has been for the last 3 months. The doctor says this thing will normalize with exercise (i.e. increasing the body's tolerance levels) and general relaxing. And then there were few other things...

September, we visited Goa. The last Portugese relic in India and the official place to have "fun". We stayed at Taj Exotica, a Portugese style resort (whatever that means) with a private, secluded and clean beach, serene and peaceful environment and great food. So for 4 days, we hogged, slept, went for long beach walks, hogged more, slept more and walked some more. Bliss.




A panorama, with hotel's golf course and all:



The doctor asked us to take one more break and so we went to Chiplun in the coastal Konkan region of the state. The resort had a spectacular view of the river down the valley and it had lots of beautiful lotuses :-). And yes, we hogged again, slept again and walked again.




Randomness: one of the offices has lots of kites circling it. Sometimes they land on the windows sills, make fluttery noises and scratch the glass.


This is when we visited Anandvan, a totally self-sufficient village of lepers. Founded by Baba Amte, the villagers who all suffer from leprosy, make everything from cloth (see the handloom below) to paper, rice to oranges, bicycles to tractors. Nobody is allowed to do nothing (*sigh*) and they make living by selling what they make. Nice encouraging place.


Then came Dasara or Dashera, the day Lord Rama defeated the demon Ravana to reclaim his wife Sita (along with good prevailing over evil in the end and all that stuff). Two of the main features of the festival are the toran (garlands of yellow marigold flowers and green mango leaves) and ravana-dahan (when an effigy of the ten-headed demon Ravana is set afire with crackers and all).



And then comes Diwali or Deepavali, the festival of lights and the biggest festival in India. Here you have the Diwali specialities:

Just fried Shankarpaale...


Rangoli and diyaas (oil lamps)...


And crackers!! Lots of them. Lots of noise and light. Everywhere.






So those have been our last 3 months. Belated "Happy Dasara", "Happy Diwali" and "Happy New Year" to everyone!

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.

Enlightened Swimming Pool

First photo taken with my new cell phone. Its our building's swimming pool, atop the club house, which next to the gym, which is atop the recreation hall, which in turn in text to the game room. In short, its one packed affair. The photo is taken in the night mode from the terrace, and so its a bit darkish and grainy.

The pool is lighted up in the evenings and people make lots use of it because of the you-can-fry-your-eggs-on-my-head summer. We haven't yet made use of it, but soon should. Although we spent saturday playing carrom and snooker there.

And otherwise, days have been hot, lives have been busy, things have been routine and we have been lazy. We hope only the last part continues :-).

New Cellphone

Thats my new cellphone: Nokia 6230i. It has a 1.3 megapixel camera, with 1 hour video. It can play MP3, Windows Media, MPEG and few other popular audio and video formats. It also has a FM radio and ... can record from it :-). It has 512 MB memory, so it can store enough songs and videos. It supports Bluetooth, Infrared and can sync with your PC quite easily.

The first thing you notice about this phone is the screen resolution. Its damn crisp. The screen is bigger and has almost double the resolution than usual phones. When you see the 3D menus, smooth fonts, and cleanly delivered images, you fall in love with it. The menus are also heavily configurable and the user interface, like all Nokia phones, is quite simple yet powerful. It also comes with a cool audio enhancer that improves voice in noisy environments.

Pretty and pretty cool.

Saavdhaan

With apologies to people who can't read and undersand Marathi. Should I feel bad I had a girl behind me on my bike? ;-) Bas!

Rainbow!

It has been raining here almost everyday for the last week or so. Not that it shouldn't, but it usually doesn't. April and May are the months of intense heat and I haven't seen it raining so regularly in these months. But the rain is really a welcome relief. It makes the evenings nicely cold and nights windy, although the days sometimes get very hot and humid when the wind stops just before the rain.

Now, when you have rain along with a brighty-bright sun, you also have a rainbow (see above). In India they call it Indradhanush, the bow of Indra, the king of heaven. I wonder what kind of arrows he shoots from such a beautiful bow. I've also heard that some people have seen the full circle of the rainbow from planes and all ... I don't know if that is true ... could never find a picture of it on the net ... but if its true, it must be damn beautiful.

Usaacha Ras

Another summer speciality is usaacha ras (fresh sugarcane juice). One of the best ways to beat the 40s, its a great relaxant. You gulp in some complex carbohydrates and thus beat the chances of simple dehydration. It is what sugar wants to be, but it wishes :-).

Usually (as in cities and bigger towns), they squeeze out the juice using tools of modern civilization ... that is, electric motor machines. While in villages, the civilization is left a bit behind ... and so you have the above: a simple gear-based configuration pulled by an ox (or oxen, or even men in some cases). The juice it seems is that much sweeter; we found it just okay ... but it was like godsend for us thirsty souls after a tour of the gorges.

The great thing about the above is that a very similar configuration can be used for many other things: to squeeze oil out of seeds (like groundnut, sunflower), to pull water out of wells, to separate the husk from the grain, so on and so forth.

We owe a lot to civilization, to gears and to oxen.

World's Only Swirl Canyon

Around 85 kilometers from Pune, near a village called Nighoj, are what could be termed as the largest natural potholes in Asia :-). Its basically a thin but long gorge, with around 2 kilometers of black stone (most probably basault), shaped by the river into all swirly shapes imaginable. The local geological people also say its world's only "swirl canyon". Unlike Grand Canyon, which is created by the flow of the Colorado river digging top to bottom and which is also GRAND, the canyon at Nighoj are created by small hard pebbles that vigorously swirl in the river flow, grind the basault base and create circular holes in it. You can see a sample of the swirly effects in the pictures above. And yeah, the thing is not grand ... less than 100 feet deep may be and less than 3 kms long. But its is a sight to watch ... to see how some tiny stones and a [huge] chunk of water can make an otherwise dull and barren landscape look very interesting and ominous.

We could see the swirls in stone because its summer, otherwise we were told that in monsoon the place is full of deep swirling water, and putting foot in the water is more fun than suicide. As is always the case in India, people habe built a temple at the place where people flock to see the gorge and thank the goddess that they are not inside it.

Terrible Mornings

Sanju has to give a well-researched presentation middle of this week. She has been fighting it out for the last few weeks, but things have really come to head since the last 3-4 days. This weekend was especially terrible for her, both days she went to sleep at 1 am and woke up for intensive googling at 4 am. I have been helping her out with the slides, googling etc, but mine have been more or less the usual 17 hour days :-).

So, I don't have to tell you who is Jon and who is Garfield in the comic-strip above :-). Umm, though the smile on Garfield's face in the last box could be more sarcastic ;-).

On the home front, we have shifted all our stuff into the new furniture. The book-case especially makes me feel real proud; I didn't know I had these many books, many of them unread :-|. The wardrobe is also quite full; we didn't know we had these many clothes, none of them unworn :-|. The house now looks more like a home and less like a hostel-room. I miss the piles of clothes and books and other smelly stuff though; after these many years its goodbye to picking your clothes randomly and getting happy for finding coins at the bottom of the heap :-(.

Furniture Saga: Rest is also done

Thats the book-case-cum-computer-table and the study table. I should be the happiest person in the world right now, to finally see my beloved book collection in the place it belongs, instead of rotting in oxidizing steel almirahs and sogging cardboard boxes.

Sanju is also happy she gets a nice little table for studying; though with a little complaint: the TV would be above her head and sadly she is one of those people (like me) who wants the TV on while studying. And while she'll be studying, I would be happily lying on the comfy new bed, reading a nice book and ... watching the TeeVee :-).

Summer Rain

Yesterday started off like any other summer day, with the sun beating down people into sweats. By mid-afternoon it was cloudy enough for us to venture out into the same sun for an after-lunch walk. Like it is on any cloudy summer day (or like every day in Bombay ;-), the heat was dampy and there was almost no wind, what is called tufaan ke pehle ki khamoshi (the lull before the storm).

Thus and hence, it rained in the evening. And since Sanju had forgotten her keys at home, both of us enjoyed our first getting-wet-in-rain routine. The rain started off small, but soon it grew wild as you can see in the pics above. It rained for hardly half an hour, but the force of it at the end was quite good. Some tree branches tore off in the neighborhood and a poor man's shanty was thrown asunder.

The result was a cold night and clear shiny morning. The rain somehow brings down all the pollution with it and the view gets all clear as in blue. To top it off, it again rained today. Indeed, a welcome relief from the hot 40s (degrees that is).

Furniture Saga: Done!

The furniture is ready! After a month of nail-on-ply and sandpaper-on-wood noises, which irritated us to no end, the wardrobe and the bed are finally done. For the last 2-3 days, we were getting impatient (and nervous) ... but now that we can see it just like we wanted to see it, it feels good to see it you see. The book-case should be ready within a day or so, but its already looking good. We spent a day wiping the glasses and mirrors and the floor squeaky clean, our hands smelling of kerosene and soap. We should start moving our stuff in its place this weekend. Tee-hee :-).

We have also ordered the kitchen wall-unit. Its that italian modular kitchen thing, with the electric chimney and all, and should arrive by the end of this month. With that, the bedroom and kitchen will be all set.

Other than that, its been a routine week. Days are getting very hot, but nights thankfully are nice. The greenness of spring is slowly giving way to the brownness of indian summer, with tar roads floating in the afternoon sun and sweats rolling into already wet clothes. Both of us had a small bout of sunstroke, with our tummies going gud-gud and heads rolling in-place, but now we are fine and enjoying ice-candies every noon and night.

Green Mangoes

Summer is finally here. After a rigorous weekend in Dajipur, we decided to stay home this weekend. It was hot enough to boil our blood, just literally. For last few days the evenings have also been quite warm. Thankfully Pune has cool nights and it should be fun sleeping on the terrace.

Summer is also time of ice-creams, ice-candies, cold juices, watermelons, and ... mangoes. Since its just the start of summer, the mangoes are still green. And yet, Indian cuisine is full of choices; we made green-mango chutney (aamti aka methamba) and soon we'll have pannha (sort of a juice made from steamed green mangoes). Yumminess.

Its a real pleasure looking at and smelling the soury sweetness of the mango trees, blooming with dense flowers and the tender green fruits.