God Blessed

It were the happiest 24 hours in the longest time I can remember. Family made me happy. And this college's erratic bull shit worked in my favour for the first time ever. Or so it seems for now.

I can't believe a superbly filmy part of my life. I can't believe that I see it and feel as powerless about it as I do. Or maybe it's some sort of a subconscious-related masochistic pleasure.

There is somebody behind perspective. I am guessing it's god.

Whoever comes to my room, does not go without appreciating my wall. Makes me super happy!



I'll come back to loving you another day. I am meeting my mom today.

Much more than a 1000 words

I completed a year on this campus yesterday. I wanted to kinda celebrate, but actually ended up spending the evening alone in the city. The only thing celebratory about that was that I got a new plant. It's a croton this time. So I am hoping it would resist the dying business.

There are a lot of things that I'd like to write about wrt this past year, but another post for that.

For now, I am concentrating on this collage of a collage that I'm displaying here. Please excuse the bad pictures... the lighting was somehow too difficult. Anyway. The point here is that I got lots of pictures printed before coming from Delhi this time because I wanted to make my wall look pretty. It took more than a couple of days to get this thing done, but it's finally done. Actually, it's 98% done 'coz there's a bit left too... but I am sure I will complete that tomorrow.
This collage is making me so happy that I cannot stop smiling. It's one of the most perfect things ever. It has pictures of a lot of people with a lot of different kinds of smiles. Each of these pictures is significant in its own way. Each one has a story. I love each one. They're perfect. :-)

My friends seem to be happier than me about a certain development that has happened. I don't think I'm happy about it at all, but maybe it's good for me at some level.

People seem to like me when I am obsessive happy. I like myself like that too. It's niice. :D


PS - Special thanks to Priyam and Ridhima for helping me with the collage. :-)

Road Trip to Chandigarh

A trip to Chandigarh with family was on the cards for a while now. On Saturday we finally decided that the Sunday must be utilised. To meet the people mentioned here. The drive up north is nothing like the one I made through the UP highways earlier this month. NH 1, 22 and then 21... smooooth it was! Here I also take a moment to thank the people who were behind the completion of the Panipat flyover. Somebody should really bless those souls. That patch used to take a minimum of one hour. Now you don't even get to know when you cross Panipat.
We had left our place at 6:00 am, had our breakfast at one of the dhabas after Karnal, and were at our destination by 11:00 am. My brother believes we lost a minimum of a half hour each way because the driver was too scared to push beyond 90 kmph. And seriously... at one point a merc overtook us from the left while we were at 90ish, and it didn't just overtake, it whooshed past. Must be at least at 140-150 kmph.
Buji and phuphaji were the happiest to see yours truly. Well, to see her whole family to be honest, but of course, I'm even more special now that I reside too far. :P
The two recently became great grandparents. They were delighted to talk about the little baby girl who is actually the first girl in their immediate family.

A nice, elaborate lunch, lots of talks, heat switching to nice rain, and it was time to move back home. The drive was obviously tiring. Dust storm was going crrazy too.

But oh, I have to mention this: I realised that the Volvo drivers' way of honking is very different from that of the Haryana Roadways guys. I mean, I always knew it, but it got registered strong this time. I can now differentiate without having to look. :) And while I am on this topic, I should also mention something that I forgot to write about in the Rishikesh travelogue. During the first traffic jam on our way back, there were a lot of trucks around. We were talking and listening to music when we suddenly heard a LOUD nagin theme music playing somewhere. It took us a moment to figure where it was originating from. It was a truck's horn. The driver did it so flawlessly that we were plain amazed. It was incredible! Talent in the truest sense of the word.

Back to NH 1. I was way too disappointed when I stopped the car to click some massive sunflower fields because all the flowers had turned the other way at that hour. And there were too many bees for me to go too far into the fields for a frame or two. :(

During the entire journey, Pa gave rest to real estate, insurance, relatives, and the works, and went on a trip to his childhood and the farmlands of yesteryears. Some stories I had heard earlier, and many were new too.

The perfectly smooth drive back home got fucked when the driver turned towards Rohini instead of ISBT from Azadpur. Annoying traffic. Lots of it. :|

Still managed to be back by 9:00 pm. Had a yumm day. Monday morning told me that it wasn't that yumm for my back. But whatever. I was happy to have met my favourite people. :-)

Dell rocks!

I bought a Dell laptop last summer. It is still under its 1-year warranty. But this warranty is limited to basic issues, and not for any damage done to the hardware. You need to pay extra at the time of purchase for that cover. I never felt the need for it, and so did not buy it. But like I mentioned here before, I'd broken a key off the keypad, and I did need assistance for it.
When I first wrote to them, they told what the process is, and the best they could do is send me a quotation for replacement of the keypad. I insisted for the repair under my existing warranty. Insisting here means writing back: "I expect this repair to be made under the warranty provided to me. Because if you are telling me that Dell products are this useless, I think it puts serious questions on the quality you people deliver". They wrote back saying that I should expect a call from their logistics team soon for fixing up of a convenient time for the engineer to visit and replace my keypad. 24 hours, and I have a new keypad. Moi is happy. Very very happy. For the first time I saw customer relationship management the way Kotler and the others talk of it.
I know I was a little unreasonable in this case. But they did not even put forth an argument. They just obliged. I love them. I really do. I could marry Dell if it were a man.

Restored Sanity

It's incredible what 7 hours of sleep after many shitty nights can do to your mood.

I was happy. I was smiling. I didn't snap, I didn't sulk. I gave hugs, and I was happy to see most faces in the morning. I didn't doze off in class. I listened to happy music. I didn't participate in a class exercise which involved a cosmetics brand - helped me tick off one sector for the upcoming internship. Forced a friend to buy me a chocolate, immediately pocketed it, and saved it till end of day so that I could savour it alone. :P Had a good conversation with the boyfriend. Kicked about somebody's frustration who laughed at my frustrations of the past 3 days. Loved going through Tarun's notes on Facebook and leaving one too many comments on it. It helped relive some moments from college and I loved doing that too. Finally got credit for talking about potty the whole time. I now have a place to visit in Delhi the next time I go there - the Toilet Museum. Apparently it's a pretty cool place.
Still fresh, and working on an assignment coolly after quite a while.

The price? A deadline I didn't meet. I generally do not take deadlines easy, but sometimes sleep takes top priority.

This is what happened...

People I hang out with had all made separate plans for the holidays. I tried real hard to get any person I met on Sunday to come with me to a place other than Goa. I called Subhadip and did a lot of crying and cribbing. Sat with a long face at the dinner table, and tossed between making a boring trip to Mumbai and an adventure trip to some place nice alone. That's when Priyam came into the picture.

At 1o:00 pm, we had some 2o tabs open with Maharashtra all over them. And it was midnight by the time we decided that it was going to be Ajanta and Ellora. So we immediately booked a cab for 5:00 am from campus to be able to take the 6:00 am bus from Shivaji Nagar in the city to Aurangabad which is the closest station to both Ajanta and Ellora.
Cameras out, packing done, shoes on, and we were off campus by 5:10 am. We sped and as luck would have it... the first bus coming out of the depot was going to Aurangabad. We boarded it and managed to get only the last seat which did bust our asses during the five hour journey. It was 5:45 am when we started, the bus took one stop at Ahmednagar for 15 minutes, and dropped us at our destination at 10:30 am - bang on schedule. It was an MSRTC bus, the near-equivalent of the Haryana Roadways buses of the north, only with slightly more comfortable seats. The ticket was for Rs 195, and somehow I felt that was a little too much for a state bus. Anyway.

Ahmednagar bus depot

We made our first mistake at Aurangabad - taking a local bus to Ellora. The distance was less than 20 kms, and it took a little more than 1.5 hours to get there. It was certainly cheap at Rs 17 per person, but if you want to save yourself an incredibly slow and dusty journey, take a shared auto from outside the bus depot at Aurangabad. I'm not sure about how much that would cost, but I am sure it would save a lot of energy.

The local bus from Aurangabad to Ellora

At Ellora, there are a couple of dhabas and a small market outside the caves. We fed ourselves with some good, filling food there. Next decision that was to be made was for our stay. It's tricky business - Ajanta is 104 kms from Ellora, and almost the same distance from Aurangabad too. So we thought that the obvious and better decision is to spend the night at Ellora, and move further the next morning. But what most tourists do is go back to Aurangabad the same evening, spend the night there, and move to Ajanta from there. The reasons? There are more options to stay in Aurangabad, and you get direct buses to Ajanta from there. Yea, we did not know about the bus thing until we had checked into our hotel at Ellora. One either goes back to Aurangabad from Ellora to catch a bus to Ajanta, or changes buses at 3 different stops if they want to go directly.

Our hotel

Let's go to the caves first, and then I'll tell you what we finally did the next morning.


Entry ticket was the standard Rs 10 as at all other protected monuments. If you're the bottled water kind of person, carry your bottles with you because inside there are only two canteens where you will get it. It is 'only two' because it is a large area that the caves cover and canteens are not that close. But there are drinking water taps available outside almost every cave.

Underground water

Ellora has 34 Hindu, Buddhist and Jain caves. The first one that you see after entering is the largest Hindu cave called Kailasa. It is massive, and it is extremely beautiful. We spent about one hour inside. Well, that's largely because we were kinda tired after a night where we did not sleep & a journey which was kinda long, and the crrazy heat. Even so, the cave is worth spending all that time in. There is a small shivling where people offer prayers inside the cave. I thanked the caretaker there when he helped me with light for a photograph, and he replied with a 'gracias'. Way too many foreign tourists. :)

Kailasa

View from top (Kailasa)

The little shivling inside cave 16

We spent about five hours in there, but did not really go inside each of the 34 caves. We'd enter one cave, sit there for looong and chat and click, and then make the effort to climb up another cave. Yea, for people who do not have ANY stamina, and are already tired, it can be an uphill task. But, it is Ajanta where stamina really comes into play.




After about 2.5 hours of moving around, we needed to refuel ourselves. So we had lots of water and a yumm aloo parantha at the canteen. The main entrance divides the caves into two sides, with number 16 in the middle. So, our second round of walking was to the left of # 16. There are a lot of autos that will offer to show you around because I'm guessing there are many people who are not too fond of walking. So these autos help you move around, take you to the important caves, and bring you back to the exit in one piece. We got many such offers in the second half because the walk to that side is longer and is on steep roads. But the boots were meant for walking, and walking we did. When it looked like the sun was beginning to take it easy, a new found energy took over me and I wanted to climb to the top of the rocks to see the setting sun. So I pushed the other two as well, and we climbed & climbed to settle at a decent viewing point. It had been only five minutes that two shady men came up as well. They had some foreign friends either waiting for them or waiting to be discovered by them. It looked like extremely shady business and we almost thought we'd surely get stabbed or something if we even looked their way. This killed the little joy we could have derived from the sunset which was average when compared to the sunset at Lavale, and we were just relieved to move out of there. Those guys also walked back with us, offered us a ride in their car, and had a weird english with accent for men who we thought would not even be educated.

They will come back next morning...

At the canteen

Dinner at another dhaba in the market. They served parathas which reminded of home

The place had no computer and I had only 1 GB of memory, so I ended up deleting some pictures to make space for the next day. Our neighbours in the hotel were a single German lady, and two men from Switzerland. All of us had plans of going to Ajanta the next morning, so the manager suggested we share a cab instead of the looong bus drama I mentioned earlier. It sounded convenient, would have only saved us some money, so we all agreed.

The next morning, all dhabas outside were shut because Ellora caves are closed on Tuesdays. So we had to have the relatively more expensive breakfast inside the hotel. And while we were at it, we saw the same shady men (who had also offered us a ride to Ajanta when we walked out looking for breakfast) come into the hotel compound with their car. They were talking to the manager, and we knew that was the car that the manager had arranged for us. We died. The three of us really lost it. But we were a lucky bunch and we were six of us who could not have fit into his Ikon or whatever that car was. Our prayers worked, and he did not drive the replacement auto which we got. The manager made money out of offering a car and ultimately sending us in an auto, but we were only too glad.

It took two hours to get to Ajanta. There are shuttle buses from where outside vehicles drop you to the caves. Rs 7 for non AC, and we were on board an MTDC bus. With us was a bunch of school kids. They helped me expererience the most embarrassing public moment of my life. We'd bought hats outside the caves because the sun was killing us. I had my sunglasses on anyway. AND my camera was in my hands (unlike Priyam's who decided to keep it in until we reached the caves). So, I could not have looked more tourist-y, and the kids thought that I'd also come from some foreign land. They all thronged to see me, made jokes about me, tried asking me 'what is your name' in a way that they thought should be comprehendable for me, laughed their wits off when they heard me talk in Hindi, and kept staring at me and my camera with non-stop giggles. I would have loved to click them as well, but they were so many of them that I was afraid of being killed in the process.


We took a guide in the caves because otherwise there were only paintings and paintings on the walls and we had no clue what they meant. In a big group, it came to Rs100 per head for us. Guide uncle was too keen on making us hear every word that he uttered, and he almost scolded me once when I was too busy clicking. I gave him a dirty look which he conveniently ignored, but then I ignored him too. Hmph.

The Ajanta caves

Lord Buddha

Painting of a thousand Buddhas

Lord Buddha in his avatar as a white elephant - offering one of his 6 tusks for the queen's ornaments

After the guided tour, we'd just rested our feet when we got talking to Anders, a researcher and lecturer from Denmark. His area of interest? Travel and tourism. He does research on backpackers across the globe, and also on the business impact of guide books that they use. Very interesting to talk to, and quite a funny man... he was nice enough to pay for our lunch at the MTDC restaurant as well.

At around 4:00 pm, we left Ajanta for Aurangabad. We wanted to reach the city and find an internet cafe so that we could plan our next move. It was another 2-hour ride (this time we chose a private bus over a local one) to Aurangabad. There we did find an internet cafe, browsed for an hour, looked at several destinations and finally came down to Srivardhan, a virgin beach about 200 kms from Pune. But when we got to looking for a bus that would drive us through the night to Srivardhan, we got to know that the travel agents had not even heard of the place. We were offered a cab, and that was the nth time in the recent past that I realised how painful it can be to be a woman in this mean world. Again, it was unsafe for the three women who were "alone" together, and they had no option but to eat and head back home.

We missed the Daulatabad Fort which is en route Aurangabad to Ellora because we did that journey only once and if we'd stopped over, we'd have missed Ellora caves which are shut on Tuesdays. Also, it was tooo hot to bother after that. We also missed the Bibi ka Maqbara which is better known as the 'Unknown Taj Mahal' in Aurangabad. This, because we used Aurangabad only to switch buses. And we did not want to spend another night there only for the Maqbara. But I guess we were happy with whatever we did manage to see as well.
One more thing that we missed and should probably not have was the Grishneshwar Jyotir Linga which is one of the 12 shrines of lord Shiva in India. Mom believes in him, I should have gone. It was close to our hotel, but we never woke up in time to visit and leave with the rest of the people on time as well.

Took the 8:30 pm bus to Pune. It took a little longer than the first journey, and we landed here at 1:45 am. Again, a private cab back to campus. The driver told us that Srivardhan can be done in one day from Pune. Also told us the rates. So, that's where we're heading next -- that is whenever we have enough money again. :)

The above-mentioned was not the only embarrassing moment. I was so tired and sleepy during the bus journeys that my sleep was not inducing little jerks of the head but wayward movement of the head in both directions in an area of about one meter. People say I was quite a sight. And Anders was finding it funny too. Well, I can only laugh about it too. I banged my head against the front seat, the window glass, and so on in the process, did not even sleep in peace, and entertained people too. Can anyone ask for more?

A couple of points...

# Ajanta caves are shut on Mondays. So the plan was actually working out fine.

# The area has some unique blood red guavas. We never got to buying and tasting them because we only saw them while we were on the move.

# I never thanked the makers of any shoes before this, but this time I owe it to Adidas. 5 am to 10 pm on one day, and 7 am to 2 am the next... I lived in an extremely comfortable pair of shoes.

# I walk fast. And when with a purpose, I leave people behind.

# We resolved that from now on we won't judge any person on the streets digging his/her nose. You CAN reach a point where you can feel dust on and inside every part of your body.

# The trip cost us about Rs 1700 per head. And this includes around Rs 300 spent on private cabs we had to hire within Pune.

# Learning Marathi is an absolute must for me now. Sometimes things become very difficult without it.

The apparent origin of the Garbha dance form

Phew! I've saved some pictures for my Flickr page. See you there as well. :)
And now I shall hope for a comment from you. :P

I Made Friends

I completed a month here on campus today. And what a day to celebrate! Firstly, thankfully, it was the weekly off. With no test scheduled for the next day. It is ironic that I am going to say the next set of words - I do not care if I get a couple of hours less of sleep (!) now. So without bothering about the few hours that I'd get even on a Wednesday night (which is Saturday night here), I ventured out for a walk with friends in the rain. Following that was a loooong chat session with Priyam in the common area. Also got to see a hyper security woman trying to get girls back in after the in-time. Funny!
For the next day (our Sunday) was planned a trip to the city. We were going to board the first bus out at 11:00 a.m. and have a nice breakfast with everybody before that. But my roommate (!) used the bathroom for 45 minutes. For the Sunday joy, I believe. So I could not go for breakfast at all. Yes, bad habits are going. Baths happen in the morning. Unless I wake at 8:25 for the 9:00 a.m. class. :P
Coming back - everybody had some work in different parts of the city, so we first dispersed in different directions. I was alone for the first time in a month. Walked a little to Deccan. This place has ALL the banks. I saw Axis. And a queue of at least a hundred people outside - second last day for purchase of CAT forms. I was only a little too amused. And then I started looking for the Vodafone gallery. Too too far. So I walked at least 3-4 kms (in the rain again). Shopped for fruits [:)] and bought a plant too with a terracotta pot!!! It is now sitting pretty outside my room.

Friends wanted non-veg food for lunch, and I went for a dosa close-by. Alone again. But that was nice. I ended up sharing a table with a dental surgeon settled in the US visiting family here in Pune. Had a nice, pleasant conversation with her and joined friends back. Pushed off to Barista from there. Everybody was going to meet up again there. About 10 of us. The session there was going to last about 2 hours and what 2 hours we had! Lots of fun, people losing it, talking shit, laughing, not cribbing, and enjoying to the core. The pictures might talk...

Adding today's pictures and a few from all the past days.

One of the inhabitants here

Debanjana, Ruhi, Vrinda, Swetha and Ridhima on Darpan's birthday

Puppy in the centre

:P

Akshay

many more photographers around me

He was around too today

Everybody! :-)

Venky taught me "aipaddi irke" and "nalle irke". He is normal.

This was during a session with my photography club president, Prakash. That zoom burst thingi. I did! :D

Exactly a month ago with the cupboard's rod by my window

Tickle is universal. Hasn't left me in Pune either.

Shoi rarely smiles. And that night we were all in fits of laughter. You can see the reason.

Hostel and the fitness club from the top floor.

Inside the hostel.

Shagun and Priyam talking and watching MTV at 1:00 a.m.

Hostel again

And somebody is being missed on an anniversary. :(