Pink City - Jaipur

It was one of the chiller's wedding (KK and JM) on 8th Dec 2010 in Jaipur and thus was an opportunity to catch up with the city I have been to as a child. The traveller in me was also highly excited as it has been quite sometime i went on a trip lasting more than 2 days.

I took an 5:45 am flight and reached Jaipur early morning on the wedding day and felt the familier winter chill of north India as soon as I landed. Met PS as i reached the hotel and settled down. Met a few old college friends post that which felt really wonderful. I have been meeting most of them for the first time since passing out including KK. The rest of the day was absorbed in the typical maru wedding and it was a very good time spent with KK and all friends.

The next two days PS and I were to spend as travellers in Jaipur. To my disappointment, the city did not had much to offer to my taste and i realized 2 full days might be a stretch. It is a historical city and major attractions are forts, palaces, meuseums etc. However, we geared up early next morning and drew a plan for the tour. Amber fort was easily the most happening place for us that afternoon and we had a good time. The crowd was also thick with loads of foreigners pouring in. The evening highlight was choki dhani and was very entertaining. The next day I went to the meuseum and the bazaars but could not shop much.

All in all, it was a relaxed tour and I started liking the city towards the end. Its a small city and towards the end i knew the ways and roads already. The only problems were the touts and the very expensive auto wallahs ready to burn a hole in yr pockets at first chance given to them which i think would make Jaipur's experience un-pleasant for most outside travellers especially the foreigners.

I was back here in the maximum city on saturday afternoon, glad to catch up with the familier sea side wind and taxi wallahs that go by meter :)

Daman

Had heard a lot of Daman and its beaches since i have come to mumbai. also it being a UT, it has a special place in mind (thats bec as kids we were supposed to remember names of all UTs etc..). finally got a chance to visit Daman this 9th of Oct 2010 and that too fully paid. :)

But the place especially its beaches were a bit of disappointment. to begin with, the cab picked us up at 12:30 pm types and we left for a 3 hr ride to silvassa. the route was very nice with various shades of green coming up on either sides of the road...also it was a smooth ride with good roads, less traffic etc.. without any discomfort we reached the plant of my client. after spending about an hour doing the official job, we left for Daman. ZH and I were tooo eager to catch a glimpse of the sea even as the sun was setting and so after an hr or soat bout 6 pm we reached the Jambore beach in Daman. Although the beach was huge but the lack of cleanliness, clean sand and low tide disappointed me. however, we had a good time and soaked in the vastness of the sea.

we left for the day back to silvassa to catch some sleep on the comfy beds of our room but not before hogging on the tasty food at the hotel. next morning we were again full of enthu and after the nearby lake which was a disappointment, we again decided to fulfill our wishes of swimming in Daman sea and left for another hr long ride to Daman, this time to Devka beach. each passing km we were getting more and more impatient. finally when we hit the beachside we were so impatient that we changed inside our cars only and din even wait to catch a glimpse of the beach and see if it was 'swimmable' or not. after we entered the beach area paying Rs 5 as entry charges, we were taken aback!! the white sand beach which many websites describe it as was a waste land and more of a 'seaside' than a beach... the shore was all rocky and sand was black with water some 2 kms from the beach head. ZH and I looked amazingly at each other and wondered if ppl were thinking we were fools, standing there half dressed, ready to jump in the dirtiest beach i have ever seen!!! (as i said b4, beach din exist only, it was a sea side)..

we hurriedly left the place with the desire to swim still in our hearts. Finally we hit the highway and were on our way back to Mumbai. we were again pleased with the greenery engulfing the highway and that helped a lot...

Visiting a new place has always been an experience for me and is highly exciting always. this was the same too. it was a good 1.5 day trip full of new places to visit and catch the beauty of this planet :)

Festival Time :)

One thing that i love the most about my country is that wherever u go, u will always get to celebrate so many occations across the year. Its the same with Mumbai. The festival time kicked off with Id celebrations on 9th Sept across Mumbai with great fervour closely followed by Ganesh utsav the very next day. The tempo soon build up and has been un-relenting since then.

Having been in Delhi for most part of my life, i am bound to compare the 2 cities. Ganesh utsav is more comparable to Diwali in Delhi except that Mumbai is densier that Delhi and thus the festival is more 'closer' to you. So you have all the 'main roads' too lined up with hoardings, welcomes and my fav item 'lights'. the sight of entire steets converted into a shamiyana is most peacefull. Add to it the uncountable Ganesh pandals visible in every nook and corner of the city. i took the opportunity to visit a few nearby pandals one day and it was such a satisfactory experience. The prayers are all loud, the bands are near you and u r in the middle of it always.

One specific thing is worth mentioning here. Communities are so close in Mumbai - i live surrounded by majority of muslim population, nevertheless right from Ganesh festival to chritsmas to id every festival is celebrated with same gusto. more so, the Ganesh pandal is erected right next to the church where chritmas mass is conducted and right opposite to the mosque where people offer namaz and celebrate id!!!

Offcourse, with the good things of the festivity comes the real practical issues of bad traffic jams, crowd etc etc and sometimes it gets real uncomfortable. However, i found police arrangement with the traffic much better than expected but one needs to take precautions and cause minimal inconvinience to the day to day life.

Its not all, the festival season is all but over and i am really looking forward to all the happenings with great enthusiam in the coming weeks :)

Bhandardhara

10-12 Sept was a rare long weekend for me and i was despo to make it count...but my big boss was all ready to play spoil sport. Finally, I managed to work on 1 holiday and save the rest 2 for my big plans.
After days of planning we finally (on the last night) decided to visit this small village called Bhandardhara, some 185 kms from Mumbai. I booked the cab, sent invites but kept the hotel booking open.
We left early @7:30 to avoid traffic and were glad to find the roads empty.the feeling was good and it was all building up when after only bout 30 mins driver stopped on mid highway to inform us that his tank is empty!!! but we were lucky enough to stop right in front of the sole petrol pump for some distance and needed to push the cab just across the road...
after taking a 15-20 min break we were on our way again acroos the beautiful lush green western ghats. after bout 2.5 hrs of more driving we finally reached the village at around 11ish.

Looking for a place to stay, we were lucky enough (yet again) to be informed that there is a provision for camping by the lake side + camp fire. w/o much doubts we finalized it, caught a glimpse of the breathtaking view of the lake, hired a guide and left off to cover the points.

After a couple of points we reached the highlight of the trip..the spillway..always knew their is a provision in dams to drain excess water once the reservoir is full. but never knew that this provision is so accessible and so beautiful. we immeditely tacitly decided to jump into the water w/o caring for the rest of the day. the view of an entire reserviour at yr eye level and u at the edge of the overflowing it. we enjoyed for some 1-1.5 hrs. i was yet again lucky when i dropped my specs in running water but thanks to madhu whose keen eyes located it..the trip would have been a disaster w/o my eyes.

rest of the points were pretty routine though the sight of greenest hills and bluest water kept us in awe all the time. we returned to our tent location by 4:30. saboo and i decided to shop for tent essentials like coil, oil etc and also bought utensils to cook tea and maggi among other things.

post the erection of tents and dinner we lighted the bon fire and cooked tea. after a few rounds of antakshari it was poker time in one of the tents.

Its very rare when u wake up with a view of clean blue sea and green hills in front of u and one would like to capture the sight and the feeling for a long time. the next morning was truly refreshing. we cooked maggi on the bonfire as breakfast and went for boating in the lake. thanks to my rowing skills learned at mahabaleswar trip i enjoyed rowing the boat and surprized everyone with it!!
post that we again went to the spillway for second round of madness. we were soon exhausted but never less appretiative of the view the place provided.

finally, we left back for home by 2 pm. i was happy to be my old self after a long while and truly missed the place the next morning while travelling throught the madenning streets of mumbai!!

IPL Final - DY Patil

As luck would have it and thanks to a friend i got an opportunity to catch the IPL final in mumbai!! 3 of us left home in a call cab and reached the venue well in time. I had been in 2 minds weather to go or not as i was to watch the match alone with other two sitting at different stand.
Offlate, whenever im in doubt for a yes or no, i have started myself to push for a yes and not think too much bout the consequences.
so i reached my stand, grabbed a sandwitch and took the first row at level 1 which was like a balcony of the old cinema halls. initially i felt bored as i was alone and was gathered by thoughts of leaving the ground soon. but then i be-friended my neighbours who were very enthu supporting mumbai. slowly, i too picked up the fun and soon enough was with the crowd. maxican waves soon started going around and it was awsome fun from dere on till the end of the game. i din had to deal with win/loss as i wasnt supporting any particular team.

in the end, it was great entertainment packed with action from bollywood stars and cricketers and the super enthu mumbai crowd. i felt so refreshed by the entire experience that i vowed to come back whenever opportunity comes to catch a T20 :)

Change...

I dont think my life ever witnessed a U turn of such degree as it has in the last 1.5 months when i left BoB. I started with a entirely new life with my mind thinking altogether differently. It changed my lifestyle, my thoughts, my actions, my surroundings including people around me, my ambitions, my fears etc.

I changed my job and I was in a culture, diametrically opposite to where i had worked at BoB. I couldnt help but wonder how could dere exist two organizations so closely yet so opposite of each other. surely it toook some time to adjust to the new world and i agree i over-reacted at times to the new life and resisted it.i think the experience of two such opposite organizations has helped me know in much clearer sense of what i want to do with my life and m still learning.

As did change were the people around me. From smiling and relaxed faces i am getting used to angry, aggresive, excited, worried expressions on people m surrounded with now. I miss the old faces and friends, some of them badly. but again these two starkly differently personalities have given me a sense of among whom i would want to be, what would suit me.

Thus I entered a new world in every sense. Nothing i touched was old. the sense of time changed and so did my reaction to it. 1:30 pm, which automatically sounded bells for lunch at BoB lost that mark. so did catching sun go down at 6-6:30 in the evening.

The only thing that remained same was the City. Same places where i used to go with my buddies, same mumbai local which i used to comute up to 50 kms in a day very often, same AS 2/3/4/440 which i used extensively just before the D day. the city remained the same but i wonder how would it have been has it also changed!! nevertheless, i must admit that somewhere, sometimes i did feel that the city no longer seems wat it used to be. i realized a place is lesser about the location and more about the people. even the best of the world would not b good enough without yr best friend.

the best thing that came out of the entire experience is i have stopped looking at change as good or bad. its never an absolute. there is always a sacrifice involved. u have to make a choice. and nothing is black or white. everything seems an experience that gave me more understanding of myself and thus made me more confident to take my own decisions. and m still learning..because change is constant...

Kalaghoda Fest

12th,13th,14th Feb 10 was a long weekend and I din had many plans for the same. So i decided to check out the Kalaghoda fest in South Mumbai. I had heard a lot bout it in the papers and so was very inquisitive about the same. and it turned out to be the perfect stress buster for me. Thousands of people had gathered on each day to visit the stalls, plays, movies etc. You could find people from all genre, nationalities, religions, occupations that Mumbai inhibits on the same small stretch of land. Add to it the colors, lights, patterns on display at the various stalls, photo exhibition and at the open air auditorium and i thought where else would one witness so much intermingling of humanity. There was a separate section for various NGOs that had come from as far as Jamshedpur to display and sell their work which drew large number of people. I shopped, ate, caught a play, a dance, invited friends and spent 2 wonderful evenings at the fest.

Kalaghoda festival of arts, culture, films and of humanity was a wonderful event and it made me realize Y i love this city. Will surely make as many visits as possible the next time it happens :)

Mahabaleshwar - City of Strawberries and ..'Points' :)

6th and 7th Feb 10 weekend I was off to Mahabaleshwar with my family which is some 5-6 hrs drive from Mumbai. We left early morning and the prospects of driving on the Mumbai-Pune expressway yet again excited me. The drive was smooth with wonderful views of the ghats once we reached near the destination. I drove on the winding roads uphill which was an experience in itself.

The city welcomes you with tonnes of strawberries lined up on the road side. I havnt seen this scarcely available fruit in North India in such quantities ever before. Needless to say, we gorged and ate nothing but berries till a long time when we finally settled down in a comfortable resort.

The city was cool and cleaner than most other cities but it did not had much to offer in terms of tourist spots apart from a lake and wonderful views of the western ghats. As with most hill stations in India the city lacked maintenance of whatever infrastructure the British build with Indians sticking to the task of inventing 'points' to attract tourists. and so I had in my hands a list of some 20 points within the vicinity of the city, names of which could not suggest what is the beauty of that point. So we began to check them out - some 12 of them lay 12 kms from the main city. My guess was right when i wondered how could 12 points lie so close to each other (and they were closer than i thought - spaced some 20 meters apart!! offering views from diff angles of the ghats). In fact, at some places the points could only be seen thru the telescopes ppl had planted (and the corresponding story that went with it as to Y is that point important). Most of the 'points', we thus realized, were pointless to visit.

The lake ride was better with all of us trying our hand at rowing and enjoying it. The evening walk at the market was also nice including the strawberry shake and shopping. The next morning also included visit to the remaining 'Points' which turned out to be better than expected (esp the Kate Point). The table top point had 8 more points within itself and offered fables which you would have heard as a child (and could appreciate only if u were one).

We started on our way back after lunch and it was my turn to scorch the expressway :) If you love driving than u cant afford to miss doing it on this driveway. All in all it was a wonderful wy to spend a weekend and i really enjoyed it. :)

Cruise

It was a long time desire to go on a cruise. Being in Mumbai with a gang of chilling enthu people gave me an opportunity to fulfill that desire. 30th Jan 2010 we started our journey for an overnight cruise off to High Seas and what a journey it was!!

From the very start it was filled with Bollywood type suspense. Me and my gang of 9 ppl had to reach the ferry terminal at 7 pm to board the cruise at 8 pm but alas 6 of us were waiting for the churchgate local at Borivali station at 7.00 PM!!! I had almost given up the hope of making it to the cruise but not my gang (and specially SSN who by now has a habit of dealing with such crises, being in such situations every now and then). So we called our remaining 3 friends to reach on time and somehow stop the cruise, called the authorities stating that we got stuck in an office meeting and on our way so please delay the thing by 15-20 mins etc etc.

Luck also favored us as we got a super fast train which took flat 40 min to reach Mumbai Central, TT ignored to check our tickets at the Andheri station (we had 2nd class tickets and were travelling in 1st class) while checking it for rest 60% of the passengers etc.

Ultimately it look a lil bit of luck, some pleading, a lot of running and praying that we could catch the last ferry to the cruise at around 8 pm!! and yes it was a wonderful feeling.

Once on the cruise the long night was ahead of us. We got involved in eating, dancing, exploring, watching some shows etc. The cruise as such was below my expectations but i din mind it much. Me and AN shared a beer and gazed at sea gulls in the night till around 3 am in the morning when SSN suggested we get to playing poker.

Reluctantly 7 of us agreed to give it a shot. and it turned out to be an addiction that kept us at the table till 7 in the morning!! It was an awesome experience and even the card shy of us (Like ND) begged for a last game with the rising sun :)

The cruise was a fun filled experience with lots of chilling and we got back with smiling faces thinking of it. It was a night of true non-stop-chilling that I so desire of every now and then :)