Yes, Still Alive!

This happens to be my first post of the year 2010!!

As Chithal rightly pointed out to me, Jan 2010 was the only month (since I started writing) when I did not write a single post. So just to ensure that Feb does not end up being the second such consecutive month, I am writing this post :). This is to let my readers (which I think happens to be at the most 5 people) know that I am still around, that I have not abandoned this blog and do plan to write more often than I am currently doing. There is a lot happening in my life right now which is taking most of my time .. but I am sure I will find a way to successfully juggle all of them and still manage to blog ... real soon :)

Dreams ..

For some reason this line from the film Luck by Chance has been playing in my head for the past few days - Sapne wo nahin hote hain so hum raat ko sote huey dekhte hain, sapne wo hote hain jo hamein raaton ko sone nahin dete ( dreams are not what we see while sleeping, but the ones which don't let us sleep).


... no wonder I am having sleepless nights these days ...

Driving Tales

Finally a post that I have been wanting to write for a while. In this post I am going to reveal all my deep and dark secrets related to driving, right from the time when I took driving lessons for the first time ...

Year 2001: My instructor (whose name I don't remember now) was a very polite young man in his early twenties. He was such a nice person that he never told me I was doing anything wrong; even when I drove at 50 in second gear or passed by a pedestrian merely centimeters away! About 7 classes and 1000/- Rs later, all I had learnt was to start the car and keep it moving at a constant speed somehow. I could not afford to buy a car in those days so due to lack of  practice I managed to unlearn whatever little I had learnt within no time.

Year 2007: After being subjected to many harassment by Bangalore autowallas, spending a fortune on cabs and getting almost daily dosage of sarcasm filled lecture from my sister (who became an expert driver in the years that went by) I decide to take driving lessons again. Fortunately for me Mr Pillai, my instructor, speaks good English, is polite yet firm while giving instructions and keeps giving driving tips. This time around I try to practice a bit in my sister's car, but somehow I was not driven enough  this time again. Bangalore traffic seems to have grown by ten folds! The fact that there's always my sister's car or City Taxis available to get me around doesn't help me with my driving again. And this time again I let the opportunity fizzle out ....

Year 2009: The fact that my sister was getting married and moving to another home, albeit in Bangalore itself, jolted me out of my comfort zone and think seriously about re-learning driving and buying a car. Thankfully by then my dad, who is an expert driver and teacher, had moved here and I had to look no further than home to learn driving for the third time. Many early morning practice sessions with him later, I was finally in a position to even think of driving on my own. The biggest challenge for me in bringing the car to work was not to face the traffic (because I take an alternate route which avoids most of the city traffic) but the fact that I will have to go over the ramp to park my car and pass through the two security personnel holding large mirrors to check the underside of the car. I always told my friends that with my kind of precision in driving I would definitely knock off at least one of them!

As of today it has been a little over 2.5 months that I am driving on my own. I haven't had any major problems on the road except ... I have asked complete strangers to park my car twice after having unsuccessfully tried for over 10 mins, I have caused some minor traffic jams few times by trying to overtake at wrong places, have made a car coming at high speed from opposite direction apply crash brakes because I was on the wrong lane, in the first week of my driving got the car's engine stalled so many times that my mom innocently asked me 'are you low on fuel, why is the car stopping so many times?' (little did she know that it was my lack of clutch/accelerator coordination that was causing it ;) ) ... Well, you get the idea.

But on the brighter side, my car doesn't get stalled in slow-moving traffic or at inclines, I don't burst into cold-sweat on seeing more than 2 vehicles on the entire stretch of road, I don't wait for early morning or late night to take my car out and I even overtake vehicles :) But the best part is - the two mirror-holding security personnel at my workplace's parking lot are still unharmed. They have no idea how lucky they are!

Images courtesy:

http://www.philwale.co.uk/

http://www.wroscoe.com/

Things-to-do and Things Done Well

It appears that a lot has been happening in the past few weeks which has made my blogging take a back seat. There have been many times when I clicked on 'New Post' link when some thought appeared in my head and I felt like putting it into words. But then it disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared without taking a proper form and I was left staring at my computer screen for a long time.There are other things also that I have been ignoring lately; most important of them being my reading. I have not read a single book in the past 3 months or more. My bookshelf is filling up with unread books (well, I have a habit of buying at least one book every month). So I have Murakami's Underground, Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, Franz Kafka's Complete Novels, Bronte's Jane Eyre, John Steinbeck's East of Eaden, Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo... the list seems endless. I also need a lot of catching up to do on the movies front. The last film I saw was Wake up Sid and that was more than a month ago!

But things haven't been as bad on other fronts all this time. I have managed to catch a lot of plays at Ranga Shankara lately (Girish Karnad's Flowers and Bikhre Bimb and Swanand Kirkire's Aao Saathi Sapna Dekhein to name a few) and am going to watch Naseeruddin Shah's Waiting for Godot tomorrow.

The other good thing is that I have started driving - in Bangalore and on my own! Well, it might seem innocuous to people who drive, but for a person like me, it is a big deal given the fact that I have taken driving lessons from professional instructors twice (the first one being 9 years ago!), got my driver's license about 10 years ago and still got nightmares at the mere thought of driving on my own in Bangalore traffic! Probably I will write a separate post on my driving (mis)adventures some time soon. I have also been taking language lessons of which I had been planning ever since I landed in Bangalore 9.5 years ago. Will write more about it on completing it :).

And while reading the post one final time before publishing, I realized that most of my plans take 9-10 years for me to turn them into reality! Now, what does that say about me? :(

Blue - Some Observations

First off, this is not a movie review post, just some random observations I made while watching the film Blue.

• The first few minutes of the film are breathtaking! They show the underwater life in the ocean surrounding Carribbean islands. Looks more like a Discovery Channel feature than a Bollywood film's opening credits. If you miss these few minutes, half your money's worth is lost
• The person who was holding the camera must have been very short (say about 3 ft tall). Most of the shots that have women in skimpy clothes, the camera is focussed only at their waist or below. So it was anyone's guess where the camera would focus whenever a woman in bikini appears on the screen
• If you have many great tattoos but don't have a great body to go with it, you are a loser. Sanjay Dutt, with his fancy tattoos could not show them one bit due to his huge paunch. Poor guy!
• If you are not in shape, please please please don't wear diving suits. You have no idea how gross it looks!
• Yes, Lara Dutta has a wonderfully toned body in this movie and I liked her styling too
• Kylie Minogue song was over-hyped. She did not look that hot either. What was the price they paid her I heard??
• Rahman's music was a bit of a let-down, I didn't remember even a single song after leaving the movie theatre!
• Akshay still seems to be extremely fit. The guy looks much leaner than he has looked in any of his recent releases

There was something I liked about the movie, wasn't it? Oh yeah, the first 5 minutes of the film showing underwater life. Well, I already mentioned that in the beginning...

Feast of Love

I watched this beautiful movie called Feast of Love this weekend. I had never heard of this movie before and had bought its DVD a week ago by just seeing Morgan Freeman on the cover :). A little bit of reading its back cover gave me an idea that it would be something on the lines of Love Actually. The film is directed by Robert Benton of The Human Stain and Twilight fame.

The film has many stories in it .. all on the theme of love. Each of them exploring a different dimension of love - be it between two youngsters who fall in love with each other the moment they lay their eyes on each other, between two women (one of them married and having no idea that she could get attracted to another woman), between two people who had been having an affair with each other only to realize later that they were actually in love all along and my favorite .. love and comfort between two older people .. the kind of love that comes from decades of togetherness. The film has been dealt with a lot of sensitivity and the characters are well developed and layereed. The film also managed to stay away from becoming the usual romantic chick-flick, which I do not have much liking for. It has elements of both happy and sad endings to love stories. Most of the actors have given good performances but I particularly liked those of Morgan Freeman and Alexa Davalos. Alexa's beauty and talent have shone through the whole film and she has managed to steal the attention away from more established names like Radha Mitchell and Selma Blair.

A good romantic film that also has depth to it. May not be suitable for family viewing as there are some explicit scenes in the film.

09-09-09

Just realized that today's date is 09-09-09. I am sure many people would have noticed this before I did and I might be getting a lot of email forwards about this date being unique as the day proceeds, but still ...

The Jungle Get-away

One of the many things I absolutely love about Bangalore is its proximity to some of the great travel destinations - most of them being just few hours' drive away. One such place is the Nagarhole National Park. So Colin & Vandana planned a trip to the national park along with a stay at this wonderful place called King's Sanctuary as a birthday gift for me (can I be any luckier than this?? :) ). The traffic on Bangalore-Mysore highway was insane on Saturday morning even if we started quite early, mostly so as it was a long weekend. We made a short 2-hour break at Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary on the way. We spotted many bird species like - White Ibis, Open Billed Storks, Egrets, bats and of course many crocodiles lying about lazily.

 About couple of hours' drive away from the bird sanctuary was our destination - King's Sanctuary; nestled almost a stone's throw away from the entrance of the national park. The resort is very tastefully done - sprawling premises with a rustic touch and some very unusual flora & fauna. The suite we had booked was a spacious 2-bedroom and a living room unit. The best part of it was the bathroom which opened into a room with bathtub and had an open roof!! The resort also offered many recreational activities of which we indulged in cycling, few games of croquet, tree-climbing using a rope & harness (I think they called it jumaneering or something; which only Colin managed to do, rest of us couldn't even get our feet off the ground!), a tribal song and dance show and children's games around the bonfire. Being my birthday, I also got to cut the very delicious cake (on the house!) in the midst of this all and got wished by dozens of other guests gathered at the bonfire :).

We woke up at 5 AM the next day to head for the jungle safari starting at 6 AM in an open gypsy. The cool morning breeze and the sounds of the jungle made us forget about our drowsiness (and last night's hangover too :) ) soon. The animals we saw were herds of spotted deer (chital), four-horned antelope, wild boar, peacock, wild hens, elephant, giant Malabar squirrels, Brahminy Kites and tortoise. There was a family of five wild boars (two adults and 3 kids) who, on spotting us, fled away instantly. Except that the 3 kids kept stopping and looking at us out of curiosity in spite of constant prodding by their parents to run away. Looks like animals aren't all that different from us humans, just a lot better. The closest we got to spotting a tiger was the pug-marks of a mother and its cub, the marks were just about few hours old as per our knowledgeable guide. One of the saddest sights I remember was seeing an antelope nibbling on (probably food inside) a poly-bag. The other being an elephant training camp which had about 5-6 elephants in huge chains being tamed by their mahouts :( . The guide told us that rest of the elephants have already been taken to train for participating in Mysore Dussehra festival.

We came back to the resort to a huge breakfast laid out for all guests (did I mention that the food there was excellent?). Another game of croquet and freshening up later, we were all set to hit the roads to head back to Bangalore braving the insane traffic - a sign that another vacation had come to an end ...

Off to the woods ...

... with family ... for my birthday weekend. Goodbye chaos; wilderness, here I come!

The Grapes of Wrath

The back cover of the book by John Steinbeck has the writer's quote: " I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied". I found this quote so intriguing that I ended up buying this book instead of the other Steinbeck book (East of Eden) that I had set out to buy that day. I must say The Grapes of Wrath left me with similar feelings that his novella Of Mice and Men had left me with earlier .. sad, dissatisfied and a bit depressed.

The Grapes .. chronicles the journey of the Joads - a farmer family from Oklahoma, who drive hundreds of miles to California in search of greener pastures (in the form of a steady job and food for the family) during the Great Depression. The transformation each person in the family goes through, while battling hunger, deaths and misery; is beautifully captured. The author has also described the principles of demand and supply (availability of farm laborers and their wages) and capitalization (large corporates controlling farm produces and in turn, making small farmers broke) in a very simple way. He even writes the conversations exactly the way an Oklahoma farmer would speak - somepin for something, purty for pretty, ast for ask .. and such like :)

It definitely is a great read if one is not looking for a they-lived-happily-ever-after kind of a story.