To Wayanad and Back

So we did make it to Wayanad after all, in spite of some glitches - we left around noon instead of the original plan of early morning. The drive to Mysore was much shorter than we had anticipated; thanks to the new NICE road. We had planned to take the route Bangalore - Mysore - Nanjangud - Gundulpet - Maddur - Sultan Bathery - Kalpetta - Chundale. When we were driving through Bandipur forest just before Karnataka-Kerala border the landscape looked extremely dry. The trees were standing leafless and the ground underneath seemed parched.

But the landscape changed drastically after entering Kerala - coconut and banana groves, beautiful palatial houses even in the smallest towns, winding roads. Two things that stood out were these houses - in all kinds of color (canary yellow, sea green, orange, peach, pink, lilac/lavender, many shades of blue) and the huge number of gold shops in each town .. it appeared to me that every fourth shop in each town center was a gold shop!! What took our breath away was the magnificent homestay Serenity where we spent the next two days in utter bliss. Nestled quietly in the midst of 60 acres of coffee plantation 6 kilometers off Chundale main road , this 200 years old rustic house offered us all we could wish for ... and more!

Its rustic ambiance and earthy interiors were so refreshing, we forgot all about our the 7-hour long journey and got ready to eat & drink around the bonfire that our wonderful host Reji had kept ready for us. We called it a night around 2 AM after gulping many breezers and tucking in a sumptuous Kerala meal.

We woke up next morning to some not-so-familiar sounds of birds like wild hen, crane, kingfisher & woodpecker and decided to explore the coffee plantation. It was a misty morning indeed and Vandana was all geared to battle it :). Thene there were coffee blooms, pepper creepers, touch-me-nots, palm trees etc.

After a heavy breakfast of pootu and curry, we headed to Banasura dam about 30kms away. It is the largest earth dam in India. On our way, we stopped for some photos at the tea gardens adjacent to our coffee plantation. After a 1 hr drive, thirty minute wait and a 20 minute speedboat ride in the dam, we were already itching to go back to our welcoming abode. We decided to leave in the evening for View point about 10 kms away from our home to capture the sunset. We never managed to make it as we slept like logs till 7.30 PM and it was already getting dark.

And Reji, our host, had a surprise ready for us when we woke up - barbecue!! More breezers and food followed - dinner special was Kerala Parotta with Chettinad Chicken/veg curry. Yummm!! We kept eating and drinking around the bonfire until we could feel the wetness of mist on our hair.

We planned to go to Edakkal caves the next morning on our way back to Bangalore. In the morning we decided to explore a different trail and ended up discovering a temple and some tribal houses in the plantation. By the time we got ready after having mouth-watering appams, it was almost noon. We had to drop the idea of Edakkal caves in the interest of time and had to leave for Bangalore. But I don't regret it as this will give us a reason to go back to this amazing place again and do rest of the things next time around.

Wayanad Blues

So we are heading to Wayanad tomorrow morning. This is one trip which we did not know of until 3 days ago. We have gone back and forth at least 4 times to decide if we are actually going or not. The list of people who are/were supposed to go has changed thrice. I had to choose between the Aero Show and Wayanad this weekend and I chose the latter (with a heavy heart of course). I have submitted, cancelled and re-submitted my leave application earlier today.

Our plan of leaving at 3 in the afternoon changed to morning 10 making me do the most important pre-travel things like painting toe-nails, coloring the hair at 11 PM tonight instead of tomorrow morning. Of course my not doing this before 11 PM has nothing to do with the 3 or more hours I spent reading random blogs and watching random videos on youtube.

Just when I thought things were finally falling into place, my sister realized that she had forgotten all about arranging for someone to take care of our pet birds while we are gone. The solution - either she stays back to take care of the birds & rest of us will go OR we will cancel the trip and she will buy me the Aero Show tickets! Hello?? Whatever happened to the good friends who could pet-sit? I had started debating in my head whether to go back to work tomorrow (I had even written an 'I-am-going-to-be-away-for-a-day' message to everyone for the first time in my life!!) or stay home and just do nothing. Miraculously, some angelic friends did materialize around midnight to pet-sit our birds and we seemed to be back on plan.

But not yet, my sister suddenly felt that she needed to take only a certain bag and nothing else. All our baits of offering other (and definitely better) bags have gone in vain. She is still standing on the Batla ladder rummaging through lofts of all rooms looking for that precious bag while I type this. Hopefully she will find something by tomorrow morning. As for me, I haven't even started packing but that's what the morning is for. Now that I have painted my toe-nails and colored my hair besides having decided which sunglasses and cap to carry, I guess half my work is already done, no? :)

Picture courtesy: http://fudocom.com/

Solar Eclipse = Govt Sponsored Pooja

There is a partial solar eclipse today afternoon and in India it will be visible in Southern India, the eastern coast, north-east, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadeep. Guess what the Karnataka government is doing to "ward off evil influences of the eclipse"? It has asked temples to perform special pooja after the eclipse.

That sure is a very proactive government, no? And what exactly is a government-run temple as mentioned in the TOI report?

First they came...

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

- Martin Niemöller

This simple and haunting poem is amongst the most popular translated version of the German original written in the 1940s by anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller.

Can someone tell me...

How spending long hours at work (not necessarily working but being inside office premises) translates into customer delight?

Or how not being allowed to carry forward your leaves from one year to the next ensures a work-life balance?

Or having limiting parking space for vehicles at workplace contributes towards a green cause?

Or how mugging up some technology fundas that have no connection whatsoever to the actual work you do (but helps you pass a test) makes you a competency champion?

Random Things

Random Thing#1: I finally managed to get my request for a song played on my favorite FM radio channel in Bangalore - 91.9 FM . I have been sending song requests to them for a couple of weeks now but they never played my requests; most plausible reason - my boring straightforward messages asking them play this or that song definitely did not catch their attention. They didn't really seem to care for my requests, but somehow they did care for my views on matters of national interest like do guys look macho with or without a moustache and what was my preference - in terms of mousche, that is. Second time around it was about what was it that I disliked the most about my fellow gym-goers while working out (no brownie points for guessing - sweaty, stinky people!!). The third time they had put me on air was the most important one - why women go to public restrooms in groups and what do they do there (apart from the obvious usage of the loo) for so long. I think there was one more time but I forget (gosh, I am getting old!). So I was a happy woman yesterday when they played Floyd's Coming back to life when I was on my way home after a long day at work ...

Random Thing#2: Apparently my blog is written by a man - that too there are 70% chances of this; at least that's what http://genderanalyzer.com/ thinks so. I am a disillusioned person (can't say man or woman now :( ) today. Sigh!

Random Thing#3: This is my 100th post on the blog, and I didn't realize it was going to be such a profound one! Anyway, I never thought I would be able to write as many posts so it is some sort of an achievement keeping in mind my history of short attention span, impatience and losing interest in things too soon. This blog has been rechristened thrice over its one and a half year journey - from Random Thoughts (ughhh, could I be any more generic?!!?) to Just Me (Ewww!) to its current unimaginative name Thinking Aloud. I never said I was good with titles, did I? :)

Words .. words .. words

Some of the words and phrases used at work so often but hardly make any sense. Every time I hear them I cringe; sometimes even visibly so

• Bring value to the table
• Ideate/innovate
• Actionize
• Thought Leadership
• Take bottomline responsibility
• Paradigm
• Operationalize/Strategize
• Business processes
• Key initiative
• Competitive edge
• Stakeholder management
• Perception management
• Normalize/ Rationalize
• Profitability
• Leverage
• Collaborate

I am sure there is more to this list .. will add when I remember

Delusion

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion" - Robert M. Pirsig

or why The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is the next book I am going to read.

1st November

The girls - Preethi, Nisha, Khushi & Shreya paid a short visit before we all headed to Sunil's house-warming party. Since some of us were in sarees, I didn't miss the opportunity of getting us photographed.

Later that evening we had a small dinner at home for Mom's birthday. A quiet birthday - just family, the only guest being Colin.


My unsuspecting Mom was happily posing for the photo without having the slightest idea what was going on behind her :)

Appraising the Politicians

Most of us who are part of corporate world have to go through the grind of annual (and in my company's case - semi annual) appraisal cycle. This was very astutely called Character Record (or CR for short) in my dad's organization (any guesses why? :) ). Whatever we call it appraisal is a process where an appraiser (employer/manager) gives us feedback about the performance of the appraisee during the appraisal period, identifies his strengths and areas of improvement (a euphemy for weakness), measures performance against set targets and set targets for the next cycle. It is a fairly standard process with slight variation across all kinds of job.

Interestingly, I have never heard that such a thing exists for the most important job in the country. That of the elected political leaders. Shouldn't we, as the people who elected them to their offices, at least have the right to ask them what exactly they have done for the people of this nation? Shouldn't we, as tax payers who part with over a third of their hard-earned money to pay for these politicians' Z-grade security, escort of dozens of cars, palatial living quarters, numerous foreign trips, deserve to know where all this money is going apart from providing comfort and luxury for them?

In a perfect world, as a citizen appraiser I would love to set real targets for the politicians. Targets that can be quantified and compared - like what percentage of people were brought above poverty line, improvement in literacy rate, increase in per capita income, fall in crime rate, availability of basic amenities for common man, generation of employment .... so on and so forth. But this is definitely not a perfect world, so in reality our politicians have agenda like drive away non-Maharashtrians from Bombay, demolish Babri Masjid, make a new state, change name of a city/street/square/airport/museum, annihilate people of a religion/community/caste/tribe, ban dancing/smoking/drinking and so on. My memory fails me when I try to think when was the last time a politician took up a real issue and did something for it.

We pride ourselves in being the world's biggest democracy, but I see more reason of being ashamed of this farce we call democracy. Does being big only mean having a higher number?

Image courtesy: www.rediff.com