Tag: coffee

Mysore trip – Table of contents post

I returned last night from a two day driving trip to mysore and surrounding areas. There are several things to blog about, but I felt too lazy to make notes in my mobile. Also, I was driving most of the time, so didn’t really have the time to make notes. I made a lot of mental notes, though, but I’m prone to losing those easily – I don’t have a very good short term memory.

I made two major stops on the way to Mysore – first at Kamat Lokaruchi near Ramanagara for breakfast, and then at Seringapatnam. At the latter place, I saw a couple of temples and a jail and a palace-cum-museum. The last named turned out to be pretty strong. Also, my car started making funny noises when I kept it parked in front of one of the temples. Turned out to be a problem with the A/C. This problem was going to become significant later on in the trip.

At Mysore, I stayed at the Ginger (subsidiary of Indian Hotels which runs the Taj chain) and was amazed at the kind of cost-cutting that they have put in compared to the extravagant 5*s. Then I went in search of the supposedly world-famous Mylari restaurants, found not one but two of them, both of which claimed to be the original, got put off by the amount of oil on the dosa and came out after having had just a coffee.

I walked around the palace area in the evening and was amazed by the respect pedestrians get in Mysore, at least in that area. Nice pavements, strictly enforced pedestrian crossings, etc. And there were millions of people walking around the area. And everywhere I saw boards that called Mysore a “JNNURM city”.

I also discovered that wearing shorts is a surefire way of announcing that you are a tourist. Hundreds of people started speaking to me in Hindi and seemed slightly startled when I replied in Kannada. I didn’t see a single other soul in shorts through my 2-day stay in the city.

Lunch and dinner on Tuesday was at the Dasaprakash, and yesterday’s breakfast and lunch at Siddharta. Got me thinking about pricing and delivery systems in sit-down restaurants (had done a series on pricing systems at darshinis in Bnagalore a few years back). Most intriguing is that “meals” are pre-paid while everything else is post-paid.

Then I went to the Chamundi hills, Nanjangud (beautiful temple), Somnathpur (again extremely strong ruined temples, but lousy roads) and the Jaganmohan Palace. Time constraints meant that we skipped going to the main Mysore palace.

On the way back, we stopped at a Sathya Sai Baba ashram in Seringapatnam after which the rain came with us. We would see dry roads ahead, and would hope that there would be no more rain. And soon, there would be rain. Heavy rain. Cupped a/c meant that the windshield kept fogging, and I could hardly see the road as I drove.

I think the rain got confused when we stopped for an hour for dinner at Kamat Lokaruchi, and decided not to accompany us all the way to Bangalore.

I took lots of pics using my phone camera. While at Somnathpur I was thinking about Aadisht’s 50mm low-light lens. I need to find my data cable now and then I’ll post pics. In the course of the next one week, I’ll also write half a dozen more detailed posts.

Shivarathri

Today is Shivarathri. It is a holiday for the National Stock Exchange, which has made it an optional holiday for us (there are 10 such days of which we can choose 3). And I’ve chosen to exercise this option today. Sitting at home and battling internal demons. And saying goodbye to winter.

My mother says that the fact that it has become considerably hotter today points to the greatness of God. “It is ordained that on the day of Shivarathri, winter will cry ‘shiva shiva’ and run away, and that it has suddenly become hot today is an indication that God still makes nature obey ‘the laws’ “.

I agree with her argument but not with her conclusion. I say that the fact that winter seems to be on its way out today, on the day of Shivarathri, points to the greatness of the people who made our calendar. That they managed to study the stars accurately, and came up with a sustainable forecast regarding the closing date for winter that is valid even thousands of years hence is a good indication of how brilliant they were.

Like that coffee bite argument used to say, the argument continues.

Today being Shivarathri also means that it should be a night dedicated to the lingam – the most commonly worshipped form of Shiva. I wonder how many people are currently looking at their hands and thinking of a form of Vishnu that is worshipped in Puri.

This morning, my neighbour went to a nearby Shiva temple, to take part in something like “linga abhishekam”. She took along a mixture of milk, ganga jal (water from the Ganga; not H2SO4 of Bhagalpur) and sugar to do the pooja. Later on, my mother was on the phone with her sister, and after a long philosophical discussion they concluded that women doing the “linga abhishekam” is not part of South Indian Brahmin culture.

Re-run of an old story

It’s been a strange evening. Maybe it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve left office really early, without a definite plan. My evening has followed approximately this kind of a pattern – nostalgia, delirium, nostalgia again, sadness (because Anand lost), yet another bout of delirum followed by yet another bout of nostalgia; then the inevitable full-blown NED, followed by declaration of NED, and then a long storytelling session.

I don’t write much fiction. In fact, I think I’ve written not more than two short stories in my entire adult writing career. There have been a number of other projects that I’ve started, but most have been stillborn. When I write fiction, my method of choice is what can be called in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) terminology as “sampling and interpolation”.

My memory is organized in a way that it mostly remembers snapshots. Usually in pictorial form. When I try to remember a certain incident, I remember it as something like a slide show. A series of images flash in my head. They are usually enough to tell the story, but not enough for the story to sound complete to a second person. Hence, I will need to supplement these pictuers with commentary. It’s like drawing a line through a set of points. Interpolation. It’s late in the night and I don’t want to get technical, but I suppose you perfectly understand what I’m talking about if you know DSP.

I revisited one of the two short stories a week back, and was horrified as to how badly it was written. This was written some four years back, within the first year of my writing career. And when I had written it, I had thought I had written a masterpiece. Now it seems all so juvenile, and cliched, and definitely not something I would be proud of.

After the storytelling session an hour back, I found reason to revisit the other short story that I’ve written. I’m not perfectly happy with it – I still think it needs a lot of polishing, but I like the basic construct. I like the way I’ve structured this story. Maybe two years down the line I’ll find this to be crappy too, but right now I still like it. I want to re-run it here for the benefit of readers who have started reading my blog in the last two years. As for the rest of you, I still think it’s woth it if you would read this story again. It’s fairly good, trust me.

I begin: (story behind the fold)

Continue reading “Re-run of an old story”