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AN Excursion!!!

There is nothing new to say about them .They are always full of exhilarating fun ,enjoyment, amusement and are filled with hyper-activity. My trip was all this and much more . It was high time we went on an excursion and I am happy that the Tsunami waves didn't dampen the spirits of my fellow travelers . It would be safe to say that the Tsunami and the ensuing fears of our parents about our visit to a coastal region immediately after the catastrophe actually helped enhance the fun part of the trip.The trip had its own share of Tsunami victims even before the tour began.The trip was planned with 21 people in mind and the Tsunami reduced our strength to 18 ( 3 casualties) .Tsunami was surely the most spoken word in the trip with every one and any one who hasn't even heard the word Tsunami prior to this proposing his/her own theory-ranging from from sublime to the surreal- about this natural occurrence conjuring up their own impressive array of figures.

We started out as a bunch of all conquering youngsters ready to face the awesome powers of nature and ended up enamored by its all conquering beauty.Imagine a trip with no one to lord over you and none to restrict you .We were like Sheep without a shepherd , grazing away our time into the sunset. I will call it a journey to the edge of the Earth (though it was only to Visakhapatnam popularly known as Vizag a.k.a Waltair ).A trip of this magnitude was long overdue and was a great way to unwind. It offered all the fun that a pleasure trip can offer.Being the final semester of study it was a final stroll for all of us leaving our foot prints in the Sands of Time.This trip will be permanently embedded in my memory. On this tour Nerds became nerdier while some people never ceased to amaze me.

Im gonna give a blow by blow details of the Tour a la 24 style so please bear with me

DAY 0 -
No trip is complete without its preparation so it only does justice to this narration if I give the prelude to this trip.

The Following took place between 0000hrs and 2400hrs on the 28th of December
The day started with news of uncertainty about the tour (clearly there were cold feet and Tsunami jitters)and I was almost resigned to the fate of a virtual non starter but alas we started to regroup and recoup from our losses and by the morning we were all set to embark on a little adventure of our own. This being my only Excursion this far away from home I was totally caught off-guard as to what to carry and what not to carry for the trip and then I made the drastic mistake of asking my adorable Mom to help me pack . This error in judgment caused me a lot of backache and headache throughout the trip. My mother stuffed me (despite all my protests) with all possible things which can take care of all kinds of situations that might arise( I guess all mothers are like that).My Dad had to finally bribe me out of the situation by offering me 500 extra bucks so that I take that extra bag ( how I hoped that my mom gave me a few more extra bags) but not before my dad described the topography of Vizag for the Nth time that day . By the end of the day I looked like a Mountaineer all set to conquer Mt.Everest.Thus I set out on my "Expedition" with all my gear in tow and the image of me looking like an "item" with my luggage hanging all over me looping in my mind's eye.But I was surprised to see similar "Items" packed to the brim with their worried parents right behind them at the Departure terminal.We boarded our train without any glitches or hitches and were all relieved to finally know that atlast we have set sail(or rather rail) to Vizag.For the first few hours we engaged in playing games and cracking wise assed jokes .Di was ever hungry and was constantly pestering us to take an early supper and so we finally relented and every one revealed their food , Voila!!!! there it was , enough food to feed a platoon .There was soo much food that there was much left to be eaten even after the feeding frenzy(imagine shark attack).After that it was a Battle of Attrition to keep ourselves awake so that we can wish Pradeepa a very Happy Birthday.A cake was cut in the moving train at 2357 hrs and I am still thankful that there were no cake wars.Then we all went on to have our sleep.

to be continued..........(writers block I guess)

Year of The Blog?

After being named the word of the year by Merriam( I guess the Tsunami came too late to compete)and ABC naming Bloggers as the People of the year there seems to be no stopping us Bloggers. It looks like Bloggers are the flavor of the season and have become an integral part of everyone-worth his salt- who is surfing the net according to PEW .
An extract from Pew's report -

Blog creators were likely to be young, well-educated, net-savvy males with good incomes and college educations, the survey found.
This was also true of the average blog reader, although the survey found there was a greater than average growth in blog readership among women and those in minorities.

Micro $oft too has been bitten by the Blogging bug ( its too late but is it too little?) and has started M$n spaces . Bill is touting Blog as the biggest thing to hit the net last year. Well its time we welcome Bill to blogosphere. The World will soon be divided into Bloggers and non-Bloggers . It will be this digital divide that will be differentiating us and them .

Though I have only one qualm with blogging on blogger.com and it is that the spell checker doesn't recognize Blog as a Lexicographic word . Its high time they recognize their error and realize their stupidity.

So until the "Next Big Thing" hits the net its THREE CHEERS!!! to Blogs Bloggers and Blogging

2004 An Year In Retrospective

Years come and years go and here I am entering a new Iteration.And as always I face this question "What did 2004 offer me ? ,or rather more importantly what did I have to offer the year 2K4 ? " and my response will be nothing ,a plain nothing.Everything went well all through the year. There were no surprises-neither pleasant nor nasty-in store.Overall it was a great year for me on my public front but on the private front there were only a few sparks of life to the end of the year.

One thing I missed this year was reading novels.No there wasn't any shortage of appetite for books , but it was due to lack of opportunity to get my hands on any book that remotely resembles a novel.The days of reading 5 novels a week were long gone and I desperately long for that golden period to come back. I have read some good novels but there is this quantity thing that still rattles me.It was so bad that I was forced to buy a novel inorder to quench the thirst.This is one aspect that I would like to rectify. I would plead each and every person worth his/her salt ( i mean who reads a book)and I will never quit till I taste the manna.

One of the worst thing and best thing to happen this year was getting connected to the virtual world .Where strangers become friends and friends become friendlier. I was hooked on to the net from the moment I got this Broadband connection ( by Indian standards, though I wish it can become faster).It was like giving the keys of the candy box to a child.In real words I was "netted".So much that at one time I spent my waking hours on the net and my preparation to my semester exams started and ended on the net.Net is a treasure trove of information and the sheer amount of info is mind boggling.In Google I trust and it is still my first and final resort , I cannot imagine life without Google.I started blogging at the end of the year and I hope to do it in '05 too.Moreover I can listen to free music .Music of all the new movies right before me ,it's like icing on the cake.I get to have the cake and eat it too.
Another thing is that I have brought this work station that I have grown to love ,though initially I had this loyalty issue with my old PC .But the lure of a 17" monitor and P4 power coupled with Xp were too good to resist and I had to ditch my old Pc for this new one.

On the quizzing front I fared better than ever before.I Won the college general and technical quiz competitions and a few other competitions not worth mentioning.Quizzing gives me a high which no other thing or activity can ever provide to me ( Reading Novels takes me to greater heights though).The sheer sense of beating the opposition to pulp and answering using only the sense of deduction and sixth sense makes it even more exhilarating.Quizzing really empowers me . It gives me the omnipotent feeling that all the people in the whole damn world crave for. To know that you are incharge of the situation and nothing can go wrong on your watch gives that added bit of edge to the game.

It was another year of study for me . I am eagerly waiting for this final sem to be crossed and get rid of this Indian system of education.I got decent grades on the academic front . My GRE scores were ok though I wish I could have got more for I feel the scores I got don't reflect my potential.Gods seem to have smiled at me when I missed the interview call of Sierra only to be placed at DSL.The package is decent and was better than Sierra . DSL offers the most among all the SoftWare companies that have visited the campus.But I still feel that I didn't deserve it for I got it without much effort.

The year ended on a great note. I was up close and personal with nature and I fell in love with her the moment I laid my eyes on her at the sunkissed beaches of Vizag and fog filled mountains of Araku. It was like paradise revisited.After the Tsunami I respect nature even more because of its beauty and ferocity ,knowing what it is capable of doing.I have a brief idea as to what I would do in future, it would be to retreat to a serene , beautiful and bounteous place like Araku or the water front and be in close touch with the elements.I would own a coffee estate or a steppe farm in the mountains and would come down to greet the waves in the winter and retreat to the mountains in summer.This will be a life I always yearned for.I would cherish the memories of this trip for the rest of my living life.

So with this in mind I say adios to '04 .

Through Blood and Darkness To the Light beyond

Asia wakes up to see the full extent of the destruction wrought by yesterdays Tsunami . As predicted by me in the previous post the Car Nicobar islands have been the worst affected of all the regions in India due to their proximity to the epicenter of the quake.Lifes have been lost even in as far as Somalia in Africa which gives an idea of the sheer magnitude of this natural disaster. There has been widespread death and destruction in Sri Lanka ,huge swathes of land have been decimated with the walls of water sweeping away anything in their way.Elsewhere in Aceh province of Indonesia a humanitarian crisis is slowly unfolding .All this because we don't have adequate Tsunami warning system in place? Its such a shame that we invest in billions of dollars for so called "National security" and we don't have a simple Tsunami warning facility .And the excuse for this is that Tsunami's are not supposed to occur in this region of the world.What they fail to realise is that there always is a first time.The most devastating wave struck India a full hour after the Earth Quake and the tide hit Africa after almost a day after the quake, but still loss of life (forget about property) couldn't be averted. This speaks volumes about human incompetence in not predicting the predictable.A common characteristic of all man made crises is their predictability in retrospect and this makes it all the more painful for missing the obvious. For the time being though its the Forces of nature that have to be faced.

TiDal Tragedy

What happens when Mother Nature asserts its Supremacy . You get a deadly cocktail of an Earth Quake measuring 8.5 on the richter scale and a Tsunami measuring 10 mts ( conservative guesstimates) and widespread destruction .Never ever in my life have I seen a natural calamity so widespread and which has wrecked such havoc across so many countries. Ranging from Maldives,India,Sri Lanka and Bangladesh on one end and Thailand ,Indonesia on the other end. It was "Day after Tomorrow " revisited and the worst thing about this tragedy is that there is no one to Blame except nature(hoping that nothing goes wrong with the relief and rescue efforts ,we Indians are so famous for that ). Its feeding frenzy for the TV crews and any home videos which caught hold of the tragedy on tape are hot property. I have heard my own tales of the Earth Quake from my friend Venkat and its the usual thing "Car shaking big time","people running helter skelter" ,"things dropping from sky" blah blah blah.... Sri Lanka has declared a national emergency and its the "magnanimous" neighbor to its rescue. We don't know the status of Car Nicobar and other islands in the Andaman archipelago but we have no qualms in eagerly sending naval ships to Sri Lanka.

What is more tragic is that we as humans have devised ways to send rovers and have been able to navigate them millions of miles away from Earth but we don't have an idea as to what is happening right below our feet. But for the time being the Tidal fury has left behind a sea of destruction which has to be dealt with.

Ode to Kautilya

P.V.Narasimha Rao could be best introduced as the first prime-minister to last a full term outside the Nehru family ( India's own First family).He was the modern day Chanakya in every respect . But he would be remembered as the architect of free market economy in India . Pv as he was called had the political will to dismantle the quota regime. He and Manmohan Singh together gave a direction to a rudderless Indian economy drifting swiftly and surely towards bancruptcy .Pv guided India into safe waters through the fog created by the Babri demolition and the Bombay riots and numerous scandals which rocked his government.

Above all he was a survivor par excellence . He sidelined all his detractors and was the uncrowned king of India's grand old party and his ability to last at the helm despite a slender majority is a testament to his political acuity and sagacity .He ruled with an Iron Hand in a velvet political glove .

He was though shrouded in controversies( jmm ,Harshad,Lakhubhai,St kitts) and was covicted only to be acquitted later .Despite all his blemishes "The Insider" would be remembered for his survival skills and for steering India in its present course.