Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Of a Canadian sojourn

Its been an interesting couple of weeks thanks to a sudden trip to Ottawa for the GCC summit and work related activities. It was a good trip to Ottawa, meeting for the first time, names that are so active on a mailing list and figuring out that everyone looks so different from what you expect them to be . Travelling to North America for an Indian Vegetarian is quite a daunting task since vegetarianism has been stretched to include fish and chicken in certain cuisines. However this time was rather interesting as one met an alumnus from my school and also working on compilers. Now take that for a coincidence. Incidentally he had the same teensy weensy problem that I had which was that of being a vegetarian :) So there was company to try and explore cuisine other than that provided by Subway or Starbucks or Tim Hortons ..

There's this Moroccan place in Ottawa that claims to serve the best vegetarian food and they certainly lived up to their expectations. So we survived on whatever they served us as vegetarian - the bread was a cross between an aaapam, a dosa made of Ragi something that tamilians would understand and the side dishes were made of lentils (dal) , sundal (black peas ?) and a chutney that would make the gonghura tear up because of the heat generated :) .

The dinner next day was spent in visiting a place run by Chinmaya Mission in Ottawa a 100% vegetarian joint ! (WOW!) Take that all you carnivores who sneer at vegetarians travelling to any place outside India ! In the middle of all this one managed to attend the lectures that were on at the summit , quite a few interesting ones at that .

Roaming about the malls looking for stuff strangely left me less lighter on the wallet than I expected thanks to the appreciating rupee. I bought a MP3 turn table for my parents, a Wii for the kalculator , a number of small little things here and there which were special requests from folks back in India. Last but not the least one did manage to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and finish it on the flight from Ottawa to Toronto. Enjoyed this book , she's tied up all the loose ends in this one and almost *everyone* involved in the series so far has a reference . No more school boy stuff but lots of stuff where it gets like the lord of the rings / return of the king . There are many people dead but one death makes all the headlines and that sparks some interesting reactions among people ...

Monday, July 09, 2007

Pure Magic.

Its been one of those really really good days. The day dawned with me waking up late for my trip to Mahableshwar a hill station about 100 km from Pune. After that what followed was pure entertainment and enjoyment. The drive to Mahableshwar, lunch at Mapro , drive through the clouds, good music , visibility = 0, Humidity = 100% , temperature = very low made the day extremely beautiful. Got a number of photos which I shall upload at some point of time pretty soon.

Once we returned from this long long drive I managed to catch the Federer Nadal match from the 3rd set. For the first time in his life, Nadal seemed to believe that he could beat Federer on grass and actually gave the champ a good marathon for his prize money . The other thing was Federer suddenly gave up in the 4th set where Nadal simply ran him to the ground. The 4th set actually had Federrer rattled and shaken like he had never been before. A couple of hawk eye calls left him non-plussed and irritated. The number of unforced errors went up dramatically in that set too. Finally it all came together in Federer's 3rd service game of the 5th set. It was scrappy, it was dramatic and it was entertaining. Watching Fedex play was like watching a beautiful act of synchronization between limbs, the racket and the ball. It was sheer poetry and it left me incredulous about how he managed to return those serves with so much power and panache !

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Shakespeare and Wodehouse.

As is evident from the title of this blog I am a great fan of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. I didn't realize that the bard from Stratford on Avon (Shakespeare for the uninitiated ) also had certain qualities similar . Statements like "That is a custom more observed in the breach than in the obeisance" show his humourous side too .

The particular quote that I was quite impressed with was not one that would tickle your funny bone . I am not sure about how true this is but anyways here goes "God in his infinite wisdom chooses to ignore some of our prayers while we in our ignorance choose to blame him for it. "

This particular piece of prose was conveyed to me by my mom after a particularly interesting day in life when something that I wanted didn't occur. However both of us were pretty curious of the origin of the particular quote , she couldn't remember if it was Hamlet or Macbeth. If there are interested readers who see this , it would be good to know if you have come across this some place on your other literary quests. Quite refreshing and interesting one must say.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Monsoons, rains , near floods and crumbling roads.

Its monsoon time again ! Rains Rains Rains, its grey dark, cold and raining all the time here at Pune. We seem to be breaking all records this year. The last weekend of June was enough to make up the seasons average for the month . The Mutha, Mula, Indrayani , the Pavna and the river on Paud Road are all flowing and are in spate . The net result, roads laid a week before the monsoons started have started disappearing or in the process of developing great big craters .

On a more serious note, its been a long time since I updated my blog . Was busy with helping out in a GCC workshop at IIT Bombay, lots of work at office travelling to Madras and Bombay through out the last month on weekends and one week . Phew its been quite a while .