The Delhi Metro and Akshardham

2 of the modern Indian places of wonder are Akshardham in Delhi and the Delhi Metro . For the first time in the history of modern India Delhi has organized neat public transport which is dependable, punctual , neat, modern and one that puts Delhiites in a queue :) . Wow ! Travelled on it to get to Ritesh's place over the weekend and getting there from Civil Lines was darned easy . Just buy a ticket, change over at CP and get onto the blue line. Rocking I say . Also train timings between the Yellow and Blue Lines are perfectly synchronized that you can get off a train walk to the next platform and you get into the other train . Wow ! Clockwork and punctuality did you say :) .

The other miracle was ofcourse Akshardham. Having seen some teasing pictures of this on the web I wanted to see it in person, again one can say that the pictures don't give you an imagination of the experience. Again wow , does this exist in India along with the hooligans in Puri , the touts in Kapali temple in Madras or the cheats at the Taj in Agra. You have organized entry, security checks that would do our airports to shame, organization and pipelining to the very best in terms of scheduling for resource utilization. There is a huge temple or meditation centre formed in the name of Swami Narain with sculptures in marble that make you wonder if such art was possible again in India, art and sculpture equivalent to the grand old chola days and something that might be equivalent to Mahabalipuram or Hampi. Also the audio video show was very well organized and a boat ride through the mythical Saraswati river and with information the vedic period etc. Yeah it does bring out the poet in one self but so be it :) ....

Again another time to bid adieu to Delhi though I would have loved to have met a few more of its temporary inhabitants whom one may consider friend.

Bollywood and Linux Asia

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Resurrection ?

Resurrection for zirakzigil, my laptop. After a hurried flight down to Madras due to the untimely demise of my grandpa ( a great man) who is to some extent responsible for me being the kind of hu"man" that I am , I discovered that I had suffered another bereavement, that of my laptop hard drive being slowly eaten up by bad blocks . Other than a couple of things being lost, nothing much since most of it was backed up in office spent the whole of Friday in resurrecting my laptop installing ubuntu and possibly setting up a mirroring system with another usb hdd that I acquired in the past. Also in this I must give due credit to IBM who got me a new hard disk in no time whatsoever.

A tale of 2 minute hands.

A clock in Bristol , UK has 2 minute hands. Why may I ask ? Apparently there exists a Bristol standard time which is 10 minutes behind London . http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/bristol-time.htm. That certainly calls for multiple minute hands in a lot of clocks here in India. Very very interesting and truly brit thing to do . I am pretty sure us Indians would also do the same thing considering all that we have inherited from them :)

The deep end can be fun.

Its been a good weekend. Slept most of it thanks to a drill of 2 hours in the pool on Saturday . The deep end usually has been a lot of fun as far as my work has always been concerned, but saturday was literally spent in the deep end of the pool . The feeling of floating with just a tube supporting the many tubes around your waist ;) was real good fun. Cycling across the pool, figuring out how to keep breathing and kicking in turn to get the breast stroke right was also rather good fun.The good part of this whole exercise has been that for a week I have successfully managed to do some physical activity to stretch the parts of the body that I had kind of forgotten totally about for a week in continuum. (Mom are you reading this ?? ) Well I certainly hope so :) ..

Anyways thats that... Sunday is over, spent the evening watching Munna Bhai MBBS a rip off on Patch Adams though Boman Irani, Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi as Circuit were awesome and spent the whole time laughing my head off. Tomorrow's Monday and the day beckons. ...

Hello World 2006

Hello World 2006. The first post in the new year and it has to be a hello world :) . Spent the New Year weekend playing Monopoly which was a classic game replete with diabolical strategies, mergers & acquisitions, meeting threats to the existence in the game. Wow ! it was a blast. Also spent some time watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings (ROTK) on a friends HDTV . That was also awesome.

The other things I did was to catch up on 3 crappy Tamil movies, one great Tamil movie by a new director called Cheran who seems to come up with one hit after another. This one was called Thavamai Thavamirundhu and Raj Kiran and Cheran himself essayed among their best performances. I expect this should win some more awards. It really was well made. The other thing I did on the last day of last year was to enroll in a swimming course. Right now learning how to kick in water, and float so that Mulshi (circa 2003) does not repeat itself. :)

Other than that, the same old work in a new year . Nose to the grindstone ....

Rang De Basanti et al.

A trip to the city that never sleeps in India (Bombay) aka Mumbai is never without events. Left Pune on Sunday around 12 hoping to reach Kandivili by 6 p.m. We reached Powaii around 4 and like the enthusiastic rabbit decided to take a break and headed towards the Mocha in Hiranandani to restore our tissues after the drive down the express way. Was pleasantly surprised at my own navigational skills and sense of direction.

After suitable refreshments and procuring a copy of the latest Aamir Khan movie (Rang De Basanti) decided to leave Hiranandani at 5 hoping to reach Kandivili by 6. We ended up there at 7:30 p.m. a distance of nearly 25 km in 2-1/2 hours while we had done nearly twice that in the same time. As I have blogged earlier every trip reinforces a belief in me . Never visit Bombay, if you have to exit at the earliest . Never stay in Bombay too... Too much traffic, too many people. Yuck... It left me with a bad sinus and a bad stomach. Ended up sleeping through monday with that only to get in late into office.

Monday Mornings.

Spent Monday curled up with Muchnick , Advanced Compiler Design and stealing out once an hour to catch the match on the TV . Finally checked on the way out and saw Bhajji bowl an awesome spell 4-14 in 8 overs till I last saw it. Bhajji literally blew the dhajjias out of the Lankans... Also down under there was a new dual centurion Brad Hodge who made a good 203.

Then drove into office because I had a telecon and some meetings to attend. Good day to study compilers :) ...

Also talking to the project kids. Looks good ATM.

TGIF

Is it the time to say TGIF ..... Yeah I guess so . One of the readers of this blog did comment about the increased frequency of posts, I am sure that the reader would have had a RSS feed set up on his fancy handheld device knowing his geek value.


The reason for the increased posts appears to be time to kill before a call or some other work at the appointed hour. Finished Angels and Demons overnight during the week being unable to sleep . Its quite a don't put me down once you pick me up book ... Well written and gripping in comparison to some other books from him.... DaVinci Code was good and so was this. I somehow didn't enjoy Digital Fortress all that much.

The weekend beckons and so does the project group and one PG Wodehouse. Psmith Omnibus is kept at home just for the purpose of a good cuppa coffee and curling in the chair ..

Squashing bugs. ...

Well the house seems to have an army of bugs, so you can say that I am back to what I do best ,squashing bugs !! Pest control and Fumigation is the only resort and even that seems to have no effect. Soon the bugs shall become the camels and we the Arabs and hence get pushed out.T

Started on Dan Brown's latest book , Angels and Demons the precursor to the Da Vinci code late last night.

Across the pale parabola of the clouds.

Flew back in and could see sunlight after ages after being in a damp squib really . The stay was good and a good time pass. Ended up sleeping through the flight back and now have a couple of telecons to work out .Aargh I hate staying up late waiting for a telecon to happen . The other thing that I have done over the past week is discover a lot of old friends and new on Orkut. Hmm interesting.

Other than that the weekend was spent in reading up on the antics of Galahad and Freddie Threepwood as well as a Wilbur Smith novel (Elephant Song) . Tried reading Anthem by Ayn Rand but dozed off through it.

One good thought though at the end of it all. Back to work moron ...

Autos , Madras and small change... Chillarai Pasanga

Got up in the morning after I realized that my ticket back was not yet booked. So went out to a local travel agent to book my ticket back to Pune and hence had to travel by a rick.. As is evident from earlier posts I really hate travelling in autos in Madras since you need to haggle all the while. Well it is no better than Palika Bazaar Delhi or haggling for Alu Pyaaz ... Ended up getting a decent deal only to find that the rick as is the case with every rick that I have had the oppurtunity of engaging during the week did not have change ! No auto rick driver carries change for a 100 ever... Its quite funny that everyone says the same thing.. sir, first boni sir (means first customer) or saar romba late aaidichu... or ippo thaan petrol pottaen.

The average tamilian would be loath to part with any change if asked by a stranger for precisely the same reason. What do I do when I need to haggle with the rickshaw chap... So people who visit Madras BEWARE carry all your money in denominations of 10 and heaven forbid you need to change a 500 or a 1000 rupee note.

Phanoos appears !!

Phanoos draws closer and its drizzling.. Really dull boring day . Had to go out someplace for a presentation of sorts and its really gray skies, a dull drizzle and what not. Ended up returning in the rains and now am stuck at home. Kind of boring now not knowing what to do in the evening. Want to go out some place , might in some time go down to Spencer and just walk around. Tomorrow is another day and hopefully there should not be too much rain :(

From Baaz to Phanoos.

Thought I landed into Baaz and would take off before Phanoos, but strangely work keeps me back in Madras. Have a couple of meetings to finish off today, gonna run off after that. The weather outside looks awesome for cricket. Cloudy, a slight breeze and a very slight drizzle. So it seems Phanoos is here ! Since I am here till Monday would be caught truly in Phanoos. Anyways A has left for Lagos so it leaves one slightly bored though R & S would be good to meet up with over the weekend. C should also be free over the weekend and ofcourse there is the old homestead, parents will be glad to feed me over the weekend.

Thinking back , this reminds me of 94 / 95 when a slew of cyclones hit Chennai , it was good bcoz we got plenty of leave from school . After all I was in one of those schools that would declare leave if it drizzled ... and ended up making paper boats to run from the streams that flowed in the old homestead and just outside.

So if I drown or something Phanoos it.

Spencer Time

Across the pale parabola of joy

Off I go to spencer plaza in the evening , one of the oldest malls in the city ostensibly to look at stuff and meet a couple of friends including R, V's sister with whom I went shopping some time back in Pune . It should be good fun to roam around Madras by the day considering I don't have any calls today and get back to coding later at night . Have a couple of tasks pending for tonight which should be finished.

Mornings, Coffee and Broadcom chips

Spent a lot of time last night trying to get a few builds going and thinking about all that I was doing in life. All of us, so called geeks as I was so firmly referred to the other day end up in front of the machine at 2 in the morning and at 8 in the morning as I sit down and post this. The balance of life and work does not exist for any of us, and the worst part is that none of us geeks pay attention or bother about it since work gives us an exhiliration that very few of other things gives us.

The sheer kick in getting a piece of code working was what drove me last night to do some cool hackery to get a disassembler up for a trivial piece of hw even though we could have lived with it not happening.

The other motivation for spending so much time online or on the comp atleast for this trip seems to be the amazing piece of hardware which seems to be the cheapo ADSL modem . Its awesomely fast, has a Broadcom chip which is possibly as powerful as the K2 in the desktop we have in the old homestead. Don't worry am not posting this from that, but from zirakzigil which is atleast 4 times more powerful.

The other cool thing is that I am trying to register for LinuxAsia and talk about GCC et al over there. Figuring out the right topic and getting an abstract up and going is a tough task , but I ought to finish it today . The flip side is that I will have to be in Delhi and might miss A's engagement which I had planned on attending. Could always fly down, thats an option. The conference site is here .

Nothing much else happening here, though I have a couple of hours of driving around Madras with R who promised to scare the death out of me in a repeat of the driving skills show that I had put on for R's visit to Pune.

Mornings, Coffee and Broadcom chips

Spent a lot of time last night trying to get a few builds going and thinking about all that I was doing in life. All of us, so called geeks as I was so firmly referred to the other day end up in front of the machine at 2 in the morning and at 8 in the morning as I sit down and post this. The balance of life and work does not exist for any of us, and the worst part is that none of us geeks pay attention or bother about it since work gives us an exhiliration that very few of other things gives us.

The sheer kick in getting a piece of code working was what drove me last night to do some cool hackery to get a disassembler up for a trivial piece of hw even though we could have lived with it not happening.

The other motivation for spending so much time online or on the comp atleast for this trip seems to be the amazing piece of hardware which seems to be the cheapo ADSL modem . Its awesomely fast, has a Broadcom chip which is possibly as powerful as the K2 in the desktop we have in the old homestead. Don't worry am not posting this from that, but from zirakzigil which is atleast 4 times more powerful.

The other cool thing is that I am trying to register for LinuxAsia and talk about GCC et al over there. Figuring out the right topic and getting an abstract up and going is a tough task , but I ought to finish it today . The flip side is that I will have to be in Delhi and might miss A's engagement which I had planned on attending. Could always fly down, thats an option. The conference site is here .

Nothing much else happening here, though I have a couple of hours of driving around Madras with R who promised to scare the death out of me in a repeat of the driving skills show that I had put on for R's visit to Pune.

A smile can go a million miles.

The other reason for me to be in Madras today seems to be for my grandpa , he is over 90 and quiet ill bed-ridden after a stroke. For the first time in my 20 odd years, haven't spoken to him or rather heard his voice.It is quite heart-wrenching to see him like this but my day was made today . After we spent half an hour with this cool new physiotherapist who came over and put him up in a plastic chair and cushioned him with atleast 5 pillows he suddenly woke up from his daze and gave me a million dollar smile which seemed to say where did you come from ?

Its been 3 days here and today was the first genuine smile. Makes up for all the remote work that I need to do this week , though I would have loved to have been back in Pune tomorrow.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire were the reason my cousin C and I decided to take a trip to Mayajaal considering that all the bridges inside the city were full with Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha appearing and waving to crowds which were gathered around the slums near the river which was overflowing . Also we could not figure out if any other theatre had this running.

So off we went to Mayajaal and figured out we were 5 minutes late for the 2 p.m show and 2-1/2 hours early for the next show. Ended up spending time bowling and chatting about nothing else. Was good fun , C finally losing by 2 points with 2 continuous strike throughs and me messing up a few. It certainly was good fun.

The movie was good really worth the wait. . Really well made and sticks close to the book. The visualization with the dragons is good, Mad Eye Moody was awesome, Dumbledore good . The plot was good , though sometimes after having read the book you felt , oh well where is this episode. The best scene for me was Malfoy turning into a ferret, though the final duel with Voldemort was also worth the watch .

Anyways go see it and enjoy it.

The Adayaru Flows .....

Flew straight into tropical storm Baaz. Our folk have started naming the storms and cyclones like their American counterparts . It certainly was the most turbulent flight in Kingfisher, though my debut flight. Its been a couple of interesting days. Reached home late on Friday night, after getting a cab to drive me through sheets of water which threatened to engulf us in a stretch between Park Sheraton and the turn off to Greenways Road.

Later reached home to find ankle deep water languishing outside, a little more and we would have had water in the ground floor of the old homestead. But as usual it was good to be home again and talk to everyone at home.

Saturday was spent in the function at home with the vaadiyar filling up the house with a lot of smoke . Evening saw me go out to Trader's inn with A and P . It was good fun and saw me in full form after a long time . Finally met someone with whom I could talk EPL and talk about Chelsea , Man U . Wow ! Trader's was good, good fun after a long time and gorged really on all the food at offer. It was good especially the pizza which was not the traditional pizza hut fare . The pasta excellent, the Danish Blue Cheese awesome . Filled myself with a lot of salad, pasta , a bit of pizza et al .. Was good fun ...

After spending the night at A's place was back home in the morning, more about the Harry Potter viewing in the next post following up .