I am so, so, SO proud of her!

My daughter had been preparing for a debate contest at school the whole of last week. The topic of the debate was "The excitement of Television is more than the adventures of a book". She came back from school (the day the debate contest was announced) saying that it was not really a choice. For her, it was obvious... Reading was way better than TV. And I know this for a fact as she spends more time reading on an average in a day than she spends watching TV.

Question was: what was she going to say and how was she going to say it convincingly. So we (the entire family) worked on helping her with what she wanted to say. She tweaked the content to suit herself and then made sure she could say it as she wanted it.

The day of the preliminaries, she came back glowing (so my wife tells me...I was travelling). She had been shortlisted as one of eight students who had made it to the final rounds. That night when I spoke to her on the phone, she was bubbling away with facts on how the rounds went and I could feel her amazement at the fact that most of the students had picked Television over books. To her, it did not make sense. She kept saying that using her imagination while reading a book was the most fun part of reading, something that she could not do while watching TV.

So the day of the final contest arrived. This morning, 18 students (8 from the third grade and 10 from the second grade) gathered to present their views in front of more than a hundred and fifty students, more than 50 parents and scores of teachers. The confidence these little ones showed while standing on stage, holding their microphones proudly and saying what they believed in (and had rehearsed) was outstanding. That day, they were all winners. The outcome was only a formality. Most of the students did not think so, though.

My daughter was one of them. 

She was in the contest to win! I can still remember the expression on her face while the marks were being announced. The contest had been fought so closely that the difference in the 3rd place and 2nd place was just a couple of marks. So was the case between the 2nd place and 1st place.

And when they announced her name as the winner of the debate, her face was radiant as she stepped forward to accept the applause. She had made the effort, she had performed flawlessly and she deserved to win. And that desire showed.

I am so proud of my little baby. She has shown that she can achieve whatever she wants if she just puts her mind to it. She has the instincts of a winner and I hope she keeps it up. I was grinning from ear to ear the whole day!!!

Objects in the rear view mirror (appear closer than they are)

I was driving home the other day and I saw a guy hitch a ride with a complete stranger on a bike. Now this is a fairly common occurrence in India and there are a lot of people who either hitch rides or who give rides to people they don't know. I myself have done it several times, both sat behind someone who took me in the direction I wanted to go (and did not have the money in my pocket to get there) or dropped someone on my way.

That simple occurrence triggered off a chain of memories in my mind.

In a flash, I had gone back 15 years to a cold night just before my Physics examination for the XIIth standard exams. Now most people in India know that this is probably the most important examination that one would have to take and this make or breaks your life (even though at that time, we did not take it as seriously). The outcome of the exams and the marks you get in those exams pretty much decide whether you get to do the vocation of your choice or you get your choice made for you. So it was not uncommon to get bunches of old question papers and solve them under simulated exam conditions to see how well you can do.

As I approached my Physics exam, I did what almost everybody of my age was doing. I had solved another year's question paper and wanted it to get corrected. The authority for us at the time was a professor by the name of Sumant. Unfortunately, Sumant Sir had recently shifted houses and all I had was his address. His telephone connection had not shifted yet and so there was no way to get in touch with him. Mind you, this is way before cell phones made their appearance in India.

That led to me riding around the area where he stayed on my bicycle for almost an hour around 9:30pm and still not being able to get to his house. At that time, I was running low on patience and high on anxiety. Luckily for me, a guy was getting out on his bike for an evening ride. I stopped him to ask for directions and I think he figured out my state from my quivering voice. So he asked me to park my bike near his house and offered to take me to the house himself. In that state of mine, that was a God sent. So I rode up to Sumant Sir's house with this very kind man, thanked him profusely, then got my paper corrected (100/100 just in case you want to know) and then walked all the way back to my bike at what was already 10:30 in the night. The next day, I thought I had cracked my paper and felt that I had done the right thing
by getting that boost of confidence the night before.

That memory triggered off another one from the same year. This one had to do with Mathematics (my favorite subject amongst all of the ones we had for the year). I remember sitting waiting for Professor NM Kulkarni (NM as he was referred t0) on the first day of class. Then a sudden commotion amongst students meant that NM had arrived. This guy had a very different way of teaching. On the very first day, he came on stage (there was an actual stage to facilitate us being seen by him, really short as he was) and wrote a differential equation on the board and asked us to solve it. Only three of us in a class of more than hundred got it. He asked us our names and then started the lesson. Only later did I realize that he had done this at other classes as well and noted the people who had solved the problem he had given.

When all classes got together (more than 400 people), he moved the bunch of us to one long bench in the middle of the classroom. That was a bench that we all had to sit on and it was an unwritten rule which forbid others to sit there. I remember this very peculiar way of his. Every time he had taught us something, he would come the next day and write about 50 equations for us to solve on the board. We would probably take around 20 minutes to crack the ones on the board while the rest of the class struggled with them. As we waited, he would come to our bench and scribble an equation on the bench top with his chalk and walk away. That single equation was enough for us to scratch our heads for the better part of the class. Only twice in all the times he had done that did I look at the equation and go "That's easy" and answered it immediately. I remember his expression when I called him to tell him that it was done. All the other times, it was a fight to get the equation solved. Gladly, most of us never let him down and always had an answer for it by the end of class.

I also remember riding my bicycle to his house (this one I knew quite well from having gone there too many times) after the exam and discussing the paper with him. I also remember him telling me exactly how much I would get (I got exactly those many marks). When I last spoke to him, he told me how he still had a solved paper of mine which was all correct even with the optional problems. He had called it the most perfect paper solved amongst the recent batches. Too bad that I had not done the same during the actual exams.

But no harm no foul. I went on to do exactly what I wanted to do and then on to other things. And finally to blogging here. It's funny how fresh these memories are in my mind. Meatloaf was right. Objects in the rear view mirror really do appear closer than they are.

I love you, ComedyCentral!

Oh Boy! This is going to be good...

I have a habit of checking up on the ComedyCentral website every morning for last night's installment of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. This is usually how I start the day and those few moments of laughter are the best way I have found to start it. Whenever the Daily Show is on vacation or there is no broadcast, I usually have to resort to watching older clips just to keep me going.

Imagine my surprise - and a pleasant one at that - to see that ComedyCentral has completely revamped The Daily Show website and have added a timescale which allows me to browse all the available videos ever since Jon Stewart took over as host of the show in 1999. Oh, this is fantastic news.

For someone who follows every single episode of the Daily Show and who thinks that Jon Stewart is absolutely great, this is a God send...To be able to see shows from 1999 will keep me occupied for a while now. I highly recommend you to go and have a look yourself. It's all there.

How do you play with this?

Recently, Facebook has invaded our office in a way you would not imagine. There are so many of us on Facebook everyday that it's not funny. What is amazing about the portal is the amount of stuff that you can do there. Ever since they opened up their API, zillions of applications have been made available on Facebook and it's just an interesting place to be.

One of the applications that a few of my colleagues and I use quite a lot is the Scrabbulous application. It's a scrabble game on Facebook where you can invite your friends to play with you. As you can see from the picture below, this the problem:

The rack that I have got has five Ts, an N and an E. While that makes TENT, there needs to be a place on the scrabble board to put that up. And this has been the problem for the last couple of games. The one before this, I was getting all vowels. I had three As, two Os, an E and a U. This game, I am only getting consonants. Before I took this picture, I had three Ts, two Ns and two Ds. What does one do with this?

In my stats, it will say that I lost miserably in these couple of games. And I don't feel bad about losing. What I do feel bad is losing because of such shitty tiles that I am getting. And this anguish will never be recorded on my profile.

Almost feel like resigning this game.

Now I can appreciate why it's called the Grand Canyon

As you might have noticed from my previous post, I was in Las Vegas for a company conference. As my golf buddy, Saday, was also going to be at the conference, we had decided to make a little trip of our own after the conference. The plan was to go to the Grand Canyon, which is a ~250 mile drive from Vegas, so that we can see one of the grandest creations of nature.

Saday's friend Ashish was going to join us in Vegas for a couple of days and then we would embark on our little road trip towards Arizona. Other than this, we had not planned on anything. While we were at the conference, we came to know about this thing called the Skywalk which had been build at the West Rim of the Grand Canyon. What these highly ingenious (and capitalistic) people had done was build a semi-circular walkway jutting over the Canyon. The most striking feature of this walkway? It's made of glass! And the view from there was reputed to be truly awesome, despite the fact that the surroundings themselves were awesome in their own right.

The conference ended on the 1oth evening and we were scheduled to leave for the Grand Canyon the next day. Thanx to Ashish, we had hotel reservations and a car already booked for us before we left. Ashish had even left in the morning for the airport to pick up the rental car. Fortunately for us, we got a FWD Subaru Outback which is a wonderful car to take out on a drive in the outdoors, especially if it's a dirt road, something that was to be expected on the way to the Skywalk.

Our itenary was to go via the Hoover Dam into Arizona, then take the Pierce Ferry road onto the West Rim. The drive would be around a hundred and twenty miles and we were hoping it would not take us more than two and a half hours. The Outback proved itself to be a stroke of good luck as it seemed to make the journey feel a lot more effortless than it was. We stopped at the Hoover Dam for a short while to admire this effort of engineering made so long ago and to marvel at the sheer size and scope of the structure. Just the flood hole of the dam was an intimidating sight. But it was not the Hoover Dam that we wanted to see. We wanted to see the Skywalk and we wanted to get there before 3:30pm which is when the last tickets get sold off. Also we didn't want to miss the sunset at the Canyon.

The last 30 miles to the West Rim is a pure dirt track and it was quite treacherous driving on the road. That was compounded by the cars ahead of me which were throwing a bunch of dirt onto our car. That was the main distraction for us which kept us from looking at the lovely Joshua Tree surroundings which littered the sides of the road. Finally when we pulled into the parking lot of the West Rim, the car was as filthy as you could imagine. But that was nowhere close to enough to dampen our spirits as we looked forward to getting to the Skywalk.

What did dampen our spirits was the fact that the Skywalk tour would cost us $81. That is a lot of money and we were not sure if the experience for the Skywalk was worth it and whether we should do it at all. Finally one of us prevailed and we bought out tickets for the tour. Boy! am I glad we did that!

As we approached the Skywalk, we could appreciate the scope of the construction. From our vantage point, the view was breathtaking and intimidating at the same time. And the Skywalk was built at a point facing the opposite wall of the Canyon so that the sun would set lighting up the Canyon wall as you stood admiring it. Nothing is allowed on the Skywalk for fear of cracking the glass walkway. So we had to leave our cameras and our cellphones in the lockers provided (for a charge, of course) and then proceed towards the Skywalk. They also make you wear these covers for our shoes so that we don't scratch the glass surface or stain it. So with these sleeves on our shoes, we were made to wait behind a curtain in an effort to dramatize the effect of walking onto the Skywalk.

The dramatization worked!

As the curtain came away, the effect was phenomenal! An all glass walkway jutting over the canyon! Before we arrived at the Skywalk, we were talking about how it would not be a big deal walking on the glass walkway and why it should be fine. Let me tell you...we were scared witless when we walked onto the glass. As I stood on the edge of the opaque area and considering my first step onto the transparent glass, sparks ran through the soles of my feet and it was an exhilarating few moments as I took my first few steps on the clear transparent surface. Saday and Ashish immediately dove for the opaque sides of the walkway, but I wanted to overcome this knee buckling effect the Skywalk had on all of us. After more than 10 minutes on it, we were finally acclimatized to walking on something that made one think that they are walking on air. I even have a picture of the three of us on the Skywalk which I bought from the staff (we obviously could not take our own pictures).

After only a minute of being there, there was a unanimous agreement that the money spent on the Skywalk was completely worth it. So much so that we did not feel like leaving. Mainly because the sun was setting and it was throwing the most amazing light on the opposite wall of the Canyon. We did have to leave though, and thankfully so, otherwise I would have missed this picture that you see on the right side. As we were coming back from the Skywalk after collecting our belongings, the sun was right behind the tour bus stand and the lone staff member sitting there to help the visitors was illuminated perfectly from the back by the sun. This is one of my favourite picture from the trip, one that I want to blow up in size and hang in my house. Trust me, the photograph looks a lot LOT better when seen at the native resolution captured by my 8 megapixel Nikon 8700.

Immediately after taking the above shot, I took my next favorite picture. The same tour bus stand, but this time with the sun on the horizon. The couple of pictures that I took just after the Skywalk provided the icing on the cake. This was one of my more memorable tours and I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested. The only suggestion I will make to anyone who is going there is to not underestimate the Skywalk. One of the staff on the walkway pointed us toward what looked like bushes from the Skywalk. He said they were actually large trees which were looking like bushes from out height of 4000 feet from the Canyon floor. That was when we realized that our concepts of distance had gone out of the window and that we could not comprehend how far some of the points in the Canyon were. The scale of this natural structure is awesome in the true sense of the word.

This was the final shot of the day at the Grand Canyon, the sun just settling below the horizon. When I say horizon, I mean the horizon as you can see from the Grand Canyon. Being 4000 feet from the floor of the Canyon tends to expedite sunset. What it also does is enhances the colours when the sun is setting and this picture is testimony to that. It is also the same time when I realized the genius that is the human body. The appreciation that these two eyes gives us is far more than any camera can capture and amplify. The sights that we were surrounded with and the light we were bathed in was just fantastic. Too bad my limited vocabulary is too feeble to describe it. What I can say, however, is that anyone who has a chance should see these sights at least once in their life. They will be memories you will cherish for a really long time.

We left the West Rim after sunset and that was the time Ashish got in the mood to do a little bit of Rally style driving. In a place where there is no cell phone reception and where the visibility is made really poor with the last cars leaving the West Rim, the man was pushing his luck sliding in and out of corners. Saday and I breathed a huge sigh of relief as we got off the dirt road and onto a paved road, on the way to the South Rim.

We had booked ourselves at the Motel 6 which was about 50 miles from the Grand Canyon National Park South Rim entrance. By the time we reached and had dinner, it was already 11:30pm. There was a lot of debate about whether we should get up early to catch the sunrise (Ashish had asked around and found out that sunrise was to be at 6am). It would take us at least an hour to reach the National Park and we would have to leave around 4:30am if we had any hope of catching sunrise. After a lot of discussion, I prevailed and we slept with the idea of waking up at 4am to take some amazing pictures. After we saw the pictures that we had taken that day, there was no contest on whether we should carry on the next day.

Wake up at 4am we did and left for the National Park entrance. After paying our entry fee of $25, we figured out that Mather Point would be our best bet for the right sunrise pictures as the sun came up over the horizon. We were not disappointed. The only thing is, we were there almost 45 minutes ahead of the actual sunrise, mainly because we did not take into account that sunrise would be a little later at the Canyon.

I had become so shutter happy that I was clicking pictures every couple of minutes. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that it was extremely cold. And the little wind there was not helping either.

So after setting the camera up on the tripod (yes, I carried a tripod for the trip knowing I would need it for some great pictures), I spent most of my time alternating between keeping myself warm and clicking pictures.

It was all worth it when the sun peeked above the Canyon top and I caught the first light of the day at the Grand Canyon's South Rim. It was a great sight and the light that it threw on the Canyon walls and the shadows it created was an amazing site. A photographer's dream! Suddenly, standing in all that cold and waking up early to get to sunrise felt like a small price to pay after being treated with such a glorious display of light and colours.

In the first light of the morning, you could see all the reds and yellows that made the Canyon walls. You could see the rock formations and the abrasions made by wind and water from the Colorado river as it chiseled it's was through rock over millenia. And standing there appreciating the scale of this gigantic structure made me realize why it is called the Grand Canyon. The scale truly makes it grand.

I want to end this post with a picture of the Canyon wall at sunrise. This is just one of the more-than-hundred photos I have clicked during this most amazing trip (and there is no reason to pick this particular one). But it is one of the most breathtaking picture sets I have taken in a long time.


This post would be incomplete without mentioning my thanks to Saday and to Ashish. Saday is the person who engineered this trip and got Ashish involved. And Ashish made the whole trip worth it for all of us. From taking care of a lot of logistics to the banter in the car to the song singing sessions to the dinner arguments, it was one heck of a trip, memories of which will stay alive in my mind for a long long time. And in the process, I got to know a great person in a short time of two days.

Thanx a lot, guys! You guys made this trip worth it and I would not have had anywhere close to this much fun without you. Thanx for making the trip a memorable one.

"You finished WHAT?"

The women in my life came back home last night! My daughter, my wife and my mom landed from their vacation last evening and it was so great to see them at the airport.

My daughter has gotten a new hair cut and she looks absolutely adorable! Not that she did not look adorable before, but she looks cuter still after the hair cut. And this is despite the fact that I would have preferred her to grow her hair for a while. So it was great to see her walk out of the airport looking that cute. And the hug that I got from her after more than two weeks said everything that she did not. She just clung on to me as I lifted her in my arms. Now she's grown to almost 4'6" tall, so she's not exactly a small kid. But lifting her up after all this while was something that I did not even have to make an effort for.

As I had thought, they were carrying enormous amount of luggage for three people. Luckily, the Laura has more than enough boot space to accommodate all that they had got and more. After they had put all the stuff in, I even had a fleeting thought that I needn't have taken my golf kit out as it would have still fit in!

My mom was seeing the new car for the first time and she completely loved it. For her, it is perfect as it is not very low to sit in and has a lot of space for her to relax her legs while still leaving enough room for people to sit on the back seats. All the way, she was commenting about how nice the drive was. And my daughter was pointing things out to her ("This is the sunroof, this is the music system, you can connect the iPod", etc.). All in all, it was an eventful drive home. The painful part was carrying the luggage from the basement parking to the house. Once we did get everything inside, then it was time for my daughter and wife to parade all the latest acquisitions that they have made during this vacation of theirs. Luckily for me, I had a few acquisitions to parade as well.

So all the stuff I bought for my kids in Vegas came out. So did the MacBook that I bought for myself. As did the iPhone. Since I have not blogged about this before, I need to tell you that I have successfully hacked the iPhone and am using it as my communications device as we speak. When I bought it in the US, the one that I got was one with the latest released firmware (version 1.1.1) which Apple had released recently to stop all the unlocking that was going on to avoid going on the AT&T network. After almost a week's worth of effort, I could not get it cracked. Until the day I landed back in India. That night, there was a new procedure available with which I could hack and get it to work. Since then, I have helped at least five of my pals to crack their respective iPhones. But more on how wonderful this device later.

My daughter was going on about a Famous Five book that she read. It just so happened that I remember which book she was talking about and knew the plot. So we have a very interesting discussion on the story and how it turned out. Then I realized that she had finished the 2nd Harry Potter book, started the 3rd, then moved to a Famous Five book, finished that and was already halfway through that. All this in a 10 day vacation!

I was so surprised at the rate at which she was reading that I could not believe it to be possible. But when I heard her describing the story and the characters in such detail that I knew she had not only read the book, but also visualized it vividly in her mind. That to me is a sign of really reading the book rather than understanding the words in the book. After finishing her first Famous Five book, she made sure that my Dad would pass all my old novels to her. And she has carried all of them back so that she can read them. And she is looking forward to the next book fair where she can buy more Enid Blyton books.

That makes me feel so proud of her. Once she starts reading, it's like an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. It will just push her to read more and more. And the more she reads, the million more perspectives and experiences that she will be exposed to. And that, I hope, will enrich her and make her an even better person than she already is. Being a big believer in reading and the benefits of imbibing information through books, this is exactly how I would have wanted my child to be. And she is everything that I would have ever wanted.

So my sweetheart is back. And I am waiting for my other daughter to arrive shortly after. No no, we are not expecting. I'm talking about my sister's daughter who is my second daughter. I love that little devil to bits. Everything that gets bought gets bought for both my daughters without exception. I cannot imagine buying something for one of them. It's impossible.

So the little one arrives on the 1st of this month and will be here for a couple of weeks. That should be a fun two weeks.

What happens in Vegas gets blogged

I was in Las Vegas for a company conference until last week. And what a week it was.

To begin with, there's the long flight into the US from India. Not only is the flight a long and painful affair, there's a lot to be desired when it comes to comfort in traveling. I had heard that Jet Airways had started flying to the US in their brand new aircrafts and so wanted to know how the experience would be. That meant that I would have to fly, not from Bangalore, but from Mumbai to Brussels and then to Newark to catch a connecting flight to Las Vegas.

Luckily, Mumbai is a great city to be in for me. Not only is a large part of my family there, but most of my closest friends are there as well. So the flight to Mumbai was a nice affair. A couple of drinks at our old watering hole (On Toes at Juhu) seemed to seal the deal. After the drinks, I was primed for a nice long sleep on the flight into Brussels. Or so I thought.

My first impression of Jet Airways (International flights) was that these people were still grappling with the process of flying people abroad. Different people had different, and completely incoherent, views of what needed to be done. While one person pointed out a queue to stand in, another person said that my passport had to be scanned into their system (for whatever reason). After waiting for almost an hour in a queue just to reconfirm my seat, I was through to immigration. This part of Mumbai airport I was completely and pleasantly surprised. Immigration and customs took just a couple of minutes and then we were at the boarding gate. There again, Jet showed their amateur status by having chaos reign as they announced boarding. It took me a full 30 minutes to get boarded. Luckily for me, I had hounded Jet for more than 3 weeks to allocate the emergency exit aisle seat for me. As most of you who know me personally, I am 6' 4" in height and that can be a serious problem on longhaul flights. The emergency exit seat gives me the space to stretch and the possibility to sleep. I think I drifted off as soon as the plane took off. The only problem I felt was the seats were not the most comfortable. My bum was hurting like crazy and that woke me up from my deep slumber. After that, it was a fight between the aching buttocks and the sleep that was threatening to overwhelm me. The aching bum won.

Brussels airport was like any other European airport. Nothing to do, very few places to eat, extremely expensive and generally sterile for my taste. Luckily, the stopover was only for a couple of hours which I used to freshen up and have a coffee. Then it was back on the flight and a long flight into Newark. This time, I could not sleep a wink and so I watched three movies in a row before I got fed up and fired up the iPod to listen to some music. A couple of hours of good music and then the landing at Newark's Liberty airport.

Like any other airport, the security was as paranoid as ever. "Take you shoes off, take your laptop out from the bag, not a single metal thing in your pocket, take your belt off." It was crazy! And the queue was really long.

Finally, the Las Vegas strip was visible from the air and we landed at McCarren airport. Thankfully, the conference had bus shuttles running every few minutes to the hotel. So the ride was alright. We were booked at the Paris Hotel on Las Vegas Boulevard which is bang opposite The Bellagio. Like all American hotels, this one is also drab and with the bare minimum furnishings. For some of us who have been pampered by our stays in Indian hotels, the difference is stark and the prospect uninviting. But we have to stay there for a few days and so we had to suck it up. The reason I am saying we is because we had to share a room, one of the cost saving measures employed at the conference.




Here are some of the pictures from Vegas...




For all the stuff that they have made there (The New York New York has replicas of the Status of Libery, the Brooklyn Bridge and the entire Lower Manhattan skyline, the Paris has the Eiffel Tower, the Venetian has canals with gondolas, Caesar's Palace is built in the Roman design), the city is still fake. Everything there, from the place to the people, is all fake. All artificial. It's a place built for sin and it fits the bill completely for it.

They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. And I am sure a lot must be going on. The day before I was to check out, I got a call at 4:30 in the blessed AM (while I was fast asleep) and the lady on the other side said that the girls were heading to my room now. In my groggy state, I asked why they were coming to my room. That's when the lady (and I say lady for lack of a better word) realized that she had called the wrong room and promptly hung up. Someone was having to have some fun Vegas style at 4:30 in the morning. All the best to him and may his energy levels be up. I was dead and fast asleep in a few seconds after I hung up the phone.

When we checkout out of the hotel, we were heading towards the Grand Canyon. But more on that tomorrow. Cause it deserves a full post with pictures and details. But suffice to say it was a fantastic trip.

Mysore, No sore

On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti...ok, ok, that's just an excuse for going out on a drive, we headed out to Mysore. The reason we gave ourselves was that the last time we had gone down to see the famous Mysore palace, our daughter was only 9 months old. So she has not seen a real life palace. Since we needed only an excuse to go on a long drive on such a fine national holiday, go to Mysore we did.

Not to take anything away from the reason for the holiday. As one of the finest examples of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (we call him Mahatma Gandhi here in India) was the inspiration for people like Dr Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela to choose the path of non violence as a form of protest. It is, to a large extent, to Mahatma Gandhi's credit that I am a free Indian with the freedom to write the kind of crap that I do on this blog.

Coming back to the topic, the decision to go to Mysore was an easy one to make. For one, it's just 150km from Bangalore. Secondly, the roads are pretty good to get there. And it would be a nice idea for my daughter to see how the kings of yesteryears lived.

So we left around 8am, wanting to get there without too much sun on our heads. When I started the car (oh, my lovely car), I could see that the car had 3/4th of the tank full. Enough fuel for the trip and more, I thought.

The drive was a breeze. The way the car handles, the ease with which it negotiates traffic, the comfort for the whole family (my daughter was sleeping sprawled on the back seat...and being as tall as she is, she still managed to sleep fairly stretched!). I had to rub my eyes when I saw the dashboard tell me that I was getting 16.7 km/l as my mileage. And all this while clipping on at 120km/hr on cruise control.

Even when I decided to floor it, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the transmission was humming on in the 4th gear way past the 120kmph mark and then still in 5th gear at the 140kmph mark. Only when I backed off the pedal did the 6th gear engage. I could have kept it floored for some more time (mainly to discovery the top speed of the car), but was sure that this was not the road to try these stunts on. What with people (and cattle) crossing the road at random intervals and from all possible places, it was the riskiest thing to do.

And then I discovered something about Indian traffic. No matter how fast you go, you will get slowed down by slower moving traffic and will lose your momentum. Not to mention your fuel. So instead of zipping around, I was driving at a fast, but not too fast, speed and watched as my fuel efficiency rode to newer heights. All this while making good time and enjoying the ride, not to mention the scenary.

And when the trip ended, I still had a lot of fuel left in the car. It was something I had never experienced when I was driving my old car (not to take anything away from it).

All in all, we had a lovely trip. Clicked a few pix (some I will post here tomorrow). A lovely day.

Happy Gandhi Jayanti!

I love my car!

The Laura is finally here!

And boy, is it great! All we have been doing the whole of the weekend is drive around in the car and discovery, or rather re-discover, the pleasure of driving. And the feeling is pure luxury wrapped in a lovely bun of exhileration.

I am yet to figure out a lot of the features of the car (there are so many of them) and that is a first for a technogeek like myself. The first thing I do with most new things is sit with the manual and understand how to operate it. This car has, for the first time, more features than I can manage to remember how to operate. And kudos to Skoda for that.

The performance of the car is fabulous, the handling amazing, the sound from the 12 speaker system sheer poetry. The comfort of the car is breathtaking. And I love the fact that after my wife took a test drive and then I unlocked the car to start driving, the car remembers my driving seat preferences and puts the seat exactly where I want it.

We are going to go on a long drive tomorrow, the place is just an excuse to take the car out. And I am hoping that it will be a lovely journey, not because I doubt the car and it's performance, but more because of the experience of getting to the place (traffic, etc.) and the stuff that we will do there.

Pictures and details coming soon to the blog.

Watch this space.