A long weekend, a horrible drive, family reunion, holi colours and thank you Reliance!

That pretty much summarizes the last few days.

Last week, around Tuesday, my cousin called me up to check what we were doing for the long weekend that was coming up. This was the "Holi" festival weekend. Since we hadn't planned anything specific, he suggested we head to Hyderabad for a long overdue reunion. That sounded like fun and so I agreed. Just like that. Our phone call must have been only a couple of minutes and this was the shortest time I have ever taken to plan a trip.

We had been told the road between Hyderabad and Bangalore (NH7...which incidentally happens to be the longest national highway in India) was in great shape with 4 laning completed and the drive being a breeze.

My foot!!!

It was a horrible drive with the road in bad conditions and needing to keep changing sides depending on which section of the highway had been completed. Adding to the misery was the complete lack of decent facilities to eat and to go to the loo. That made the journey even more uncomfortable. And, as if we did not have enough to deal with, my daughter had motion sickness because of the road conditions. Poor thing, she became so weak because of the constant throwing up.

Enter Reliance A1 Plaza! This is a God sent on the highway. Tucked away right next to most large Reliance petrol stations, this is a nice place for food and a clean toilet to boot. The food is decent, the service quick, the place clean and the toilets better than any other place I have seen on the road. This was the place we had used on our earlier trip to Poona for a bite and a quick relief. Funny enough, the Reliance fuel prices are higher than the rest of the bunks and so we did not top up at the Reliance stations, but at my preferred Indian Oil bunks. But coming back to the point, the A1 plazas were a sight for sore eyes and a welcome sight every time I felt the need to relieve myself. So for this simple, yet magnificent gesture, thank you Reliance!

The journey, if you forget the roads, was relatively nice. The weather was great...a bright day and a lot of cloud cover at the same time. You can see from the picture that the day looked nice. That made the journey a little more comfortable and the music feel a lot mellower. The music too was completely eclectic. Ranging from the "Jab We Met" and "Metro" Hindi movie soundtracks (when my daughter was awake) to Melissa Etheridge and Andrea Bocelli and even some old rock anthems, we heard it all. It made it easier to ignore the bad road and look ahead to reaching Hyderabad.

A warm welcome and a few drinks later, we prepared to put the kids to bed cause they had a relatively early morning, what with the Holi celebrations looming large. The hitch to that was the lovely weather that followed us all the way from Bangalore to Hyderabad and made this usually hot and dry city very pleasant. (We would like to think we brought the weather along!). It even rained in the evening making it very cool and breezy.

Then the next day we were all woken (a little later than we had planned, I should add) with the commotion with all the people in the complex on the central lawn in a riot of colours. There were so many colours and so many people together, all playing amongst each other when they did not even know each other before this day. Strangers putting colours and water on strangers, children playing as one, the entire lawn as colourful and as vibrant as the national flag of India. And on that day, I realized how so many people of so many different religions and so many different languages and so many different colours, cultures, traditions and origins coexist in harmony. We have found ways to celebrate what is common and now what makes us different. And here India is different!

As you can see from the pictures, the two kids had a ball. Drenched from head to toe and covered with every possible colour imaginable, they came home with a smile on their face and spring in their step. Even the scrub that I had to give my daughter (to take all the colour off her) did not deter her spirit. She was running around after a few minutes playing with my cousin's daughter (you can also see her in the picture).

And then the dreaded trip back. I tried to get the family to fly back to Bangalore so that they would not have to endure the road trip, but because this was the long weekend, all the flights were sold out and we had no other choice but to bite the bullet, make my daughter pop a pill for the motion sickness and start back. The way back was compounded with torrential - and I really mean torrential - rain slamming into the car. There was bad visibility because of the clouds as it is and it became worse with the rain coming down hard on us. That slowed us down considerably and made the trip feel longer than it was. But there were a couple of places where the sight was picture perfect. We even saw two rainbows side by side (I couldn't take a picture as there was no place to stop on the highway to do that) and then this beautiful sunset.

All in all, it was a mixed trip. But I want to thank my cousin Sachin, his lovely wife Sri and their adorable Ria for making our trip a memorable one. The conversations, the amount of ragging I went thro (I will get back, you guys!), the food and the general trip was amazing and we had a lot of fun. We are looking forward to another such vacation with the families.

Until then, take care!

This is like the Bangalore of old

Some of us who have been here long enough remember the time when Bangalore was this wonderful place with perfect weather. Whenever it threatened to get hot, a sudden rain shower would blow in to cool things down. The smell of dry earth suddenly drenched with water would be a regular intoxicating feature of Bangalore.

Then, as people started pouring into the Silicon Valley of India and as the number of people, cars, auto rickshaws, busses, vendors, diversions, one ways and in general traffic went rocketing, the weather started to change, ever so subtly in the early days and then dramatically to a point that now Bangalore is like any other bustling crowded city. 

Not today!

Today is like the Bangalore of old. As the temperature threatened to make things uncomfortable, all of a sudden there was a deluge for a short while which brought much needed respite from the heat. And suddenly Bangalore started to look a lot greener. The reason I can say that is because the view from the office overlooking Cubbon Park just got a few shades better!

Welcome back, Bangalore weather! It's great to see you again :-)

A tick mark I have waited for a long time

The day has finally come!

I am now the proud owner of a Blue Dial Speedmaster chronograph. I finally made up my mind, thought I had waited long enough, drooled over it long enough and been to enough stores to check on the looks of it (and the price!). It just so happens that I thought that at this point in my life, I deserved to wear it!

So this afternoon, post lunch, I went down to Rodeo Drive, the local heroes for these kind of watches, told him about this deal I was getting on the Internet (not joking, check out the prices on Amazon) and asked him if he could do better. Which he did!

So I walked out of the place with a huge grin on my face, my wallet a lot lighter and my wrist gleaming with this beautiful heavy object that I gladly chose to wear and have been waiting to wear for a really long time.

It's a very special birthday gift for me and, admittedly, it came a little early, but then we should always have these things whenever we can and not bound to dates, right?

My daughter's first poem

Can you believe it? My seven year old has written her first poem all by herself!



Isn't that amazing?

I'm so proud of my baby!

I know what my last post said

I know its been 2 months and 8 days since my last post. And that one was apologizing for not posting for a while. Looks like a trend, huh?

So a bunch of reasons for not posting. Traveling a lot, pretending to work a lot, playing some golf, spending more time on Facebook, reading books, playing with my daughter and then some more...

More than anything, it was boredom that kept me away from blogging. For some reason, I could just not bring myself to put anything up here. Not for lack of fodder. There's a bunch of things that have happened and I could have blogged about all of them, just couldn't get myself to do it.

Call it laziness. Call it extreme laziness. Call it whatever you like.

But hopefully, now that I have started again, I will be more regular.

Thank you for bearing with me and hopefully you will keep coming back.