Chapter ZER0

2011-05-09T15:45:00.007+05:30

After getting inspired by Doc. Raval's pics of his Kolli Hills ride, I had already decided that I'm gonna ride out to this destination...Last weekend's BN G2G brought up this topic... Ashish Chamoli jumped to the idea of going for a ride, any ride! As long as it is a long ride :)

Made a few calls and sent out emails asking friends who would be interested; and only Arijit Ghosh reverted, saying that he is interested, he roped in another of his friend Dilip who has done extensive riding across India, specially the northeast part... So the planning was done, date and time decided, all that was needed was to turn up for the ride! We met up at 5am on Hosur Road, and started for our destination by around 6ish (it took some time for everyone to assemble) the roads were butter smooth and the climate was perfect!

First stop was at around 7 near Krishnagiri for some awesome idlis and omelets. After getting a fill of food we started again, next stop was Salem, asked for directions and hit the right road towards Rasipuram, here funny thing happened! A kid comes up and asks in Tamil if this is a college trip, I just shook my head and didn't say anything; he then asks if we are the Police! I shook head again, so his mum tells him, they are the army... :D

From here, the great NH7 turns into a modest State Highway… but kudos to TN govt for making such great roads, not too many potholes on the way and perfectly picturesque scenery to give us company all the way!

After Rasipuram we had to start climbing the ghat section… the dreaded 70 hairpin turns! But to my surprise, the road condition was so smooth that the dread turned into sheer joy after every turn! And by the time we reached the top, the adrenaline and the joy both were on a full high!

Now bearing in mind from Doc's instructions we knew that there are not too many accommodation options here, and hence Ashish had carried his 4person tent (just in case!) there are 2 famous resorts and a couple of measly lodges that provide accommodation… to our luck, everything was full! Finally the owner of a resort allowed us to pitch our tent in his coffee plantation (of course after charging 1K for it) but it was exactly what we wanted! We pitched our tent in the middle of nowhere, with coffee plants all around us and the noise of all the birds and insects around :)

After pitching up and resting for a while, we set out on our bikes to do a look-see of the place. We were surprised to find that the place doesn't have much to offer from a `touristy' option… just 2 `points' for witnessing the sunsets and loads of liquor stores to buy cheap beer and brandy… we did our `shopping' and went to one of the points to see the sunset, saw hoards of people come, pose for pics, and go while were sat there unmoved.

After sunset and some basic `appetizers' we headed for dinner, ate dinner and crashed in the tent amongst total darkness and sounds of all the insects… the sky was totally clear so saw a lot of stars…

Woke up early in the morning, packed our stuff and rode out before the local traffic increases… after some photo-ops on the ghats, we descended to Rasipuram for some breakfast of dosas and parathas… ate our fill and rode out… next stop dharampuri for tender coconuts then again rode till Electronic city, stopped looking for lunch options and realized that we are too close to home to eat out now… so, said good byes and ripped all the way home…

Total ride distance, door to door: 650kms

Riders: Ashish Chamoli – LB500

Arijit Ghosh – TB350

Dilip – STD350

LJ – RedEye

Arijit's Pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/106810833727605113966/KolliHillsMay782011?feat=directlink

Ashish's Pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/ashishchamoli/KolliHills

ITERATION

2010-12-20T18:03:00.001+05:30

We were sitting, sipping the nectar from the goblets of life; and suddenly she asks me, “Why don’t you say anything nice about me? Don’t you feel the same like how you felt earlier about me? “I was speechless, flabbergasted is the right word actually, and didn’t know what to tell her…

When I was sitting alone; reminiscing, contemplating, anticipating… I realized that I really don’t feel like how I felt about her earlier, I feel much more! That was the time when we were still strangers, trying really hard to know each other, keeping up the respect and not reacting the way we would want to to a lot of things that the other did. Now we are almost one, we know what the other will say even before we begin to speak.

Relationships are a very funny thing. You try hard to build them, once they are strong, you start taking each other for granted, start ‘hurting’ the other one even without realizing that our actions or words might be really hurtful!

Well, I have to confess… I am cursed with a twisted tongue; no matter what I say, even if I try to make it sound good… it comes out either blunt or rude or crude or sarcastic, basically something vile… and this happens only for people who I love and care about. For the insignificant ones, I can build castles in the air with my words but unfortunately the same castles turn to ash when I turn my face towards someone close…
It’s a curse, what to do?

Coming back to the point… something nice for her? What do I tell her? I am who I am because of you? I am the man that you wanted me to be? I changed my entire existence just to match your liking? I am alive just for you… else why would I even bother to write this for her?
She is the meaning of my life, she is my life…

See U on the road :-)

2010-12-07T18:13:00.001+05:30

I know I know;

guilty as charged… there has been a terrible silence and a really long gap on this
Blog. So long, that even I started to wonder if I should just close the blog and delete the account!

Then, I realized that the sabbatical from biking was long over a few months ago; I rode till the
maddur lake with a few BN biker friends.

Now, again it will be time for our annual ‘distancing of selves’ where the wifey will
go off to places that she yearns to go to, and I will slog my behind in the office… heh heh

But this GAP is going to gift me with 2 wonderful weekends which I intend to put to complete use
and go out riding… destination is not known as of now, but I know I will be out riding my butt off :-)

See you on the road then!

Sabbatical Over

2010-06-22T19:15:00.000+05:30

Finally broke the silence from riding… did a small ride (couple hundred kilometers) the last Sunday….

My sabbatical is now over and I will be riding and writing more… the blog that had absolutely dried up, might just start getting random posts again :)

Wish me luck on my future rides… and do contact me if you want to join in any of them!

No more...

2010-04-13T16:13:00.001+05:30

We all were sitting close by, there was some heavy breathing for a few seconds and then all went quiet… he left us exactly at 11:05 on a Friday… this was the blow by blow (or should I say a breath by breath) account of my Grandpa’s death given to me by my dad over the phone.

Now since my imagination is still a bit too wild, I got transformed in the room where my gramps spent some of his final weeks… I had met him in January, and he was joking, “This is the last time we are meeting, you will not be able to see me again after this” and I commented back, “you will be alive even when my kids get married, you would probably outlive all of us” if only I had known…

Fact is, we all knew… his cancer was growing really bad and that there was no way we could bring him back to the healthier side… we all were just waiting for him to pass on… now that he has actually gone, there is such a big gap! Now way this lacuna can be filled by another person.

It’s so funny that you look up to one person all your life… you love them, and then you despise them, sometimes you hate them… but, you know that they are right there. And then suddenly they are not; they suddenly become a memory of a lifetime!

We all were sitting around that empty bed that was occupied by the memory… a nice laminated picture frame sat on the table across the bed looking at us, a few of us wiping the tears that flow down, uninvited; the other brave ones console the weak and then breakdown themselves.

Death is a very funny thing, cousins who didn’t even acknowledge each other’s presence are now urging the others to take care of their health and ensure that we stay in touch!

Condolences are shared across all the modes of communication, calls, messages, tweets…

The biggest thing will be to go to the online genealogy and put the ‘deceased date’ in front of that name…

Deceased…. Not here any more… Rest In Peace!

wishin'

2010-03-25T20:27:00.000+05:30

If you like what you do… you don’t have to do what you like…

Unfortunately this is not the case most of the times. I know a lot of people who spent their lives till now trying to figure out what they like to do and what should they do to do what they like :)

I am now gearing myself up to get off this silly chair and get on the seat of my bike… ride down at least 100 kilometers and feel alive again.

Inshallah that should happen pretty soon now… I can see the leaf turning…

In the words of Richard Bach, “what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly”

still swimming underwater...

2010-03-19T18:27:00.000+05:30

After swimming underwater for such a long time… I just bobbed my head over the surface to whine…

I haven’t done a single ride in more than 15 months now, the creativity is drying up slowly, all my friends think that I have moved to another planet because I am hardly available… sometimes even I feel that I have moved to a different planet coz the type of people I am dealing with nowadays are definitely not human!

I guess I need a change; pronto… otherwise I would probably turn into one of those boring uncles who turned old before their time and who just sit and whine and pass really sarcastic comments.
God?!! Are your listening??? If God is busy, any of his assistants listening???

Accidentally falling LOVE…

2009-12-16T17:02:00.004+05:30

Just the other day a young man in my team crashed his bike head-on into a moving car and got severely bruised… His bike was almost totaled and it took him quite a lot of cash and time to bring both his ride and himself back on track.

I was talking to him a few evenings ago and told him the importance of having proper riding gear. Since I am older and a bit more experienced in the riding scene, I almost bragged about my vast array of riding gear… from multiple pairs of gloves to a few riding jackets; a couple of riding pants to the set of knee & shin protector and my collection of various helmets…

The morning after this talk to him, I was getting ready to go to work as usual. The weather in Bangalore is slightly different these days, it’s been raining on and off (sort of reminds me of Seattle, only dirtier and more crowded) It has been my daily regime since a few weeks that I wear my knee & shin guard along with my city riding jacket, gloves and helmet every time I ride out of the house…

This morning, I was feeling cocky and decided that I don’t need to wear the knee & shin guard since they need to be worn over my office pants and they spoil the LOOK! (Big Mistake!) I rode the bike out from my house to the open road, it was still drizzling and the roads were all covered in slush, I reach the first main road crossing and as usual took the showoff lean turn, the bike was impressively tilted at low speeds on the busy crowded area… I noticed a few people admiring me and smiled at myself and my skills inside the helmet… just a split second of attention diffusion… and suddenly in the turn I notice a car blocking the onwards road and I panicked (another big mistake) I hit the front brake hard and the bike spilled taking me along… all the show that I was giving just a second ago had turned into a crash. Thankfully RedEye seems to have a mind of her own, she didn’t give a very fabulous looking crash with sparks flying all over, she just dipped and dropped on her side… this was one of my crashes where I actually got thrown away from the bike and sprawled on the road.

A few guys huddled around me and pulled me to my feet; two of them even used some brut force and pulled RedEye on her feet. They asked me to sit down for a while and assess the damages done to me and RedEye… I was hurt, not physically but my ego was totally shattered… how can an experienced biker like me crash?!! Why didn’t I wear my Knee guard? Coz my left knee was bruised pretty bad. I got on the bike to notice that she had done some damage to herself just to ensure that I am safe… her foot rests were broken.

I managed anyway to get her running and took her to a garage on my way to work. Got her damage fixed, while the mech was doing what he does best, I realized that just a little bit of cockiness and overconfidence and bring you down bad…

Now, I am back to normal with my feet firmly on the ground… the bruise and the pain in my left knee reminding me that it’s human to be humble… and I am thanking RedEye for being the beauty she is… She has saved me and my grace so many times…

(Image Courtesy: T. McCracken http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.mchumor.com/00images/7783_accident_cartoon.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.mchumor.com/accident2_bframe.html&usg=__A1v_VQPsZZD2zGtF8i80QZ0sq40=&h=435&w=330&sz=34&hl=en&start=8&tbnid=9mdjUAKDh24R2M:&tbnh=126&tbnw=96&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmotorcycle%2Baccident%2Bcartoon%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den )

Have you ever...

2009-12-15T22:06:00.002+05:30

Have you ever dreamt a dream so true and so many times that after a while you start mistaking that dream to be a reality?

Have you ever changed your past in your mind as per your taste?

Have you ever thought about changing your future to something completely different from what it seems to be?

The human mind is an amazing tool and has unending potentials… you can live your life the way you want to in your mind and then the mind takes over the realities… the mind strives to change all the realities to your whims, thoughts, ideas, wants, and every other synonym you use for it!

The mind also lets you choose your own FAMILY (yes you did read it right, I did say family) the family that the mind chooses is not made of the people who you live with in the same house or who are fruits and leaves of the same tree that you belong to… This family is the people who you choose to share your plane with, who are on the same sphere as you, and they are not off a tangent…

Some people have really large families and some brave it out alone on their plane coz their minds are not as open as others’ to let anybody in…

I dedicate this post to all those people who always wished for more but couldn’t actually get it coz their mind was too busy pulling them away from the goal…

P.S. I Love You!!!

2009-11-27T16:41:00.001+05:30

There are stages in your life when all you do feels mundane and monotonous and still you find really small pockets of time out of the monotony and name them weekends…

Over these weekends you are allowed to and supposed to have all the fun that you have missed out in the past 5 days.

A few days ago, over one of these days of joy… I got some time just to myself; since this seclusion has become a very dear experience I decided that I wanted to invest this time to sit, meditate, ponder and think about a lot of things that have happened in my life in all these past years…

I realized that we rarely get a chance to tell our family, our friends, our loved ones, and all the ones in between… how happy we have been with them and how much they have contributed to make our life a learning experience; sometimes the happy way and the other times with a pinch of salt.

So this day relishing the few spare moments that I had to myself I just wanted to mentally, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually thank all the people who had touched my life in one way or the other…

I sat and in my mind called out all those names that I remembered… some known, some ghosts of the past and some who had now become strangers… and then I thanked each and every one of those individuals.

Just a note to say… P.S. I Love You!

Incase if I haven’t mentioned this to you on your face or over the phone or in any other way.

If you have landed here, you landed here to be thanked for being what you are!

3 Years and counting...

2009-10-22T14:04:00.001+05:30

Today apparently marks the 3rrd anniversary of the day when I first met my wifey… A lot of people find it very hard to digest that ours is an ‘arranged marriage’ this means that our parents ‘arranged’ for us to meet before we hit it off…

I wouldn’t forget that day… I was still recovering from my devastatingly bad breakup from an ex-flame. I had decided to go to my parents’ home and recuperate from the emotional, mental, intellectual, spiritual and every other ‘al’ drain…

The first 2 days I was there, I spent my time lazing in front of the idiot box and catching up on all my reading… I reread my collection of Richard Bach books for a super boost since they usually help me out when I am feeling low.

On the third day, sometime in the afternoon post lunch when I was sprawled in my bedroom sleeping with a book; my mum unceremoniously announced that someone has come to visit me. Well since I was at home and I didn’t expect any visitors I was dressed in my usual ‘ghar ka attire’ ganji and chaddis I step out in the living room and find a pretty looking girl sitting on the couch with a bunch of flowers, I jog my brain trying to place her in my memory… was she an ex classmate? A friend from my old college? Someone who I worked with? But all the slots came blank… she was a beautiful stranger.

She introduced herself and I went through an immediate whirlwind of emotions… first anger (why did my mum try to set me up with someone when she knows that I came home to recover from a breakup?) then blushing (first time she came to meet me and I am dressed in tanks and shorts?) and then elation (yaar ladki to badi sundar hai)

We sat and talked random things for a while and then she left… leaving me wanting for more…

The next morning she called, she wanted to meet me again! We decided to catch-up over coffee… I had a haunt whenever I was in Ahmedabad and that was a café called Mocha, I invited her to meet me there.

We met sometime in the morning, around 10ish ordered coffees and started talking… after a while I ordered a hookah (this was more of a test to check if she agrees to me smoking or not) and to my utter surprise, shock and elation she didn’t mind but actually joined in! Wow, I do like this girl...

And then I felt as if I was talking to a long lost friend… in fact we had a lot of friends in common! Couple of her school friends were my girlfriends in college and some of my school friends were her friends in college. We talked and talked and talked some more…

By the time we realized that we have had buckets full of coffee, stomachs full of chow and lungs full of the hookah smoke it was already past 6 in the evening! We had spent over 7 hours on our first date! And there still was a feeling that there was a lot of catching up to do…

We met everyday for the next 4 days and on the fifth day we decided that we are ready to spend the rest of our lives with each other. So on the 6th day we got engaged and early morning on the 8th day; I left back for Bangalore…

In four months we were married and since then, every day I wakeup smiling and thanking my stars that I decided to go for a 7 hour long coffee that morning…

Generation GAP...

2009-08-03T14:01:00.000+05:30

Over the weekend I met a group of young women who all were in the range of 18-21. We were having a strangely ‘mature’ discussion about life, experiences, and things in general.

They all were overly intelligent and ‘grown up’ and a lot more matured than what I used to be when I was doing my graduation.

One thing that hit me real hard is that in just 10 years the threshold of being ‘grown up’ has narrowed so much! I still remember when I was 21 quite a few years ago, I sported the perfect devil may care attitude; the only priorities in life for me were pumping iron, hanging out with my friends and have as much FUN as I could… this didn’t consist smoking up, drinking or getting laid

I thought that I had seen a lot in life when I was 20 but now I sit here wondering how much more do I still see to say that I have seen it all…

These girls were so ‘matured’… they had the experience of rolling joints and smoking them up, they had downed buckets full of spirits, had lost their virginity a really long time ago and yet, all of them were just kids!

Do I think of this as the beginning of the end? The kids are not kids anymore… they all are desperate to grow up… Most of them have already started looking overly matured for their age and they also behave as if they have seen it all… the little girls want to be women and the boys well, they will still remain boys but they all seem to be in an awful hurry to get laid as soon as they realize that they are able to hold on to a hard-on…

I really hope and pray that some of the youngsters read this post and they all try to retain and relish their innocence, childishness, youth, and the optimism that only they can hold… please hold on just a little bit longer guys, you still have a long way to grow old and trust me, when it finally hits that you are OLD, you will miss all the innocence that you left behind a long time ago…

GOD BLESS!

Doing it in the rains

2009-07-31T21:50:00.001+05:30

She looked so fine standing there in the sunshine… smiling at me… taunting me… asking me if I’m game… I looked at her shyly at first, brewed some confidence deep within… walked over to her and touched that glistening, silken smooth surface…

She asked again, so are you gonna do it or not? Aren’t you man enough? All men do it at least once in the rain… getting wet, riding hard…

I finally mustered the courage and mounted her… put the little magic piece into her and pressed all the right buttons… and she roared... SHE’S ALIVE! SHE’S ALIVE!!!

There was the RedEye growling and purring at the same time…

Ready to take on the wet roads once again… my partner in most of my crimes…

Thought...

2009-07-23T11:33:00.000+05:30

It was a long arduous walk through the maze in the forest, a few beams of sun filtered through the gaps in the canopy of the foliage…

I looked up at the tall blades of grass, through them, beyond them… looked at the blue wonder. Where life seemed to be…

Now, I trod the long forgotten grasslands… with my head in the clouds… looking down, wondering, how wonderful it would be to get lost again in that foliage…

Does everyone go through this???

ain't no sunshine when she is gone

2009-04-29T23:28:00.001+05:30

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone.

It's not warm when she's away.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone

and she's always gone too long

anytime she goes away.

once again the annual ‘distancing of selves’ happened yesterday when I saw off my sweet wifey… she went away to her parents’ for a month and it actually hurt seeing her go! Maybe coz I had just returned from my two month long ‘stint’ in the UK.

A lot of smart and experienced people have told me, the distancing of selves in a close relationship is very important for both the people involved to better understand and appreciate each other along with knowing your own self.

Hmm, so what more do I need to know about me that I didn’t catch in the past almost 30years? Did I accidentally or intentionally stop talking to myself? Did I cease diving inside my head and getting lost into my thoughts? Humph, maybe…

Thankfully, this time around the not so new job in the new company and the transition of the processes is taking up so much of my conscious time that I hardly notice or acknowledge the passing hours, days and now weeks… since everyone who still has a job cribs and complains about the dwindling market conditions and the uncertainty of the job market globally, I’ve decided that I am not going to join the crib gang or take any stupid hasty decision like quitting my last job on a day’s notice…

This time I will hopefully take it easy, try and manage two different teams… though I am getting methodically drawn and quartered in a very gradual process at the office by my bumbling team of newbies and some really rusted oldies :-) I like it in here since it is still new…

Thanks that the wifey has decided to go away for a month so that I can invest this time in the office and update blogs like these at an ungodly hour of midnight (especially when my day started at 10 in the morning) I do miss her…

I think about her almost all the time… just when I wakeup, thinking that she looks pretty when we wakeup together and smile at each other thanking god for one more day of togetherness and love…

While having my breakfast I wonder if she would’ve had eaten or not?!! Wondering if she will be taking her vitamins…

During the tough times at work when I realize that she will not be waiting for me when I go back home all tired and battered in the evening…

During the long and mindlessly dragging meetings I happily slide in my day dreams about us…

Dreaming about her in my sleep and then the whole cycle starts again the next morning as soon as I wake up :-)

This year I will not complain, crib, or stay cross at my wifey going away… instead, I am going to cherish, relish and treasure this amazingly special relationship that I have with one of the most wonderful souls on this planet.

wishful thinking?!!

2009-04-18T01:09:00.001+05:30

From 14 hour workdays to 12 hour and then again to the same 14hour day grind! Sometimes a tired mind would venture to wander a bit and wonder, “is this all really worth it”?

Titles change, people change, surroundings change and even the goddamned ‘work culture’ changes! But you realize that the grind is still as tiring as always and the politics are as murky as every…

Someone asked me a few weekends ago… LJ what would be your dream job? Honestly I was caught unprepared and I started fumbling with my answer; I started by saying how I always loved writing poetry and prose, then moved on my love towards music and thinking about ‘RJ’ing or ‘VJ’ing… for a while I also talked about becoming an international travel show host! (Anybody out there listening???) then settled to one of my personal favorite dreams… my own Restaurant!

But honestly, I don’t know what I enjoy doing for a living now! Been doing the same work and hitting the same grind since so many years now that this industry looks like a pool of quicksand and I would give anything to step away from it and do something where I could use my brain’s creative sides a little bit… off late I have actually started feeling extinct when I look and talk to some of the ‘youngsters’ who manage to wiggle some spare time out of their schedules and still pursue a hobby or do something interesting!

Even the books now look at me from the bookshelf like long forgotten friends who try to strike up a chord of knowingness but I just can’t recollect where I met them last.

I was told once when I was very young and then had the same thing reiterated and burnt in my brain for so many times by personal experiences and hearing others’ stories…

NEVER LOSE FAITH!

If you are a good person, good things will happen to you… if not now, maybe when you are ready for them… wait is the best thing that will work…

Hoping for the best!

INSHALLAH

Long Space

2009-03-10T23:00:00.001+05:30

There has been an absolutely huge gap between my last post and this one…

There have been too many reasons; if I can try and remember a few of those!

The main reason, I was getting bugged with my job and had to get a change in my life, so one fine day I put my resignation on my boss’ table and walked away… just like that! Had no back up plans thought but just had to get away from all that I was going through.

After that I rode with RedEye around Karnataka for a while, stayed at home and watched lots and lots of TV and basically recuperated my broken self.

Joined the rival company in January and started working with them… got moved to Bournemouth (UK) for a project and writing this post from the UK…

Things have been so different in all these months of silence! I’ve experienced a rollercoaster of emotions in the last 3-4 months… feeling of restlessness, helplessness, hopeless, tired, low, heady, stressed, fear of rejection, feeling unhealthy, and from that to bliss, joy, smiles, belonging, reason to live, elation, peace, feeling wanted, rediscovering the self-respect.

Well, I am back and hopefully I am here to stay :)

Will surely try to stay connected now…

Cheers! And Hello World…

K Gudi - Weekend Ride

2008-10-20T22:57:00.001+05:30

There are times when you are just bugged of your mundane week and pray for a decent weekend when you can just escape the rigmarole, even if only for a couple days or a few hours… you want to just break free.

This Saturday thankfully was one of those weekends. The wifey had a day off from hercollege and we actually had the complete 2 days to ourselves. Two full days to do whatever we want to!

Planning was pretty prompt, a few calls made on Thursday and confirmations done onFriday; we were all set for a nice day trip to BR Hills – a nice patch of the wildlife sanctuary not too far from Bangalore. Since it was a day trip, there was not much packing to be done, the tank bag was stuffed with spares, some basic food and only one set of clothes (in case of any emergency) we decided that we’d roll out by 5:30 am and had thought that would be back latest by 8pm in the worst case scenario.

Come Saturday morning, we left around 6am, the way to the Mysore highway was all dug up from my locality till the highway and we took around 10 different diversions before actually reaching the highway at 6:30 (thanks BBMP for screwing up my timinghere) once on the highway RedEye growled for speed and I promptly obliged her to pickup some… thanks to the free-flow goldie exhaust and the bigger carb added with a K&N air-filter. We were cruising around over 100kph without even realizing.

Off late (after the Coorg ride) my lovely co-rider has actually improved her endurance levels on the road and doesn’t flitch till around 70kms of nonstop riding. Our first pitstop was the Maddur tiffany’s for their idli and filter coffee.

The handicraft store there was already open at 7:25 and we decided to check it out just for kicks… recently I had noticed a website online that specialized in something called the Bead Rider the idea was very simple put a layer of beads bound together in a mat between your butt and the bike’s seat and see the difference. I saw a very crude version of similar beaded mat for a very cheap rate and decided to pick it up and experience if it actually makes a difference. From there we started towards Mysore; took the ring Road at Mysore towards Chamrajanagar and then managed to take a wrong turn (I know I am blessed with being geographically challenged.) and suddenly noticed that the milestone saying BR Hills 28 Kilometers turn into BR Hills 96kms. (Double whammy!) The sky was cloudy and the morning was pleasant so I was not complaining, strangely the wifey was also not complaining!

The roads led us back to Malavalli from there to Kollegal and then some really bad roads took us to Yellandur (this is the last town before entering the sanctuary) at the check post of the sanctuary I noticed that we had clocked over 250kms for a usually 180km journey! And we hadn’t taken any butt breaks till now…

Upon entering the sanctuary the roads amazingly changed into a buttery smooth well tarred blacktop narrow road. The twisties were just amazingly mouthwatering and the climb up was just exhilarating… imagine riding through a lush green thick forest on an amazing smooth road and the only sound you hear is the thump of your beast and the blood pumping into your brain.

We continued on from the BR Hills temple towards K Gudi – our most favorite joint destination of all till now, along the twisties and I suddenly noticed to my horror that on the tight twisties I couldn’t somehow manage to turn right! Gosh… this is deadly, you lean with your bike completely and instead of turning, the bike keeps going straight into the steep fall and you start to panic… after bravely managing a few of these right banks (without the co rider know about it) I finally gave into once of the corners where the front tire just refused to turn and I almost crashed into the trench below… I somehow managed to brake in time and the got back some balance and composure. The wife noticed this particular turn and asked what was wrong, why wasI riding straight into the trench… I made up some vague story about rider fatigue, fed some crap and carried on… only slower.

Reached K Gudi at 11:25; met our dear friend Nahar there and talked with him for a while… in the next 15 minutes he convinced us that since we don’t have any special plans for Sunday we should stay back at the wilderness camp and arranged for a room for us… so by noon we had stowed our tank-bag and riding jackets into theroom and emerged into the camp as if we have been permanent residents of the place.

Had some sumptuous lunch and retired to rest for an hour. In the early evening we were introduced to the new (well, actually 10 month old) naturalist Narayan at K Gudi. He took us for a jeep safari into the jungle… our jeep was shared with an old Swedish gent and 2 south Indian couples (guess they come for some real junglee time) the old gent was pretty reserved and kept to himself all through the safari and talked only with Narayan couple times in the next 2 hours. The two couples on the other hand were the typical yuppies that I hate to interact with and thankfully kept to them-selves talking in Tamil or Kannada or whatever they talked in behaving like a bunch ofjuvenile retards.

Halfway through the safari, we got a radio message from the other jeep that they had spotted a leopard and informed us on the exact coordinates to the location. Narayan like a pro rally driver drove the jeep through some unbelievable terrain and in less than 7 minutes we were at the rendezvous point with the other jeep oohing and aahing atthe amazing beauty of a leopard just a few hundred meters away from where we were.

The juvenile retard group in spite of several reminders and reprimands for maintainingsilence couldn’t contain their excitement and behaved in such a disgusting manner that for a while I actually felt like beating then up and feeding them to the leopard… Iguess the leopard read my thoughts and scooted the scene in a while probably fearing the idea of eating meat made out of only rasam rice and curd rice… ugh!

After that we continued our safari. Spotted some spotted deer, some Sambar (not the one you eat but the one people hunt) and a few very pretty birds… but I was not interested in this any more… two main reasons, I was already content of looking at a wild cat in the wild for the first time in my life and also because the juvenile retards were now acting as if they were on an African safari and were hanging almost out of the jeep while pushing their bums into our heads and groping each other (maybe while thinking of the orgy they will have later on in the night)

After going back to the camp had some amazing onion pakoras and saw a documentary on a gang of macaques based out of a town in Tamil Nadu. Sitting around the campfire later Nahar and we discussed about his future plans of moving to the land down under and studying for his PHD… made vague plans of doing a vacation together sometime in the future in Gujarat covering all the wildlife sanctuaries and the Rann of Kutch.

Had a nice dinner and slept in the royal bed of the maharaja’s royal bungalow…woke up at 7am just to realize that the morning safari had already left and we missed it only by 20minutes… boohoo

Ate breakfast, and packed our tank bag, started planning on a proper route to go back to B’lore… the previous evening Nahar had already told us about some temple at Somnathapura which falls on the way to Bangy; so were thinking if we want to do it or go straight home.

Narayan came at 8:30 with the news that he spotted a sloth bear and the wife was literally in tears… she’s been raving about spotting one since the first time we landed at K Gudi for our honeymoon. Narayan promised her that he’ll keep a bear ready next time we come again. Said our goodbyes and left. Halfway through the twisties Iconfessed about my inability of banking right on the twisties to the wifey and rode down the ghats at a very slow speed… the wifey was exceptionally helpful and supportive during the ghat section and once we got out of the sanctuary we turned towards Yellandur and then to the onward journey to Bangalore.

Just entering in Yellandur we realized that the state government was not content by digging up all the roads in Bangalore so they had actually come all the way to these small villages and dug up all the roads and highways here as well! Saw a bus trying to take a tight turn in less than 6feet radius, dodged the buss and rolled off towards Malavalli. The roads now turned from good to bad and bad to worse and then just stopped to exist! It was more like doing an off-road stint with a pillion on the Bull and poor RedEye was grumbling and screeching at every pothole and every ditch. But she bravely carried on.

It took us more than two and a half hours for us to cover around 70 kilometers! My nerves by now had completely frayed and I was grumbling and bitching at every SOB driver on the road.

Finally some smooth roads shown and they brought all the maniacs drivers and riders of India along with them… people not understanding the light signals, the hand signals or even the abusive curses that I screamed inside my helmet. The return was generally uneventful and we reached home around 2:30 in the afternoon. Had a quick shower and then both of us sat and brooded about being back in this godforsaken city.

Now we are waiting for 17^th November when we go back to K Gudi along with my parents and my older sister…

Till then, I just sit and wait and hope and pray

Cheers!

WebBikeWorld

2008-10-19T21:01:00.001+05:30

I’ve been a motorcycle aficionado since a while now…

Initially was impressed only by the Royal Enfield beasts (well, honestly still am impressed) but now I do see quite a few new machines coming in our local Indian market and of course the ever expanding international motorcycle market. Whew there are so many new bikes out there!

And more bikes mean more and more bike related products; be it cleaners, waxes,apparel, luggage, protection, performance parts, upgrades, u get the idea. It’s awhole unending plethora of products that you might need for your bike or maybe you are a crazed maniac like me who just WANTS things even if I get to use them or not…

Now the confusion starts, there are so many products and almost everything comes with either the similar features or a few nicks and changes. How do you decide what is good enough (if not perfect) as per your requirements?

I very happily stumbled upon this website a few months ago and honestly, just got hooked onto it! The website I’m talking about is webbikeworld.com I think the name says it all. It actually is the bikers paradise on the internet! They have reviews of almost everything that comes out in the international markets which relates to motorcycles or the love of motorcycling.

The reviews are pretty sharp, accurate, informative and in-your-face… the last part is what I personally appreciate, they use a no-nonsense approach for their reviews and are brutally honest when it comes to giving conclusions and verdicts.

Another good part about this site is that they also feature user comments and reviewsof the things featured. Again, these guys are not hesitant if they need to give out‘constructive criticism’ or just say that the product is not value for money.

I’ve personally ordered a few things online after going through the reviews and must admit that the reviews were bang on! I got what I was exactly expecting to get in thepackage.

Our Indian buyers still need to think about a lot of alternative ideas to get the stuff shipped here as the shipping costs are usually pretty high.

Either ship it to your friends/family in the USA who are traveling to India or place multiple order with your fellow bikers and then split the shipping costs amongst yourselves (this still is costly, but saves much more when compared to individual shipping)

So those of you still haven’t gone to this site, click here and I promise you’d happily surprised to see the amount of reviews, comparisons and links to vendors for products that you had thought about but didn’t know where to buy from.

Cheers and happy riding!

Independence day weekend ride

2008-08-21T19:19:00.007+05:30

After the Lepakshi ride, we had decided that we need to do a longish weekend ride with the same group together… Pallavi took up the responsibility of looking for a very exotic and remote location that can be easily covered in day’s ride. She came up with this place Cardamom House; somewhere in Tamil Nadu past Dindigul and off a small town called Athoor… and boy did she find us the best place to stay?

The discussion on logistics and all started a week prior to the ride, I as always get a bit hassled about longish riding and started looking up the weather websites checking on the weather forecast for the coming weekend… I generally get more worried when I have to ride with the wifey; otherwise I am generally a very careless biker. Not only did I look up the weather forecast but also shared the same with the entire gang! And the reactions I got on that…. Guess will have to write another blog entry for those :p

Anyway, we were to start at 5am on Friday. Thursday evening onwards it rained and rained and rained and then rained some more (u get the idea) it was pouring till 4am… I was mighty scared that we’ll get stuck in the rains and the ride will turn into a disaster. Anyhow, we finished our coffee and shared a can of Red-Bull, donned our rain pants and finally rolled out at 4:30 made it to the meeting point at 05:10 Doc had decided that he would join us in his car, everyone was there and we started off, the rain had turned into a very slight drizzle but the rain lashing the entire night had washed out the roads and there was a thin mist of mud that got onto the helmet visor too easily, must say the truck traffic was amazing for 5am!

Our first stop was at Hosur at the IBP GHAR, it’s like the Reliance A1 plaza but the service was okayish, and fuel was cheap (58/- for hi octane speed!) just had a chai there and rolled out again, the rains had relatively stopped but we still were too chicken to remove our rain pants. Then came Dharampuri, strangely the cops here were diverting the traffic towards the new NHAI bypass and I happily turned on that route just to realize that all the other bikers had gone ahead through the town :( after around 10kms I turned back and regrouped with the biker guys at a small chai tapri that was also serving hot puri-bhaji and omelets for breakfast. Hogged amazing food here, met some RTMC guys who were riding towards Dhanushkodi near Rameshwaram… after our breakfast and pleasantries we started again, took relative breaks for chai and some butt-breaks and reached Dindigul at around 1:30 from here asked for directions for Cardamom House and reached this amazing destination at around 2pm.
This place is managed by an elderly British gent who meets, greets and befriends all his guests. We were welcomed with an amazing mocktail of mango juice with cardamom here  after the mocktail and a nice beer, I rushed to freshen up; this is when I discovered the amazing rooms! I think the resort has around 10 rooms (not sure though) with an amazing view of the lake below and the hills in the distance. My room was the last on the verandah, with cane chairs in the porch and a complete bookshelf. I had a shower and went for lunch, after lunch we tried to sleep and relax for a while but I woke up in less than an hour and went out to explore the resort. Oh what an amazing place! So much lush greenery! Only problem was that the air was heavy with humidity.

The owner of the place had organized a party in the evening celebrating the Indian independence, met some amazing people from Texas, New Zealand and Europe; chatted with them and then took the party back to Rocky’s cottage, sat there in the moonlight talking, laughing and just having fun.

Morning came at 6am! The area had a very fresh aroma; I sat out in the porch over a cup of coffee. Once the wifey woke up we strolled out to walk around the lake. Clicked a lot of pictures and saw much too many birds! Came back and had an amazing breakfast, one great thing about this place is that everything they cook is made at the resort and grown on their farm, even the bread we ate was baked in their ovens! Post breakfast we retired to our room I tried reading a wild western and the wifey read ‘The Lost Horizon’ (the story of the Shangri-La) I was sitting here and thinking that we are in our Shangri-La… after lunch I sat with Mr. Ramdas who I nicknamed RD over a bottle of beer and talked for hours… snoozed off in the afternoon only to wake to a heavy rain! Yes, an amazing view… rains falling on the lake, the plains and coming over the hills… the rain lasted just long enough to make the entire area more beautiful, I was too tempted to ride out solo on those beaten country roads; road for a good 10kilometers, oh I forgot to tell you, the resort also housed two twelve year old Diesel bullets! Prateek and I tried our hands on those as well just to realize that the bulls need a lot of servicing and maintenance.

The evening was a quiet affair with some nice dinner and again a session at Roky’s cottage under the moonlight.

The next morning we started at 7am after a nice breakfast, wifey had decided that she will come with Doc and RD in the car so I was solo… YIPPIEEE! I had such an amazing time ripping the bike to speeds I couldn’t even think about generally, especially after getting the K&N performance air-filter. We stopped straight at Salem for a small butt break, after that the roads just became too inviting for me… I broke formation and rode like a crazy maniac for kilometers together… just to stop at the Tamil Nadu tourism hotel at Hosur. Had a heavy lunch and came back to Bangalore by 5pm.

Overall this was an amazing ride with amazing friends and a very well deserved weekend away form Bangalore. A few pointers that I would want to suggest if you plan to go there any time soon…

1) carry loads of water along
2) there are enough dhabas to eat on the way but keeping something handsy will help a lot
3) most of the people in TN do understand English and will not give you wrong directions.
4) The resort is slightly expensive but worth every penny you spend here.
5) The last 20kms from Athoor to the resort are a bit bad, if you are in a 4wheeler make sure you have decent ground clearance.

link to my pictures, Rocky's Pictures, Pallavi's pictures,

change

2008-07-29T18:40:00.001+05:30

Changes, some needed some requested
Some fall on you unwarranted…

Beg for some, pray for some,
But the change will happen…
…Only, when you are ready for one.

Wished on shooting stars,
Prayed on all the scars
Darned life felt so stagnant
Will this ever change and take me far?

This might sound a little bit strange,
But all we crave for now is a new change.

Inked again...

2008-07-21T15:52:00.004+05:30

Another busy Saturday came and went past…

I had so many things to finish!!! Since a while RedEye has been giving me troubles, she just doesn’t go beyond 80kph when I ride with a pillion and I had taken her to the mechanic to figure out why was she behaving like a lazy bull… spend almost half a day at the mech but we couldn’t figure out too many things… eventually it was decided that I change the air-filter on her and get he a high performance free flow filter to satisfy her appetite.

After finishing that, went home to find out that wifey is a bit late and we would have to rush out to meet XH, we were supposed to have a quick lunch and go to Russell’s place XH was going to get inked! Yes, he was going to get a tattoo and I was going to be his moral support and the expert commentator ad critic… we had a nice and economical south Indian lunch and then went to meet Russ.

I was too excited to be there and to see XH go through the pain (yeah, I’m a sadist sometimes) XH had selected a very safe and sober Hindu design of an Aum in the center of a sun… while Russ inked XH I too decided that I wanted to add a bit to my own tattoo… so after XH was done, I sat to get my tattoo done, thanks to the lack of exercise; my arms felt like jelly and the needles hurt a lot :( but I got a very neat design, I added to my Native American collection and a bit of my biker spirit…
The wifey was also interested in getting one tattoo but she was not sure if she wanted it or not… after a lot of deliberation she decided to get a nice small design which was part floral and part tribal. She was very brave, didn’t flinch at all!!! After all the tattoos we said our thanks and rode back home… now the wifey and I are already contemplating another tattoo anytime soon!

ALL HAPPY ALL INKED :)

50 Ways to Save Your Life

2008-07-07T11:41:00.003+05:30

i read this article here on motorcyclistonline.com and just had to share this with the Indian audience. i've finetuned this artical to Indian references so that it becomes a bit easier to comprehend.

The best bike in the world is scrap--or soon will be--unless you learn how to use it. The most powerful piece of high-performance hardware is between your ears. To help you program it with the right information, we've assembled 50 potentially lifesaving bits of street savvy. Some you'll know, some you won't. All are worth remembering, because when it comes to riding motorcycles on the street, the people over at the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (www.msf-usa.org) have the right idea with their tagline: The more you know, the better it gets.

1. Assume you're invisible Becayse to a lot of drivers, you are. Never make a move based on the assumption that another driver sees you, even if you've just made eye contact. Bikes don't always register in the four-wheel mind.
2. Be considerate, The consequences of strafing the jerk du jour or cutting him off start out bad and get worse. Pretend it was your grandma and think again.
3. Dress for the crash, not the pool or the prom; sure, Pizza Hut is a 5-minute trip, but nobody plans to eat pavement. Modern mesh gear means 100-degree heat is no excuse for a T-shirt and board shorts.
4. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst Assume that car across the intersection will turn across your bow when the light goes green, with or without a turn signal.
5. Leave your ego at home The only people who really care if you were faster on the freeway will be the officer and the judge.
6. Pay attention Yes, there is a half-naked girl on the billboard. That shock does feels squishy. Meanwhile, you could be drifting toward Big Trouble. Focus.
7. Mirrors only show you part of the picture Never change direction without turning your head to make sure the coast really is clear. Mirrors only show you part of the picture.
8. Be patient Always take another second or three before you pull out to pass, ride away from a curb or into freeway traffic from an on-ramp. It's what you don't see that gets you. That extra look could save your butt.
9. Watch your closing speed Passing cars at twice their speed or changing lanes to shoot past a row of stopped cars is just asking for trouble.
10. Beware the verge and the merge. A lot of nasty surprises end up on the sides of the road: empty McDonald's bags, nails, TV antennas, ladders, you name it. Watch for potentially troublesome debris on both sides of the road.
11. Left-turning cars remain a leading killer of motorcyclists Don't assume someone will wait for you to dart through the intersection. They're trying to beat the light, too.
12. Beware of cars running traffic lights The first few seconds after a signal light changes are the most perilous. Look both ways before barging into an intersection.
13. Check your mirrors Do it every time you change lanes, slow down or stop. Be ready to move if another vehicle is about to occupy the space you'd planned to use.
Scan 12 seconds ahead for potential trouble.
14. Mind the gap Remember Driver's Ed? One second's worth of distance per 10 mph is the old rule of thumb. Better still, scan the next 12 seconds ahead for potential trouble.
15. Beware of tuner cars They're quick and their drivers tend to be aggressive. Don't assume you've beaten one away from a light or outpaced it in traffic and change lanes without looking. You could end up as a Nissan hood ornament.
16. Excessive entrance speed hurts It's the leading cause of single-bike accidents on twisty roads and racetracks. In Slow, Out Fast is the old adage, and it still works. Dialing up corner speed is safer than scrubbing it off.
17. look out for stray animals Ungulates and other feral beasts prowl at dawn and dusk, so heed those big yellow signs. If you're riding in a target-rich environment, slow down and watch the shoulders.
18. Learn to use both brakes The front does most of your stopping, but a little rear brake on corner entry can calm a nervous chassis.
19. Keep the front brake covered--always Save a single second of reaction time at 60 mph and you can stop 88 feet shorter. Think about that.
20. Look where you want to go Use the miracle of target fixation to your advantage. The motorcycle goes where you look, so focus on the solution instead of the problem.
Check your mirrors every time you change lanes.
21. Keep your eyes moving Traffic is always shifting, so keep scanning for potential trouble. Don't lock your eyes on any one thing for too long unless you're actually dealing with trouble.
22. Think before you act Careful whipping around that Camry going 7 mph in a 25-mph zone or you could end up with your head in the driver's side door when he turns into the driveway right in front of you.
23. Raise your gaze It's too late to do anything about the 20 feet immediately in front of your fender, so scan the road far enough ahead to see trouble and change trajectory.
24. Get your mind right in the driveway Most accidents happen during the first 15 minutes of a ride, below 40 mph, near an intersection or driveway. Yes, that could be your driveway.
25. Come to a full stop at that next stop sign Put a foot down. Look again. Anything less forces a snap decision with no time to spot potential trouble.
26. Never dive into a gap in stalled traffic Cars may have stopped for a reason, and you may not be able to see why until it's too late to do anything about it.
27. Don't saddle up more than you can handle If you weigh 45 kilos, avoid that 305-kilo cruiser. If you're 5-foot-5, forget those towering adventure-tourers.
28. Watch for car doors opening in traffic And smacking a car that's swerving around some goofball's open door is just as painful.
29. Don't get in an intersection rut Watch for a two-way stop after a string of four-way intersections. If you expect cross-traffic to stop, there could be a painful surprise when it doesn't.
30. Stay in your comfort zone when you're with a group Riding over your head is a good way to end up in the ditch. Any bunch worth riding with will have a rendezvous point where you'll be able to link up again.
31. Give your eyes some time to adjust A minute or two of low light heading from a well-lighted garage onto dark streets is a good thing. Otherwise, you're essentially flying blind for the first mile or so.
32. Master the slow U-turn Practice. Park your butt on the outside edge of the seat and lean the bike into the turn, using your body as a counterweight as you pivot around the rear wheel.
33. Who put a stop sign at the top of this hill? Don't panic. Use the rear brake to keep from rolling back down. Use Mr. Throttle and Mr. Clutch normally--and smoothly--to pull away.
34. If it looks slippery, assume it is A patch of suspicious pavement could be just about anything. Butter Flavor Crisco? Gravel? Mobil 1? Or maybe it's nothing. Better to slow down for nothing than go on your head.
35. Bang! A blowout! Now what? No sudden moves. The motorcycle isn't happy, so be prepared to apply a little calming muscle to maintain course. Ease back the throttle, brake gingerly with the good wheel and pull over very smoothly to the shoulder. Big sigh.
36. Drops on the faceshield? It's raining. Lightly misted pavement can be slipperier than when it's been rinsed by a downpour, and you never know how much grip there is. Apply maximum-level concentration, caution and smoothness.
37. Emotions in check? To paraphrase Mr. Ice Cube, chickity-check yoself before you wreck yoself. Emotions are as powerful as any drug, so take inventory every time you saddle up. If you're mad, sad, exhausted or anxious, stay put.
38. Wear good gear Wear stuff that fits you and the weather. If you're too hot or too cold or fighting with a jacket that binds across the shoulders, you're dangerous. It's that simple.
39. Leave the iPod at home You won't hear that cement truck in time with Spinal Tap cranked to 11, but they might like your headphones in intensive care.
40. Learn to swerve Be able to do two tight turns in quick succession. Flick left around the bag of briquettes, then right back to your original trajectory. The bike will follow your eyes, so look at the way around, not the briquettes. Now practice till it's a reflex.
41. Be smooth at low speeds Take some angst out, especially of slow-speed maneuvers, with a bit of rear brake. It adds a welcome bit of stability by minimizing unwelcome weight transfer and potentially bothersome driveline lash.
42. Flashing is good for you Turn signals get your attention by flashing, right? So a few easy taps on the pedal or lever before stopping makes your brake light more eye-catching to trailing traffic.
43. Intersections are scary, so hedge your bets Put another vehicle between your bike and the possibility of someone running the stop sign/red light on your right and you cut your chances of getting nailed in half.
44. Tune your peripheral vision Pick a point near the center of that wall over there. Now scan as far as you can by moving your attention, not your gaze. The more you can see without turning your head, the sooner you can react to trouble.
45. Every-thing is harder to see after dark Adjust your headlights, Carry a clear faceshield and have your game all the way on after dark, especially during commuter hours.
46. Don't troll next to--or right behind--Mr. Trucker If one of those 18 retreads blows up--which they do with some regularity--it de-treads, and that can be ugly. Unless you like dodging huge chunks of flying rubber, keep your distance.
47. Take the panic out of panic stops Develop an intimate relationship with your front brake. Seek out some safe, open pavement. Starting slowly, find that fine line between maximum braking and a locked wheel, and then do it again, and again.
48. Make your tires right None of this stuff matters unless your skins are right. Don't take 'em for granted. Make sure pressure is spot-on every time you ride. Check for cuts, nails and other junk they might have picked up, as well as general wear.
49. Take a deep breath Count to 10. Visualize whirled peas. Forgetting some clown's 80-mph indiscretion beats running the risk of ruining your life, or ending it.

50. Enjoy the ride, ride because you like doing it and not because you want to prove a point or because everone you know does it... ride ONLY for the joy of it and nothing else :D

Lepakshi Ride June 29th

2008-07-07T10:50:00.004+05:30

I had been itching to get a cosmetic makeover for RedEye since a few months, had ordered the decals from a very upscale website in USA and they have been sitting in my house all these months as I was too chicken to try and put them on the bike on my own. Finally last Saturday I did go to JC road and got them fixed along with a personalized name tag of the bike. The guys at the sticker shop were real professional and they did the job in less than 40minutes and in around a 100/- bucks! I was all enthu to click a few pics of her with all the cosmetics and take her out on a ride somewhere, anywhere!

Sometime during the last week Rocky had called me and told that they will be planning a day ride to Lepakshi and will let me know on the updates. Saturday evening he called and said that the ride is on for Sunday morning and we are meeting up at the Hebbal flyover. I was so happy! It was feeling like a really long time since both wifey and I rode together anywhere. Our lives had becoming really monotonous; wakeup, breakfast, go-to-work, come home, sleep… the days had become too boring and stress levels had started kicking in really hard, both of us needed a break and needed to feel some wind through our heads.

Sunday morning came too soon, woke up hurriedly and rolled out the bike to meet the guys there, by the time we reached MG road RedEye decided that she needed a full tank of fuel and we had to stop by at a gas station to fill her up. This was probably the longest, sloppiest and the most lethargic gas station service that I ever encountered till date; the staff there had no clue on who is filling the gas and who collects the gas, the quality of the fuel was the worst, after the fill-up they didn’t have change to give and they actually wanted me to let go of 10bucks since the didn’t have it!!!!! Fackers

Anyway, after this disgusting episode, we shot off towards the designated meeting point, must say that it had been a long time since I rode down that side of the town and those roads… the roads have changed drastically! The government actually had felled around 300-400 trees to widen the roads and to accommodate the traffic (no exaggeration) and to broaden the already broad roads. (Sigh, what is this city coming to? :( )

When we finally reached there we were already around 15-20 minutes late and everyone was waiting for us… the gang was Rocky and his wife Pallavi (who we met for the first time but it seemed that we had known her since ages) Prateek and his pillion Nita (who works with Oracle) and Orgy, I mean Mr. Arijit Ghosh (strangely, he is also Nita’s boss) everyone was there and getting jumpy to ride out as soon as possible to avoid the early morning traffic. After a quick round of introductions and pleasantries we all rolled off, Prateek and Nita were the spot and Orgy was the sweep… the roads to this side of the world looked so different! Everything felt new… after only about 15-20 minutes of ridding we pulled over into one of the south-Indian fast food restaurants for a quick round of Idli-Vadas and Dosas. The management probably found our crowd very funky since everyone around started jumping around trying to accommodate us there with our tankbags, helmets, riding jackets and all the works… we had a nice filling brunch and rolled out again.

The roads were reasonably empty and our riding was pretty eased. We were enjoying the scattered clouds and the cool strong winds… Prateek was the lead and I must say his 500CC bull with the rider and the pillion and its monster panniers was still roaring and keeping a pretty decent steady speed! I was right behind him and was sort of playing tag with Rocky, he’d overtake us then slow down and overtake us again… I was feeling happy to ride with a group of people who I like not only as bikers but are also great friends.

Then came the town of Chikaballapur and came Prateek’s initiation thanks to some drunk local on a cycle who didn’t know if he was coming or going… thankfully nobody was hurt, Pallavi used her amazingly polished Kannada on that drunk soul and gave him a piece of her mind… we didn’t want to stay there long and wait for the crowd to change its mind so we pushed off from there… after a few kilometers we stopped to asses the damages, thankfully there were none! Thanks to the riding gear both the rider and pillion were geared into. This was also a time was an amazing photo session, which also included Pallavi chasing an old woman leading two buffaloes or maybe the other way round and shouting ‘amma smile maadi’ while clicking the pics in the meantime Orgy showed us the long chain he kept on his bike and the ways he can beat off attackers in self defense, honestly I felt that if the attackers were of the homosexual tendency, they’d probably carry orgy along after looking at his self protection dance :D

After that photo shoot we again rode off towards our original destination… I guess after Hindupur we took a left turn and the great, majestic 4lane expressway turned into a small two lane road… we were in biker friendly territory :D almost around 15-20 kilometers of riding into these amazing landscapes brought us face to face with the monolithic Nandi bull’s status which is supposed to be carved out of a single granite stone slab… parked our bikes and all of us were itching for some masala chai, sadly the solitary shop opposite the bull had only ‘cool drinks’ and nothing else… just say the cool drinks were also not all that cool :(

Here we saw quite a few interesting characters, the cripple beggar who also was a mute, the two old women near the Nandi who were very happy to pose with us while clicking pictures and I believe they also fleeced us of quite an amount to click the pixies… there was nothing much to do here so we finally went to the actual attraction of Lepakshi, the Veerabhadra temple; strangely this temple reminded me a lot of my ride to Hampi, similar pillared facades, almost similar stone structures and the same amount of tourists, touts and guides. I was in no mood to checkout the place, so when Orgy announced that he is going to sit around in the shade and not go anywhere; I readily agreed to give him company. The others left us sitting there with all our samaan and Orgy and I had a real heart to heart discussion about work, marriage, kids, and life in general.

After a while, everybody gathered back and persuaded Orgy and me to at least go and look around a bit at how the place looks like… we like slackers walked around a bit, made a few oohs and aahs while looking at the sculpturesand got back in less than 10 minutes… all of were now hungry and were contemplating on what to do next when suddenly Pallavi emerged like devi ‘Annapurna’ with a paper-plate full of Pulliogre and Curd rice (the typical South Indian dishes) we all jumped at this sight and realized that the temple trustees are offering prasadam to all the people there. We like bhukkads charged at the temple, stood in line and got ourselves a good helping of the prasadam, now I’m not a big fan of the southi delicacies but I’m not sure if I was so hungry or was the food cooked really well… I actually had 2 helpings of the food.

Bellies full we decided to roll back… the ride back was pretty similar, but the crosswinds had picked up really bad and the bikes were actually getting pulled away… now the cheap petrol that I had filled in my tank started acting up on the bike, I could feel sudden power loss in the bike at a steady speed of 80. I thought it’d be the cross wind but upon listening to the beats of the engine I could actually notice it missing a few beats every few minutes. Upon stopping at a roadside dhaba I informed the guys about this… first we devoured some egg preparations (must say the food was not all that happening) after this Rocky and I started trouble shooting on the bike and realized that the spark plug was not in a very good state and needed some cleaning, done that and we rolled again… dunno what took over Rocky post lunch on our way back… he and Orgy both disappeared into the horizons speeding line maniacs… I had maintained a steady 80 as I still didn’t want to push the bike too bad on the crappy petrol. Prateek was right on our tail all the while, saw Rocky, Pallavi and Orgy waiting for us when we reached the Hebbal flyover again… stopped there, talked for a while decided to make more plans like this and said our goodbyes… reached home around 6:30-7ish in the evening…

Reached home all thrilled and happy and glad that I’ve made friends with some of the most genuine people on this planet! Guess its too good to have a few food friends… the ride was just a day trip but my respect and admiration for my friends grew a lot!

Music

2008-06-09T12:45:00.003+05:30

…I suffer from this insane psychological condition... I need to listen to music when I’m doing something that needs concentration and sitting still at one place (hardly happens) I initially noticed this trait when I was in the 10th grade and used to study for my math paper, one of the subjects that I hated in those days…

That year, my cousin had gifted me a set of little box speakers to keep in my room and listen to music whenever I want. He also had happily handed me down his used cassette player to setup a pseudo music system in my room. Whenever I studied for math, I’d pop in a cassette into the tape, keep the speakers on each corner of my study table and start solving problems. A very simple rule that I had laid was to take a break only once I listen to the entire cassette.

I kept listening to more and more music and thankfully I managed to pass out of my 10th grade with exceptionally good grades for my math paper…. Since then I decided that I’m gonna listen to music whenever I need to sit in a place for a longer time and to concentrate… I finally realized that I was a music fan, not only a fan but a complete music buff! There’d be some music playing either when I’m at home, while I commute and even when I’m at work (not many people know this) I got myself a very inconspicuous pair of headsets that I connect to my computer and then listen to online music over and over and over… then I got introduced to the online radio phenomenon and I just got hooked to it!

As of now, I listen to all sorts of music. Starting from Indian classical to heavy metal, jazz to hip-hop and even the occasional filmy tunes...

Okay coming onto track.

I recently discovered a very wonderful online music presence handled by a fellow Indian who has carved a niche on the international online music scene! The station is called IndiaBeat01. it is handled by a someone called Samiran Gupta. Know where they plays music from? Saddi Dilli!!!! And here is the best news yet I got today; EMI (the music giant) are going to exclusively distribute boutique music label IndiaBeat

Here is the press release I got on it today…

5th June 2008, Mumbai: EMI Virgin announced today their exclusive distribution agreement with boutique music label, IndiaBeat.

IndiaBeat, which has had a popular presence on the Internet as an online radio station and music-related social networking site since 2006, covers the genres of Indian classical, jazz, progressive rock and fusion music. Slated for its debut in the latter part of June 2008, IndiaBeat is planning releases by critically-acclaimed artistes including, Sanjay Mishra, Pete Lockett, Amit Chatterjee, Broto Roy, Amit Heri, Henrik Andersen, Shashank and several others. A marketing kickoff with a sampler is expected later this month.

From the time when Yehudhi Menuhin, Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha collaborated in the mid sixties, Indian music has held great interest and has enjoyed widespread popularity particularly in Europe, UK and North America. Indian musicians are regularly seen and heard performing across the world. Equally, it is not uncommon to find musicians from the west spending long periods of time in India, sharing, exchanging and honing their skills, side by side with their counterparts here. With the passage of time, Indian classical music and its musical instruments have influenced global sounds at different points to create new audiences.

“India is a vast nation with diverse musical tastes. Classical, jazz and fusion music performances, while very well attended have a poor co-relation to CDs sold. Thus it is IndiaBeat’s clear objective to help popularize and sustain niche genres for the discerning music lover in India,” says IndiaBeat co-founder Samiran Gupta.

“We are looking forward to infusing the IndiaBeat catalogue in to our repertoire in India. Like all EMI products, our customers can look forward to taking home a rich musical experience each time they purchase from the IndiaBeat catalogue,” said EMI Senior Manager Anand Srinivasan

For more information please contact, Samiran Gupta at indiabeat01@gmail.com

Well, I hope they make some really great music in the coming future and music lovers like me can listen to all of it over and over :D

BTW, if you do have a musical ear and are able to appreciate the Indian Jazz, Fusion, classical or any other genre I’d very strongly suggest that you give this station a good listen… you might actually like it! you can also find it on http://www.live365.com/

Movie Marathon

2008-06-09T11:42:00.000+05:30

In the last 2 weeks I saw so many old, new movies seen at the PVR Cinemas Gold class and so many on my home theater system…

I’ll make a list of all the movies I saw…

An Inconvenient truth – an amazing and hard hitting documentary narrated and presented by Al Gore on the status of our planet now and how it will deteriorate in the coming years (read ‘years’ not ‘decades’ or ‘centuries’ I’m sure we’ll manage to finally screw-up our planet in a very short time)

Friday – a relatively old ‘hood movie’ made by Ice Cube completely brainless fun
Next Friday – the sequel to the original movie
Friday after the next – a sequel to the sequel (was okayish guess after the first 2 movies they lost the charm along with most of the original cast)
Barber Shop – another Ice Cube movie that was fun to watch (I’m a big fan of a lot of the black artists)

Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull – a very amazingly made yet another Indy movie with a bit boring end… I loved the movie till they all went into the antechamber and then lost it after the aliens appeared, not that I am not a fan of aliens (in fact I do believe they are out there and I’d love to meet them once) but them coming into the movie and taking all the credit was a bit let downing .

The Rambo collection – if you still don’t know, I’m a big fan of the overly macho action movies; my personal movie collection has a lot of those and was missing on the RAMBO collection, got it and watched all the four movies when the wifey was out on work and I was lying at home mending my sprained neck (don’t ask me what happened to the neck, its mighty embarrassing).

Pirates of the Caribbean at world’s end – just had to watch Captain Jack Sparrow to get back some attitude in life, savvy?

Sarkar Raj – yet another nicely made Sarkar movie from the RGV labs, I saw the review of the movie on one of those shows where a guy called Rajiv Masand gives out very entertaining, blunt and almost accurate reviews of the newly released moves on the box office… when I saw RM’s review on Sarkar Raj, I was actually disappointed coz I had already bought the tickets for the gold class and here this gent said that the movie is a worthless boring long and dragging RGV disaster. But honestly I was very strangely surprised when the movie turned out really impressive and much better than what I thought it would be.

DDLJ – the evergreen SRK and Kajol move that released over a decade ago but still impresses both the wifey and I equally :D

Maine Pyar Kiya – what a funnily made movie with loads of ham-acting and yet it managed to be a super duper block buster in its days… fun to watch something like this after so many years.

World’s fastest Indian – a movie dedicated to the legendary Burt Munroe who broke the land speed record on his Indian motorcycle at the Bonneville Salt Flats, worth watching this move not because it is a motorcycle related movie but it shows a very impressive way of approach to life by Sir. Anthony Hopkins who has played the character of Burt Munroe and has reflected that life is all about being optimistic and living in the moment… a very touching story.

Fools rush in – the perfect mush filled movie with my favorite Salma Hayek and Mathew Perry. How people of different ethnicities fall for each other and face so much ‘music’ together.

There were a couple more movies but I strangely am not able to recall the names for them… oh, by the way I’m also reading the funny Dilbert books the latest being ‘Welcome to Cubicleville’ which is as hilarious as the other books. Darn I can relate to so many of the instances in these books!

Well, that has been me since a while…
Okay then, cheerio, ta ra and all that :D

Happy Birthday

2008-05-23T15:25:00.003+05:30

It's my Happy Budday.... YAY! YAY! YAY!

I'll grow one year older this May 24th

Growing old is mandatory but the 'growing up' part will be thought about when i grow up :p

cheers to you all!!!!

Guardian Bell

2008-05-19T12:34:00.005+05:30

while rummaging through the internet i came across a very interesting american myth that i just had to share with you guys...

many of you who know bikers or bike tourers that according to you are jut cursed with crashing on every ride! (i for sure know a couple bikers who crash once in a while) know the reason for that?

here goes: this is an original excerpt from http://www.guardinabell.com/ it is just too interesting to share...

Legend has it that Evil Road Spirits have been latching themselves on to motorcycles for as long as there have been bikes on the road. These Evil Road Spirits are responsible for mechanical problems and bad luck along a journey.Legend goes on to say that by attaching a small bell onto your bike, the Evil Road Spirits will become trapped inside the bell where the constant ringing drives them insane, making them lose their grip until they fall to the ground. (Ever wonder where potholes come from?)Legend also has it that the mystery of the Guardian™ Bell carries twice as much power when it is purchased by a friend or loved one and given as a gift.Show someone how much you care. Offer them defense against the Evil Road Spirits! Give a Guardian™ Bell and share the Legend of Good Luck it offers to a motorcycle and its rider!

and here is their link againhttp://www.guardianbell.com/

go ahead! if you know any biker who would want something like this, go crazy and gift it to them! :D

experience of the co-rider

2008-04-28T14:20:00.003+05:30

this is the email my wifey sent to one of the biker groups I'm part of; the words are not mine and are here coz i felt very happy when i saw her email here and just had to share with you all :D

Co-rider
Posted by: "tana trivedi"
Hello !! Just felt like sharing my experience of riding my longest one dayride, and finally graduating to becoming a co-rider from being just a pillion (Like Rocky says, I am a co-rider now!!!). Its my first log on this forum and I don't expect many people to know who I am, I am Tana- LoveJoshi's wife :) (Bangalore).
We started for Madikere (Coorg) on Saturday morning at 5.30 and after two short breaks at Maddur and one along the road, we reached Bylacuppe at10.30- the roads were good, the weather was also good in the morning and myhusband did ride very safe :) The monastery is beautiful but unfortunately it was very crowded and the fact that it is so commercialized put us off.The ongoing Tibet protests also gave the place a slightly troubled feel.From there we went to Dubare Elephant Camp (Which was even more crowded witheven louder people), and after being troubled by so much noise and heat, we decided not to go further and head back home instead. We left Dubare at 1.30 and again after a few short breaks, reached home by 7.30 in the evening.It was a good ride, 512 kms in all. I can however sue the RE people formaking such narrow seats - they can get really uncomfortable...after a while one gets a wonderful feeling that her bottom does not exists...it is excruciating. The ride was otherwise smooth and riding with proper gear helped in feeling safe. Of course the heat was killing, but the roads were good and RedEye was fast.
Anyway, it was fun, and each time I ride with Love it makes me realize howmuch I trust him with my life, makes me feel closer to him. We have taken a few pictures, Love should be putting them up soon.

here is the link to the pictures : http://picasaweb.google.com/love.joshi/500kmsInADay

and here are some of the initial reactions from the fellow members:

Posted by: "Sumeet Popli" Sun Apr 27, 2008 11:43 pm (PDT)
Hi TanaWelcome to BN. Lovely log. Great to have you here. We've only heard of you as a pillion to Love. Now you are amongst us :)Enjoy your stay. and looking forward to more logs from the "co-rider" perspective

Posted by: "Dr.Prithvi Raval" Mon Apr 28, 2008 12:23 am (PDT)
Yo Tana, Nice wrie up and all ! Perfect English (teacher) Also you are a terrific sport compared to so many others who are either scared stiff or 'kill joys' If this is one of the firsts, I hope Vibhu will post it on the Forum as well. As for the seat, perhaps it can be customized to a broader one. Should not be a problem. LJ's bike is really nice. Since you married him, you've already trusted him with your life :)

Posted by: "Kartik Ayyar" Mon Apr 28, 2008 1:02 am (PDT)
Hi TJ, good log and it seems that you had a great and a 'memorable' ride! So next time, for the BN meet can we expect you riding TB and LJ as the pillion ?? :PLJ are you listening???

Posted by: "Anoop S. Kumar" Mon Apr 28, 2008 12:19 am (PDT)
Good write-up, TJ. Hope the heat didn't affect you both much...--xh--

...Mr Moon...

2008-03-26T19:27:00.002+05:30

Something I scribbled, looking at the waning moon…

Here he comes with his wares to sell,
Sell it in the market of the night,
He sells the stars to the light,
Meet him here, he’s Mr. Moonlight…

I’m the moon, sitting behind the clouds,
I’ll smile at you, when you uncover these shrouds;
The smiling moon in the wailing night
He cries his heart out, to part with his borrowed light

Funny life he lives, borrowed
Cool bright he gives, borrowed
Those wonderful smiles, borrowed
Living off the million miles, borrowed
Companion of the nights, borrowed
Inspiration to the insights, borrowed

All borrowed, nothing to own,
I’m mister moon, on my way home
I howl away the night with you
I’ll always be here, smiling…
… smiling with you…

for you

2008-03-03T18:10:00.001+05:30

Tough questions they ask you,
Questions that leave you tongue-tied
The ones that make you rummage…
…Through the dark pits of your mind

Tell me something nice!
What do I tell you? Is it okay,
If I say, that I love you?
No, that wouldn’t do…

Boost my vanity; make me feel special,
Make me feel pretty… Fumbling for words now?
I can see you fumble; you make me tumble,
In love, in your eyes, into your beauty

Hush you liar, you are a poor flatterer,
At this rate, you will not win me tonight…
Give me one more chance to prove it,
I’ll make things sound just right…

You are the beautiful distress,
Of the equations of my meddling mind,
I stand with my arms stretched in a Y
And you can really make me fly,

You are the reason I fly,
Now you know why…
Even if I try,
I’ll be just another guy
Who doesn’t know much to tell you?
But may be these three words…
I love you…

… Now do I get you?

...One Year...

2008-02-26T17:47:00.008+05:30

This post is specifically dedicated to my lovely and loving wifey who has judiciously jhelo’d me since a year now…

Just last Friday we successfully, courageously and very blissfully completed a complete year of being married to each other. One year! Can you even believe me? Okay for the people who don’t know me… I am a very terrible person to live with, I actually make you go mad… and this woman has lived with me without losing any screws! In fact, she managed to actually tame me and bring me down to an acceptable ‘sane’ level!

I can vouch on being married now… this is one of those amazing experiences that I’d suggest everyone to go through at least once in their life… I am so happy and thankful to god that he hooked me up with my loving wifey and so thankful to my wifey that she agreed to get married to me.

Ours is a traditional ‘arranged Indian marriage’ with a strange twist! I had always been a staunch believer of going through a serious courtship for at least six months before you decide to marry any person. Against this, the wifey and I dated an exact five days at the end of which we had realized that we wanted to get married and spend the rest of our lives with each other.

Its just so much of peace that I feel when I am with her… life does start taking a specific shape and your actions are for a reason… suddenly you start ‘living’ instead of existing or surviving… life gets its meaning and you live and love for a reason.

Sounds like too much mush from me, no? I know… the wifey usually has this effect on me, every time I’m with her or I talk about her I usually get all mushy… she’ll completely deny it though…

Just wanted to publicly profess that I love her a lot and she is the reason that I’m sane, grounded, (almost) human, and the person that I am now… she is the reason for all my smiles and laughter, for my joy and my glee she is the one who made me turn into me!

Finally, a song by the Beatles to end this blog… just love the mush factor in this song… if you haven’t heard it yet, I suggest you give it a hear…

I give her all my love
That's all I do
And if you saw my love
You'd love her too
I love her

She gives me everything
And tenderly
The kiss my lover brings
She brings to me
And I love her

A love like ours
Could never die
As long as I
Have you near me

Bright are the stars that shine
Dark is the sky
I know this love of mine
Will never die
And I love her

Bright are the stars that shine
Dark is the sky
I know this love of mine
Will never die
And I love her

funny tag

2008-02-21T14:33:00.002+05:30

Got a hilarious tag from -XH-… Found it so funny that I have to do it right away! :D

1) Have you been on a date in the last month?
> If going out with the wifey counts as a DATE then I’m going on a date every other day since a year now, :D

2) What was your dream growing up?
> I was a chronic day-dreamer… had too many dreams, started from being a pilot, moved on for a hotelier then a rich playboy… now I’m married and dream to get a job of being a travel show host (anyone interested in giving me a job?)

3) What talent do you wish you had?
> making people happier with my presence.

4) If I bought you a drink what would it be?
> Depends on the mood, if I’m tired and in a hurry, a pint of beer; if I want to enjoy the drink, a long island iced-tea; if I want to be a snob a bottle of some fine wine…

5) Favorite vegetable?
> Veggies? EUWW… they give me the heebie-jeebies

6) What was the last book you read?
> The Afghan by Fredrick Forsyth

7) What zodiac sign are you?
> A perfect GEMINI

8) Any Tattoos and/or Piercing? Explain where.
> A lot of tattoos on my arms and torso, you can read more about them on my older post here

9) Worst Habit?
> I piss people off too easy

10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride?
> I know you dude, you’ll prolly be ‘riding down’ not walking down… but if my pillion seat is empty, you are always welcome!

11) What is your favorite sport?
> playing videogames?

12) Do you have a Negative or Optimistic attitude?
> I’m optimistically negative :p

13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
> depends on the situation, and how drunk I am :p

14) Worst thing to ever happen to you?
> Nothing REALLY WORSE has happened till date (touch wood) a lot of bad things, but hey! That’s life!!

15) Tell me one weird fact about you.
> My passion is riding but I’m perennially scared of twisties and ghats when I ride

16) Do you have any pets?
> Had a loving dog, he passed away… will get some pets once I get a status check on my life :)

17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?
> That’s so old-skool… I actually wait for people to show up at our house

18) What was your first impression of me?
> A very reserved person who didn’t talk too much, but as time passed I met the real you and am happier every time I meet you again! :D

19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
> At this age, clowns are stupid :p

20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
> have more hair (its falling too fast) and try and be a bit more ‘in-shape’

21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
> What’s the crime?

22) What color eyes do you have?
> Brownblack

23) Ever been arrested?
> Yes

24) Bottle or can soda?
> SODA? Not sure, anything goes

25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it?
> Get a few upgrades for the bike, get some more riding gear and invest whatever is left of it

27) What's your favorite place to hang at?
> Home with my better-half, or if she is with me, anywhere

28) Do you believe in ghosts?
> I do. But they don’t believe in me :(

29) Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
> laze in front of the TV, movies, books, music…. This list is unending, only effup is that I don’t have spare time

30) Do you swear a lot?
>started cutting down on it now.

31) Biggest pet peeve?
> There are a lot of things that annoy me, I try and ignore those :D

32) In one word, how would you describe yourself?
>simplyconfusing (is that one word?)

33) Do you believe/appreciate romance?
> I’m romance personified

35) Do you believe in God?
> YES, and he sometimes believes in me…

36) Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?
> would you really wanna do it again?

I’m running out of names of people who would want to do this… please pick it up if you like it just let me know so that I can read about you as well!

Stress Busting - the new way

2008-02-19T18:07:00.004+05:30

It’s been a while since the wifey and I have started something new for our weekends, it’s called ‘Krav Maga’… the official explanation in Hebrew is contact combat. An effective, easy-to-learn, battle tested Israeli system of Self Defense & combat tactics trained in realistic scenarios with 'no rules' & muscle memory based instinctive techniques to eliminate or escape from the threat.

For me the interesting factor for this was the increasing deterioration in the quality of people in Bangalore… off late I’ve seen too many news and incidences of women getting eveteased, molested or worse raped and murdered in our so called developing country. I’ve been perpetually petrified when I personally witnessed two or three different counts of women being teased, grabbed, groped and felt-over on the crowded streets of Bangalore. Sad part is that those women didn’t know how to react or defend themselves in such a situation!

What Krav Maga teaches is not something hyper like most of the martial arts, its the use of your basic common sense and muscle reflexes in different situations, not only this! This is probably the only form of self defense where a woman can easily inflict enough damage to her attacker and get out of a situation even while draped in a saree! Here are a few of the situations that many women can find themselves in and probably use KM to get out;
>What do you do when you’re pinned to the ground? (Classic rape scenario)
>When someone holds a knife to your throat? (Kidnapping anyone?)
>How do you fight back when someone grabs you from behind? (A lot of women experience this in clubs and on the crowded streets)

Well not only will you learn how to get out of all these situations and more… you’ll also burn around 800calories in every one hour session of rigorous KM training; which means really toned muscles and perfectly figured bodies.

The wifey enjoys these sessions so much that she actually looks forward to our weekly weekend sessions of KM… and trust me, she is one of the most aggressive students in the class… most of the guys there are so scared to spar with her! Coz they eventually get beaten-up by a frail looking woman.

What started as an experiment to see if training for self defense can be useful anywhere in life has now changed into a weekly stress busting session for us. We punch the $h^t out of the boxing pads there, do so much of workout, and every week we learn something new that can help in tight spots. I also notice a good improvement in self confidence, reflex and attention levels in both the wife and me. I also notice a growth in the overall awareness of surroundings when we are somewhere out of the house.

Well, this might sound like a paid advertisement for KM. but honestly, after personally witnessing and experiencing the before/after effects of KM I would want to recommend it to everyone I know…

Go ahead people! At least go and see what this thing is and try out one introductory session… I definitely see it an amazing stress buster and a way to keep you safe and sane in today's unsafe and insane world.

you can check it out here:

http://www.kravmagabangalore.com
http://www.selfdefensebangalore.com

Live safe!

P.S. KM is going to arrange a session on Road-Rage. This session will be on February 24 in Bangalore near the Old-Madras road. If you want more details on this do let me know.

Happy Birthday dearest RedEye!

2008-02-15T13:14:00.002+05:30

Last year Valentines Day I got the best gift till date! I got myself my loving beauty, my RedEye.

She is now a year old…
So many adventures we’ve accomplished together!
She’s already done more than 13Kkms, averaging to more than a thousand kilometers of running every month! Now, that’s some good running :-)

I still remember the day I got her… out of the showroom… she was all prissy and prime, shining in all red and silver with lotsa chrome… just like a new bride! :D

In this one year, we changed so much! She got a pair of better and brighter headlamps, louder horns, free-flow ‘goldie’ exhaust, more cushioning on the seats, a bigger tank and loads and loads of love from me!
And I; well, I became calmer, older, more mature and more loving, more adventurous and lastly MARRIED!

The wifey also loves RedEye as much as I do, sometimes though she thinks that I think more of her than her… ;)

We’ve explored so many different destinations and did so many rides! The last one being my ride from Bangalore to Ahmedabad… and yet, there are so many rides still to be done, so many destinations still to be explored and so many horizons yet to be chased…

Hopefully, this year we’ll do Leh-Ladakh (Khardung-la pass, the highest motorable road in the world) and maybe some more!
Sometimes I wish if I was paid to just travel and write about it! (Anyone out there looking for a not-so-good-looking travel show host?)

I just pray that our relationship deepens every kilometer covered and our love and loyalty for each other doesn’t fade… that we ride on and on and on and chase all the horizons we see…
Amen!

"Tag of Names"

2008-02-11T10:54:00.000+05:30

-XH- sent me this funnily hilarious tag... i'm rolling on teh floor reading his answers and how putting in mine!

1. YOUR ROCK STAR NAME: (first pet & current car) Johny Don’thaveone
2.YOUR GANGSTA NAME: (fave ice cream flavor, favorite cookie) chocolate bourbon
3. YOUR “FLY Guy” NAME: (first initial of first name, first three letters of your last name) L-Jos
4. YOUR DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color, favorite animal) Black Dog
5. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you were born) LJ Ahmedabad
6. YOUR STAR WARS NAME: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first) Jos Lo
7. SUPERHERO NAME: (”The” + 2nd favorite color, favorite drink) The Black Bournvita
8. NASCAR NAME: (the first names of your grandfathers) Madhu Himmatlal (muahahahahaha)
10.WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother’s & father’s middle names ) sorry, we hindus are too restricted on ‘middle names’
11. TV WEATHER ANCHOR NAME: (Your 5th grade teacher’s last name, a major city that starts with the same letter) Pandya Pondicherry
12. SPY NAME: (your favorite season/holiday, flower) Winter tuberose (sounds more like a diesease!)
13. CARTOON NAME: (favorite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing right now + “ie” or “y”) Mellon pantshirty
14. HIPPY NAME: (What you ate for breakfast, your favorite tree) cereal banyan
15. YOUR ROCKSTAR TOUR NAME: (”The” + Your fave hobby/craft, fave weather element + “Tour”)The reading snow Tour

i don't know if you guys want to do this but i'll tag gunj and shre to pick up from here and do the honors :D

Reviewer of the month

2008-02-08T17:08:00.001+05:30

i had been a member of the Hungry Bangalore website since a while; been conttributing also a bit of the reviews of a few of the restaurants and places that i like to visit quite often...

guess what? they chose me as the reviewer of the month for February :D

here is the weblink for the same... http://newsletter.hungrybangalore.com/february-newsletter.htm

feels good to brag ;)

cheers!

Shay Day

2008-01-31T13:04:00.000+05:30

got this email in my junk folder... almost deleted it but then thought, what the hell? let's just read it... the story was so interesting and inspiring that i almost cried... read on if you have time...

Two Choices

What would you do? You make the choice. Don't look for a punch line, there isn't one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves learning-disabled children, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question: "When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?"

The audience was stilled by the query.

The father continued. "I believe that when a child like Shay, physically and mentally handicapped comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child."

Then he told the following story:

Shay and his father had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, "Do you think they'll let me play?" Shay's father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.

Shay's father approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, "We're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning."

Shay struggled over to the team's bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. His Father watched with a small tear in his eye and warmth in his heart. The boys saw the father's joy at his son being accepted. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as his father waved to him from the stands. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat.

At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball.

However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay's life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.

The game would now be over. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game.

Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman's head, out of reach of all team mates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, "Shay, run to first! Run to first!" Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.

Everyone yelled, "Run to second, run to second!" Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base. By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball ... the smallest guy on their team who now had his first chance to be the hero for his team. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher's intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman's head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home.

All were screaming, "Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay"

Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, "Run to third! Shay, run to third!"

As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, "Shay, run home! Run home!" Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.

"That day", said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, "the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world".

Shay didn't make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making his father so happy, and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

AND NOW A LITTLE FOOTNOTE TO THIS STORY: We all send thousands of jokes through the e-mail without a second thought, but when it comes to sending messages about life choices, people hesitate. The crude, vulgar, and often obscene pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion about decency is too often suppressed in our schools and workplaces.

If you're thinking about forwarding this message, chances are that you're probably sorting out the people in your address book who aren't the "appropriate" ones to receive this type of message. Well, the person who sent you this believes that we all can make a difference. We all have thousands of opportunities every single day to help realize the "natural order of things." So many seemingly trivial interactions between two people present us with a choice: Do we pass along a little spark of love and humanity or do we pass up those opportunities and leave the world a little bit colder in the process?

A wise man once said every society is judged by how it treats it's least fortunate amongst them.

You now have two choices:
1. Delete
2. Forward

May your day, make it a Shay Day.

interesting tag

2008-01-30T18:42:00.000+05:30

I got tagged by –XH- for this. This is a meme, but a little bit interesting and different. There are 10 points/questions, and you are supposed to elaborate on each point. My responses to everything…

1) It is important to be liked by others: only if you really care about the ‘others’ I usually behave like an uptight prick (according to most people) and still manage to make enough ‘good friends’ that I wouldn’t even think about this question. People are perceptive and perceptions are always different… so bottom line should be “to hell with ‘people’ if the ones who matter to me like me as much as I do them, its all okay” :D

2) Obedience is a virtue: what is obedience? – lemme do a word search…
o•be•di•ence [oh-bee-dee-uh-ns]
1. The state or quality of being obedient.
2. The act or practice of obeying; dutiful or submissive compliance: Military service demands obedience from its members.
3. A sphere of authority or jurisdiction, esp. ecclesiastical.
4. Chiefly Ecclesiastical.
a. Conformity to a monastic rule or the authority of a religious superior, esp. on the part of one who has vowed such conformance.
b. The rule or authority that exacts such conformance.
Honestly, after the meaning put right there I still am kinda confused about the whole ‘obedience’ funda… yaar, obey the rules/norms/principles/etc that your want to ONLY IF U BELIEVE IN THEM! If you don’t know why you do something, but still keep on doing it, what’s the fun of being an individual (in-duh-vidual)? So the honest answer from me to this will be do it if you wanna, but then don’t be a rebel just because you are a cheapass wannabe rebel :p and don’t be submissive to everything that gets thrown your way too!

3) People are not malicious but they become so because of bad experiences or circumstances: line up all those malicious buggers and shoot them in the #$%$@#
Who am I to judge people to be malicious? This is a very classic scenario that I and my wifey go through almost every day, she thinks that the world is a very nice/safe/lovely place and the people here are like angels without their halos… I on the other hand, believe that the world is full of creeps and wannabes who are out there to hurt me and the ones I care about and I’m gonna hunt down each one of those runts and kick their happiness outta their butts… there, you figure it out now… ain’t it a very perceptive subject.
The proper statement here should’ve been “you find people malicious coz you’ve gone through some really ugly shit and some really tough times in your life and now you think that everyone else here is nothing more but a creep who should be castigated.”

4) Education broadens our view and makes people more humane: agree to it to a little bit… some of the things we study in schools do help us when we grow older, not the E=MC2 funda though… but making people humane? Nah, I don’t think so… we’ll be human ONLY if we decide to put whatever we studied as kids into action, in real life. Otherwise, this is just a world of some really well-educated monkeys and donkeys ;)

5) People who have no money troubles are happier: SAYS WHO? Just because they don’t have money problems doesn’t mean that they don’t have any other problems… its human nature to keep their minds clouded with worries and problems, if we have a very long spell of happiness, we start worrying about the impending doom and about the BAD that’s gonna happen very soon :p and trust me, it does happen.

6) As people get older they get wiser: I’ve read a very interesting bumper sticker on a friend’s car “Growing OLD is mandatory but Growing UP is optional” yeah, I do agree that old age does bring a lot of experience in life but how many of the people that you know actually use those experiences to enhance their lifestyle? And there is always the funda of ‘generation gap’ strangely everything our grandparents tell us about is usually outdated or absurd (I consciously listen to my grampa now every time I meet him, dunno how long he’s got to share his experiences with me)

7) You can live on love and fresh air: is it? Try doing it only once, just for one day! Know what? Valentines Day is just round the corner, why don’t you try and spend the whole day in your beloved’s arms without food or water… just live on all the LOVE and FRESH AIR you can get! Muahhhahhhahha
Even though I’m married and I absolutely love my wife so much that I’ve got her name tattooed across my heart, I wouldn’t survive only on love and fresh air! I’m practical and I’m human… next question!

8) There is a celestial guardian angel looking after each one of us: STRONGLY AGREE! I am a strong believer of ‘guardian angels’ and I’m sure I got a few of them hovering right over my head to look after me… otherwise how can I explain my completely ‘uneventful ride home’? Something or somebody does look after me.

9) All living beings reincarnate: They do? In that case I’ll be a dog in my next life and you will be a fire-hydrant :p
I’m still trying to run out of my current life so will not even want to think about the ‘reincarnation’ part…

10) Heaven and Hell are places you go to after death: Heaven and Hell are places right here on this planet and you’ll go through them in this lifetime! You don’t need to wait till you are dead to experience the joys of both :D
My dad has taught me a very important thing in life, we make our heavens and hells here in this lifetime, and we get to experience them in bits and pieces…
If you are living an honest life (honest means, being true ONLY to yourself) and not hurting others deliberately, you’ll live the life very happily and you’ll get to see more pieces of the ‘heaven’ here…
And if you try to cross me, ‘I’ll give you all the hell you want’ :p heh heh heh

Anyways, this was fun to write, but, there should’ve been a disclaimer onto the questions (relates to only situations in a perfect world, under perfect circumstances) I don’t know who all frequent my blog so if you find the questions interesting and if you want to come-up with your own version of answers, be my guest and tag yourself  just notify me once you do it so that I can read your answers too! :D

Cheers!

Accident

2008-01-28T14:43:00.000+05:30

Last Thursday was a very busy morning, we had woken up earlier than out scheduled time since both the wifey and I had decided that we’ll start our new workout regime once again! Went for a nice little jog in the park next to our house, came back just to realize that we are running late now.

A quick shower, some breakfast and hop on the bike to start the grueling day.

Since we were slightly late, the traffic had started picking up on the roads and I noticed that the amount of the ‘idiot commuters’ had increased relatively… those who are still new to the idea of ‘idiot commuters’ lemme give a bit of gyan; these are the people who will ride/drive anywhere on the roads (this includes pavements, gutter lids and other pedestrians’ feet) they will try and put their vehicle in the smallest gap available in the traffic… anyways, because of these ‘idiot commuters’ I had to be extra cautious and extra calm since wife was still pillion.

Dropped her at her destination and took off towards my office… the traffic in Bangalore is like an anthill after rains… everyone is running around crazy, everyone is in a hurry and everyone thinks that everyone else on the road are idiots. So I was one amongst the few thousand idiots on the roads, listening to music on my cell-phone and trying to be as careful and calm as I could. I was happy that I was avoiding most of the idiots around and keeping a pretty decent gap on all the sides for my bike.

Suddenly all the traffic came to a bottleneck… there were two BMTC busses racing each other on the really jam-packed road. The busses looked like giant caterpillars bursting at the seams with loads and loads of passengers. The drivers ‘saale Schumacher ki aulaad’ were all over the road and I kept my distance way behind them looking at the sheer stupidity happening on the road.

At the signal the busses stopped neck to neck and the drivers looking at each other like the drivers on a drag-strip. But this ain’t any strip! This is the main roads in an overly populated town! Anyways, I slowly rolled ahead of them with the movement of the smaller vehicles and got in front of them, the signal went green and whoosh both of the maniacs were at it again! I tried to be as far from them as I could, one of the busses shot past me like a loose cannonball! I was worried now and wanted to stay as far as I could… I was almost riding on the divider of the road, when boom! One of the bus drivers knocked the bike from the back… I fishtailed out of balance and crashed on the bloody tarmac!

Thank god for all the crash guards I had put of the bull… I was pinned under the bike but the weight was not directly on me and I wasn’t hurt too bad, also the protective gloves and the helmet ensured that all my important parts are still safe and in working condition… I ended with a slightly busted knee and a lot of rage in the brain! (just wanted to pull that god$%$^$%^ effin driver out of his effin buss and kick his effin eff off…

The cops arrived at the scene almost immediately (hoping to fleece some poor bugger) I got up and screamed at them for the horrendous behavior of the bus drivers and shouted again in general to vent off some steam… the cops realized that I’d be a tough nut to crack to fleece they consoled me a bit, pulled the bus driver away and asked him to scoot… by the time I realized what was happening, the inspector (or whoever he was) came up to me and told me that I’m obstructing traffic flow and I should get the eff outta there, if I want to lodge a complaint I should very well go to the police station 3-4 kilometers away from there and do so…

I was getting too late for work and I’ve learnt out of my so many years of experience on the roads here that nothing works better than, beating up the bugger who hurt you and roll out of there…

I took the bike to Saleem to check if there was any major damage… nothing much, just a bent crash guard and some more scrape marks on the sides… the bike was A-okay… from there I went to the office to meet my doc and see if I had any major damage… she checked, put some iodine and almost made me cry of the pain and then said that everything is okay, I might have some swelling for a couple days and that it might hurt for a while…

The day went on… I limped for 2 days and then am back to normal… but somewhere I’m also thinking;

Will we ever have roads with ‘responsible’ commuters on them? Will the public transport actually be avant-garde? Will the cops actually learn to be more courteous and give respect to people?

Too many questions that I guess have no answers…

Well, let’s learn to be one amongst them… WHATEVER!

wannabe LOSER!

2008-01-23T18:20:00.000+05:30

BMI = 29… OMG!!!

Darn, shoot, $%$%^$@, FDW#$#$#%%^, idiot!

I can’t curse myself enough… after getting married and staying in shape for a few months; we suddenly started slipping in our small haven of happiness and eating and started gobbling up all the junk we could lay our hands on.

During my last visit home, I’ve eaten so much! I remember chomping down 500gms of kulfi all alone in just one sitting! Those pizzas I devoured at Choice! Darn, what was I thinking? The wifey tried to stop me a couple times but I didn’t listen to her… even my usual snacking at home was handfuls of cashews and almonds.

I had started feeling a bit heavy around the waist since we returned back but I didn’t pay it too much heed, I kept on my gastronomical expressions and experiences till yesterday, I had to go and donate some blood for a friend’s wife’s operation… I walk into the blood bank feeling like a macho hero and tell them about the donation thingy, he asks me my height and weight, I knew the height so promptly told him the figure feeling really tall and big and strong! Next, he asks my weight and I being a dumb smartass that I am, told him that I’m not sure about the latest number, why don’t we check it? He asks me to step on the scale and BOOM! I was shot down from my glory flight to the pits of weight and being heavy… I knew that I was overweight but didn’t have any idea on how heavy I had become.

I kept the number in mind and did a BMI calculation on one of the websites with my height and weight figures. All hell broke loose… my BMI is 29 (almost obese!) I got so paranoid about this… I’ve decided that I’ll cut down all the crap that I eat. Now onwards it’s gonna be a healthy, non-fat and fast diet. Only salads and healthy stuff will go down this gullet unless I don’t get back in a decent shape. I have to get rid of aver 20 kilos now and this time I will not stop till I lose it…

For once in my life, I want to be a proud loser.

Please pray to god that I get through this ordeal at the earliest.

Homecoming

2008-01-17T15:13:00.000+05:30

Coming home was never so much fun!

This was the first time when I rolled the RedEye in the compound of our Ashima apartment in Ahmedabad… this was around 22:30 on December 23, 07. My parents had no clue that I was going to ride all the way from B’lore to Abad (they in fact were expecting me to step out of the airport the next evening) thanks to the changed looks that I developed overtime (courtesy wifey) my mum didn’t even know who this guy with long curly hair and a goatee was! I had to actually convince my parents that it was actually me and that I had ridden all the way from Bangalore in 2 days.

Oh JOY! Papaji threatened that if I was any younger and living with them, I would’ve been grounded by now for doing such ‘insane heroics’ he and mumma actually reprimanded the wifey for letting me ‘do such stupid stunts’ thankfully she was brave, bold and smart enough to keep her feet down and talk some sense back to them… after around 2 hours of arguments, discussions, consolations and making-ups they accepted the facts and came to terms that their little boy has finally decided to grow older, a bit grown up but still does the childish insanities :D we all finally slept happy, they happy to see their son after almost a year, the wifey happy to have her hubby back and me just happy to be back ‘home’! To get a decent bed after over 40hours of being on the roads and one heck of a saddle-sore ride…

The next morning all charged and renewed! Mumma and the wifey had a prior appointment scheduled with their beautician so I was all free to do nothing! I called up the local RE showroom in Ahmedabad and scheduled myself an impromptu appointment with the mechanic there to get RedEye’s few knick-knacks fixed. When I reached there I realized that there were only 3 mechs, one supervisor and the store owner there! I mean c’mon! Here in B’lore even the small mech has 3 helpers… but who cares as long as I get my things done? The people there were mighty impressed to see RedEye, she is a BIG & LOUD bike, those of you who haven’t seen her in real life, lemme tell you a few interesting things that you might notice about her… she’s got a monster 20L tank (almost double of the stock tank) a ‘Goldie’ exhaust (which means that the firing is louder and more meatier) she’s got 2 extra auxiliary head lamps, extra horns so basically my bike is bigger, louder, brighter and makes more noise on road to grab attention.

Anyways, the mech felt very happy to work on a bike that had traveled almost 1650kms without a single glitch in only 2 days which included enuff pit stops and a night-halt at Pune. I was given special treatment there and I felt so happy! After everything was done, they didn’t charge me a penny for whatever they did! Wow! Now this is what we call good customer support :D

Came back home and had some amazing ‘mumma made’ lunch at home, dozed off in the afternoon for a while and just lazed the day around… all the days that followed were full of lazing around, socializing, driving around in papaji’s car and having a ball at home!

One of those days we did a day trip to Rajkot. Left pretty early from A’bad to make sure that we don’t face too much of the gujarati heat. I was still in my biker mindset when I sat in the car; I have sort of decided that for any ride longer than 200kms we should stop only after 100kms. Papaji was not very happy with this idea coz he likes to stop at almost all the roadside dhabas and try the different food there, he is one absolute foodie and I guess I get my taste buds and passion for food :D we reached Rajkot pretty well in time! The first stop here was to meet Dilip uncle, he runs the ‘Prakruti parivar’ (nature family) and has a great knowledge about animals… we started talking about keeping pets at home and he suggested we get a pair of tortoises, and then told us so much about almost all the animals (and birds and reptiles) that we can keep at our Bangalore home as pets. From here we went out to meet Jaleshbhai (the guy who has an amazing toy store and now also a great bakery) saw his progress in life, felt very happy talking to him and moved on to Omkarbhai’s place, I was thrilled to finally meet his sweet dog Mary… also saw his collection of lovebirds and his tortoises… this made me realize how much both the wifey and I miss a pet in our life and that unless something about our long-term plans is finalized we wouldn’t be able to get anything :(

The day progressed into evening and then slowly started slipping in the night, we had a long way to travel before we hit the sack so around 8ish in the evening we finally headed back towards Ahmedabad, we again were making good time, but the endless lines of trucks and their blazing highbeams made the drive pretty uncomfortable, besides I was feeling a bit tired and sleepy. We stopped for dinner at a hotel, had some khichadi-kadhi (which by-the-way could’ve well been a dog’s dinner) and rolled out, just as we got on the road the car started handling weird and we discovered a puncture in one of the front tires. Thankfully we were close to a puncture repair shop and the whole episode got over in around 30minutes without any major repercussions. We started back again and now the road just seemed unending! The wifey offered to drive the rest of the way, I happily agreed and swapped seats with her… we reached home and just crashed out, what a day!

One more highlights of my stay home this time was the 2 different sets of puppies we had in the society, one set of five pups near the main gate and the second set of 3 in the back garden. I played so much with them!!! Most of my conscious time was spent with the pups and by the time I left, they actually recognized every time I stepped out of the house :)

I was supposed to ride back to Bangalore, leave on the morning of January 2 and reach home by late 4th or early 5th but I had so much fun this time at home that I just didn’t feel like going away or getting back from home. Finally I agreed to papaji’s plan of putting RedEye on a transporter’s truck and staying back a couple days so that I can fly back with the wifey on 5th. This was a relief for all of us! My parents didn’t want me to ride back coz “its too dangerous and something might happen to me” , the wifey wanted to spend more time with me in Ahmedabad and just wanted to revisit a few of the places we dated at in A’bad before our wedding, and finally I didn’t want to ride the same way again back, if I was riding I wanted to do a non-stopper all the way to B’lore but I realized that it would’ve been a blind-man’s bluff and both the bike and I would’ve taken a huge toll, which I was not sure about taking…

Anyways, I finally left Ahmedabad in a jet-plane on the 5th morning and got back to B’lore, after coming back I had to wait a grueling 6days before I actually got the bike back in my hands, she came back in a very bad state, the lamps were busted, there were major scratches on the fenders and tank and she just had gotten too dirty to recognize! I took her to the mech and kept her there for 3days, finally she got revived and she roared back on the roads of Bangalore… as they say in Hindi, ‘ant bhala to sab bhala’

Honestly, after this trip, I’ve decided that I need to get back to Ahmedabad, am done living alone here, we can do with some ‘family warmth’ both the wifey and I are keen on moving back ‘home’ now… pray for us that we finally find a way back home :D

Cheers!

Chasing horizons

2008-01-07T13:30:00.001+05:30

‘Just Ride’ this was the catchphrase I learnt on my last Hampi ride with the wifey… we had rode with the Bike Nomads for their fifth annual meet and I got to meet a lot of different bikers who ride just for the passion of biking… nothing to prove, no wars to fight, no revolutions to lead, no lives to change... just the joy of the ride.

During this meet I decided that I also want to do a solo long ride and see how it feels to be all alone on the roads chasing the horizons, witnessing the changing landscapes and feeling all the thoughts blow out of your hair in the wind… I wanted to RIDE!

The thought had been in my mind since a while; all I needed was a bit of motivation and push in the right direction from a few guys to get me going. I decided that I’ll ride from Bangalore to Ahmedabad and back for the Christmas and New Year holidays that I had applied for.

Planning and preparation for the same started almost immediately! Got spare cables for the bike, spare tube for the tires, a little bit of tools (most of the tools were borrowed from friends) puncture repair fluids, balaclavas, spare visors for the helmet, and a few other small things) all of my biker buddies here at Bangalore and in other locations like Pune, Bombay and other parts of the country who knew about my plans were really excited about the whole thing and kept me really motivated and charged for the ride. The last minute preps included an oil change for the bull’s engine, checking of all the wiring, tightening all the nuts bolts and screws and getting the monster tank filled to the top!

The last two days before the ride were the most painful for me; I was too excited and couldn’t calm down at all! My spirit was itching to cover all the roads that I can. On Friday I dropped the wife to the airport (she was traveling the ‘sane way’) saw the ridiculously long line at the check-in counter and told her that I’ll be in touch once I hit the road. We said so long and I went back for my final packing and preparations. The saddlebags were packed, tank bag had enough food, fanny-pack filled with the necessaries and my riding gear was laid out for the early morning ride. Once satisfied with the packing and preps I crashed thinking that I’ll wake up at 3am, get ready and ride out by 4am.

Next morning!

Awoke by 4:30am, (darn this is late!) by the time I showered, dressed and set out, it was already 5:45… I was kinda worried that I might not make my time if I started so late! But then the words of a veteran biker echoed in my head “ride for the joy of it… don’t set too optimistic goals… you can stop whenever you want, wherever you want!” I finally rode out ‘dressed to the tooth’ at 5:45am on December 22. Strangely the roads were relatively empty (thank god for the winter mornings) I reached out on the NH4 highway by 6:15ish and then let the bull rip for a while… both the biker and the bike were fresh and prepared for a long run for the day! Amazingly, since I was solo, the bike reached 100kmph easily and I couldn’t even feel it! My first stop was around 100kms from B’lore the morning chill had set in, a faint light on the horizons I clicked a solitary picture from my phone-cam, drank some of the mango juice I was carrying and started again.

First pit stop was the Reliance A1 Plaza at Chitradurga (around 166kms from B’lore) when I pulled in the plaza it was already quite crowded but being a solitary guy you find a place to sit pretty easily! I ordered a nice south Indian breakfast of Idli-Vada and some freshly brewed filter coffee… the junta there had some kids with them and the kids were the friendliest people I saw there! All of them lined up around me and started asking questions one of them I still remember (we going to Bangalore, you go where?) (Are you India?) heh heh, was really funny and cute, I finished my breakfast quick and rolled out again.

From Chitradurga I rode straight to Davangere, the road is one straight stretch with a few potholes and very few craters, I could maintain pretty decent speeds, crossed Davangere in a flash and then the road just started turning from good to bad and bad to worse! Almost one hundred kilometers of sand, dust, dirt and no roads! But as I’ve learnt from my numerous rides in Karnataka, every stretch of bad road eventually ends and gives way to a nice well carpeted good tar road. By the time I reached Hubli-Dharwad, the road conditions had come back to normal and then improved again! My stop here was a very smallish chai and sootha break. By now, the muscles in my butt and my hamstrings had started a bit of tingling… not serious pain yet but yeah, the seat did feel as if it was on fire! Heh heh…

I crossed Belgaum and entered Maharashtra when I landed near Kolhapur… I kept taking my 10minute breaks every 100kms on the way but they were not very special, maybe a sootha break and a swig from the water bottle and ride again. Upon hitting Kolhapur I realized that the state had changed as the traffic sense amongst people suddenly changed drastically! I saw too many bikers, pedes and dogs along the road but didn’t stop, just became extra cautious to ensure that I don’t crash into something. After Kolhapur as I neared Pune I could sense fatigue setting in, thankfully on every break I would find motivating and inspiring sms messages on my cell phone from the fellow BNers. I crossed the Karjat tunnel when darkness had already set in, called up Capt. Nandu Chitnis who was my host for the evening at Pune; took directions from him and rode on into Pune! What a feeling! YAY! YAY! I had covered over 800kms in a day!

Pune has changed a lot fro what it used to be in 2001. I had spent 2 days in Pune in 2001 and had fallen in love with the town, found the people very amiable, the traffic manageable and the town to be small. But now! Oh my god! The city had expanded out of its limits… it was like looking at a really fat lady trying to fit into a tight bikini :D people everywhere, crazy traffic and too much pollution… I could actually see smog settling on the city while I rode past.

After managing to get lost a few times and coordinating with Capt, I finally landed in his apartment’s parking lot. 891kms clocked on my trip meter! Was exhilarated but also was a bit pooped out when I pulled the bike in. Upon meeting Capt I started feeling much better... I was showed the guest room and I rushed into the shower for one of the best showers I had in ages! Amazing hot water, washing all the stress and aches off my body… upon stepping out of the shower I find Capt waiting with his trademark 2KF (for those who don’t know Capt and the story of 2KF, it means ‘2 bottle KingFisher’ – a premium brand beer) sat with Capt, guzzled some beer, smoked more soothas, chatted about this and that, and Medini aunty called us for dinner… what a sumptuous meal! Palak-paneer, aloo-gobhi ki subji, fulkas, dal-chawal, and some amazing sweet. I ate like a glutton and then crashed… in less than 15minutes I was fast asleep! The only drawback here was the excessive amounts of mosquitoes in the area! I woke up around 1am with a swollen face (swollen because of all the mosquito bites) pulled my bedding right under the fan and slept off again, woke up around 4ish, got dressed, messaged Adi Bhelke (a fellow BNer who was going to ride with me from Pune till B’bay) woke Capt in the wee hours of morning to say goodbye… had a cuppa chai and rode out with Adi.

Early morning, cool breeze, mist, fog and smog all along the way! We took the route towards Bombay… the road was whizzing past as we stopped at Lonavala for breakfast. Ordered our last ‘south Indian’ meal for a few weeks; had some utthapams and coffee, while having our breakfast we saw a gang of some Bombay based bikers who all rode in with some cool bikes! I remember seeing a goldwing, a HD sporster and one Suzuki sports bike… funny part is that we were admiring their bikes and they in turn were looking at my bull! Well I must admit, my bull is a pretty looking steed, and for the ride it was laden with the saddlebags, the tankbag and lot of other stuff on it. Felt really funny! From Lonavala we started for Vashi (Bombay) where Prasad Temkar (BN B’bay chapter) was going to meet us.

Dunno what was going through my mind while doing the Lonavala twisties; I missed turning on one of those and climbed on the sandbank… almost an accident happening, but there were a few guardian angels looking over my shoulder that I was on the bike and the bike was all okay after this incident. After this, I kept my speeds relatively lower on the ghat section tillwe hit Bombay. Finding Prasad was not too hard but we had spent quite a lot of time on the road and it was already late morning when we actually met up. My bull’s chain was a bit loose by now so Prasad found a local mech who fixed it for me in 30bucks. Adi said goodbye here as he was riding back to Pune now, and Prasad took over the lead to guide me out of Bombay city towards Thana (where the milestone says Ahmedabad 545kms – in Prasad’s language) the climatic differences were very obvious, I could feel myself sweating like a pig in my riding jacket and the heat was becoming unbearable. We stopped once more on the way to get me a bottle of water and some more mango juice in a bottle (this was courtesy BN B’bay chapter as Prasad put it) reached Thana in a while after that, had our soothas and Prasad did show me the milestone showing Ahmedabad 545kms. Said farewells and I rolled towards home time in my watch a little after noon.

My initial plan was to ride till Surat, stop over for the night there and then ride towards Ahmedabad the next day… call it the amazing speeds or the amazing roads, I reached Surat around 4ish (not bad!) stopped at a nice chai tapir for some chai, chatted up with the locals there, they were too amazed to see such a wacky looking bike and an even wackier looking biker :D I got to know that Narendra Modi had won the CM elections for Gujarat again! Called up the wifey from there and she said that the whole city of Ahmedabad is in a jubilant mood and major celebrations are happening all over, roads blocked and stuff. She also suggested that I should stopover somewhere on the way and not hit A’bad.

After Surat it felt that god was not on my side at all! The roads were nonexistent. There were diversions every couple kilometer and everything was covered in sand and dust, with mile long lines of trucks and cars… felt as if I wouldn’t be able to get out of here anytime soon! My average speed had dropped from 80kph to 40kph and I felt like a slug moving along the really bad traffic. I actually was cursing myself now in my helmet, screaming and shouting that I shouldn’t have done this stupidity, should’ve taken a flight like every other person and not thought about riding out… finally Baroda came and the roads improved… it was around 8ish now and I stopped after Baroda for a chai and to ask the chaiwallah if he knew any decent hotel to spend the night. This guy was one extraordinary enthu cutlet. He was coaxing me, “kya saab, itna saara chalake aaye ho aur an 100kms pehle ruk jaoge?” honestly, he did make sense, he gave me one complimentary cup of masala chai and some more words of inspiration and I rode out in the night!

I had decided that I’ll reach home tonight, nomatterwhat… strangely all my exhaustion and fatigue had suddenly vanished and I was all charged to reach home now… stopped at an Essar gas station and put in some of their ‘advanced petrol’ in the bike (must say it felt better than the shell that I usually use for my bull!) called the wifey from here and told her that I’ll hit A’bad in a couple hours. The ride from here was pretty decent, once again, the winter evenings had demotivated most of the ‘faltu’ riders on the way so the roads were relatively empty. When A’bad was only 50kms away I encountered a trio of ‘filmy, faltu, lukkha’ bikers on one 100CC bike racing with me, I usually avoid racing with such guys who don’t even have the brains to wear a helmet on the highway but they were becoming irritating… every few minutes they’ll zoom past me, slow down, try to cut my way and do the same circus again… I kept maintaining my normal speeds but they became too irritating! I finally twisted the wrist and shot over 120kph for a while, the roads were still empty and traffic was strangely was nonexistent… in a short while I lost them out of my rearview mirror and I regained my ‘normal’ speed.

Ahmedabad came with its hustle and bustle, I was sane enough to remind myself that I’ve approached into the city and the speeds were relatively slower and the concentration was extra high… went and picked up the wifey from her parents’ place and we rode together to my house… my parents had no idea that I was riding all the way from Bangalore to Ahmedabad, so when I rolled through the gate into the compound, they just freaked out! Funniest thing is that they didn’t even recognize me for the first few minutes… heh heh

The bike was finally unloaded of the bags, I took off the riding gear, had a nice shower and then we sat and chatted. My dad had ruled in his ultimatum that I will not be allowed to do any of such antics in front of him ‘EVER’!

The next morning I woke-up fresh and recharged, took the bike to the Royal Enfield dealership in Ahmedabad, met Samir Dutta the owner of the store who got the small knickknacks serviced for free! That guy had a great spirit and I really hope I get to move to A’bad to expand a few biking clubs there aswell!

Well this was my dream ride that finally came true. The trip meter clicked 1648kms in a total of two days and I now feel much better about myself and the bike… I was supposed to ride back too but that was a flop story and I’ll tell you about it in the next post.

A few people I want to mention and thank here:

Capt. Nandu & Medini Chitnis – for their amazing hospitality, the amazing food and the 2KF.
Adi Bhelke – for riding with me from Pune till Vashi
Prasad Temkar – for guiding me out of Vashi all the way till Thana and showing me the A’bad 545kms milestone.
Doc Arnob & Doc Prithivi – to keep me company and sending their guidance every pit stop.
Rocky – kept calling me everytime I stopped and motivated me
Wifey – for being who she is and keeping the whole matter hush-hush till I landed in A’bad
Cdidi & Jiju – they were with me all through the ride ‘long-distance’
Anoop aka XH – for lending me his tools
Samir Dutta – for servicing the bike free @ a’bad and spending so much time with me there.

Finally I thank RedEye – for being the beast it is and taking me places…

Life is all about the journeys, not the destinations…

RIDE ON!

p.s. stay tuned for my part 2 to this blog (my stay in A’bad and my journey back)

the rider becomes "the tester"

2007-12-17T13:21:00.000+05:30

last saturday i met my good friend KJ who runs the Cramster gear co.... we were sitting and chatting about things in general, biking, bikers and the likes. i had dropped to his office to pick up a pair of touring gloves for my coming ride from Bangalore to Ahmedabad. well, he didn't have the gloves in stock :( phooey!

when i spotted a pair of great looking boots at his store, i asked him details about them and he said that this is the 'test pair' of the boots he is planning to launch soon! he just wanted someone to test them on a longish ride across different situations and terrains and give him an update on the same.

i guess lady luck was smiling extra hard on me that day, he offered the pair to me for testing upon the condition that i give him a proper feedback on the same....

BTW, if you want to know what all the boots endured read my travelogue here

so here is my feedback for the Cramster touring boots.

1) Quality - the build quality of the boots is pretty impressive, fits snug on the feet and rises all the way to the shins (just where the knee protector of the riding pants end) the grip is an anti-slip material, the similar we see on the tecnic boots.
2) Comfort - the boots have a breathable liner all along the inside and a water resistant 'rubbery' material on the outside so even if you ride through rains or put your foot in a puddle, there is no water slipping or seeping in your feet giving you the squishy-squashy feel.
3) Style - the most important aspect for someone like me, do the boots look good on me when i wear them? HELL YEAH! they are drop dead gorgeous! in fact, i already got too many offers from a lot of people to buy this pair from me.
4 VFM (Value For Money) - perfect! something that i'd buy and not regret later, and as far as after sale service is concerned, i've had really good experienced from this one brand so no hassles here.

a few things that i might suggest though for the coming models are:

> Toe gear shift plate - something like a small strip of rubber with deep grooves on it near the toe, so that the gears and the brakes can be engaged even with the side of the foot.

>detachable / or / smaller crash knobs - there are these 2 bulbs of plastic protuding on the external side of the boot which i guess should be detachable for the 'tourers' as they wouldn't scrape their bikes and their boots so low (IMO)i must say that these would be perfect for the motocross or the racing bikers tho.

>reflective tapes on the back - i feel that if the boots have a small reflective piece at the back of the boot just above the ankle, it might be really helpful for those who ride without a decent pair of riding pants, the reflector not only looks good but increases all the chances of visibility (which is very important for night riding)

well, i honestly can not think of more suggestions for this product, it is something you just want to wear and start riding.

kudos to Cramster once again!

...peace...

2007-12-14T11:07:00.000+05:30

i was going through Kalyan's post on the buddhist chant...

//his blog text//

The special mantra that is hummed by buddhists, painted or carved on rocks, prayer wheels, vehicles or yak skulls is the OM MANI PADME HUM in the buddhist dominated places. They believe chanting this mantra invokes powerful benevolent attention and blessings of Chenregiz, the embodiment of compassion.

Their are 6 syllables in the mantra. I gathered the meaning from them which is something like this:

OM- purity
MA- enlightenment
NI- ethics
PAD- tolerance
ME- concentration
HUM- wisdom

Buddhists actually pronounce it om mani peh me hum and broadly means ‘hail to the jewel in the lotus.’

//his blog text ends//

i had heard this same chant in a friend's car and have been facinated by it since then... found it online today so wanted to share it with you all

this is just peace! close your eyes for the next 7 minutes and just breath easy... you will feel refreshed (my personal guarantee!)

Love with his Love

2007-12-11T17:42:00.001+05:30

here is a pic clicked by a great friend... i liked the title he gave.... LOVE WITH HIS LOVE :-)

thanks so much for the picture Doc. Raval!!!!!

GOT TAGGED!!!!

2007-12-11T16:56:00.000+05:30

So here I was rambling away at my comp trying to figure out what I was doing here and not having fun outside…. I get a flash msg on the screen “-XH- commented on your post” I check the comment and findout that this dude has tagged me… WOW! My first ‘official’ tag ever?!!

So now I gotta write about my new year resolution….

WTF? Resolutions? New Year? Haven’t done that in over 5 years now… well I do keep making stupid resolutions that I break most of the times but haven’t made a specific new year resolution in a while… don’t even know what to decide on.

Okay, so on a serious note… I guess I do want to make a resolution. And make sure I stick to it! This year (onwards) I want to start living for a reason… start thinking about the future! And stop my usual ‘live-for-now’ BS.

Want to be clear on what I want, when I want and what will I do to get it…

Have to start saving money for the future… want my parents to retire soon and chill at home; maybe send them out on really nice vacations and cruises! This is not a new year resolution but more of a five year plan (or maybe a life long plan) but I’ll want to stick to it :)

January 1 onwards, I’m gonna change a lot of things that are happening right now and start concentrating on my life, my family and my future…

Amen!

MEN - the 'blessed' sex :)

2007-12-07T14:12:00.000+05:30

was having a conversation with an 'eternal feminist' about equality amongst men and women... personally i don't think too much abot it all! its just too much to decide who is equal or who is not... for me, if you can do the job do it, don't compare...

after the conversation though, i thought of these points that i thought will share...

Men Are Just Happier People. What do you expect from such simple creatures?

- Your last name stays put.
- The garage is all yours.
- Wedding plans take care of themselves.
- Chocolate is just another snack.
- You can never be pregnant.
- You can wear a white T-shirt to a water park.
- You can wear NO shirt to a water park.
- Car mechanics tell you the truth.
- The world is your urinal.
- You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is just too icky.
- You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt.
- Wrinkles add character.
- Wedding dress $5000. Tux rental-$100.
- People never stare at your chest when you're talking to them.
- New shoes don't cut, blister, or mangle your feet.
- One mood all the time.
- Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat.
- A five-day vacation requires only one suitcase.
- If someone forgets to invite you, he or she can still be your friend.
- Three pairs of shoes are more than enough.
- You almost never have strap problems in public.
- You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes.
- Everything on your face stays its original color.
- The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades.
- You only have to shave your face and neck.
- You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look!
- You can "do" your nails with a pocket knife.
- You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache.
- You don't freakout when you go to a party and see another man wearing the same shirt,instead you become buddies.

No WONDER men are happier...!!!

Blog Personality

2007-12-07T12:11:00.000+05:30

i've been having a bit of 'free time' on my hands these days and i utilise it on my own blog and surfing through random blogs and stuff.... stumbled across this link that tells your 'blog personality'...

hmm, interesting! let's see what they say for my blog?

Your Blogging Type Is the Private Performer

Your blog is your stage - with your visitors your adoring fans.
At least, that's how you write with your witty one liners.
And while you like attention, you value your privacy.
You're likely to have an anonymous blog - or turn off comments.

What's Your Blogging Personality?

now, this is what they say about lil ol me!

Your Rising Sign is Aries

You're full of energy - and people look to you to get the party started.
Confident and honest, you'll be the one to say what everyone is thinking.

You are easily bored, and you always find unique ways to do things.
You don't just dream it, you do it. And that's why you're so successful.

Too intense for some, often times people are intimidated by you.
But you're usually smart enough to charm them anyway!

What's Your Rising Sign?

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-05T11:24:00.000+05:30

hey! Christmas is almost here... here is my take on the funny side of X-mas... as usual, will have a little dose of sarcasm as well! :)

BTW, no offence to any person/religion or Santa Clause is intended while the images are compiled... its just for laughs!!!

:-)

man's best friend? maybe not!

2007-12-04T13:31:00.001+05:30

CLICK ON THE IMAGE AND MAXIMISE IT FOR THE BEST VIEW!!!

2007-12-04T13:30:00.000+05:30

Thought for the day

2007-12-04T13:25:00.000+05:30

one more boring list

2007-12-04T13:15:00.000+05:30

do you really enjoy doing these 'lists' that make no sense?

well, this one was sent by a dear old friend... simple... put an 'X' against things you've done...

here goes:

(X) smoked a cigarette
(X) crashed a friend's car
( ) stolen a car
(X) been in love
( ) been dumped
( ) shoplifted
( ) been fired
(X) been in a fist fight
(X) snuck out of your parent's house
(X) had feelings for someone who didn't have them back
(X) been arrested
(X) gone on a blind date
(X) lied to a friend
(X) skipped school
(X) seen someone die
(X) had a crush on one of your internet friends
( ) been to Canada
( ) been to Mexico
(x) been on a plane
( ) purposely set a part of yourself on fire
( ) eaten Sushi
( ) been skiing
(x) met someone in person from the internet
(X) been moshing at a concert
(X) taken painkillers
(x) love someone or miss someone right now
(x) laid on your back and watched cloud shapes go by
( ) made a snow angel
(x) had a tea party
(x) flown a kite
(x) built a sand castle
(X) gone puddle jumping
(X) played dress up
(x) jumped into a pile of leaves
( ) gone sledding
(x) cheated while playing a game
(x) been lonely
(x) fallen asleep at work/school
(X) used a fake id
(x) watched the sun set
(X) felt an earthquake
(X) touched a snake
(X) slept beneath the stars
(x) been tickled
( ) been robbed
(x) been misunderstood
(X) petted a reindeer/goat
(X) won a contest
(x) run a red light
( ) been suspended from school
(x) been in a car
( ) had braces
(x) felt like an outcast
(X) eaten a whole pint of ice cream in one night
(x) had deja vu
(X) danced in the moonlight.
(x) like the way you look
(X) witnessed a crime
(x) questioned your heart
(X) been obsessed with post-it notes
(x) squished barefoot through the mud
(x) been lost
(x) been to the opposite side of the country
(x) swam in the ocean
(x) felt like dying
(x) cried yourself to sleep
(x) played cops and robbers
( ) recently colored with crayons
(x) sung karaoke
(X) paid for a meal with only coins
(x) done something you told yourself you wouldn't do
(x) made prank phone calls
(X) laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
( ) caught a snowflake on your tongue
(x) danced in the rain
(X) written a letter to Santa Claus
(X) been kissed under a mistletoe
(X) watched the sun rise with someone you care about
(x) blown bubbles
(x) made a bonfire
(x) crashed a party
(x) gone rollerskating
(x) had a wish come true
( ) worn pearls
(X) jumped off a bridge
(X) ate dog/cat food
(X) told a complete stranger you loved them
(X) kissed a mirror
(x) sang in the shower
(X) had a dream that you married someone
(X) glued your hand to something
( ) got your tongue stuck to something
(X) kissed a fish
(x) sat on a roof top
(x) screamed at the top of your lungs
(X) done a one-handed cartwheel
(X) talked on the phone for more than 6 hours
(x) stayed up all night
(x) didn't take a shower for a week
(X) picked and ate an apple right off the tree
(x) climbed a tree
( ) had a tree house
( ) are scared to watch scary movies alone
( ) believe in ghosts
( ) have more than 30 pairs of shoes
(X) worn a really ugly outfit to school just to see what others say
(X) gone doorbell ditching
(X) played chicken
(X) pushed into a pool/hot tub with all your clothes on
(X) been told you're hot by a complete stranger
(X) broken a bone
(X) been easily amused
( ) caught a fish then ate it
(x) caught a butterfly
(x) laughed so hard you cried
(X) cried so hard you laughed
(x) cheated on a test
( ) have a Britney Spears CD
(x) forgotten someones name
(x) French braided someones hair
(x) been threatened to be kicked out of your house
(X) been kicked out of your house
(x) ever been to a concert
(X) been off the continent

really HONEST answers to a job interview

2007-12-04T13:11:00.001+05:30

been thinking a lot since i started taking interviews for my current employer... would i also answer all the questions the same way?

well, here is my version of the typical answers... hope no head hunter reads them! :p

1. Why did you apply for this job?
> I have applied for many jobs along with this and you called me now.

2. Why do you want to work for this company?
> I have to work for some company who ever gives me a job, I don't have any specific company in mind.

3. Why should I hire you?
> You have to hire some one, you may give me a try.

4.What would you do if this happened?
> Well, it depends my mindset and mood at that situation...

5.What is your biggest strength?
> Basically, daring to join any company who pays me well, without thinking of the fate of company

6.What is your biggest weakness?
> Girls

7.What was your worst mistake, and how did you learn from it?
> Joining my earlier company and learnt that I need to jump to get more money, so I am here today

8.What accomplishments in your last position are you most proud of?
> Had I accomplished any in my last position, why do I need to change my job? I could demand more and stay there.

9.Describe a challenge you faced and how you overcame it?
> Biggest challenge is answering the question "why are you looking for a change" and I started blabbering irrelevantly to overcome that.

10.Why did you leave/ are you leaving your last job?
> For the same reason why you left your earlier job

11.What do you want from this job?
> If no work is given but keep giving good hikes

12.What are your career goals and how do you plan to achieve them?
> Make more money and for that keep jumping companies for every 2 yrs

13.Did you hear of our company and what do you know of us?
> Yeah, I know that you will ask this, I've gone through your website

14.What is the salary expected and how do justify that?
> Well, no one will change job for the same salary, hence, give me 20% extra than what I am getting and that is unpublished industry standard
(I know you will bargain on what ever I ask, hence, I have already hiked my current salary by 30%)

The rules of MANHOOD!

2007-12-04T12:55:00.000+05:30

since i posted the GUY RULES, women are pretty clear about what guys want and how to deal with things...

here is the second installment which is targeted for the MEN! the rules that HAVE to be followed...

so here is my list!

1: Don't call. Ever.

2: It is OK for a man to cry ONLY under the following circumstances:
(a) When a heroic dog dies to save its master.
(b) The moment Angelina Jolie starts unbuttoning her blouse.
(c) After wrecking your boss' car.
(d) When she is using her teeth.

3: Under no circumstances may two men share an umbrella.

4: Be as ambiguous as possible..

5: If you've known a guy for more than 24 hours, his sister is off limits forever unless you actually marry her.

6: Moaning about the brand of free beer in a buddy's fridge is forbidden. However complain at will if the temperature is unsuitable.

7: No man shall ever be required to buy a birthday present for another man. In fact, even remembering your buddy's birthday is strictly optional. At that point, you must celebrate at a strip bar of the birthday boy's choice.

8: On a road trip, the strongest bladder determines pit stops, not the weakest.

9: When stumbling upon other guys watching a sporting event, you may ask the score of the game in progress, but you may never ask who's playing.

10: You may flatulate in front of a woman only after you have brought her to climax. If you trap her head under the covers for the purpose of flatulent entertainment, she's officially your girlfriend.

11: It is permissible to drink a fruity alcohol drink only when you're sunning on a tropical beach... and it's delivered by a topless model and only when it's free.

12: Only in situations of moral and/or physical peril are you allowed to kick another guy in the nuts.

13: Unless you're in prison, never fight naked.

14: Friends don't let friends wear Speedos. Ever. Issue closed.

15: Tell her you will call. Then, refer back to rule #1.

16: Women who claim they "love to watch sports" must be treated as spies until they demonstrate knowledge of the game and the ability to drink as much as the other sports watchers.

17: A man in the company of a hot, suggestively dressed woman must remain sober enough to fight.

18: Never hesitate to reach for the last beer or the last slice of pizza, but not both, that's just greedy.

19: If you compliment a guy on his six-pack, you'd better be talking about his choice of beer.

20: Never join your girlfriend or wife in discussing a friend of yours, except if she's withholding sex pending your response.

21: Phrases that may NOT be uttered to another man while lifting weights:
(a) Yeah, Baby, Push it!
(b) C'mon, give me one more! Harder!
(c) Another set and we can hit the showers!

22: Never talk to a man in a bathroom unless you are on equal footing: i.e., both urinating, both waiting in line, etc. For all other situations, an almost imperceptible nod is all the conversation you need.

23: Never allow a telephone conversation with a woman to go on longer than you are able to have sex with her. Keep a stopwatch by the phone. Hang up if necessary.

24: The morning after you and a girl who was formerly "just a friend" have carnal, drunken monkey sex, the fact that you're feeling weird and guilty is no reason for you not to nail each other again before the discussion about what a big mistake it was occurs.

25: It is acceptable for you to drive her car. It is not acceptable for her to drive yours.

26: If you don't like a girl, don't tell her. It's more fun to let her figure it out by herself.

27: The girl who replies to the question "What do you want for Christmas?" with "If you loved me, you'd know what I want!" gets an Xbox. End of story.

28: There is no reason for guys to watch Ice Skating or Men's Gymnastics. Ever. Any attempt to coerce a man into watching either is an instant pass for him to go to either the hardware store or the sporting goods store.

We've all heard about people having guts or balls. But do you really know the difference between them? In an effort to keep you informed, the definition of each is listed below.

"GUTS" is arriving home late after a night out with the guys, being assaulted by your wife with a broom, and having the guts to say, "are you still cleaning or are you flying somewhere?"

"BALLS" is coming home late after a night out with the guys smelling of perfume and beer, lipstick on your collar, slapping your wife on the ass and having the balls to say, "You're next!"

How to answer unusual questions asked to Indians!

2007-12-04T12:49:00.001+05:30

a lot of friends off late are going 'offshore' to different countries and different locations... here are the funny questions they get flooded with, and my take of the answers you shoulg give...

keep in mind that once you give these answers they might never ask you anything EVER!

Q. What does that red dot on women's forehead mean?
A. Well, in ancient times, Indian men used to practice archery skills by target practicing by aiming at their wife's red dot. In fact, that is one of the reasons why they had many wives. You see, once they mastered the art of archery and hit the target....

Q. You're from India? I have read so much about the country. All the wonderful places, the forests, the snake charmers, the elephants. Do you still use elephants for transportation?
A. Absolutely. In fact we used to have our own elephant in our house. But later, we started participating in elephant-ride sharing schemes with our neighbors, to save the air. You see elephants have an "emissions" problem.....

Q. Does India have cars?
A. No. We ride elephants to work. The government is trying to
encourage ride-sharing schemes.

Q. Does India have TV?
A. No. We only have cable.

Q. Are all Indians vegetarian?
A. Yes. Even tigers are vegetarian in India.

Q. How come you speak English so well?
A. You see when the British were ruling India,they employed Indians as servants. It took too long for the Indians to learn English. So the British isolated an "English-language" gene and infused their servants' babies with it and since then all babies born are born speaking English.

Q. Are you a Hindi?
A. Yes. I am spoken everyday in Northern India.

Q. Do you speak Hindu?
A. Yes, I also speak Jewish, Islam and Christianity.

Q. Is it true that everyone there is very corrupt?
A. Yes, in fact, I had to bribe my parents so that they would let me go to school.

Q. India is very hot, isn't it?
A. It is so hot there that all the water boils spontaneously. That is why tea is such a popular drink in India.

Q. Are there any business companies in India?
A. No. All Indians live on the Gandhian prinicples of self-sufficiency.
We all make our own clothes and grow our own food. That is why you see all these thin skinny Indians -- it is is a lot of hard work.

Q. Indians cannot eat beef, huh?
A. Cows provide milk which is a very essential part of Indian diet. So eating cows is forbidden. However in order to decrease the population of the country, the government is trying to encourage everyone to eat human meat.

Q. India is such a religious place. Do you meditate regularly?
A. Yes, sometimes I meditate for weeks without food and drink. But it is difficult to keep my job, because I have to miss work when I meditate like that. But the bosses there do the same thing. That is why things are so inefficient there.

Q. I saw on TV that people there walk on burning coals. Why do they do that?
A. We don't have shoes. So we burn the botton of our feet to make it hard so that we can walk.

Q. Why do you sometimes wear Indian clothes to work?
A. I prefer it to coming naked.

the GUYS RULES...

2007-12-04T12:39:00.000+05:30

here is something i had read a long time ago and comfortably forgotten... remember sending it to my wife...(trust me you don't want to know her reactions).

found it again today... hence sharing it with you all... mostly for the 'wemmen' readers...

i've seen a lot of women complaining on how the guys behave... so this is the guys' take on your complaints... here is what we call the GUYS RULES!

The Guys' Rules
At last a guy has taken the time to write this all down Finally, the guys' side of the story.
Please note... for priority purposes these are all numbered "1" ON PURPOSE!

1. Men ARE not mind readers.

1. Learn to work the toilet seat.
You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down.
We need it up, you need it down.
You don't hear us complaining about you leaving it down.

1. Sunday sports. It's like the full moon
or the changing of the tides.
Let it be.

1. Shopping is NOT a sport.
And no, we are never going to think of it that way.

1. Crying is blackmail.

1. Ask for what you want.Let us be clear on this one:
Subtle hints do not work!
Strong hints do not work!
Obvious hints do not work!
Just say it!

1. Yes and No are perfectly Acceptable answers to almost every question.

1. Come to us with a problem only If you want help solving it. That's what we do.
Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.

1. A headache that lasts for 17 months is a problem . See a doctor.

1. Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument.
In fact, all comments become null and void after 7 Days.

1. If you won't dress like the Victoria's Secret girls, don't Expect us to act like soap opera guys.

1. If you think you're fat, you probably are.
Don't ask us.

1. If something we said can be interpreted two ways and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one .

1. You can either ask us to do something
Or tell us how you want it done.
Not both.
If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.

1. Whenever possible, Please say whatever you have to say during commercials.

1. Christopher Columbus did NOT need directions and neither do we.

1. ALL men see in only 16 colors, like Windows default settings.
Peach, for example, is a fruit, not! A color. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.

1. If it itches, it will Be scratched.
We do that.

1. If we ask what is wrong and you say "nothing," We will act like nothing's wrong.
We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.

1. If you ask a question you don't want an answer to, Expect an answer you don't want to hear.

1. When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear Is fine...Really.

1. Don't ask us what we're thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as baseball, the shotgun formation, or motorcycling.

1. You have enough clothes.

1. You have too many shoes.

1. I am in shape. Round IS a shape!

1. Thank you for reading this.
Yes, I know, I have to sleep on the couch tonight;
But did you know men really don't mind that? It's like camping.

saw something that makes sense!

2007-12-04T12:09:00.000+05:30

i saw the following text as a blog on my mate -XH-'s blog... i've copied the body of the blog and made changes on how i'd comment on it :)

here goes...

Got a fwd email abt life – the things in bracket are my responses . A kind of small retrospection.

-----

Have a firm handshake.
(I do, but not to prove my 'macho' worth)

Look people in the eye.
(make sure they are not intimidated tho)

Sing in the shower.
(aaaiiieeeee)

Own a great stereo system.
(i hope a home-theatre and a worldspace receiver count in this!)

If in a fight, hit first and hit hard.
(try and avoid the fight, but if you hit... hit to draw blood)

Keep secrets.
(i beg to differ, my life is open, everyone knows everything about me... but, yes, i do keep secrets that others ask me to keep for them)

Never give up on anybody. Miracles happen everyday.
(waking up everymorning itself is a miracle!)

Always accept an outstretched hand.
(only if it's for friendship or asking for help)

Be brave. Even if you're not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference.
(GRR! GROWL!!!)

Whistle.
(...)

Avoid sarcastic remarks.
(umm, too tough to do, i am sarcasm personified :( )

Choose your life's mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 per cent of all your happiness or misery.
(ALL BULL! i met my life's mate and in 5 days we decided to get married... haven't regretted that decision even once!)

Make it a habit to do nice things for people who will never find out.
(if they don't find it out, why will you do it?)

Lend only those books you never care to see again.
(if you like books, don't ever lend them!)

Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all that they have.
(true - this is something i care a lot)

When playing games with ! children, let them win.
(will try not to cheat next time)

Give people a second chance, but not a third.
(give a chance only if you believe that the person has a potential to improve...)

Be romantic.
(i am...)

Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.
(just too tough to do sometimes)

Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life-and-death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems.
(true - thing life taught me)

Don't allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It's there for your convenience, not the caller's.
(hmm, will remember it next time)

Be a good loser.
(but why?)

Be a good winner.
(no really, but why?)

Think twice before burdening a friend with a secret.
(if its a secret you care about, take my word... KEEP IT, DON'T SHARE)

When someone hugs you, let them be the first to let go.
(aise to chipke rahenge ghanto tak)

Be modest. A lot was accomplished before you were born.
(heh thanks to my parents :p)

Keep it simple.
(also, keep it real)

Beware of the person who has nothing to lose.
(hmm, still to find someone like this)

Don't burn bridges. You'll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river.
(i know... still regret burning a lot of them bridges)

Live your life so that your epitaph could read, No Regrets
(that's the motto of my life!)

Be bold and courageous. When you look back on life, you'll regret the things you didn't do more than the one's you did.
(but dont be reckless)

Never waste an opportunity to tell someone you love them.
(do that a lot!)

Remember no one makes it alone. Have a grateful heart and be quick to acknowledge those who helped you.
(i do)

Take charge of your attitude. Don't let someone else choose it for you.
(hmm, need to work on this sometimes)

Visit friends and relatives when they are in hospital; you need only stay a few minutes.
(will surely try)

Begin each day with some of your favorite music.
(thanks to WorldSpace)

Once in a while, take the scenic route.
(heh, heh, do you follow me home?)

Send a lot of Valentine cards. Sign them 'Someone who thinks you're terrific.'
(received a lot them, but never sent one... will do it this year)

Answer the phone with enthusiasm and energy in your voice.
(Anser only if you feel like, otherwise dont take the call)

Keep a note pad and pencil on your bedside table. Million-dollar ideas sometimes strike at 3 a.m.
(i have a pen and a book :P)

Show respect for everyone who works for a living, regardless of how trivial their job.
(very true! RESPECT!!!! give it to get it)

Send your loved ones flowers. Think of a reason later.
(haven’t send any one flowers till now)

Make someone's day by paying the toll for the person in the car behind you.
(never tried)

Become someone's hero.
(I am)

Marry only for love.
(dont think too much to marry... things usually fall in place if 2 'sane' people get married to each other )

Count your blessings.
(Always)

Compliment the meal when you're a guest in someone's home.
(muft ka khana hai yaar... taarif to karni padegi!)

Wave at the children on a school bus.
(some of them flip back a finger these days)

Remember that 80 per cent of the success in any job is based on your ability to deal
with people.
(that is the reason i am where i am )

Don't expect life to be fair.
(IT NEVER IS)

The Bullet

2007-11-29T16:33:00.001+05:30

A Hilarious clip that i saw somewhere on Youtube a few months ago... been hunting the movie since! hope you like it...

BN to Hampi?!!

2007-11-28T19:53:00.000+05:30

You know it’s kinda difficult to try and sleep by 10:30pm and then wakeup by 3:15am!

Well, this was our plight if we wanted to make to the meeting point near Forum at 0400hrs that chilly Friday morning. We were going for the annual meet of Bike Nomads, one of the biker clubs that I’m part of… funny thing here is that this is one of those clubs that is not bike specific! So doesn’t matter if you have a 100cc chotu bike or a 500ccbull; if you have the passion for touring and biking, you can join in!

I was overly excited about this particular ride… main reason being that this would the first ‘long ride’ that we’ll be doing together (read more than 300kms in a day) and secondly, we never had been to Hampi, those of you who know me and ‘my better half’ would know that she is a big fan of history, archeology and the arts in general; so this would’ve been the best place for us to go for the weekend. The wifey and I had started preparations for it since a long time! A lot of physical workout and training for our endurance and stamina was going on. I took the RedEye to the mechanics and got her completely serviced to ensure that I don’t face any major showdowns for the ride.

I met the bikers from the Bangalore BN chapter a couple weeks before the ride and found out that none of them had a bull! They all were plastic riders! This brought the first question in my mind; do I really want to ride with the plastic crowd? I’ll get back to what I think now later… a total of 11 bikes were scheduled to leave Bangalore at around 5am on Friday the 23rd of November… this group also included a few newbie bikers who hadn’t done a single ‘long ride’ and some of the veteran bikers who had done enough to earn good ‘bragging rights’

Cut to morning of 23rd

I turnoff the alarm at 0315 (my special alarm theme for that day was ‘gonna fly now’ out of the movie Rocky) look around the room, the gleam of the night light and a few flickering lights on the laptop and modem made our bedroom look real cozy! I wanted to pull the sheets over my head and go back to my la-la land as soon as I could. But I roused my sleepy brain and asked my body to move, to get out of the bed and turn on the geyser, walked around the house once completely aimless trying to figure out why was I up so early, practically in the middle of the night? And then it dawned… we were supposed to meet in the next one hours’ time with the other BNers! I woke the wife up, she was strangely relatively calmer and focused when she woke up. We hurriedly freshened up, dressed, had some coffee, did a final check on the luggage that was packed the previous evening and stepped out. This was the first time that I was putting the saddle bags on my bike, was slightly confusing… but once I figured the front from the back, it sat on the bike like a charm and we were all set to roll!

This was the first time, both of us were riding through the area at this hour… forum was strangely only 10minutes away on the empty roads! When we reached there, the scene was awesome! There were already 7bikes waiting there and all the riders looked eager to ride, here I met Aditya who was the only other biker from Bangalore riding with his spouse, met Sapna and found out that it was her second longish ride with Adi… we waited for Prassanna till 0440 but he didn’t show up, finally I called him and we decided that he’ll catch-up at the second regroup point at Nelmangla.

I was the point rider from this point till Nelamangla where we were to meet Vaas, Aashish, Kaapi and the others… by the time we reached Nelmangla, it was already 0530, 15minutes late from our originally decided departure time. Vaas and Chamolibhai are the guys who I would call punctual; they were already there and had finished their first rounds of chai. We all ordered our chais, ciggys and other stuff… other riders rolled in by 6ish and we finally rolled out by 0630, already over an hour late…

What can I say for the roads? Amazingly smooth! As they say in Hindi – Makhkhan! Pretty picturesque, almost a straight line and no bumps at all! We all averaged pretty decent speeds and stopped post a town called Sira for our breakfast, the small dhaba there was just right, the only things available were idli and dosa. We all ordered our options, did a small photo-op there and rolled again… the next stop was Chitradurga. And this ended our ‘good, smooth’ roads… the road from here was almost nonexistent; I guess Karnataka has this specialty, after every good stretch of the road they put an equally pathetic stretch so that you can appreciate the good roads. We gazed at hundreds of windmills and rode on, onto the really bad roads. This stretch was just sad.

Finally we made it to Hospet and Hampi was just 15-20 kms away… by now, the bad roads had started taking their toll and most of us started feeling tired. The hotel looked like heaven when we pulled in the parking lot. All I wanted to do was just crash. Sleep for a while and then decide on what next…

The Bangalore crowd was the first to reach Hampi, we were expecting people now from Bombay, Pune and Hyderabad… on and a few unannounced riders from different locations. While the couples rested in the hotel, the bachelors and the enthu-cutlets went out for a short ride around Hampi to just explore the place… I somehow couldn’t sleep so after a while I stepped out in the foyer of the hotel to find Vaas chatting with a gentleman who smoked two cigarettes back-to-back… on getting introduced I realized that this guy was GR, the most witty, punny and soft spoken gent I’ve ever met! I just turned into a big fan of this chap when I realized that he is almost 40 and rode nonstop from Hyderabad to Hampi (not even bio-breaks!)

The second set of riders to turn up was Doc. Arnob and Prasad Themkar; these two also had done an almost nonstop ride from Bombay to Hampi… after they freshened up and came to the dining area, I discovered that Doc also is a very witty and jovial person! And Prasad was a ‘well built’ well mannered guy. I was actually realized that I was smiling more and more and my apprehensions were turning into dust as the people I got to meet were all much better than what I was expecting! Usually bikers are thought of as the typical of loud-mouthed, unruly and arrogant people, but here is a crowd of really nice, well mannered and genuine people!

While sitting and chatting, Doc. Prithvi Raval turned up… I must say that Doc is older that my dad! But his spirit for biking is just amazing! a very nice guy to know… I actually had heard a lot about him whenever I talked to rocky’da about the other bikers he knew and the ones he would recommend for me to know. We ordered dinner and sat in a nice big group in the chilly evening, having our dinner and sharing stories about names, tattoos, bikes, places to visit and almost everything under the sun!

We retired by around 11pm as Saturday was supposed to be a long day… woke up at around 7ish, got dressed and stepped out to have our breakfast. Strangely the wife hadn’t complained about anything and I could see that she also was enjoying our stay here, in the dining room we met Capt. Nandu Chitnis, the ‘ageless biker’ as we know him, he is I guess in his late 50s, a person with an enormous passion for a lot of things in life, who rode to Leh-Ladakh this July with his wife; that too on an avvy!!! I met him and instantly became an avid fan. I would want to be something like him when I grow old.

Slowly the other Pune, Bby people started pouring out in the dining room, another round of introductions, more amazing people introduced to each other and all I could think was WOW! So many people at one place, all here just to make sure that they turn up for the annual meet and all respecting each other so much! Amazing!!!

By the time we actually stepped out of the hotel, it was pretty late… so the whole ‘guided tour’ plan got chucked and we decided to see only the famous places at Hampi… we rode around the ruins, looking at whatever we could and whatever our brains could digest… there is just SO MUCH to see! By around 1330 we decided to break for lunch and meet again at 3ish at the hotel for our photo-ops… we all split into groups for lunch and my group was Capt & wife, Adi & sapna, Vibhu & Anu, Nav and 2 of us (my wife and I) we went into the by lanes of the Hampi bazaar looking for a specific place that Capt had talked about… it was a nice shack sorta place, good music, good ambience and only 2 people running it. When all of us started ordering for stuff the guys panicked… we actually waited almost 2 hours for the lunch (which could’ve been better) but by this time we were already late and had to rush back to the hotel.

Imagine 40 riders and over 25 bikes in one place!!! We clicked a few ‘formation parking’ photos at the hotel and then all of us left for the Vithalla temple; it was THE PLACE you come for at Hampi. It’s a huge, magnificent structure… a whole stone-pillared market place; musical pillars in the temple, a whole stone chariot in the compound… just breathtaking! We clicked some more pictures here.

(Image Courtesy: Harshad Sharma)

After the photo-op we descended to the TungaBhadra river, dipped our feet in the cool, clean water and just sat there till the sun set… from here we decided to go towards the TB canal and click some more pictures… but only 4 bikes made it till there, the others apparently lost their way and headed back to the hotel… the canal in the full moon light looked very eerie and a bit spooky. We didn’t spend too much time here, went back to the hotel and found everyone waiting there.

Now was the most interesting part of the meet. The ‘introduction’ round, I know, I know you’ll be thinking what’s so funny about the intros? The twist here was that one person stands up and the others were supposed to introduce him; now imagine you are standing there and people all around are passing comments for you, both good and bad! :-) was a gun session after which Doc. Raval pulled out the BN stickers from his bag… now we all BNers have a BN sticker on our bikes, helmets and for some even their cigarette packets! (Yes, Mayank from Sangli actually smokes BN brand ciggys now) after all this followed the dinner which was strangely tasting better than the previous evening’s

A desperate attempt for a campfire was next; but after around 20 minutes of pouring kerosene and Petrol out of Mayank’s bullet we realized that the wood was just too wet to light. We all said our good nights; Sunday morning people had to head back to their own destinations…. Bombay, Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore. We all said our goodnights and goodbyes and retired into our rooms, the single junta had a grand drinking binge (which I was kept out of)

Sunday morning came too early! We had decided to meet sharp at 8 in the parking lot so that we can roll out by 8:30… guess what? The people showed up only after 9! Then some of the junta suggested that instead of riding straight to Bangalore we should do a detour to the TB Dam and spend some time there… after too many protests I had to give in and ride to the damn dam… this pushed our departure quite a bit and we could get out on the highway only after 1230! This was scary for me… well; honestly, I am very scared of riding into the nights and always make a point of either reaching my destination by nightfall or stopover wherever I can. But NO RIDING IN THE DARK! Now, all my fears were coming to surface and I pushed my bike and the others to ride as fast as we could…

The lunch stop was at chitradurga, and I told Vaas that we now have to follow discipline in riding and take a break ONLY after at least 1hour of riding… he agreed to this and we pushed off towards Bangalore. But, darkness came too soon and we did ride pretty much in the dark for a long while, by now the order or the formation of the bikers was getting broken and we were into really small groups of 2-3 I was with Chamolibhai and Gaurav… we stopped only at Nelmangla, had a chai and started towards Bangalore again, after almost 2 hours we reached home at around 9pm. Tired, with sore bums and just wanting to crash.

Must say the wifey was pretty strong all through, she had a bit of tonsillitis before we started which got really aggravated and coupled with a bad cold, but she stayed pretty strong all though. Just made me fall in love with her all over again.

And another point that I’d make here is that bikers are not made by metal or plastic but only by the passion and drive that they have… I saw people ride 150cc pulsars, to 220ccZmas to 180cc Avvy cruisers; and all I could understand is that they all share a similar passion fro biking.

I liked it! Gave me a new direction to think and appreciate people the way they are…

Anyways, this post is long enough and I’ll signoff for now…

The pictures of the meet are here:

Capt. Chitnis ka album
Mayank's Pictures
Sameer's Pics
Vibhu (moderator's view)
Harshad Sharma - superb pics!

And my album!

me...

2007-11-28T12:16:00.000+05:30

a closeup of yours truly clicked by his very talented wifey... cheers to her!

IronButt - officially :)

2007-11-19T18:54:00.001+05:30

“Dude, are you awake or did you decide to chicken out?”
“Its only 5:40 yaar, we are meeting at 6:30 right? Tell me where”
“At the junction of Outer ring-road and Mysore road”
“thik hai, will be there… C ya”

This is a conversation that happened really early on the last Saturday, and I’m wondering how would it have felt, if I backed out of this ride???

Since the time that the wife had planned a one week ‘work trip’ to Ahmedabad, I’ve been itching to do a ride that was a bit longer than my usual 300kms a day day-rides. And I was clear that I don’t want to do a BIG group ride also, something sort of a cannonball run with a few bulleteers that I like to ride with. Sadly, all of them were either busy or didn’t want to join in and one of my old colleagues who I had lost touch with for over 3 years suddenly popped out of the past and said that he also wants to ride! My first reaction was, “what the hell? I don’t even ‘know’ this guy any more and he suddenly comes out of the blue suggesting that we ride together?” but, then slowly the saner me started taking over and said that boss, you didn’t ‘know’ him then also… just ride with him and see if you like the company and if he is a prospective member for one of your bike-clubs. I agreed.

Honestly, I was slightly impressed with his preparations for the ride and his enthusiasm! He actually went and got his tyre changed, his battery recharged before the D’day!!! The day for the ride was decided; we were to do a ‘iron-butt’ ride on 17th November (a Saturday) all the way to BR Hills and back… a ride of little over 500kms in a day.

We met on the Mysore road (I was late by 7-8 minutes) around 6:40am, his first reaction to see me on the bike was somewhere between a WOW and WTF… as usual, I was all prepped in my riding gear from top to bottom, the only thing missing still is a decent pair of riding boots… hopefully I’ll get them too! And he was in his denim jacket and jeans without even a pair of gloves!!!

Well, we started the ride, since it was still relatively early in the day, the traffic hadn’t picked up and we could do pretty good speeds! This is one of my favorite roads to ride on, smooth 4lane well tarred blacktop with enough visual consolations. Our first pit-stop was Kamat’s for a light breakfast and coffee… strangely, Kamat popped into the view even before I actually started the feel of the ride… we pulled over just to find a full house! The whole place was jam packed! We negotiated ourselves a table for 2 after buttering the head waiter there… breakfast was the usual Kamat junk, idlis made in the banana leaf and vada.

After the breakfast and a brief break we started again, the destination now was mysore-nanjangud… the roads were not too dense with traffic and we could manage pretty good bursts of speed well over 100 (sheer pleasure!) Mysore was in sight pretty soon… we were supposed to take the Mysore ring-road towards Nanjangud but I guess I was too focused on the speeding and forgot to take the turn… after around 2 kms inside the city Raam appeared in my RVM frantically flashing his head-light and honking like crazy, I slowed and he said that we were to take the other road for Nanjangud! Darn, took a U-turn and got onto the ring-road. This road is amazing! I straight smooth piece of road with lush greenery on both the sides… looks like a road leading to the horizon, into the unknown… the ring-road soon turned off into a 2lane highway, this was a decent road, not too bad and nothing too good… traffic had started picking up and we had to brake often to dodge crazy maniacs in their four-wheeled coffins… just before Nanjangud we saw a detour off towards BR Hills and decided to venture this road, this was our first big mistake of the day… the detour turned from a decent 2lane road into a stretch of sand, gravel and rocks… since I was solo and I was too enthused to show off, I stood up on the foot pegs of the bike and kept on ripping on the almost off-road ride, the bike took too much punishment here… after a while the road evened out to a smoother terrain and we decided to take a butt break as soon as we spot a chaiwallah. I guess god was on our side during that part of the day coz as soon as I decided to stop, I noticed a pretty decent dhaba on the road, we pulled into the dhaba and asked for some chai, I also had to update the wifey that I have been safe and in one piece till now… made the quick call and had chai, in fact the chai was soo tasty that we had one more round of it, we noticed some tame ducks and turkeys at the dhaba so played with them for a while. The dhaba owner seemed to be a pretty enthu cutlet! Maybe our dressing and the funny looking bikes aroused his curiosity; so he started talking to Raam in Kannada, I didn’t understand what they talked apart from who are you, where are you from, what are you doing here and why is the other bloke dressed in such funny costume? I tried to pitch in the conversation with my limited knowledge of the language but to no avail, my mate told me that the dhaba guy has suggested a different, much better and scenic route to the place, I was pretty impressed! But alas, this guy told me that we should stick to our predecided route and shouldn’t go any other way. Foiled, this is not the adventure of biking! This is not the motorcycling spirit! How can you keep going on and on over the overly trodden roads? Where is the fun of riding through uncharted territory? Phooey…

And it turns out that the road we took kept turning from okay to bad and from bad to worse… in most of the parts, the road was completely nonexistent, but we kept going on… finally we reached the KGudi forest check post, the first thing the security guard at the gate insisted was that I turnoff my headlamp! I told him that I know it’s on and I’m comfortable riding when its on even at noon, but he insisted! One more phooey here… I turned it off, signed our names in the register, the forest officer appeared out of nowhere while we were writing in the register and picked up a conversation, again the same, where are you from? Where are you off? Why did you ride all the way when you can get a decent state transport bus? Why is this bloke dressed in such funny clothes? This was the limit for me! I started riding into the forest while Raam was still talking to the forest guard, taking this as a cue; Raam also rolled off… this was one scenic piece of land! Almost 4kms of straight road running through the jungle into the hills up ahead!

Well, the road did lead into the mountains also and we rode through some of the worst twisties I’ve ever seen! Really bad road, crater sized potholes on the road and we riding here trying to negotiate the potholes and making sure that we don’t ride off the edge of the road into the forest below! After around 20kms of riding into the jungle brought us to another check-post and this time I switched off the headlamp even before we reach there, the guard again asked the same questions that I was so familiar with, Raam was patient enough to answer all of them… after riding through this second check-post, I noticed the jungle lodges board. This just brought back memories of the time I spent in February, the 3 days I spent with the wifey for our honeymoon! I thought of stopping by and saying hi to Nahar who is a good fried and the manager of the KGudi resort. I rode into the familiar yet almost forgotten trail towards the resort. And what surprise! Nahar was sitting there in the sun along with Anant who was here when we had come for the honeymoon… what a bloody pleasant surprise! We sat there chatted for a long time, Nahar was more than kind to offer us lunch which we readily agreed to (heh heh, who would say not to free food?) after the nice food and some more chatting, we started on our way back around 14:40… Nahar suggested we take the route through the jungle past BR Hills and ride towards a town called Yellandur for our way back, after Yellandur there apparently are 2 different routes for Bangalore.

We bid adieu to Nahar, His wife, to Anant, to Vikrant and to KGudi (with a silent promise in my mind to return back soon!) the start for the way back was overly shaky the forest department had started working on the roads and forgotten about it, so the whole patch of the road was dug-up but we managed to ride through it… a few kilometers later… HEAVEN! Smooth tarmac, single lane road, lush cool forest on both sides! And amazing twisties! We spotted some chital, wild dogs and a few mongooses on the way… this patch of the road got over in a flash and we were at the final check-post to signoff and bid the place goodbye…

After getting out of the forest, we took the ‘immediate right’ turn towards Yellandur, the road was again not too good and not too bad, I guess I had gotten used to the bad patches of the road by this time after over 50kms of ‘almost’ offroading. Through Yellandur we were to reach Malavalli but in the spirit of riding we missed the turn that we were supposed to take… eventually after 20-25kms we realized that we are going ‘wrong way’ turned back again and got on the proper route to reach Malavalli. Malavalli brought us two routes to Bangalore one was via Maddur, on the Mysore highway again and back to Bangalore, the other was via Kanakpura into Bangalore… dunno if both of us had lost our marbles at that moment of time… we decided to go through the Kanakpura road, BIG MISTAKE! The road was nonexistent, complete butt-breaking offroading adventure for over 20kms, stopped for chai and to loosen the taut and aching joints, checked with the chaiwallah how long will the bad road last and he happily smiling said “saar, 18 more kms” darn, I hated my life at that moment! I was so frustrated with the bone jangling ride by now that I was begging for a ‘normal’ road… after a few kilometers the road conditions finally improved a bit, instead of the dirt offroad, we had a patchy road with a generous proportion of potholes… after bouncing off so many bumps and crossing over crater sized potholes my bike’s rear end had started giving issues… the tail light and rear indicators didn’t work, the tyre started wobbling like crazy and the air-pressure was almost nil! But the ride was still on!!!

Darkness came too early! Just to remind us that the battery work that Raam had gotten on his bike didn’t work. Result? His headlamp was dimmer than a candle. So I had to cut my speed, and make sure that he is almost tailgating me and riding off my bull’s headlights… wasn’t I happy for putting those auxiliary headlamps that illuminated the way ahead? The speed that we had maintained throughout the day had drastically reduced to 50-60kmph here also the heavy vehicles wanted to showoff their brighter and much better headlamps to they blinded us almost running us over… anyhow we reached Kanakpura missing a lot of turns on the way and taking the longest route back to Bangalore. The journey was not over yet!

Slowly, painstakingly we finally managed to reach into Bangalore, I stopped at a gas-station to get my tyres inflated and some gas in the tank… Raam missed looking me turning into the gas-station and kept riding on… we got lost again! He was on some road and I was somewhere else! Coordinated where to meet in Bangalore via cell-phone (don’t I love technology?) and I started into the town alone. My brain had gone numb of the excessively long ride and most of my joints were actually screaming for some rest coz of so much offroading adventures. Thinking of going home soon, I took a wrong turn and got lost in Bangalore!!! This was the final straw for me… I couldn’t believe that I actually managed to take a wrong turn and instead of going to south Bangalore I was bouncing around the streets of east Bangalore… thankfully I managed to reach BTM after 1hour in the city! Found Raam there, had some dinner (sorry guys, I was so tired that I don’t remember what I ate) reached home, parked the bike, she looked like a wounded soldier; tired, bloody, messy and broken down.

This was the butt-breaking, ironbutt ride that I had, over 540kms in a day and over 200kms of really bad roads managed. I was tired, sleepy and aching, but I was proud that I could ride ‘alone’ when I had to. I was satisfied that I rode so much and I saw so many good sights on the way. I was glad that I did what I had been thinking since over a month finally happened.

Finally I earned myself some bragging rights of riding so long in a day and over such varied terrain… I have earned my smirk for this one ride :-)

feet

2007-11-15T19:26:00.001+05:30

These are the feet that walked into my life... walked all over me and changed who i used to be (for the better!)

ain't i glad that they walked to me???

Without her…

2007-11-15T19:17:00.000+05:30

Warning: the below post is written under a spasm of loneliness and has more mush than recommended to ‘normal’ people; read at your own risk! I am not responsible if you lose your mind and start ripping your hair out by the time you reach the end of this post.

You know it’s really boring to wake up all alone in the morning!

I keep telling myself that its just a matter of one week and she will be back even before I realize that she’s gone; but somehow every evening when I unlock the door and step into the apartment, I realize that life itself has completely disappeared from here! The ‘lively’ ‘warm’ and ‘loving’ home suddenly has transformed into a cold, crummy, chilly and lonely place.
Funny part is that I was so used to my loneliness, my solitude, ‘my space’ just a year back... and now suddenly I got so used to being with this stranger who has become the most important piece of my whole existence!

I actually stay in bed in the mornings instead of jumping off to make the honey-lemon concoction and starting my workouts… I haven’t worked out in a week… when I felt too guilty about not taking care of my body, I wrapped that heating belt around my waist and sat like a lump of lard for an hour hoping that it’s gonna eat up all the flab from my body.
Is it possible that a person you didn’t even know existed, becomes so important in less than a year’s time? I mean, I always said that I need to ‘know’ the person before I decide to spend my life with her and here I’m brooding my heart out missing this girl I just met less than a year ago.
Well, all I can say is ‘I miss you’

Living my life off dreams,
Enjoying every moment just with my whims
Taking people for granted was acceptable
Even the loser drunkard next door was respectable…

I met you, and life took a u-turn
I don’t have that cruel glint in my eyes
And I don’t sit and say, burn-baby-burn

Smiles started coming easy
Life found a reason
My creativity had fled
Now I have a better vision

You are the reason
The reason to smile,
The reason to live
Just for a longer while…

I miss you,
I miss you bad…
Never felt so forlorn
Now I’m lonely and sad.

Come back to me,
Bring me back to life
Let’s smile together again
Come back my loving wife…

… I miss you

She is pretty

2007-10-31T18:49:00.001+05:30

Darn, i get high just looking at her... Wonder if every other biker would be this obsessed?

Clutter...Colors

2007-10-31T18:37:00.001+05:30

PENS IN A COFFEE MUG...

My Red-Eye

2007-10-30T11:46:00.001+05:30

on Sunday i rode with RTMC (a bullet club in Bangalore) well, half-way i had to turn back with Rocky and on the way i clicked a pic of my red-eye with the fone cam...

The beast the bullet

Pretty decent pic! :)

BIKER SLOGANS - borrowed stuff

2007-10-25T12:46:00.000+05:30

Never confuse the map with the journey.
Its the attitude, not the altitude
My Life is a blur...
Some people measure their adventures in miles or days. I prefer "horizons crossed".
While some people are choosing between chicken and fish, my choice is between dust and mud (with rocks on the side).
Getting there isn't easy. And that's the best part.
When someone says, "let's go" , you shouldn't have to ask, "where?"
On my way to nowhere ... and proud of it".
Sometimes the morning commute can get a little bumpy.
Every lane is a passing lane.
I do my flying on the ground.
Addicted ? Possesed is a better word.
Who needs a stereo when you've got a throttle ? ( Time to turn up the volume.)
Its out there somewhere. And we're going to find it.
Where does this road end ? Never.
We can stop anytime. But who wants to ?
Hobbies : Riding... Interests : Riding... What I do for fun : Riding... You get the point.
Been there. Doing this.
My job? Just something I do between rides.
So many rides. So little time.
Most people take the subway. Have fun most people.
If you need a reason to ride,You are not on the right bike.
The destination is one thing.Getting there is everything.
Grasp life by the handlebars.
Years ago someone told me that life is a journey.Obviously I took it to heart.
One question we've never heard is, "Are we there yet?"
I don't know where the bike ends and I begin.
The faster we go, the more life slows down.
If speed is a sin, I am guilty of It.
Cars Suck !
We ride two wheels..sometimes one wheel..but not like dead body carried in 4 wheels
The Journey is the destination
Where there is a wheel, there is a way.
I would rather be riding my motorcycle thinking about God,than sitting in a temple thinking about my motorcycle.
I don't suffer insanity, I enjoy every minute of it - I RIDE
One life live it!!!!
I'm a cowboy;A steel horse I ride...I'm wanted...Dead or Alive
If heaven doesnt allow bikes, I will ride mine straight to hell
Only a Biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window
Life is not a journey to the grave with intentions of arriving safely in a pretty well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming ... WOW! What a ride!
Getting high on life.. down the never ending road.. just me and my ride..
Roll on the black road on a red machine
Rover, Wanderer, Nomad, Vagebond... Call me what you will.
Just Twist The Wrist!!
Destination Anywhere
Live life on empty roads
Beyond Good and EvilSome take drugs,Some do bungee jumps,Some become monks,I do motorcycling......!
The truth is out there. Get out of ur couch.!!!
No riding, No fun. Know riding, Know Fun
Speed is an Illusion
Never ask me for directions if you're in a hurry to get there
Lean into the corners and whisper something dirty to the pavement
Its not about the number of wheels, its about the degree of freedom
I Ride. Why don't you ?
We talk in KMPH not KMPL
Life begins at 40, but it doesnt get any interesting till 150
We talk in MPH not KMPH
The Holy Trinity: Traction, Torque and Tarmac.
What you ride is what you get. How you ride is who you are.
Work-Life balance is like Air-Fuel mixture.
I run it lean...in the corners.
Running-in is all about self-control. How you ride is what you get.
Safety is a state of mind, neither influenced nor restricted by how you ride or what you wear.
No matter what bike you ride or how deft you are at handling it, accidents are caused by this notion of certitude.
Every Day I wake up, if I don’t feel like riding, I go to work.
If the ride is so smooth, u are in wrong lane.

MY Tattoos - My PRIDE :)

2007-10-23T15:26:00.000+05:30

I am a proud tattoo collector and i always look for reasons to add to my collection... a lot of people have asked me a lot of questions about my tattoos so here is an answer to most of the questions about the designs:

My first tattoo was a tribal/Celtic fusion design with an eye in the center… to remind me that someone is always watching you...

The second tattoo was the sun design… when observed closely; you’ll notice a moon in that! Its two faces in one… something that I am “a perfect Gemini”

The third tattoo was a bit complicated… it’s a dream-catcher, with a yin-yang pattern to signify proper balance and grizzly bear pugmarks to represent the majestic yet gentle nature of the grizzlies. (this combines the Native American and the Oriental patterns together)

Things you REALLY don't want to hear your mechanic say . . .

2007-10-22T20:09:00.000+05:30

Uh-oh...
Oh S***!
What the heck?!?
That's SOOOOO bizarre.
Wow!! Look at this...
Hey!! Bullets don't do this!
Mechanic's certificate of training? What's that?
Well, it's doing SOMETHING...
Wow...that seemed funny...
I got a better job at Honda...
State inspection rules say...
Sorry, the parts you ordered are no longer kept in stock by The Company.
Damn! It didn't do that a minute ago...
Damn, and I just bought that Coke...
I removed a gasket and now there's LOTS of clearance.
Hey, do you smell something?
Hmmm! What's that grinding sound?
I have never seen one do THAT before...
I don't think it should be doing that...
I remember the last time I saw it do that...
My vacation starts tomorrow.
Oops! (said in a quiet, almost surprised voice)
Hmm, maybe if I do this...
Hmmm, curious...
We're standardizing on metric.
Wonder where THIS nut goes?
(Looking at your T-Bird) What's this switch for anyways?
If I knew it wasn't going to work, I would have tested it sooner.
The air cleaner isn't supposed to leak brown gunk, is it?
Boy, it's a lot easier when you know what you're doing!