A weekend that changed the course of my life forever

Last year around this time…. It was 18 (or 19) November 2005. On my yahoo messenger I got an offline message from some unknown id. If I was to believe that the ID was not misleading then it could be someone named Deepa save.

It was clear that the person on other side has mistaken me for someone else because that id was not in my friends list and from the message it was clear that it was not for me.

I just wrote back and asked for an introduction. To be precise, this is what I had written from my yahoo archives…

“hi...buddy....it will be great if u could give some introduction of urs....”

Next Sunday I was in office. I had got a reply from that id to my query for intro.
It was a girl named Deepa Save. We had a brief chat. We soon found a common ground in form of a yahoo group where we both were members. She had some trouble in sending an email so I sent it on her behalf.

After that we exchanged our phone numbers and talked top each other.

At that time I did not know what lied ahead…
Very soon the phone call had become a regular thing. Thanks to VSNL, Deepa used to call me regularly. When she was not in office, we used to give missed calls to each others.

We used to talk about a lot of things office…family…friends…likes…dislikes…hobbies and many other things that mattered to us. We used to exchange opinions advises so on and so forth.

One day decided that we should meet sometime. I agreed that whenever I will come to Mumbai next time I shall take out some time for the meeting.

It was when I came home for Holi we managed to meet. We spent an entire evening talking to each other about so many topics.

Phone calls were now a daily matter. We used to speak at least once a day. We used to meet whenever I was in Mumbai and our schedules permitted.

This continued till this Diwali. During Diwali we met three times. One thing we had done was we never lied to our parents. We used to tell parents whenever we met. No hiding. By this time all this sequence could not have gone unnoticed by parents. In Diwali my mother questioned me if had any plans to take this relationship to next level. I had not thought on this point till then. We used to discuss even the marriage proposals we received but I had never thought of this angle of our relation.

I was one day she was telling me about a proposal her family had received from some relatives and how serious they were about it. This made me think.
Am I really willing to let her go? I questioned myself.
The Answer was No.

I started thinking seriously on this line. Shall I or shall I not? What does she think about me? What will be her reaction? But somehow I needed to communicate. And I did not have the courage to ask directly.

One day I got a sms from her,
“Dont love the love unless d love loves u,If love loves u then love d love in such a way tht it wont love anyone else...”

I responded…
“Does the love love me?”

And there was a reply in a short while…
“Yes.”

I called up. We talked for a lot of time. But now the conversation was not the same as in the past.

We decided that we shall have a face to face discussion in this regard before we take up the matter with our parents.

Regular phone calls went on as usual.

We met on 25th Nov… One year…53 weeks to be precise… after our first introduction…

We discussed a lot of things that mattered to us… which we thought could be causes of potential conflicts later.

In the end everything was fine… I asked her if she would marry me. She accepted. We decided that we would keep quiet for a year and only our parents would know it.

A new phase in life had begun. The snap here is a snap of sunset taken on 25th Nov at Girgaon Chowpatty. This was an evening to be remembered forever.

I have written this on 30th Nov 06 but I shall publish it on the day we would get formally engaged.

(Publishing on 28 Mar 07... 2 days after our parents formally announced the alliance...)

A month full of twists n turns…

It’s almost a month since I left for home for Diwali…

This one month has been so far the most eventful period in recent past.
Well… it is not so much about Diwali celebrations…. But about the other events during Diwali and days that followed.

The day I reached… next morning I got two bad news… my uncle was hospitalized because of mild heart attack… and one uncle expired…. both on same day…

So effectively there was nothing to celebrate about Diwali. I was regularly visiting the hospital to look after my uncle. That was first time in my life that I spent a whole night in a hospital. Since someone was always required to be present at hospital, me, my father, and aunt we all used to stay in shifts. That was a totally different experience for me.

Those visits had other things in store…. Something that was about to become a major turning point in my life…

My friend’s office was nearby the hospital. We used to meet every time either before start of my “shift” or after it were over. Those visits have come a long way in just a month…
I ended up proposing to her…

After I returned to Bangalore… there was another twist…

One day I saw a mail asking for referrals… the requirements were for our Pune Development center. I had a long pending with of transfer to Pune. I immediately send mail to higher ups asking to consider me first for the positions in Pune before any recruitment happens.

My wish was immediately granted. And movements began as to decide which team to move into and all.

The bosses here wanted to hold me back for some more time… and bosses at Pune wanted me to join at Pune at the earliest.

It was almost on the verge of completion…I was almost sure that I will be in Pune by year end…

Then I got another offer from my bosses…

There was a new implementation project coming up at Hong Kong… They wanted me to join that team as a team leader.

I wanted to go for this assignment… This was going to be my first independent assignment as a team leader….
but at the same time I did not want to loose this Pune opportunity. I told so to my boss. He too agreed…that after I finish off this assignment I will continue with my Pune relocation.

And here I am... traveling to Hong Kong next month… everything happened just within a month… certainly one of the most eventful months…

Things have taken twists and turns so fast that even though it is less than a month since I came back from home… I feel too much of time has elapsed…

Finally SCJP.

It is almost 3 years I m working in software industry.

Being a Diploma as well as Degree holder in Mechanical engineering, I had spent 8 years learning Mechanical engineering. And immediately after finishing my Degree, I landed in Infosys.

I remember the days during my DME when they had failed me in practical exam for Pascal. I had never thought that a few years down the line and I will be working in software industry.

Even during BE I had never thought of becoming part of so called “IT BandWagon”

I used to feel very odd…
Even though I could do all the coding and all that generally a software engineering graduate is expected to do, I had no formal qualification that would link me with the software skills.

So I decided to do some certifications which will give some credibility to my claims about software related experience in resume.

I decided to go about the Sun certification. After spending 3 years in java this was the easiest thing I could do.
I registered for the exam on 19th September…

Like they say “Prathamagraase Maksheekapaat” (roughly…trouble at first step) after I stared studies and planned to give exam, I was sent to my usual destination, Saudi Arabia… that too during the period when I had booked the exams.

I had to postpone the exam date. I set it on 30th September.

I started to study again for it… it was going cool… daily 1-2 hrs… just 2 days before exam, friends in office suggested about going to picnic somewhere….
The dates??? 30 Sept to 2nd October…

2nd October…. I had entirely missed it out while booking the exams. This was going to be a 3 day weekend. A rare opportunity for picnic... After initial hesitation, finally I decided to postpone the exam and go for picnic.

The exam date went to 14th October…

They had given me two chances for postponing the exam. And I had used both. This time I must appear for exam or I would have to pay fine.

So finally… study started again…. This time there were no holidays… no travels…
I had planned the exam on Saturday hoping that it will be weekend.

And finally the D-day arrived.
But as it had been happening since beginning… something was still to happen…
They had a strike on 4th of October in Karnataka. The office had remained closed.
To compensate that they had decided to keep the 14th as a working day!!!!

I had to consume a leave to appear for the exam.

I reached the exam center on the given time.
Exam server was down…
It was not expected to be up on that day!!! Sunday was holiday for training center… so I had to go again for exam on Monday…

I chose the very first exam batch on Monday….

Even though I was very much confident… usual exam nervousness was there.

But final outcome was good…. I got the much wanted certification…

Sun Certified Java Programmer…. ;-)

Youngest Daughter’s Town...

Continuing with my series of travels… One more new place….Once again the mesmerizing Western Ghats…

This time it was Chikamangalur and around. Chikamangalur literally means Youngest Daughter’s town and hence the title.

We had made a very ambitious plan for three days that is 30th September,1st and 2nd October. Although the plan was great… no homework had gone into it… no planning… just ad hoc decision… booked tickets and left for the destination. End the there were quiet a lot lessons to be learnt.

As expected… trouble started right after we landed in Chikamamgalur. It was a three day weekend and in addition police had beefed up security for Vijaya Dashami as well as Datta Jayanti (Chikamangalur is surrounded by many holy places). All this had resulted in all the lodges being fully booked since police dept had also booked lodges for staff. After roaming around whole city we finally managed to find a lodge with a room available… we decided to make it base camp for next three days.

On the first day we went to Kemmannugundi… A beautiful hill station. One needs at least a whole day to fully enjoy this place. We started in the morning for the hill station. The distance in map was given as about 50 KM.. so we had expected an hour to reach. Bt again… the hilly region ensured that journey too double time.

One more handicap we faced was that since we were only 3 people… hiring a sumo became too costly. So we decided to travel by local transport. This obviously resulted in lot of wastage of time. Furthermore last return transport from Kemmannugundi was available at 4 00 pm… so we had to leave our adventure halfway… we could not visit the Hebbe Falls.

Learning from this, we decided to start a bit early for the next destination… Kudremukh.
Again…. Just 80 km on map. We started at midnight 12 30 by local transport. And as expected reached early morning… but it was a bit too early. There was absolutely no one at bus stand except a few private transport drivers. First we decided to spend the time at bus stand but later we changed plan and went to Kalase.. a nearby village and nearest plave where one could find a lodge. The plan was to get refreshed and collect some info.

We had a lot of expectations from Kudremukh. It during initial research before travel, we had found a lot of information about trekking opportunities at Kudremukh. We made a lot of enquiries at Kalse expecting that there should be some facilities to get trekking permission from local forest dept. but we were told to go and get permission from the forest department at Kudremukh.

The photo above is of a Tea Garden in Kudremukh Area.

So finally we went back to Kudremukh.

We visited the forest office. And here came the biggest shock.
They had stopped permitting the treks. The reason? Rise in naxalite problem in the Jungles. This was my first direct encounter with the naxalite problem. Till today I was only reading about it in the news papers.

Frustrated… we asked them if there is anything at all that we could see under such condition.

They suggested visiting a nearby waterfall “Hanumangundi falls”.
We had already wasted a precious day… there was no point in returning back immediately… so something is better than nothing. We went to the water falls.
The snap beside is of Hanumangundi Water Falls

We spent some time there. While coming back we faced the biggest travel setback ever during this travel. There was no transport available for two hours!!!!

We returned back from Kudremukh to chikamangalur late evening… again 4-5 hours journey. We had not slept properly since last two days because of travel.

Next day we were to travel back to Bangalore by 3 00 bus.

We decided to spend the morning visiting nearby places... mainly temples. We identified two temples that we thought we could visit and come back before 2 00 pm.

One of them was the Belevadi temple.

Chikamangalur was under the Hoyasala dynasty from 11th till 14th century. This area is full of temples. Beautiful temples... We had planned to visit Belevadi temple and the Marle Temple which were nearby.

While going there we were expecting a normal south Indian temple with so many people around. But what we came across was entirely different. There was no one in the temple.
The temple sculptures were too good. Below is a photo of temple's interior.

One good thing we observed was that they were trying to restore the structure of the old temple. They were trying to do it much the same way as the original builders by using similar ingredients.

The priest there took us around the temple explaining the stories carved in the stones. After he learned about our plans to visit Marle temple next, he strongly and repeatedly recommended us to go to Halebid and see the temple there.

Initially we were reluctant given our time constraint. But after repeated recommendations from the priest, we decided to give it a try. He gave us all the details about going there, and we set out on the way to Halebid.

Based on our prior experience with local transport we were too skeptic. But this time we were wrong. Transport was good. We changed the transport twice on our way to Halebid but it was a smooth process. We never waited for more than 10 minutes.
The priest was right in his recommendation. If Belavadi was good… Halebid was simply awesome. I had never imagined that sculptures can be made to such minute details. The efforts of those unknown artists were clearly visible after more 600 years… after so many devastations from Muslim rulers and the nature…. It had withstood all… Photograph below is a panoramic view of one of the sides of the Hoysaleswara temple.

Halebid was the capitol city of the Hoyasala Rulers.

During my last visit to Murudeshwar, I had seen a hige new “Gopuram” built for the Murudeshwar temple. I can not resist temptation to compare the devotion and imagination of these ancient artists with those useless people working at Murudeshwar. On the entire Gopuram being built which is almost 10 floors high, one could count a small bunch of sculptures that were mass produced and put everywhere along the entire Gopuram. As if they were doing it just for the sake of doing…
Just look at the photo beside and you will understand how much attention has been given to the details.

We returned to the Chikamangalur Bus stand by 2 00 pm as planned. And finally set out on the return journey by 3 00 pm bus….

This picnic was not a well planned one. And as a result we could not see one place fully but too many places incomplete… certainly I shall plan and visut the same region again…
Well planned… and very specific…

Once Again Riyadh...

There seem to be some truth in Elmer’s remark that every time I say that I will never return; I end up visiting Saudi Arabia for some reason or other.

This time too I landed in Saudi Arabia once again on 16th Sept… although for a short… rather shortest visit ever for seven days..
But this time the trip was full of fun. Primary reason was that it was only 7 day trip. We had a workshop for clients and then back.

I got to spend time at home while going...as well as coming back. Thanks to Air India… they have issued more confirmed tickets than the flight capacity. So passengers in Mumbai could not be accommodated. So we got the next day flight and a hotel stay. I refused the hotel stay and went home ;-)

After the workshop was over I stayed there for three more days because of unavailability of return tickets. Those three days were full of time pass (within the “Saudi” limits of course)

There were a few things I did for first time in my life.
For first time I went on the top a 300+ meter high building. The Kingdom Center in Riyadh. With 302 meters height it is currently the 33rd tallest building in the world. As well as the Al Faisaliah Center this is currently at 64th position. Below is a snap from the top floor of the Kingdom Center.



It looks awesome from the top. Something that can only be compared with the view one get to see while plane landing. Although from google earth we can get the brief feeling but it is no match for the actual experience.

Also I got to eat Ostrich Meat for the first time. I saw the Ostrich egg also for the first time. Even though it is as big as a small coconut, it looks too small for the size of the bird. They were giving the eggs as gifts whenever available. Unfortunately I was not lucky enough.

But the biggest fun was escape from Ramadan… last year I had spent entire month of Ramadan in Jeddah…I still remember all those “Hungry Days”.

This time I left just one day before the Ramadan Started. On my way back, I once again spent the weekend at home before going back to Bangalore.