Back from a break!

"Hey, let's go to Wayanad!"
"Sure, why-a-not?"

That was a sad attempt at a sadder joke. Now that that's been got out of the way, I'll get down to the post itself.

A few of my friends - Archana, Murali and Sharmila(Mul), to be precise - and I decided recently that we decided a break. Murali had been slogging away at work and clearly needed a few days off. Archana was enjoying her last few days of rest before leaving for IIM Calcutta, and felt she owed herself a treat. Mul had just graduated and richly deserved to enjoy her very short holiday before joining work. And I was, quite simply, bored. A week long bout of discussion and argument later, we decided on Goa Kanyakumari Andaman RoadTrip Wayanad.

For the uninformed, Wayand is a district in the North East of God's Own Country. No, not my room; I mean Kerala. (Connoisseurs of my blog, if any, would remember my having cracked this sad joke earlier.) It boasts beautiful forests and tea estates, multiple water bodies and a several days of stress-free relaxation. (More useful info available on Wiki and the official website.) So that's where we headed for three whole days - Wayanad.

As we drove into Kerala from Karnataka on NH212, the landscape changed from ho-hum plains/towns to stunning greenery with only a few smatterings of civilization along the way. It felt good to be far away from the heat and grime of Chennai, with the cool mountain breeze welcoming me as I hung out of the car window, not unlike a dog. Those who know me well would insist the similarities don't end there, but let's not discuss that now.

We checked into a very nice hotel in Kalpetta, the capital of the district. It wasn't exactly a budget hotel but hey, we wanted to pamper ourselves a bit. So we went the whole hog and booked a duplex for ourselves - two rooms and a living room, to allow us our madness and celebration of life in complete privacy from the rest of the patrons.

We hit all the recommended tourist spots... Pookote Lake, phenomenally beautiful as the mists descended over it in the early morning (pic below). A major tea plantation, which afforded plenty of scope for photography. The breathtaking walk - and I mean this literally, we just about managed to huff and puff our way through it - to the Soochipara falls. Also on our must-view hitlist were a couple of dams (truth be told, they were rather boring) and the best viewing points.



The four of us also took a leisurely drive through Muthanga wildlife sanctuary, and got a glimpse of several deer, wild boars, exotic birds, two herds of elephants (the baby elephants are sooo cute!) and even a tiger! Another interesting place was the Kuruva Dweep (Kuruva Island), a protected ecosystem on the Kabini River. We went on a two hour trek through the evergreen forest, much of it to the accompaniment of eerie noises and twittering birds, not to mention the steady yet upliftingly light rainfall.

Some distance from Kalpetta, we came across the curiously named tourist hotspot, the Chain Tree. It is, quite literally, a tree with a chain on it. The tale behind this is quite interesting... As the legend goes, a prominent British Engineer was building roads through the mountainous terrain of Wayanad, and decided to hire a local lad for help. An young Adivasi man named Karinthandan volunteered, and was instrumental in guiding the engineer through the region. His mission accomplished, the engineer brutally killed the guide so he could take full credit for the work done. Karinthandan's soul, it is said, lived on the tree where he was killed and subsequently haunted travellers for years. A local priest controlled the troublesome spirit by chaining it to the tree... hence the Chain Tree. Quite a good yarn.



A special mention must be made of the Edakkal caves, which feature petroglyphs several thousands of years old. It was awesome, mind-bogglingly brilliant. The experience was rendered all the richer because we hiked up a painfully steep slope to get to the caves, and then battled the pouring rain and slippery mud, clinging onto rocks and rickety ladders for dear life as we pulled our way to the caves. Sweet triumph, sweet victory. And it was a special feeling, all of us wet from the rain and the sweat, gathered together under a overhanging rock, drinking in the sweet smell of wet mud in the tropical monsoon rain. The leaves glistening, the flowers blooming bright, laughing an enjoying the moment with my friends, and the promise of a hot chai to follow. Beautiful.

At night, we relaxed to a hot meal and card games, the Simpsons and the news, swapping stories and memories of our school days. We also treated our feet to a hot water massage and cleansing session, which gave me almost orgasmic pleasure, as the picture clearly shows.



All in all, a VERY welcome break for all of us. Sadly, as we go our different ways in a few weeks from now, we don't know when we'll meet next. When we will once again have a chance to relive the good old days and discuss our futures. When we'll get the time to, quite simply, chill out and bask in the comfortable warmth of each others' friendship and company.

D0604: National Park

He watched her through narrow eyes, judging when she would be close enough to be taken... She moved closer to him, then further, and then closer again, dancing to some unheard cosmic rhythm. She flirted and teased, flitting about just beyond his reach, taunting him to take her... He would wait. He knew his chance would come. When the trance-like movements ended, he knew he would have her. Only a slight shifting of his lithe body indicated his rising excitement... Blissfully unaware of his heightened senses and the small crowd watching the silent battle, she drew just a little closer. Too close. One quick snap of the jaws and two gulps later, he had had his fill...

I watched, fascinated, as a huge lizard ate an enormous moth just outside my room. I'm getting to watch a lot of this sort of live Discovery Channel stuff in my dorm over the last month or so. Even as I'm typing this, my eyes intermittently stray to a weird bug doing what appears to be a figure of eight on my Human Resources Management textbook (Which means it's touched it more in the past week than I have.) This insect seems to have a shiny black back speckled with bright green spots. It seems beetle-ish, though given the depth of my knowledge of natural history, you'd be well advised to bet against me on that one. Elsewhere, a grasshoppery crickety insect is performing a pirouette on my wallet. Yonder, a mini-cockroachish one is scrabbling up a wall in a desperate attempt to prove Newton wrong, watched interestedly by a dark brown spider.

There are so many more lifeforms... mosquitoes with weird stripes on their backs (anti-malarial tablets every week), brilliantly coloured birds, brightly hued butterflies, all manner and sorts of six-, eight-, twenty four- and one hundred-legged insects, a frog (that seemed even more surprised to find itself on my balcony than I was to find it there). Throw in the stray cats and dogs, with peacocks crying in the background, and the only things missing are a coupla big cats and a stall to collect entry fees.

All this is probably due to the heavy rains we had about two or three weeks back, which swamped large parts of the campus. Here's LKP before and after.

Anyways, I don't mind insects at all, they give me company during long nights spent cursing the chap who developed accounting standards. And when I'm not listening to arbit Tamil, Hindi, English and Telugu songs (in that order), their chirping and trilling and fluttering forms a very pleasant background score...

But my love for all insect forms nosedived last week because of a traumatic experience...

I gave my jeans, which were in desperate need of a good hard scrub, to the dhobi who serves my dorm. He usually does a reasonably decent job on my clothes, and I only thought twice before entrusting my beloved denims to his care.

"Kab milega?" I asked him, still clutching the jeans, unwilling to be parted from them.

"Sirf do din, saab," he said.

"Pukka?"

"Pukka milega saab."

"Theek hai, iska khayal rakhna...," I said, giving it a final farewell pat.

Somewhat buoyed by the thought that I would be jeansless for just two days, I returned to what turned out to be a rather productive session of Operations Management.

As expected, he brought back my clothes eight days later. I fell upon my jeans like a starving wolf of the steppes falling upon a plump villager who had been on a month-long holiday. A couple of loving caresses later, I placed it on my bed, ready to wear it to class the next morning...

My class starts at nine. I woke up at eight thirty cursing all and sundry, had a half-hearted bath, crammed my books into my bag, pulled on my jeans, locked my door and rushed off to the mess. Halfway there, however, I felt a strange sensation in my pants. A... scratchy sort of feeling. It made my skin crawl. What's worse, it literally felt like something was crawling on my skin! All thoughts of a refreshing and much-needed dosa abandoned, I rushed back to my dorm, barged into my room, slammed the door shut and ripped off my pants. (I wonder how many women are swooning as they read this...)

I adjusted my specs which had gone askew in all the excitement, and peered into my pants (a picture of this would make an awesome topic for an abstract GD!). And my breath caught in my throat as I beheld... ants! Not one, not ten, but a rough estimate indicated their population was somewhere in the region of 2.3 million (OK, give or take about 2.299 million...). It was an entire bloody colony there in my jeans. I had no doubt that the queen was churning out hordes of them even as I stared at the ant farm in mute shock.

Practical considerations saved the day. Fascinating as it was to contemplate spending four hours in class with ants in my pants, it was more fascinating to think of the ways in which my grades would suffer if I turned up late for class. I let out an expressive oath, grabbed a spare pant that had suffered use for the whole of the previous week and ran all the way to class...

As a result of this life-altering episode, I am firmly anti-ant at the moment, and until an ant saves my life or helps me pass an Economics paper or performs some such miracle, I am unlikely to feel any warmer towards the ant community at large.

Just a little something to end this post - if I had been bitten or harmed in any way by the ants, what medicine would I have taken? Antibiotics!

Bombs away!

I am being persecuted. Attacked. Ambushed. Hounded. Stalked till my nerves are jangling like they've never jangled before. I walk/ride about in fear, trying to avoid open skies as I go about my daily life, a mere shadow of my former self.

My eyes are always open to any offensive. My ears are alert, listening, waiting for the telltale SPLAT as some incontinent bird lets loose. On me. Every time. It's inhuman, I tell you. Inhuman.

I have never been cruel to any species of bird in my life. OK, I've eaten chicken now and then, but that's hardly a reason to torment me in this manner. This relentless shadowing and frighteningly accurate aim... sometimes it makes me want to go. If you know what I mean.

"Hah, he's exaggerating", you say. "What crap!" you comment (quite appropriately). You dismiss my narrative with a careless "This one's for the birds!" Hear ye, dear reader, this be not crap. I speaketh the truth. As Yoda would testify, the truth I speak. History bears witness to the pitiful condition of my relations with the feathered folk.

Four times in the course of the last ten days. Twice on my shirt, once on my bike's headlight and once on the seat. Four in ten. Coincidence? I don't think so. The tally would have been five if I hadn't niftily swerved when I noticed a large yellow-green-white blob heading for me earlier this afternoon. It landed a relatively safe 6 centimeters away.

This has to be an anti-AC conspiracy by the birds. It isn't just the pigeons or crows, it's now all manner and sorts of birds. Some even appear to have called in distant relatives from foreign lands for the express purpose of decorating me or my vahana with their bodily wastes. And the odds are just too great for me to battle against. What chance does one pathetic human being have against a whole battalion of birds who scheme and plot against me. Maybe they even have a bird-Olympics, where one of the most prestigious events is the LALOAH, Land A Load On AC's Head.

I don't mind body art at all. In some cases I would donate rather liberally to foundations that aim to spread the culture of body arts to bring about world peace or the eradication of poverty or bringing a decent educational system (sans politics) to Tamil Nadu or other such causes that I know will not succeed in my lifetime. But I draw the line at the 'body' in the body art being my body. Oh, I know, if I let birds crap all over me and then stand in a glass box, I'd probably win the Turner Prize which, in my opinion, they award to the most insensible and downright crappy installation they find in the competition. But I'll turn down that honour, thank you very much.

I'd much prefer to remain clean and un-bird-crapped. I look just a little better without white-green-yellow blobs on my clothes or skin. I'm sure I smell a lot better without them too, though some might consider this point debatable.

Mosquito ergo sum

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?" - Macbeth, circa 1040
"Hah! Gotcha! Die, lousy bloodsuckers! Bwahahahaha (evil laugh)" - Me, Nov 2004

I have beaten my own record, and it feels so good. Last night, I killed five mosquitoes with one snatch. That's just closing one hand into a fist, and five little buggers dead or fatally wounded. My earlier record was four.

I hate mosquitoes. I simply cannot stand them, and my conscience does not prick me when I kill them. Nothing barbaric, just swatting them (if the term is applicable to mosquitoes) if they are anywhere near me. I have fond memories of one night less than a year ago when I killed no less than 150 mosquitoes in the space of about 25 minutes. Pretty darn good, even if I do say so myself.

I expect some of you are horror stricken at my bloodthirstiness (I'm pretty sure this word doesn't exist, but what the heck). But wouldn't you want to get rid of /maim / kill me if I was to do the following:
a) Buzz incessantly in your ears
b) Make your skin crawl by creeping along your hands and legs
c) Occasionally enter your nasal canal
d) Suck your blood. In fact, gorge myself fat on your life-blood.

If it was Dracula, one would chop off his head and all that jazz. The simplicity and beauty of mosquito killing is that it does not require trips to Transylvania, is cheap in terms of equipment (no stake, no garlic) and is very competitive (there are plenty of mosquitoes to go around). It also spreads social and communal harmony. It isn't uncommon to see a saas and a bahu in a tag-team mosquito death match. Or hindus and muslims swatting away together. So slap away merrily and make the world a better place.

To fight the mosquitoes
Forget the mats and cream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Squish them to death.

Ok, the rhyme scheme's kinda screwed but you get the point. I'll try again

To fight the mosquitoes
Forget the mats and creams
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Squish them to death. Sweet dreams.

One more point; i find far more mosquitoes near my PC than anywhere else. Why? Is there some cool radiation funda? I would definitely appreciate an explanation...

Statistically, Finland has the largest mosquitoes in the world (doesn't that just make your day). I've heard that there is this hugely popular competition there where participants vie to see who kills the most mosquitoes. I wonder how they keep count. I would really really like to go there and participate. Represent India and all that. Show that we are no less than them in bloodsport. Mera Bharat Mahaan. All I need to make my dreams come true is a sponsor. (Hint, hint)

As Tiny Tim would have said had he been plagued by mosquitoes, Kill them. Kill them, every one!