Ponmudi Trip

So, it had been almost a week since we had our makki trip and we were weary of a sunday to be just spent on a trip to shanghumugham at night. And after a little confusion over whether to go or not because of the lack of LPG to fill Jojy's car, we finally decided to go for it, with or without the gas. The decision was tested early with the gas running out and we having to pop the hood in the middle of the road and get the car into running condition.

Anyway, we filled petrol, since no gas was available on sunday and started out our trip with only 4 guys, which has now become rare in our gang. Once we got there we were greeted with a wonderful day and absolutely beautiful scenery. We decided to try and climb the next hill the hard way, finding our way through the overgrown steep side, even though we had santhosh ichayan, who wasnt so confident. The climb was exciting, hike style, with us having to make our own paths through the grass and rocks. We were trying to psyche each other out with stories of snakes and pointing to "potta kenars". And after upteen rest breaks we finally made it to the top of the mountain, only to be met by extremely "chorry appooppans" gang at top. So we had to cut down our stay at the top and climb back down, the easy way.

Next since we had no water, we decided to quench our thirst with what ever liquid we could get our hands on. And we were not dissapointed that, the particular liquid that we got our hands on happened to be a couple of bottles of chilled beer. So after a thoroughly enjoyable session at the table with a round of beer and couple of plates of green peas later, we were ready to come back down the hill roads in our gypsy. On route, plumbing problems forced us to take a few stops ( beer obviously made us all a little too hydrated!!) , followed by some very theatrical performances by both jonathan and jojy on the roads with both of them threatening suicides in one form or the other.

The rest of the ride was standard issue kind. Ofcourse the cops were conducting routine checks on the roads, and we ofcourse found ourselves not in the mood for wasting time with them, hence ran through the road block. We finally reached back, just in time before the darkness really set in, because the gypsy lacked head lights along with its horn (which was solved by everyone screaming at the top of their lungs before taking any hairpin turns).

The picture oddessy follows..


The ponmudi gang.. Jojy, Me, Jonathan, Santhosh Ichayan


My view

The hill we climbed.. its bigger that it looks!!


The proof... me completely winded..


Jonathan upto his usual stuff... 

Jonathan jumping off a rock.


Holding the rock up


Me and Santhosh Ichayan


The Gypsy..

State Bank Of Kannamoola : Pictures

Rajan and his Karizma


Lower part of makki


Me on my beautiful bike :D

Vallam Kali..


Me, Joji (RG), Sankar


The bikes...


Through the forest... 

The whole gang at Makki


The whole gang at Kowdiar


The fun... 

State bank of Kannamoola

So officially everything is over for me and hence I should start the hibernation period till the actual date of joining for wipro arrives. That would have normally meant sitting at home trying to fix up as many self imposed tasks/programming classes (java is the fave) like most others. But that would have completely spoiled the chances I would have had to blog about any of the recent events.

After the Blore/Mumbai trip, I delved straight into the world of Joji (RG) and his 'spend money and get a gang going' routine. What the statement meant is roughly this : My gang usually has many and more members ready for any kind of adventure/sleep over/biking trips/ boozing that can (reasonably) possibly be arranged. So RG, who had shipped off to the US a couple of years back and came back recently a bored soul, has come to our rescue with solutions to all of those incomplete dreams. The solution came mainly in the form of plain cash. Hence the title "State Bank of Kannamoola". He provides the means (cash, a car and the place to crash in) for all of those endeavours. So we are now accustomed to tearing through traffic in a military edition powered up gypsy at 90 kmph at rush hour, tires screaming on tight corners and where there is enough sand on the track a complete 180 degree spin using the hand brake.

So the trips are fairly normal, with daily Shanghumugham rides, either in his jeep or on our bikes with petrol partially RG sponsored. Ofcourse the smokes are completely sponsored by RG with his choice varying from scissors to 555 and marlboros (smoking is the pretext we use for any ride may it be ponmudi, kovalam, veli, akkulam or shanghumugham ; but a couple of us like me dont smoke). The rides starts or ends at RG's house, which in itself deserves a bit of commentry.

The house in itself is a work of art (I think), being the first Baker desgined home. It is by far the most complicated design that I have ever seen and it is also one of the most spacious ones. The beauty of it lies in the fact that it has all been construct in a mere 4-5 cents of land. Without getting into detailed explanations, the house is built aroung a single spiral stair case at various levels, with 5 bedrooms, two huge halls, and many bathrooms and other rooms. What makes the house more interesting is in infact the hardware sprewn all around. You cant take a step without the fear of threading over infinite number of wires of the 4-5 mac systems and a couple of Intel-D windows ones, several external hdds of capacities varying from 128 MB sticks to 350 GB external ones, and the various devices needed for complete bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity ( I dont know the details, and I am not mentioning the couple of laptops lying around with 80 GB external hdds). So this is the setting for night out booze parties, which I can only give mostly second hand descriptions since I slept quite early at about 2 am and I dont drink. But the gist of things is like : full volume swearing, mock fights, lots of banging around stuff and running about the house a lot. The external events which I missed included being chased by the police who followed them home, JB skidding the bike to a stand and taking off on foot into the compound and jumping over wall and hiding. Much more interesting was the reported customary drunk outing into the neighbouring cemetary late at night ( maybe early morning), and talking to each other and begging forgiveness of the dead dudes for realising too late they were standing on their graves. The scene alledgely involved JJ crying and hugging the cross and wailing to the dead dude for his forgiveness.

Today was more sane with a ride to the beach all on bikes. The ride was slow due to popular demand of the public and the beach was full. What was interesting was an array of modified and high end bikes parked on the beachfront which usually restricted to maximum 10, today totalled to about 50-70 with over a 100 bike freaks gathered around in various groups in the vicinity. (sadly not even one chick was sighted in a mile radius) . Leaving the beach was expected to be exciting since the abundance of bikers of various calibres hightened the posibilities of race taking place. And we were not disappointed for even a minute and as soon as the crowds were passed, a pulsar 180 with blinking flourenscent lights fitted to the bottom raced pass us almost sneering. I saw the Karizma of GJ and Rx100 of bipu come together in front of my p180 and confer for a second, give a slight movie style nod. This perpetrated a quick shifting down of gears from the front two bikes, followed by the same action by me and the sudden burst of pure acceleration and the accompanying booming sound. All three of us easily touched 100 and took the first 90 degree curve slipping and sliding about, already dissipating the challenger on the curve. The straight stretch was pure drag style with me gaining on the kzma. GJ slowed but the challeger x, was still trying to catch up. So me and bipu never let go of our throttle for a second after that. The next 90 turn was taken on full slide of the back tyre after each down shift and during the sudden acceleration afterwards. The next one was excitingly similar to the Rossi-Melandri rivalry we had seen on MotoGP the same evening with the curve taken extreme angle and between two cars taking the same curve all at atleast 70 and accelerating. After a 120 kmph straight stretch and full speed taking of the next curve there was not even a sign of x and we slowed down as soon as we reached the chaka stretch. Everyone was pumped, adrenaline rushing through our viens and everyone was screaming. Though JJ missed his CBZ and NSR400, everyone was satified. Next week the plan is the muster up all the bikes including the NSR and the gypsy.

Next ride> tuesday trip to makki > distance about 55 kms > route ponmudi.. fun/thrill factor=10/10!!!

Life Lessons

A few days back I was reading Silverine's post about a self proclaimed embarassing confession of hers. The confession turned out to be that she was indeed a Himesh Reshammiya (HR) fan. I for one had never given the dude any attention and hindi songs were never a favorite in my circles, with only an occasional piece of art like 'bulla ki' or 'woh lamhe' breaking into our circle. All this changed last weekend with my little trip to Bangalore and Mumbai. The consequences were indeed dramatical.

So, me being selected by Wipro Technologies, had been presented with a red two paged medical checkup card along with some other documents sent by the company to our CGPU. No one had given it much of a thought, automatically assuming that we need not move a finger in that direction unless the company were to instruct us specifically about the process to be adopted to complete that dangerous looking card. Luckily some of our off-campus fresher colleagues knew better and took it upon themselves to enquire about the case, and after according to what they say 20-30 tries they got through to the concerned person and found out that the medical test indeed had a last date which was infact dangerously close. The word was spread and in turn evoked a spur of interest from fellow CETians resulting in an extension of the dates thankfully for another week. That brought me to the decision to club my medical test with a visit to Mumbai that my cousin Dina has been inviting me and another of my cousins Hari to.

The volvo ride to Bangalore was fairly uneventful, with me locking eyes intermittently with a brown eyed chick sitting across me being the only timepass that I could find. The ride also signalled the beginning of the movie fest that I was to be exposed to for the rest of the trip (here it was a funny malayalam flick starring Mukesh). Getting to Bangalore, I got the first taste of what was in store for me from an innocent looking auto driver. Since my cousin was not going to be free untill afternoon he talked with this auto driver dude and set me up for a 'Malayali' lodge about Rs 150 and his auto charge Rs 10. He also assured me that the Ranbaxy institute, where I was to have my medical test was just walking distance from there. As you can all imagine everything changed when we actually got there, with the rent turning out to be Rs 350 (and I needed the room for only a few hours) and the auto driver being very generous in asking "maybe 150-200 thannal mathi" for taking me there- about 200 mts from where we started. But I got over this initial jerk to the ride, thinking I should have known better than to trust my cousin in setting things up. After freshening up I started out on the "Walkable" distance to the Ranbaxy institute. So after certain instances involving a mixture of broken syllabels and sentences in malayalam, hindi and english, I got a general drift and confidently walked myself to the City Market. Here the bus conductors and other officials completely succeed in not helping me by producing non-commital sounds or shrugs or both. My luck got a break with a by stander explaining to me in surprisingly good english that I was to take the 111 bus. So I hopefully asked him whether the bus ride was necessary or whether I could make the "Walkable" distance by foot if I had enough time. He laughed and urged me on to a coming bus. The ride, as you can all guess took about half an hour, with my luck showing again with me finding malayali co-passengers showing me the remaining way to the institute.

After this it was a taxing effort on my navigational skills to get back to the point where I boarded the bus, because unlike Trivandrum, Kollam or Calicut etc, where one could quite easily find ones way, Bangalore was, like we learned in Town Planning classes, was roughly in the form of concentric circles. Anyway surprisingly without much effort I got back to the market, picked up my cousin and got back to my room unscathed. There ended the Bangalore story because the very same day at 3 pm we boarded a bus to Mumbai.

It is here that the major change in me took place. Like I have mentioned earlier I barely knew the guy named Himesh Reshammiya and just barely could recognise his hit songs. But the bus management I think took it upon themselves to change anyone who boarded their buses into a fan of HR by continously bombarding us with his songs every second that a movie was not playing. Understandably the tunes were etched into my newly found mushy conciousness. Another notable change was the one concerning my opinion of hindi movies, especially comedies. I could never stand hindi comedies and I had always stayed promptly away from them. But alas this time I could not run away and was forced to watch Salman Khan in "Maine Pyar Kyo Kiya". But I got over my initial skeptisism and found myself enjoying the obviously lame "challu" jokes and found the whole experience very much to my liking. They also showed flicks like Taxi 9211 and Rang De Basanti (which I never liked inspite of all the hype). The Mumbai stay was in itself unmemorable with us catching the peak of the rain action there, confining us to either a apartment room or to the confines of a rickety maruti800, except for a couple of visits to a Vashi Mall (Chicks were cool and they returned stares!!.. that was for the guys reading this)

The return trip was continous travel, with just one hour gap between connecting buses from Mumbai to Bangalore and Bangalore to Trivandrum. So the movie and HR fest continued with the same HR vcd playing or flicks like "Gangster" (beautifully taken, and lovely heroine), "36 China town" (which I enjoyed immensely) and completely forgettable "Pyare Mohan". In the end I stepped out onto homeground soil a changed man. Now hindi movies have a chance to be good ( my list includes now > Kaante, Dil chahta hai, 36 china and gangster), inspite of completely stupid movies like "Krishh" . AND I can stop myself from humming "Jhalak Dikhlajaaaaaaaaaaa, aaajja ajjja ajjja aaaaajaaa" all the time !!!!!