Its been a while since I bought my new camera, but this is the first worthwhile picture I have taken. I had a great time using my S3IS, but I guess I felt it was time to try something a little more challenging. I would have liked to get something with good video recording, but I guess this is good enough for now. I might have to get some good lenses for indoor photography, but thats all in the future, for another day, another post. Keep shooting(,) people (no pun intended!).

Kerala Me

Idleness makes people do very different things, and gets people thinking (although rather more infrequently) of very different things. Growing up, I was never a politically aware person, thanks to my stubborn abstinence from newspapers and news shows during my school and college days. Nevertheless, there used to be those occasional moments of regret, during which I used to feel that I should indeed take a few minutes off of my busy days of goofing around doing nothing with friends, and read a few lines of the day's Hindu editorials, or check up a bit on the latest change of allegiance of Karunakaran's party members, or take a look at the finance budget presented the previous day. It wasn’t that my household lacked the air of political awareness, newspapers, or a television playing some India/Kerala vision News, twenty four hours a day. My dad was a hard core news junkie, watching the news on 4 to 5 different channels starting at 6:30 in the evening stretching well into the night. However, this glorious period of my dad's news-watching peak thankfully coincided with my eleventh and twelfth standard in school, meaning I did not have much time anyway, after all the tuitions possible cramped into a week (actually my situation was rather ‘light’ when compared to the next generation). Not that I would have watched it with him anyway.

Now that my years have rooted itself firmly into the later part of it's twenties, I have started to feel the void of not having all those wonderful opinions about the world, its makings, and its makers, which several of my rather interesting peers seem to possess and make a point to share across to the world at every opportunity. Added to all this, comes the hours I need to be in office, pretending to be productive in front of the computer, even though it is common knowledge in my office that we have not had any real work for months. So, I end up spending hours of my ‘productive’ time browsing through articles on subjects as varied as the iOS, to Methamphetamine, to ‘The Economic liberalisation in India’, which all has started making me ramble on about several of these topics in conversations that I have been having.

Lately I have been trying to particularly follow the development of our very own beloved capital city of Thiruvananthapuram. Not that there is a lot going on to ‘follow’. Even though I have been away from my home town for over four years now, I have been in the city enough to see that very little has improved in these past few years. In fact, the condition of the city seems to have gone backwards significantly in the last few years. When I did live in the city there were plans of road expansions and ring roads, and in fact the beautiful stretch of the Kowdiar road was widened and opened. The plans for the ring road made very little sense to me at the time of their announcement and partial implementation. But after a few years in the midst of the real 'India Shining' experience in Bangalore and Hyderabad, I've come to realize how far ahead to the future you need to set your sights to and plan, if you want to keep pace with some of the other states in India. I've not been to Gujarat, but I keep reading about how Narendra Modi has revitalized a dying state and has transformed a state into an investment heaven (It seems 'It is stupid if you are not in Gujarat'). I think I remember reading in ’98 that Gujarat was dead broke, or maybe I am just imagining things.

While none of the people I've talked with are experts on the subject, it looks like Kerala is going nowhere in terms of development. I tried to read up on the development initiatives of Kerala, and could not find much on the topic. The most useful, by far has been blogs by a senior from CET, Ajay Prasad, which gave very specific and on the ground commentary about the projects going on in the state, albeit with a slight inclination towards the left.

I wish someone would at least write a column, or a blog, to try and analyze the (bad) state of things in the city and in the state. Since it would be hypocritical of me to urge other people to show at least a passing interest in the plans for the city, I thought I would give my two cents worth about it. Since my experience in this field of social commentary is severely limited, I expect other folks (from the prestigious colleges, the IT companies, the expatriates, et al) to give it another serious shot.

So I have decided to use my rather abundant free time to write something and have my next post on this subject, just to make sure that I keep blogging and my poor blog here does not die. Maybe it will prompt some of my other friends to fish out their blogging pens and write something on this topic too (or in the very least write something).

P.S: Thanks to my friend Pitt from college for reminding me I haven’t blogged in a long time.

A Civic sense..

I had started on this across the seven sea relocation, drooling over the thona kaykal this whole thing was supposed to offer me. Now after a month of doing almost next to nothing, I have found myself in a spot that is very familiar to me - the edge of being broke. I had had enough of being broke in Trivandrum, to shift to Bangalore to continue being broke and onto a continuation in Hyderabad of the same. I had expected a monastic existence in the US was what the doctor would prescribe and had gone ahead with the very difficult choice of moving here without C.

Now suddenly nothing makes much sense. I am stuck at home with no TV, no movies, no one to talk to and no car to go anywhere. To top it all off my bank balance is steadily dwindling. And if that weren't bad enough, I went to an ATM to get cash to buy lunch, the ATM refused to provide me any money and to add to the injury, refused to give me back my ATM. Then I realized that the check card was a temporary one and it was high time it would have expired. So now I have three dollars in my wallet. Not that I would need a lot many notes in my wallet to sit at home and watch infomercials on the basic channels which come free with Comcast.

In the morning, while my laundry was being done, I took out my ten dollar, goodwill secondhand roller blades and headed out to the tennis court (hah!) to try roller blading for a while. Well in case anyone is wondering why the tennis court - I do not yet know how to stop very well and you can imagine what would happen if I try something on the very sloping roads in front of my house. But the cold got to me, it got to my bones and I had to hang up my blading shoes and think of other things to do while my clothes were being done. So that sent me jogging to the gym and a few sets of heavy shoulder presses and lat pulls followed.

Now I am sitting here and thinking of how to get enough money to buy a car once my social security number comes. Again, it needs to be seen if the social security card actually gets here to my mailbox, considering that my name is not there anywhere on the lease (which might explain why I did not get my debit card which was sent weeks back). Keeping my fingers crossed that both the debit card and social security number comes soon, and hoping that someone sells me a Honda Civic for less than three thousand bucks...

Does anyone know anyone in Atlanta selling a car?

A jab in the face

Its been a month that I've been in Atlanta and when I look back I am not so sure what I did this last month. My new year was wasted in the New Delhi International Airport with a Canadian settled Indian lady and her obese son sharing the dinner table with me at the New Delhi International terminal. I did not even notice the minute hand cross the 12 mark, and it was already 15 minutes past 12. What a way to welcome the new year into my life. Taking how my new year went, something tells me that life ain't going to be a lot of fun this coming year. I've had to leave my better half in Hyderabad and move to Atlanta on a long term assignment. Its going to be hard on both of us, with just two months together after getting married. We had not even gotten used to replying to people with 'Yes, I am married', or introducing the other as 'Husband/Wife' to friends.

Settling here in the US was a cakewalk compared to last time. There was no roaming around in downtown in the middle of the night with two suitcases and no idea where to go or not even the search for accommodation in places where drug dealers were quite conspicuously standing outside. This time around, I already had an apartment waiting for me thanks to my colleague who got here two weeks ahead of me. And how hard is it to settle into an empty life?

Finally after 4 weeks of inactivity I finally decided to go and do something. I had always wanted to take boxing classes. So after a fair bit of googling, I narrowed it down to a place which is walkable from a Marta (Atlanta's metro rail) station. I took a free sample class from the place and decided to go ahead with the place. They killed me the second day and I could not even lift my arms after an hour. The speed bag is as tricky as it looks. Same goes for the double end bag. I can't even jump rope properly! But the fun part was my first real spar. There is nothing like getting your face smashed up by a Chinese dude.. :-)

Everyone should try this!

So when do I learn Tango...?