The Perfect Blend of Tradition and Modernity

May 30, 2015

 

My father, whom I respect, love, and admire, is admittedly not infallible. And one of the major mistakes he made where my own life is concerned was in 2013, when in a mood that was mixed parts of ‘Nothing else is working’, ‘Customised service is better than faceless matrimonial websites’, and ‘The upside could be great and how bad could the downside be?’, he enrolled me in the lists of Sycorian Matrimonials (back then, it had not yet become Sycoriaan).

As it turns out, there was one upside and four downsides. The upside was that the whole association with Sycorian left me with stories upon which I will be able to dine out for years and years. The downsides were:

  1. The hefty enrolment fee they charged. As Amba said, for that amount of money they ought to be manufacturing brides and grooms, Pygmalion style, to customer specifications.
  2. The customised service being far, far worse than faceless matrimonial websites because the Sycorian relationship managers refused to reply coherently to email, kept begging for phone calls or face to face meetings (in which nothing ever happened), and in general did nothing beyond sending profiles of prospective brides, which matrimonial website algorithms do anyway, at far less cost.
  3. The psychological pain which my father suffered when he was repeatedly spurned by prospective brides’ parents, either because they were yuppies and shuddered at the thought of their daughter marrying into a crass Punjabi business family, or because they were lalas and shuddered at the thought of their daughter marrying into a business family so manifestly unsuccessful that the father in law drove a Toyota Corolla and the groom himself rode a bicycle to work.
  4. The time I wasted and psychological despair I suffered while reading the profiles of said prospective brides.

This despair was largely because most (though to be fair, not all) bridal profiles were very much like each other, especially in the following respects:

  • Education at a British university
  • Worked in a family business or didn’t have a job
  • Claimed to be from a cultured family (though neither any profile nor a Sycorian relationship manager could ever give a satisfactory explanation of what a cultured family is, and if it involves petri dishes)
  • Claimed to be the perfect blend of tradition and modernity

What impressed me over give months of reading Sycorian profiles is that whenever it came up, everyone claimed to be only a perfect blend of tradition and modernity. There were no imperfect blends, near-perfect blends, ninety-fifth percentile blends, off-spec blends, or cheap-but-serviceable blends. The only parallel is to olive oil, where if you go to a supermarket you can find extra virgin olive oil, olive oil, and even that gross pomace olive oil, but never virgin olive oil without the extra virginity.

Just as with cultured families, no explanation was ever forthcoming on what exactly a perfect blend of tradition and modernity is, and what it implies for one’s daily life. Nor was it ever explained why being a perfect blend was a desirable trait in a bride, when in whiskey blends are looked down upon and single malts are preferred.

RoKo and I once speculated that the modernity consisted of meeting in a five star hotel coffee shop, and the tradition consisted of getting the prospective groom to pick up the bill, but that was just us being bitchy, and anyway, as the months went by, I ended up meeting ladies from Sycorian even in mall coffee shops. So I eventually decided that “perfect blend of tradition and modernity” was just something that people used to fill in matrimonial profiles when they could think of nothing else to write, the way we, as Class XI students who had to come up with farewell dedications for graduating Class XII seniors whom  we had no clue about, used to write “Amit Kumar’s smiling face and cheerful personality will never be forgotten!”

So after completely giving up on Sycorian around the beginning 2014, I paid the expression no more attention until the very end of 2014.

In the end of 2014, I was vacationing in Bavaria, and went to Neuschwanstein castle.

It is important to note that Neuschwanstein, which inspired the shape of Walt Disney’s Cinderella Castle has no military value. It looks like a fairy tale castle because the mad king Ludwig II wanted to build a castle that looked like it was out of a fairy tale and which would be the perfect backdrop in which to perform Wagner operas. In fact, in pursuit of this goal, he actually wanted to build three more fairytale castles, all without military value, just so he would have the perfect simulacrum of an imagined age of chivalry and knights.

However, as the guide at Neuschwanstein pointed out, it wasn’t just opera backdrops and medieval high fantasy and impractical castles. Neuschwanstein also had a toilet that automatically flushed whenever you stepped off it, and one of the first telephone lines in Bavaria. All the modcons that the late nineteenth century had to offer, really.

A couple of days after going to Neuschwanstein, I was in Nuremberg, where I visited the transportation museum, which exhibits the personal train coaches of Chancellor Bismarck and King Ludwig II next to each other. Bismarck’s coach is straightforward, free of frippery, and has a stenographer’s desk and telegraph machine. Ludwig’s coach is a bright blue with gilt all over the place. Talk about contrasts.

 

Anyway, by 1886, the rest of the government of Bavaria was fed up with Ludwig spending the entire treasury on his impractical romantic castles, so they had him declared mentally unsound and unfit to be king, and replaced him with a prince-Regent. He mysteriously died by drowning shortly thereafter. Even more mysteriously, the psychologist who signed off on the medical report declaring him insane died the very next day.

It was after learning all of this that I had a flash of insight: with his obsession for creating the perfect medieval castles, but also making sure that said castles had flushing toilets, telephone connections and electricity, and were linked by a train that had a gorgeously medieval livery; it is actually Ludwig II of Bavaria who was the perfect blend of tradition and modernity. If you aspire to be the perfect blend, nothing but bankrupting a nation, being declared insane, being deposed from the execution of all your responsibilities, and then dying under mysterious circumstances will do. Anybody claiming to be a perfect blend without going through all this is either ignorant or a liar.

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Oh The Place Names You’ll Know!

February 3, 2014

Today, I drove from Kanchipuram to Coimbatore. The drive is excellent, and the highways from Vellore to Krishnagiri, and Krishnagiri to Salem are wide, and almost empty of traffic. (Which means that concessionaires who’re operating the toll roads are probably in grave financial distress, but that’s a separate issue.)

One of the unique pleasures of traveling medium distance by car is the sense of possibility it gives you. Rail travel has its own charms, but by and large, once you board the train, you’re stuck on the route it will travel (unless you make really special efforts like changing trains every now and then or maybe even hijacking the train). But with a car, the ability to change plans and to go forth and to completely different places is much higher. “I could detour just eighty kilometres and see Hogenakkal, and still be able to reach my hotel tonight,” I thought around eleven thirty this morning. “I could cancel my appointment and just drive on to Cochin!” later, around two thirty in the afternoon. “Gosh, what if I skipped the direct route and went via Namakkal instead, just for the opportunity to make terrible Chennai Super Kings jokes.”

The seed of this temptation is planted by highway signs, telling you that such and such place is a left turn away, or just 40 Km from where you are now. (In an extreme case, on the way from Pondicherry to Chennai, my passenger saw the sign for Calcutta and suggested going there instead for phuchkas. I did not oblige.)

The highway signs between Salem and Coimbatore made me realise that this  particular part of Tamil Nadu has places with names that are very different from the ones I’m familiar with from Chennai, Kanchi, and their surroundings, which tend to the “Long live divine classical Tamil!” mould; what with names like Thiruvallur, Sriperumbudur, Azhinjalpet, Thiruvannamalai, and Villupuram.

The Salem – Coimbatore stretch has those too, of course (Tiruppur, and Kovai itself), but there were four names I saw which had a much more immediate connect with me as a North Indian: Sankari, Bhavani, Sathy, and Avinashi.

All these four names are Sanskrit, all four are names or epithets of Parvati, and none of the four have suffixes. The town is called simply Bhavani, not Bhavanipuram, or Bhavanipet, or Bhavanipalya or Bhavanihalli. And they don’t have any honorifics either – neither Sri nor Thiru is appended to these names. They are quite simply, some of the most direct and personal names I have seen in Tamil Nadu.

(Place names with honorifics are not unique to Tamil Nadu. Punjab has Anandpur Sahib, and there is a very unfunny joke about the pious Punjab Roadways bus conductor who slaps passengers who ask him for tickets to Amritsar instead of Amritsar Sahib and Ludhiana Sahib instead of Ludhiana.)

I wonder if there are more such prefixless and suffixless Sanskrit names in this region, and for that matter, how these names came about. There must be a story here.

On a more frivolous note, I also saw a signboard for a place called Gobi. This being TN, the name might actually be Gopi or Kopi, but now I am filled with a burning desire to go there, find out if the local method of preparing cauliflower has something distinctive about it, and then release the recipe to the world as Gobi Gobi.

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Would You Pledge Money if I Rode for Charity?

April 5, 2013

I started bicycling last year. I’ve been doing it regularly now for a little over a year, and I’ve improved a lot in the past six months especially. I can now easily ride 40 to 50 kilometres a day. If I practice really hard, by December 2013 I could possibly be riding a hundred kilometres or more a day without wearing myself out. If I achieve that sort of stamina, I could conceivably complete the Tour of Tamil Nadu (a thousand kilometres in a loop through mostly flat terrain in Tamil Nadu) or the Tour of Nilgiris (only eight hundred kilometres, from Bangalore to Chamrajnagar, but almost all of it through hilly terrain).

Both these tours are in the end of December, so I have eight months to train for them. Both tours also let you associate with a charitable cause and ride to raise awareness about what they do, and money to help them do it.

So let’s talk numbers. The registration for either tour will be approximately 18,000 rupees. The costs of transporting my bicycle from Delhi to South India, the costs of additional gear and provisions, et cetera, could come to about seven or eight thousand rupees. Let’s say twenty five thousand rupees total for the venture. I’m pretty confident that I can raise twenty five thousand rupees from my freelance writing from now until December.

However….

If I’m getting this money from my freelancing anyway, I could just donate it to a charity of my choice straight away without going through the rigmarole of riding through South India. The activity only becomes worth it if you guys pledge to support the charity if I complete the ride, and end up donating more than twenty five thousand.

So I’m now asking you straight up: if I rode either the Tour of Tamil Nadu or the Tour of Nilgiris (I have three months to decide which), would you pledge money to a charity? If you would, please leave a comment.

Ideally, mention how much money you’d contribute in the comment, but if you feel shy about doing this in public, you can instead ask me to email you for the amount. If I get pledges for more than twenty five thousand rupees, I’ll do one of the rides instead of just donating my money directly.

Fine print:

  1. My charity of choice is Pratham, which does a bunch of stuff related to education in India, including monitoring school effectiveness, conducting interventions in education and child nutrition, and creating teaching material. I’d love it if you donated to these guys.
  2. But if you would rather contribute somewhere else, that’s okay too.
  3. It only counts if you’re donating over and above what you usually would. If you’re already giving ten thousand a year to a charity of your choice, please don’t do it again, just under my name. I’m asking for something extra.

And now, I’ll leave it to you to do the pledging in the comments.

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Lonely Planet, Amethyst, Parks

July 31, 2011

This isn’t the common name for it, since a Google search doesn’t seem to throw up the link I want, but there’s a Lonely Planet Curse: as soon as Lonely Planet (or, to be fair, any major travel guide publisher) lists a restaurant/ hotel in their guidebooks, it starts getting an influx of tourists. Since it now has a captive market, the place in question lets service standards slip, raises prices to white-people levels, and earns the lasting ire of the locals over there. I think Adri rants about this often.

I was at Amethyst in Royapettah today and I suspect it may be suffering from the Lonely Planet Curse. It was certainly full of white people, and at least one table had a French couple reading an Inde de Sud guidebook. If anybody’s seen the latest South India guidebook, can they verify this?

The Lonely Planet Curse would explain the averageness of the food and coffee there. It’s not bad – it’s just meh. I wouldn’t refuse to go to Amethyst ever again because of bad food, but I’d never go there for the food. The desserts are still very good, though. The lemon curd cake I had today was fantastic. So was the banana bread, but then I am biased when it comes to bananas. People who are going to go ‘Haun!’ or ‘TWSS!’ in the comments, here is a pre-emptive ‘Shut up.’

But the thing is, you don’t really go to Amethyst for the food, which is just a bonus. The reasons to go to Amethyst are:

  1. You are a corporate whore who still wants to pretend to be a hippie
  2. You want to gawk at all the hot people or posh people or actual hippies there
  3. You want to buy nice presents for your darling girlfriend
  4. Amethyst is lovely and you can sit and wander around among plants, fishponds and cats

The new venue is even greener than the old premises in Gopalapuram. They’ve planted pineapples which haven’t come up yet, and have a huge melon (or perhaps pumpkin) patch, as well as brinjal plants. Delightful. I was there last week as well, and I sat in the verandah to write and blasted out almost a thousand words in three hours. As a place to just sit down and write, the Amethyst verandah pwns my guesthouse room, my office, and five star hotel coffee shops (which I tried last year). Though to be fair, doing this writing-on-the-verandah thing during the July monsoon is probably far more comfortable and far less hot and sticky than doing it in May. But even then the green cover would probably help.

So it’s partly the air of artsy hippieness that surrounds Amethyst that keeps taking me back there (and telling other people to meet me there)  and partly the greenery. But I realised that the hippies come there because of the other hippies and the greenery too – so fundamentally it’s the greenery. It’s the third greenest place I know in Chennai – the first two are the IIT Madras campus and the Horticultural Society.

However, I never invite people to meet me at IIT Madras (unless there’s already a quiz on there, but let us not delve into these boundary conditions) or the Horticultural Society. As is my wont, I mused why this is so. After all, with such wonderful greenery, why not invite people to meet me there?

After due consideration, I realised that this is because our social norms – especially in India –  demand that we combine socialisation with consumption. We either meet at coffee shops, where we consume coffee – or restaurants, where we consume food – at the movies, where we consume images – or at malls, where we commit wanton consumerism in general. Thus, most people who adhere to social norms will not go to a place merely because it is green. On occasion, I have suggested to people that we meet at the Horticultural Society or the (Delhi) zoo, but I am not quite as beholden to social norms. (As Bernard Woolley put it, this is “an irregular verb. I have an independent mind. You are an eccentric. He is around the twist.”) Anyway, either they never agreed or the one time someone did agree, the zoo was closed. So it goes.

I further reflected that changing social norms would be difficult and time-consuming, whereas getting parks to add a restaurant, or a small cafe, or a gift shop would be comparatively simple. In fact, many Delhi parks have done this. Deer Park has Park Baluchi, Lodi Gardens has the Garden Restaurant, and the Garden of Five Senses has something whose name I cannot recall at the moment. The only trouble is that these are all high-priced, and there are no lower price alternatives. The parks have street food hawkers outside, on the footpath, but none inside. As far as I know, Chennai does not have anything at all inside its parks, but growing up as I did five kilometres away from both Deer Park and Nehru Park, Chennai’s parks seem ridiculously tiny to me, and I suspect that they wouldn’t be able to squeeze a restaurant or food court in.

In an ideal situation, parks would have restaurants, cafes, small shops, and other such things to attract people for whom greenery was not sufficient motivation. Which is most people, when you come to think of it.

And then finally I remembered that somebody had already written about this, in 1961.

Certain qualities in design can apparently make a difference too. For if the object of a generalized bread-and-butter neighborhood park is to attract as many different kinds of people, with as many different schedules, interests, and purposes as possible, it is clear that the design of the park should abet this generalization of patronage rather than work at cross-purposes to it. Parks intensely used in generalized public-yard fashion should have four elements in their design which I shall call intricacy, centering, sun, and enclosure.

Intricacy is related to the variety of reasons for which people come to neighborhood parks. Even the same person comes for different reasons at different times; sometimes to sit tiredly, sometimes to play or to watch a game, sometimes to read or work, sometimes to show off, sometimes to fall in love, sometimes to keep an appointment, sometimes to savor the hustle of the city from a retreat, sometimes in the hope of finding acquaintances, sometimes to get closer to a bit of nature, sometimes to keep a child occupied, sometimes simply to see what offers, and almost always to be entertained by the sight of other people.

 (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

Jane Jacobs, ladies and gentlemen. One of the twentieth century’s leading badasses. You’d be well advised to read the whole thing – all 448 pages of it.

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Notes From a Delhi Weekend

October 11, 2010

Or, too long for tweets, too short for individual posts. This is an Amul Chocolate blogpost. Or perhaps Goldilocks. Whatever.

  • To my great sadness, I fell sick on Saturday, and though my family had tickets to the athletics events at the Commonwealth Games, I wasn’t able to attend. I’m not sure when India’s hockey semifinal is, but between leaving tomorrow afternoon, and the immense difficulty in getting tickets, I think I won’t be able to attend that either. Such is life.
  • The innermost lane on all roads to Games venues have been reserved for vehicles with Commonwealth Games stickers. I am astonished for two reasons – first, that Delhi’s drivers are actually obeying this rule for the most part; and second, that there are so few vehicles with stickers. Since this is Delhi, I would have expected anybody with even a tenuous connection to anybody in government to have stickers. This is not the case. Astounding.
  • My home is near the tennis stadium, and thus my neighbourhood has born the brunt of Commonwealth Games ‘beautification’. In the past year, our sidewalks have been ripped up and relaid thrice. The last time (in the beginning of August), this involved raising the sidewalk to a height of six inches above road level. All well and good, except this was also done across everyone’s gates, making it impossible for cars to move from the roads to the driveway. The next morning, the MCD Senior Engineer accepted bribes from everyone to build small ramps to facilitate entry and exit. Well played, I say.
  • That said, the new sidewalks and road berms are very nice indeed. They are lowered to road level at zebra crossings, the berms too are interrupted to make an island at said zebra crossings. And when I walked from Safdarjung Enclave to Green Park, the new sidewalks made the walk much better than it used to be. However, it is still not perfect, because six things keep fucking up what is otherwise an excellent sidewalk:
    • power transformers
    • garbage dumps
    • cars parked on the sidewalk
    • street vendors
    • security guard boxes
    • shops enroaching on the sidewalk
  • The last two categories – shops pushing their displays or stairs onto the sidewalk and security guards’ kiosks being placed on the sidewalk instead of inside the house are sheer bad civic sense on the part of private parties. The street vendors and cars parked on sidewalk are bad luck or incompetent planning – Safdarjung Enclave and Green Park were developed in the 1960s when few households had even a scooter, and nobody could have anticipated that every house would have two cars at least. The transformers and garbage dumps on the sidewalk, though, are inexcusable enroachments by the government itself on public property.
  • There is now a FabIndia outlet in Green Park. Delhi visits have therefore become even more expensive.
  • Green Park Market is becoming positively Chennaiesque in the density of pharmacists. It has at least five, in what can’t be more than a three kilometre stretch. I suspect this may be a result of the Adyar Ananda Bhavan triggering a slow metamorphasis. If it continues, than in twenty years Green Park will no longer have Punjabis but elderly TamBrahm thathas taking morning walks in GAP shorts and white Converse sneakers. Whatay.
  • I also finally got to travel on one of the new low floor buses with the bright green paint jobs. If you can get a seat, they’re definitely more comfortable than the old rattletraps. If you can’t, there’s not much difference. The getting on and off on the low floor is a small delight though.
  • I have more to say on the subject of buses, but that is a blogpost (or possibly an oped) in itself.
  • The Hindi signage for the Green Park metro station reads ग्रीन पॉर्क and not ग्रीन पार्क. That is, Green Paurk. The signs inside the coaches are fine though. I am mystified.
  • The Airport Express Metro Line is not ready yet. Oh sigh. But more on that in a separate post.
  • The Metro coaches themselves are very nice, and the way they use LEDs in the route strip above the coach doors to show which station is coming next is very clever. They also have power points for laptop and mobile charging; though the coaches seem far too packed for anybody to use these properly.
  • Yes, the coaches are jampacked, even on the South Delhi stretch of the Yellow Line that people were afraid would be underutilised, because, hey, South Delhi snobs always take their cars. The Violet line was only jampacked upto JLN Stadium though – and that was presumably because people were going to watch the Games. But then again this was on a Sunday night – a weekday maybe more crowded.
  • There was a Wired article which said that the major attraction of public transport over driving yourself was that instead of focusing on the road, you could read, or play games on your smartphone, or tweet, or suchlike. This is true in general, but the Metro is so crowded that reading will require immense concentration and Zenergy. And the network in the underground parts of the Metro is good, but not good enough.
  • In fact, the Metro is so crowded that it leads to practically Bombayesque levels of overhearing other people. On the violet line, I ended up overhearing a girl who was terribly unclear on the concept of interchanges. This was in addition to the person who asked me at Central Secretariat station if the train we were getting into was going to… Central Secretariat. He believed that the sign saying Central Secretariat was actually denoting the train’s destination.
  • I was tempted to be snarky about people who cannot understand how the Metro works, but after reading this Slate article on signage, I am more sympathetic. It is actually an important question – how do you explain the concept of an interchange to somebody whose learning style does not mesh well with maps?
  • Also on the violet line was a small child who was surprised that the train suddenly emerged from the underground tunnel and went on to a bridge. His mother explained to him that the Metro runs both under and above ground. He pondered this, and then nodded gravely.
  • The story of 4000 condoms being distributed at the Commonwealth Games Athletes Village and then the drains getting clogged with the condoms (insert cleaning your pipes joke here) is by now known to everyone. But all these foreigners keep having sex anyway. What I am more concerned about is – are the games also helping the local teenage volunteers get any action? They seem suspiciously cheerful. And if they are, how much does the bright red and white volunteer tracksuit contribute to this happy state of affairs? It is true that bright plumage helps birds attract mates, but in that case only the male is brightly coloured while the female is dowdy. But here, the male and female volunteers both have the same shiny tracksuit. This must be investigated.

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My Trip in Beer

October 5, 2009

Cobra Beer

In order:

  1. Stella Artois, near the Tower of London. Recommended to me by Nega Maami.
  2. Amstel, at Henry’s Bar in Piccadilly. Also a Nega recommendation. Dry and delicious.
  3. Cobra, along with delicious paalak paneer at a place called… Punjabi Spice? Punjabi Spirit in Hounslow. As strong as Kingfisher, without the unpleasant aftertaste.
  4. Warsteiner, on the Lufthansa flight to New York.
  5. Heartland Brewery Wheat Lager once I got to New York. Not too bad. It was Masabi who suggested meeting at Heartland Brewery, and I have to thank him for it.
  6. Heartland Brewery Pumpkin Ale. Delicious, but an acquired taste. With every sip, I thought to myself – ‘Is this really beer?’
  7. Sam Adams, in the Dulles lounge. If this is the pinnacle of mainstream American beers, I weep for that unhappy nation.
  8. Uerige Alt in Düsseldorf. Even more of an acquired taste than the pumpkin ale, and very difficult to get used to if practically all your beer till date has been lagers.
  9. Franiskaner Weissbier at Frankfurt. This, I think, is the start of a beautiful friendship.

I tried nothing at all in Texas, mostly because I was far too zonked. Corona will have to wait for another time.

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Tribhanga Here, There and Everywhere

August 27, 2009

So about two years ago I had linked to the blog of a guy called Anil Menon, where I had got a whole bunch of fundaes which I used to make questions for my KQA quiz. This year, I found out that Anil Menon is actually a sci-fi writer. Here is an interview of Anil Menon by Vandana Singh.

I found the blog because I had been searching for more information on the Tribhanga pose, which it provided in great detail. If you didn’t read that post when I first linked to it in 2007, read it now. It’s brilliant.

The tribhanga is a pose in which the body twists or flexes thrice – on the leg, the waist, and the upper body. Because this pose comes more naturally to women than men, Chola sculptors used it in their statues of Parvati to emphasise her feminity, something I learnt in V Ramachandran’s Rieth lecture on the neurological basis for art appreciation. I found the Reith lecture (and then decided to set a question on the funda) in a link from Ravages, who had been photographing the Chola bronzes. I can’t find the original photos he had posted then, but here’s one he posted more recently: 

Parvati

And here is a photo of a lady in Raffles City mall who is checking her iPhone while standing in tribhanga:
Tribhanga

Her face is obscured, so there are fortunately no privacy issues. It’s also a happy coincidence that I got this snap – I was practicing manual focus on the awesome 50 mm f/1.8 lens while waiting for a friend to join me at lunch, and didn’t notice that I had got this tribhanga snap until I came home and transferred my pics.

Incidentally, the Wii Fit – in sharp contrast to Anil Menon – insists that the tribhanga is a terrible thing and that standing in this pose is the road to ruined posture, upper body weakness, and spinal injury. In a shocking display of Nipponese hypocrisy, the animations for the yoga and stength exercises show the trainers standing with their bodies flexed before the routine actually starts.

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The Greatest Trip Ever

September 27, 2008

In three hours of extensive enthusiasm, Kodhi and me have come up with what we think is the greatest travel route ever. I decided that it would be cool to travel overland from the Pacific coast of Asia to the Atlantic Coast of Europe. In a stroke of genius, Kodhi decided that it would be even cooler to travel back to the Pacific coast once the Atlantic coast had been reached, with the additional rule that you couldn’t visit any of the same cities. We came up with the following route, which (I repeat myself here) is the greatest ever (except that we couldn’t fit in Ulaan Bataar). For your viewing pleasure, here it is:

Hong Kong – Beijing West
Beijing – Urumqi 
Urumqi – Almaty
Almaty – Tashkent
Tashkent – Samarkand – Bukhara – Nukus
Nukus – Turkmenistan (border crossing) – Ashgabat
Ashgabat – Merv 
Merv – Mashhad (border crossing)
Mashhad – Yazd – Shiraz – Esfahan – Tehran
Tehran – Tabriz – Istanbul
Istanbul – Sofia – Belgrade
Belgrade – Sarajevo – Zagreb – Ljublubna – Venice
Venice – San Marino – Naples – Rome – Florence – Genoa – Milan
Milan – Ventimegla – Monaco – Nice
Nice – Perpignan – Barcelona
Barcelona – Valencia – Sevilla
Sevilla – Faro
Faro – Lisbon – Porto
Porto – Vigo
Vigo – Madrid – Bilbao – San Sebastian
San Sebastian – Bordeaux – Nantes – Paris – Lille – Brussels – Antwerp – Rotterdam – Den Hague – Amsterdam
Amsterdam – Koln – Bremen – Hamburg – Berlin
Berlin – Prague – Vienna – Bratislava – Budapest – Krakow – Warsaw
Warsaw – Minsk – Vilinius – Riga – Tallinn – St. Petersburg – Moscow – Vladivostok

This will take 13 visas (I counted) and cover about twenty or thirty countries (I didn’t count). Porto is basically journey’s end on the first leg of the trip since that’s where Vasco Da Gama started from. The trip starts with the trans-Chinese railroad and ends with the trans-Siberian railroad.

Since Kodhi and me are poor FMCG traveling salesman and retail broker  in the midst of a financial crisis, and we don’t have the coolth that Popagandhi has to just pick ourselves up and start traveling, please contribute generously so that we can quit our jobs and undertake this trip. We will be very grateful for this act of kindness.

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IRCTC

April 3, 2008

… is the worst travel website in the world. To start with, they make you sign up (why?). And because they don’t clearly tell you that they truncate the password after the 10th character (why?) I’ve been through about six usernames so far.

After that, the usability. You can’t search by city – you have to search by station. It also makes you press different buttons to find the fare and to check the availability. Trying for a different class means you have to start the search all over. Gah, I say. Gah.

And then, to top it all off, the thing crashes in between, barfs if you try to use the back button, and then you have to start from scratch. Death to the public sector.

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Posted by Aadisht

Night and Day

July 8, 2007

The Alkaff Bridge by Day:

Alkaff Bridge - II

Same bridge, by night:

Alkaff Bridge at Night

Sigh. It’s opportunities like this that make me wish I had better skills, and better equipment.

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Posted by Aadisht

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