Trip-Day two - time travel

As we ventured out into the streets of Calcutta we started doubting if we travelled from Bangalore on an Airplane or was it a time machine ? (!) ... The roads , the buildings and the buses , trams and cabs seemed to suggest that we seemed to travelled back some 15- 20 years ... The city of Calcutta seemed to be what i remember of cities of late 80s ... Though we had an idea that this city is totally diferent from other cities of India and that it does retain the old world feel , adjusting to the city took some time. The city is called the cultural capital of India and has the legacy of Raj ( being the former captial city fo the country) . So we decided to check out the Victoria memorial and the museum first. The Chandni chowk metro station was pretty near to our hotel , so we decided to travel by the metro . Though we dint really like the cabs , buses and the congested roads , the metro changed our impression about the transport facilities in Kolkata. It really is a cheap, fast and effective means of transportation and i guess is one of the best in the country. The underground metro stations had maps indicating stations covered and train timings and was really hassle free travel for us.


We visited the Victorai memorial which was built as memorial for Queen Victoria who the empress of India in early decades of last century. It is made of white marble and is pretty well maintained and though it was a British Building at first glimpse it reminded me of Taj Mahal. Like Taj , this was also surrounded by sprawling gardens on all sides . Inside this there is a musuem which has a huge display of potraits/photographs from British era till Indian independence. The building is surrounded by gardens and a couple of big pools. After a couple of hours we trooped out to have a look at modern Calcutta.


Then we had our first glimpse of a tram ! The tram is a really unique mode of transport and tram lines run along the major roads and how all these vehicles on road , pedestrains and trams manage to co exist on same road is something really amazing !


After we came out, we cut across the Maidan which is supposed to be largest urban park in Kolkata , the Eden Gardens , Victoria Memorial , the turf club and polo club are located on its fringes. We then strolled through busy streets of kolkata for an hour after lunch. Then decided to check out the Kalighat , it is believed that kolkata derieves its name from it. Kalighat is where the famous Kali temple is located. But our timing was very bad , by the time we reached the temple had closed. But what was shocking was how the whole place was maintained , the place is full of touts out to squeeze money. Less said about it the better, this is one place to AVOID for casual tourists ie who are'nt really religiously inclined. Place is full of beggars and other assorted pujaris and their helpers out to snatch money under some pretext or other . The worst part is that all of of them are together in this and they have a unique model by you are forced to pay all of them. When you enter you are asked to leave your footwear in a shop ( there was no footwear stand outside temple) and hence you ahve to buy something from the shopkeeper and need to tip the guy who suggested the shop to you and so on ... The experience of visiting a temple is totally spoiled when you come across such elements . The temple visit turned out to be a really bad experience and we decided not to visit any temples in this part of the country.

We returned back to our hotel and in the evening visited the Howrah bridge ( Rabindra setu) and took a boat ride across Hoogly river.
Later in the evening we checked out of the hotel and moved to Sialdah station to catch the train to Siliguri. The journey was supposed to take 12 hrs. Another major problem we faced was lack of Restaurants at Railway station and surprsingly no one was selling food stuff.

Trip- Day one

Day one

For the last 2 years i have been going on road-trips with my cousins once in an year.
This time , me and 2 cousins of mine , Aswin n Sridar had planned an outing somwhere in Dec . By sheer chance i saw an article about sikkim and we decided that this is the place we are heading this winter. None of us had any idea what to expect or any friends at these places we were planning to visit. Thanks to internet we managed to gather adequate info about the places to visit , some do's and don'ts etc to make a rough plan. So this was the initial plan Bangalore-> Kolkatta->Siliguri->Darjeeling->Gangtok->Siliguri->Kolkatta->Bangalore

So finally we are off today on 20th Dec afternoon , the flight was supposed to be in the evening 5:05 pm , but it turned out that the flight was actually at 5:50 PM , anyways we reached the airport at 3:30 itself. All the while I had flown only with Indian Airlines and occasionally on Jet , this was my first flight on low cost carrier , we were flying in SpiceJet.

The flight was via Hyderabad and finally we reached Kolkatta at 9:40 PM , after retrieving our luggage and standing in a long Q for pre-paid taxi we finally got to our hotel (researched thru net) . It was at a place called Ganesh Chandra Avenue , we booked coz name seemed nice -> hotel Broadway. Also the location was near a Metro station(Chandini Chowk) and near the Sialdah Railway station also. It turned out to be pretty neat choice , the rent was moderate , the rooms were decent enuf . The city was full of cabs and buses , very less no: of Autos which we see here in Bangalore. Also when we looked around that night it seemed we had boarded a time machine and had landed back in 80's . That was our first impression of the city.
Most restaurants had closed by the time we reached our hotel and we had roam around for an hour around the city before we found one ! What a start !!!
Plan for tomorrow - Trip around "the city of Joy"

Sikkim Trip !

Three of us ( me and 2 cousins of mine) went on a week long trip to Sikkim n Darjeeling this Winter !

Before we embarked on this trip , we had no idea of what to expect the idea seemed exotic so we thoght lets give it a shot.
All the info about the place , planning was done wholly based on info collected from net.
Internet has info about everything , all u need to bring to table is desire to explore places.
Nowadays wih the advent of low cost airlines , air travel has become pretty affordable and has made possible vacations to places in different corners of our country in limited time that we have.
These days you get a lot of books/sites about holiday destinations and most of the logistics are well covered.

I thought of blogging our trip , so that it provides some helpful info for ppl planning similar tripsand hopefully wud encourage ppl who have been planning to do something like this to finally do it.

We were what cud be classfied as budget travellers , luxury/best facilities was not the main criterion for us , but we were not always looking at the cheapest alternative either. All we had in mind was good comfortable holiday without being an expensive one.
We had decided on the hotels where we would stay in advance ,but we did not book them ie make any advance payment. We had telephoned and told them that we would be requiring rooms , since it was not the peak season that arrangement worked everywhere.

Flight and train tickets were the only ones we booked and all the rest were decided then and there ...

We left from Bangalore on 20th and came back on 26th Dec

the travel route was Bangalore -> Kolkatta -> Siliguri -> Darjeeling -> Gangtok-> Siliguri-> Kolkatta-> Bangalore.

Belling the Cat !

At last the day arrived and off i went with to crack the exam along with 2 Lac others , phew !
CAT is one exam which has kept everyone guess ing and in the last few years stumped everyone . Earlier pre2003 it was the no:of questions/no:of sections which kept varying , then in '04 we had differential marking , last year no:0f Q came down. So all of us were waiting for the surprise as expected !
Well this year it was no different , as expected there was something different 4 marks for a Q and -1 for wrong ans , 25 Q in a section , 75 Q in all :-(
Took the English section first as usual as that is where i always 'score' and build up tall percentile scores ! It was not a walk in the park as i had hoped , rather it seemed like a night at a casino , had to gamble and gamble a lot as most of the questions had atleast 2 answers which seemed ok. Soon i got into the thick of things and ended up answering all the Questions in the section...
Never taken so much risk before , 5 options for each Q made it real toughie , just keepin my fingers crossed andhopin my insticts pull me through again !
DI&Logical was the best section , questions seemed workoutable and the section was pure delight.
Quants were always my weakest area and today was no different the limitaion in no:of is something which seemed to go against me , as my strength is speed over accuracy ! But the Quant section was not toughie as expected , there were lots of crackable questions and some required a little bit of application to crack them but was an overall good package and ppl who were 'decent' in math would have done real well. As for me clearing 25% was the target this time as IIMs have announced 25% in each section as minimum , last year i had just managed to scrape through , need to get lucky again !

Mind your Language !

Language seems to be the new 'hot' word here now , and has knocked off reservation , corruption et all from the headlines ! But unfortunately its in the news for wrong reasons .

Come to think of it language is actually a means for communication which basically enables people to 'talk' and 'understand' and interact better with each other leading to improvemnet in the way we live.

But instead of enhancing realtionships and bring people closer , language , now seems to be a barrier which drawing people apart.

For ages , there was this debate about English vs Regional languages , the debate was fuelled by politicans who insisted that English langauge would contaminate and destory local languages and what not. They were instumental in bringing in various legislations to ensure that kids in Govt school are taught in mother tongue rather than English. But it is entirely different matter that children of these leaders attended private English medium schools ! Over the time the movement slowly eroded as people started realising that English is the passport to good future and you had to learn it ,whether u like it or hate it.
Evenstates like Bengal have gone soft on anti-English movement.
But suddenly now in South , the same movement has reared its ugly head again ! First it was PMK in TN with its oppostion to english names in tamil movies ! recently after coming to power the govt announced waiver of tax for films with tamil names ! I dunno by simply naming the films in tamil will these gaurdians of culture save the culture esp with kind of films being made these days !

In Karnataka there was huge outcry against Govt's ill advised move to close down schools which were teaching English , this was at a place known as It capital of the country and the global outsourcing hub which has a huge BPO industry where knowledge of English has opened a whole new successful world to millions of young graduates , ironically the word Bangalored will soon apply Bangalore itself if such people had their way and access to English education is cut off.

When states were formed , it was done on basis on language , the idea was to bring people of same language 'together' and all such states together to form a country called India.
But language instead of uniting people have turned into a force for dividing people , in Maharashtra it started with cries of of mumbai for marathis and through out south , you can notice that people who dont speak the local language always get the rough end of the stick.

When world over countries are encouraging ppl to learn English and get more in the IT/BPO pie here we are still fighting over wether we need to learn English or not !
When these ppl learn that we need to stop fighting over the share in the pie and rather look at increasing the size of the pie

Well the reason for me raving and ranting about this particular issue is that today happens to be a Karnataka Bandh , being from Kerala , the word Bandh is quite commonplace thing , so I took adequate precaution to ensure that I dont starve and would be able to spend the 'holiday' peacefully , but what i didnt anticipate was cable tv operators joining the bandh and shutting down all other channels except Kannada Channels all over Bangalore.
Now what could be the logic behind this ? Im totally at loss ? When the same thing happened after death of Dr.Rajkumar , I could understand it was mourning period for state , so all entertainment channels were blocked. But why today , why block all entertainment channels in other languages ? Why let Kannada movies/music channel play ? If they wanted ppl to understand their cause ( it is some border dispute , again language related) then they should have blocked all entertainment channles, allowing only news channel ( which incidentally has become a major source of entertainment ! ) ...
this is something i never get , why partiality towards outsiders , only localites get to enjoy this day off , espeicially in a city which prides itself as a Cosmopolitan city . This is not the first time we saw other language channels/movies targetted , last time there was ban on non-kannada films and what was really sad was that a lot of people were supporting it .All in all the level of tolerance is sometimes scary !

PS: Heard that Shekar Kapur is planning to make a movie set in future India , which deals with wars happening over water which wud be scarce commodity then , the movie was supposed to be called 'Paani' . I guess he could actually make a movie on wars based on language which might happen if such incidents continue , guess the movie on language wars might be called 'Basha' ( but oops there is already a Rajnikant movie by that name ! )

Reservation Ministry ?

Today's morning newspaper threw up shocker of a news , there was a news report about plans by Karnataka Education ministry to provide new kind of reservation for non-merit students!
I know this sounds crazy but these guys seem set on making Arjun Singh's Mandal-2 look like nothing in comparision. What these guys want is reservation all private schools for students scoring 35-50 % !!!
The reason given for this absurd proposal is that inorder to maintain ther 100% pass rate private school managements have very strict admission criterion and dont admit students who have low marks and infact you need to score close 90 to get into top schools which acc to these guys is bad , hence the need for quota to sneak in non-performers ! The report further stated that there was plan for certain % reserserved for students scoring 35-50 % , and some for the next set and so on ...
I simple cant understand , how do ppl come up with such ideas !

Please dont tell me the logic behind this is that even bad students deserve chances ...
On paper the idea sounds nice , but how do u find out possibly good students out of bad students , I wud say its highly impossible.
If poor performers are given backdoor entry , how do u expect students to be motivated enough to put all that extra effort and score really good marks ?
India were riding high because our education system (though kinda faulty)ensured that there was a a huge competetion and you had to struggle a lot and put in a lot of hard work to stay ahead in the race , which helped them do really well when competing with others across the globe. Now we seem set to spoil that also !

What next , reserving 50% of college seats for non-merit , 50% of jobs for non-merit guys ?

At this rate we should not be surprised if they come up with a new ministry called "Reservation Ministry" to do come up with more such possible reservations !

fizzy ya fishy ?

3 years back (almost to the day) CSE had published its famous pestic-cola report , now its back again. the reaction have been predictable this time around too.
Last time there was a talk on ban and all , but campain seemed to have lost fizz !!! Now again pestic-cola controversy is back , and this time lot of state govt seem to have jumped inot the fray in the battle with so called bad MNCs.What really got me and made me write this blog is a report in yesterday's newspaper supplement where they had published the opinion of college students in the city (mostly girls) who all unianimously declare that they will never ever drink cola and urge the Govt to immediately ban them. I find this extremely ridiculous especially in the light of this article titled cola con, on www.indianeconomy.org
Now the report may or may not be correct , but this act of banning is simply illogical , now cola companies should ensure that they dont sell substandard products , but another question is how did the pesticides enter the drink , now nobody seems to be least bit bothered about this. All they want is to ban colas and be done with it , but the source of pesticides are believed to be ground water and sugar . Both of which nobody seems to be interested in correcting.
Now for me , I still will drink cola when i go out coz i somehow feel that even if colas maybe contaminated , they will be much safer compared to water in small hotels or fresh juice in small shops. So banning them will only expose public to more danger. If standards are there then it should be for everyone , Govt should ensure that the water for preparing juices/ served in hotels are safe.
But since that never gets the kind of praise n fame u get when u bash an MNC/America no one bothers.