When I got home from college earlier this year I was home for a month before my legs got a bit itchy. I decided to make a move and travel some places around. I decided to make a trip to MP which was soon shunned by both my parents stating the dacoits in the area as the point of concern. I was all upset before I got a call from Akbar Hussein my classmate from college asking me if I was joining them for the get-together on the 15th of July for collecting the provisional certificates. I was even more upset knowing that I couldn't join them as it was already the 10th of July.
My mom then called up dad and asked him if I cud make it and he then arranged for the tickets and I took off from Bokaro for Chennai. Reached there just on time to meet all of them together and had a lovely time in the college visiting the department and meeting the staff who taught us. It wasn't long before we'd left college and we dint feel we'd actually passed out of college but somehow it a was a very nice feeling visiting the department and meeting the teachers all over again and getting their feedback about our batch as a whole. Since we were now out of college they were more open in expressing their views about us.
It was indeed a wonderful day, I also happened to meet Anuradha ma'am and Padma ma'am who made the whole day even better.
I then took a bus to Coimbatore that night with the help of my jiju who booked the ticket for me. I dint sleep that night at all because just when I caught some sleep the bus ran over a speed-breaker so fast that we all at the back seat were thrown up to the ceiling and back to the floor of the bus within a fraction of a second and that was indeed a bad experience, I hurt my feet badly in the mishap. On reaching Coimbatore the next morning, me and attain moved to the airport to receive Namita (my father's friend Mr.Sridhar's daughter coming from the US of A)
We received her and I had a few words with her half of which I couldn’t make out courtesy her HEAVY American accent. I slept off on the couch watching TV that afternoon while she was in the bedroom resting. At about 3 we decided to make a move to this place called Anaikatti where a hospital was built for the surrounding tribal villages and rural people. So basically Ms.Namita was doing a degree on rural and tribal hospital. She had come down for an internship in the hospital there, for a month.
Anaikatti is one of the most scenic and most beautiful places I’ve been to so far. The hospital is surrounded by hills called the Nilgiris (coz they look blue in color generally from a distance) and the other aspect is that the place is actually all dense forest and so about 10km ahead of the hospital the telephone network no more follows you except the BSNL network. And the forest is inhabited by elephants who cause a lot of havoc once it’s dark. I dropped her at the hospital and then went to an ashram there which was run by some famous swamiji the name of whom I forget at the moment.
I freshened up a bit and went for a stroll in the ashram complex. It was full of trees, I felt like I was living in a room in the middle of a forest. I met the watchman of the ashram and asked him a few questions about the surroundings and if the elephant menace I’d heard of was true. He then explained me that the elephants come down to the foothills to escape the mosquitoes in the forest which bite them. I’d never heard or even thought of a mosquito being able to bite an elephant, piercing through that skin. I kept talking to the watchman listening to all his experiences and confrontations with the largest mammal on land. And how they come into the ashram premises and cause a lot of havoc destroying the trees and eating away any and every plant they find in their way.
I heard the stray dogs in the ashram barking and the watchman said that a wild boar was in the campus. Just then I saw two dogs chasing a huge wild boar at a distance barking at it. It was a sight indeed. And I learnt how dangerous these wild boar were with their horns, and how they can rip apart an adult human in a fraction of a second.
I kept on chatting with the watchman till another man came to me and asked me to show my palm and he started reading my palm and talking all philosophy about life, love, knowledge etc. it went on till 12:30 in the night an I still hadn’t seen an elephant.
I woke up the next morning and took some photographs of the surroundings which were immensely beautiful and packed my bags to leave. I decided to see the hospital in the daylight before leaving for my aunt’s at Coimbatore. The location of the hospital was simply fantastic surrounded by blue hills all around. I met Namita and then left for aunt’s.
We planned for a trip to Ooty together on Sunday and did make it though at the end of the day we were extremely tired as the whole trip was on the bus, Coimbatore to Ooty being 3.5 hrs one-way and we roamed in Ooty also by bus. So it was quite tiring but it was definitely exhaustively exiting a trip and something I won’t forget for a long time to come. The tea plantations, the Ooty lake right in between three hills the valley, Dodabedda-the highest point on the Ooty hills, everything. The beauty of the place took me in completely… hills are simply the best structures on earth. They give you a feel of calmness, and fill you with a lot of peace, majesty and a sense of happiness unsurpassed. The serenity absorbs you completely and you kind of give yourself in completely and surrender to the beauty.
That’s how great the hills are.
I’m lucky in a way to’ve met Namita in that trip because I came to know a lot about the American culture and also was able to see my country through a foreigner’s point of view. Not exactly a foreigner but yes a person who’s not stayed in India other than in the vacations. And I also ended up picking quite a bit of the American accent by default, talking to her. All her experiences in Israel, Germany and from college in Canada.
I later made a trip to Trichy to drop one of my cousin sisters, we drove it down, a 5 hr drive from Coimbatore. It was a nice trip. The best part about South India is they have real beautiful roads and so you can actually enjoy the country side while on a drive rather than trying to figure out which part of your body is the next in line to dislocate, like in the north.
I got back to Chennai in a weeks time and then home in another 3 days. On the whole I would term it as a very memorable trip and thank my stars for having cancelled the MP trip, for i leaned so much about South India and the Americans too. :)
Thursday, December 11, 2008
How it all began. . .
I always wanted and loved to travel. I remember cycling about 15 miles almost out o the town once when I was in the 6/7th grade without informing my parents and when I returned back I found all of them back home praying hard and standing out of the house worried. And then I got one of the worst thrashings of my life.
I wanted to carry on the same to the college life, but unfortunately I wasted all of my 4 years of college searching for partners to roam with. I was in the third semester of college when I wanted to get out of the hostel badly having gotten bored to an unprecedented extent.
I chose to ask one of my friends who'd always talked of plans of going out and freaking out. And he refused stating a very lame excuse which I don’t quite remember at the moment. So I got bugged completely and ended up packing my bags and taking a bus to Mahabalipuram early in the morning from Tambaram (a major inter-city bus depot in Chennai)
I spent the whole day roaming around Mahabalipuram and enjoying my first trip al alone. I ate and drank all that I wanted without having to take the consent or permission of anyone. And roamed as much as I wanted. Saw the ‘Krishna’s rock’ the ‘lighthouse’ and all the temples and caves, then at the end went to the beach and sat for an hour in solitude, quietly enjoying the breeze and the sound of the waves hitting the shore. On my return I had a surprise waiting for me. I was at the Mahabalipuram bus stand when the bus for Chennai came and I found this guy who was also getting into the bus, saying to his friend "arey apna bus hai, sala majal hai koi roke humko", and I replied " achcha? Aisa kya?” he looks back with all readiness to take me on only to discover that I was his classmate from school. It was Ujjawal from DPS who was a good friend of mine back in the 11th and 12th grade. I remember most of his pranks and all the stories he used to proudly tell about beating up people and sometimes getting beaten up.
He was a character I will never ever forget all my life. he was all stories of what he was doing there and I discovered soon that he was running an admissions' business there earning a gross of 3.5 laces p/a (Something I don’t earn even now working for TCS, 3 yrs hence) and that he was on his way to settle some issues with some union head there. So that’s the kind of character I had as my bench mate in school.
Moving on, I realised after that trip that I dint need a company to make a trip to any destination I needed to visit. I only realised this fact a li'l bit, in the sense not fully till I finished college. Which means I dint make a trip at all for the next 2 yrs till I went again to Mahabalipuram in the last semester after my project review with Iyer. Of course the final year was all too busy for me with the department fest, tech-fest and the cultural fest al coming together.
So that’s how things actually started far as my traveling without my immediate family is concerned. I’ll be describing all those experiences here on this blog and also those where I roamed around with my family, coz they’ve a different touch to themselves.
I wanted to carry on the same to the college life, but unfortunately I wasted all of my 4 years of college searching for partners to roam with. I was in the third semester of college when I wanted to get out of the hostel badly having gotten bored to an unprecedented extent.
I chose to ask one of my friends who'd always talked of plans of going out and freaking out. And he refused stating a very lame excuse which I don’t quite remember at the moment. So I got bugged completely and ended up packing my bags and taking a bus to Mahabalipuram early in the morning from Tambaram (a major inter-city bus depot in Chennai)
I spent the whole day roaming around Mahabalipuram and enjoying my first trip al alone. I ate and drank all that I wanted without having to take the consent or permission of anyone. And roamed as much as I wanted. Saw the ‘Krishna’s rock’ the ‘lighthouse’ and all the temples and caves, then at the end went to the beach and sat for an hour in solitude, quietly enjoying the breeze and the sound of the waves hitting the shore. On my return I had a surprise waiting for me. I was at the Mahabalipuram bus stand when the bus for Chennai came and I found this guy who was also getting into the bus, saying to his friend "arey apna bus hai, sala majal hai koi roke humko", and I replied " achcha? Aisa kya?” he looks back with all readiness to take me on only to discover that I was his classmate from school. It was Ujjawal from DPS who was a good friend of mine back in the 11th and 12th grade. I remember most of his pranks and all the stories he used to proudly tell about beating up people and sometimes getting beaten up.
He was a character I will never ever forget all my life. he was all stories of what he was doing there and I discovered soon that he was running an admissions' business there earning a gross of 3.5 laces p/a (Something I don’t earn even now working for TCS, 3 yrs hence) and that he was on his way to settle some issues with some union head there. So that’s the kind of character I had as my bench mate in school.
Moving on, I realised after that trip that I dint need a company to make a trip to any destination I needed to visit. I only realised this fact a li'l bit, in the sense not fully till I finished college. Which means I dint make a trip at all for the next 2 yrs till I went again to Mahabalipuram in the last semester after my project review with Iyer. Of course the final year was all too busy for me with the department fest, tech-fest and the cultural fest al coming together.
So that’s how things actually started far as my traveling without my immediate family is concerned. I’ll be describing all those experiences here on this blog and also those where I roamed around with my family, coz they’ve a different touch to themselves.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Introduction
Its August of 2008 and I’m on a traveling spree at the moment... i finished my engineering by may end and then got back home and started preparing for my MBA entrances and went on for a month and a half aalong with sme real good relaxing time at home enjoying the at-your-service status of life.. But it was just too much to go on with the same monotonous life for more than a month... and it started to get on me by the day... I decided to go to Madhya Pradesh and visit some places of historical significance and places which are a tourist attraction in there major ones being Khajurao,Gwalior fort, Indore fort, Jhansi and Ujjain... but the security concers kinda crept into my mom's mind a li'l too much and i was advised (rather oredered) not to make the trip.. I then decided to go down south and see what I hadn't seen. So went down to Coimbatore and saw places near and around Coimbatore... moved further down to Palakkad and then got back to Chennai and the back home to more excitement and fun with Iyer coming home and we guys going to the steel plant and then the mines in Dhanbad with the man himself "Amit Bhai" (The Creator of Aaruush).. and then we went on to se Bodhgaya, Rajgir and the Nalanda University Ruins... I’m also going to add some of my experiences from the visits to different places in the past... I’ll also be posting some photos to aid my vivid explanations of the beautiful places I visited in India...
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