Showing posts with label saos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label saos. Show all posts

Saturday, October 29, 2011

random takes

ಪುಷ್ಪಕಣಿವೆ ರಾಷ್ಟ್ರೀಯ ಉದ್ಯಾನದ ಹಾದಿಯ ಸುಂದರ ನೋಟ *

An excursion to the airport yesterday. What an offensive affair - I've seen better railway platforms. You could find me sitting and staring offensively at: BMI > 40 crowd, poor taste in dressing, people infected with i-will-play-bad-music-on-my-phone-speakers disease, mismanagement, 'paan' spits, pariah dogs, 'sarkari' muscle, sad games the children invent, and parking spaces, among the other stuff that made it outrageous to have 5 sensory inputs (visual, auditory, tactile, haptic, olfactory) at disposal. Confirms why I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

कर्मवाच्य देशभक्तों के नायक अन्ना अब मौन व्रत पर हैं - कुछ भी नहीं कहेंगे | और फिर टी.वी. बोलता है की "अन्ना ने कहा है की वोह अपना मौन व्रत ३ दिन और कायम रखेंगे "| अन्ना कुछ कहे बिना सब कुछ अपने ब्लॉग पर कह रहे हैं| यह धोखे के बराबर है| शब्दों का लेन-देन वैसे भी आजकल ऑनलाइन होता है - मैं खुद कितने ऐसे दिन गिन सकता हूँ जब वाणी का प्रयोग न के बराबर रहा - तो फिर अन्ना के व्रत का क्या महत्व रहा? मौनी होने का अर्थ क्या अपने विचारों को समूचे समाज पर थोपना होता है? जहाँ तक मेरी समझ थी, मौनी तो अपने मौन से दूसरों को खुद अर्थ ढूँढने को उत्साहित करता है|
As for another aspect of keeping a resolve of muteness, I would contend that this entire nation sits in a state of muteness, anyways. When was the last you saw somebody heckle a policeman on the streets for accepting bribes, or stage a (non-politically-motivated) agitation outside a politician's for fooling an entire nation, or rescue a child labourer at construction site or hotel, or kill a misinformed conversation among their friends? Anna is just making us realize how impotent we'e been all our lives, and people hail him for glorifying the impotency?

* This is the link on wikipedia tamil page for Valley of Flowers to my 2006 travelogue. Bot translation on Google Translate gives "Puspakanive National Park and the beautiful view of the path" - [Puspa = flower] - can somebody help with a more accurate translation?

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Dodi Tal now online



The grand Dodital Trek image gallery is now online! This 4-day trip turned out worth a thousand anecdotes.

Here's some archival fodder detailing the awesome night that we trekked without rest, starting from Dodital, right uptil Gangori; a distance of 34km (and 47km for me for the entire day)
The atmosphere is quiet and thick with shadows. The silence has intensified the void. Dark mountains bulk all around us, and if not for our dim torch lights, we couldn't be certain if we were trudging ahead on our own discretion or had the darkness taken us in for prisoners.
These extremities of Uttarkashi - the roads that form its nerves - are like a bad mutation. They get no blood, for there are no settlements along them for many kilometers; many kilometers of stretches that you thought were populated, lie barren in the night. Me and Saurabh seem to have internalised this emptiness - walking on sans any emotion, not even fear.


Here's the trek listing
Here's my image gallery

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Still OK

Well, its been a long time since the last I posted. That post left on a dangerous note, but I'm still alive; the next two days that followed unfolded with perfection, and had its share of moments; both panic and serenity. It was the coolest thank-god-that-ended-alright adventure besides Leh. The amusing part comes when I try to share the experience: those villages - Padampuri, Guniyalekh, Chyurigaad, Kalagarhi, Babiyaar, Bhodia, Tilwadi, Lugar - are on such unknown tracts that nobody can create a mental map, hence they can't figure out a thing, like what kind of lands we were on or what history lies behind these, hence the anecdotes/photos fail to build much interest.

So much for that, I'll still upload the photos on the gallery. Have already created a reference, yet to make the gallery public.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Things to come

I was contemplating better things ahead when I fell asleep and woke to the dream of me in a bear suit chasing a girl (accompanied by her boyfriend) in a dimly-lit NY park. God knows what that hints towards.

Did make some changes at my other blog - cms upgrade, reinstalling the skin files, some no-very-visible css changes - and hope to resurrect it. There were some visible and some back-end changes to the little set of scripts I had written back in March as a tool for publishing all my future trips. Its live and working, take a look. The gallery for the Leh trip is up; just needs approval from my side to be made public - which will be within the next 12 hours. Sample some of our earlier galleries in the meantime if you've got some time.

And while the immediate world around me is in the clutches of GRE, I've got no such ambitious plans for the future. I'll be leaving for Lucknow today. I intend to visit Kukrail, the famous Crocodile and Gharial (Fresh Water Crocodile) farm, but it would surely be bunked for the lack of any company. I plan to catch up on AS 3 in the time I'm there. The Leh trip does not die this fast.