Ok. So here is the story. My cousin is getting married in December and I had to book tickets for my Mom to travel to Delhi. Browsed the net to find good fares and got a decent deal with Air Deccan, 7398/- to and fro. So I go ahead and fill in the card details (on my Firefox browser) and submit. I just get a blank page. No confirmation, no response nothing.. If that wasnt enough to piss me off, I had to register again (using Internet Explorer) and in the hurry I left the Salutation as Mr. instead of Mrs. But they had another box for Sex where I correctly chose female. Filled in the card details and submitted.
I realized my mistake on the e-ticket, when there was a Mr. printed in front of her name.. So I decided to call Air Deccan and get the problem fixed. Before I could talk to the operator I was told that the call is being monitored, I wondered why. This lady picks up the phone and I tell her what happened. (Actually I still thought I entered a Mrs. and not a Mr.)
Then she tells me there are two separate boxes, one for Salutation and one for Sex. "Sir you should have changed the value in the left box also" and I argued "How can you have a female who is a Mr. ? Who wrote your online ticket booking application". She also told me it would cost me 200 bucks per ticket to get the change done. Well at first I blew my top and then agreed to getting it changed.
The next thing she said was absolutely ridiculous. She asked me "Sir, would you like to change the Salutation from Mr. to Mrs. for both onwards and return trip." That really got my trip and I started blasting her, telling her things like "What kind of a stupid question is this? How can she by a Mrs. while going and Mr. while coming back". After few seconds sanity prevailed and as I was about to tell her the credit card number the line got disconnected.
So this is what I am left with. 1) An e-ticket for my Mom with the title as Mr. (Will get that fixed at the airport) 2) No idea what happened to the first transaction (HSBC says it will take 3 days to reflect my purchases on the card) 3) A wait of three days and nightmares of interacting with Air Deccan folks to get the extra ticket cancelled if it was booked. 4) Loathing for the sites which do not support Firefox. 5) A blog post about Dhakkan
A few good ones from them: "If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0" "The best accelerator available for a Mac is one that causes it to go at 9.81 m/s2." "My software never has bugs. It just develops random features." "Programmers are tools for converting caffeine into code." "The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones."
All work and no play makes Aakash a dull boy. So Aakash decided to do something about it and bought PS2. I bought "God of War" and the "Hitman" (For the uninitiated these are games) DVDs along with the console. Well to say the least these games rock.. They are awesome fun and you feel like playing them again and again.
But there was a similarity that I noticed which was kinda weird. Both God of War and Hitman had their main character as bald people. Well going bald aint so bad after all..
The first main character with hair that I encountered during my PS2 endeavours was Lara Croft . TombRaider Legend is a good game. Still playing it..
So any PS2 gamers out there. Do suggest some good games.
Sun Microsystems have bought Hewlett and Packard.. Yes its true if you look at the blog entry of the CEO of Sun "Jonathan Schwartz"..
So here is the story.. Some artists came up with the idea of mixing technology and art and put in a Java enabled mobile phone in their art which enables them to trace the location of their art. And they display the location on google maps (Pfft!! They should have used Yahoo! maps instead) on their website.. Artist's site
These guys made a sculpture of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard (and their garage ofcourse). And according to Jonathan's blog they unsucessfully tried selling it to HP and they didnt want to buy it so out of his respect(Ya right!!) for Hewlett and Packard he bought the piece of art .
He just doesnt stop there he poses with them wearing a Sun T Shirt.. Cheeky eh!!
Now this has given me a business idea.. If HP would have bought the sculpture I would have approached MF Hussain to make a portrait of Hewlett and Packard and sold it for double of whatever MF Hussain would have charged me. Jonathan Interested??? I still can ask Hossain to make a portrait of Hewlett and Packard or may be Ray Ozzie or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates :)
Online stock market of words... "Your ideas are worth no more than the media coverage they get"
www.trendio.com
Got hooked on to this game last week.. Really interesting game. You play stocks with words and based on the frequency of appearance of the stocks in news the value of the stock goes up or down...
This game is a real life saver. When you are down and dont feel like working for some time.. When you are waiting for a meeting (like I am now), When you have nothing better to do.. go play this game..
I am deeply saddened by events in Lebanon. Some political leaders just dont get that war is not the solution to all problems. I am not taking sides here but I feel that the seen of destructions seen below are really uncalled for.
I heard in the news that some Hezbollahs are carrying M16 assault rifles... I wonder where they got it from????? Any guesses.. And the people who sold them to it should not expect them to hang the rifles as a showpiece in their living rooms..
And then they send their secretary of state to negotiate for cease fire.. (It is like giving a kid a lollipop and asking him not to eat it)
My question is WHY? Is this war needed? Dont think there is a simple answer and even if there was one, I would not understand it but just imagine if this happened in your very own backyard...
After hearing our black magic stories we got a bus to MM Hills at 10:30 PM. I was so tired and wanted to sleep badly (Working in Yahoo can be tiring you see) so I just packed myself in my seat and slept like a baby..
No I dont know the guy sleeping next to me who was using my shoulder as a free parking for his head but I was too tired to mind it..
We reached MM Hills at 1:30 AM on Saturday and spent 10 minutes searching for our Guesthouse "GuruDarshini". The names were very confusing we came across "ShivDarshini", "GiriDarshini" and finally "GuruDarshini". We woke up the guesthouse staff and got ourselves two rooms (Oops.. If I still havent mentioned we were 8 guys who went for the trek. Harish (The organizer of this trek and the model of the group), Aakash (Thats me), Jagga(Fanta man and professor in History) , Shivyogi (Time keeper and Tent man), Anil (just playing Anil), Vijayendra (Mr. Minneapolis), Sumit(our very own senior citizen) and Srinath(our cameraman) ). From left to right the folks are: Harish, Vijayendra, Sumit, Jagga, Shiv, Anil, Aakash (Moi) and Srinath
So we guys got two rooms (number 19 and 22). But we were not alone in the room, we were given company by the wonderful resident cockroaches :)
After our morning tea/coffee we started exploring MM Hills and even before we started our model starting giving poses
Before going ahead you should realize that if you go on a trek with Harish and he takes a photo of you or the group he expects the favor to be returned within 30 seconds.. So 70% of our photos have harish in them. This number is greater than 50% because of some snaps taken by other folks.
We went to the "Malay Mahadeshwara Temple" and roamed around in the confines of the temple. We saw people praying (Ya right!! like we would have seen people playing golf in the temple) and they placed their hands on a stone and we doing some ritual.. No idea what it is.. Putting the snap here so that you could let me know what it is.
The good thing about the temple was that it was not crowded with tourists taking snaps and running around all over the place. The place was really nice and relaxing, the problems were outside where you had some beggars and people forcing you to buy pooja samagri which you didnt want. But I think we can handle all that..
Then we saw the temple elephant who was 35 years old but looked way older when we looked at his toe nails but we just took the mahoot's word for it.
There were many donkeys in MM Hills (No we are not refering to ourselves) and we also saw one who looked really cute like the donkey in Shrek..
Had breakfast of Idlis and Vada. The person who was serving us kept asking us if we wanted "Upma" and Harish kept correcting him, asking him to call it "Upit" as we were in Karnataka, and "Upit" in Tamil Nadu is called "Upma"
We went over to the forest rangers office and waited for our guides to turn up. They were gonna take some time so we went back to the guesthouse and bought our luggage to the forest office.
(Natural photo on the way back to the guesthouse)
We came back to the forest dept to see another group from YHAI waiting to go for the same trek.. We also met our guid "Naganna" a local from MM Hills who was going to take us into the Jungle... Naganna can be seen leading the group in the photo below.
So our trek finally started around 11 o clock.. For the initial part we were just trek on a tar road and being sarcastic and saying "Ya right, Walking on tar road is a really difficult trek". We were soon gonna eat our words..
We soon hit mud and stone roads..
After some time the road was just a stone road and we came across some beautiful landscapes. We saw a couple of houses in the distance with trees around them and hills behind them. Looked like the kind of paintings we did in our childhoods. The only thing missing was the sun rising/setting behind the hills. (The picture doesnt do justice to how cool the place looked)
After trekking for some time we took a lunch break. where we had company with some dogs.. We had overtaken the other group to the lunch point (The other groupd got a 500m head start as they covered the tar road distance in a Swarak Mazda) and they soon joined us. Their guard had a gun so we started fooling around with it (Disclaimer: The gun did not have any bullets in it and the cartridge was empty and removed. Warning: Never fool around with guns)
We had harish trying to find good spots to take photos :)
We got some *Free* food from the YHAI folks. So nice of them to offer us some chappatis and we really enjoyed them. PS: We are gonna pack the same food for our next trek.
After restarting the trek I got a cramp in the upper thigh and we were taking breaks very often thanks to my cramp. And we utilized the breaks to the fullest.. Here you can see me and Harish modeling for Glucon-D. Amitabh Bachchan watch out here we come..
Here you can see Harish and our Supandi(Anil) taking a break under the tree. Look at Anil, he looks so tired. Thats what carrying a tent for a long distance can do to you :P
The terrain was very tough and you can see here how steep the inclines were..
and a break for posing for photographs is ever welcomed. Her we can see our model and cameraman trying to recreate titanic scene at the edge of the cliff.
A piece of Trivia about the background of the picture. There is a dirt trail in the background where Verrappan has killed the SP of police after deceiting the SP by telling him that he would surrender. He cut his head of and threw the body on the road..
Here we can see jagga taking in the view
Finally we reached the village and here is the proof :P
On the way to MM Hills our first stop was at Kollegal. Upon landing at Kollegal we headed to Shanti Sagar for dinner, After having a good dinner we ordered for Fruit Juice and asked the waiter to use Mineral Water instead of normal water (We had no idea what type of water {or was it water} we were gonna drink for the next two days). After finishing the juice we were waiting for the bus.. The general talks began and I was informed by Jagga (Jagadish) that Kollegal was famous for Black Magic and that a couple of decades ago people were scared to come to Kollegal. Upon pestering him for more information for some time he gave in. But while giving us information he made it very clear this is what his grandmother told him and thats what he is telling us. Probably he didnt want us to probe him with too many questions or maybe he was scared he might offend some spirits in Kollegal..
Black Magic by definition is "Sorcery; necromancy, or the raising of the dead and other selfish abuses of abnormal powers. This abuse may be unintentional; still it has to remain "black" magic whenever anything is produced phenomenally simply for one's own gratification.".
Here is the description of what happens during a black magic ceremony. A person or a family approaches the sorcerer to conduct a black magic ceremony for them. Once the sorcerer agrees he makes a doll (The material used in fabrication of the doll, the size of the doll etc.. were some questions that were not answered by Jagga) and is places it on a rock in a sleeping position. Then he start invoking the spirits (or ghosts you like to refer them as ghosts). After some invokation a spirit from the spirit world enters the doll and the doll stands up and starts moving. The spirit is really furious to have been invoked and tries to attack the people who have invoked it.. But... (Yes there is always a but) the sorcerer has placed a lemon under the foot of all the people present at the ceremony and if the doll tries to attack you, you just press on the lemon placed under your foot. This would stop the doll from attacking you. You then appease the spirit in the doll by offering it meat and blood (The type of meat, whose blood, hoe does the doll eat the meat and drink the blood were again not answered by Jagga). After accepting the offerings the sorcerer tells the doll about the grudge that his clients have against a person and ask it to do cause harm to him/her. The doll agrees and turns in the direction where the person leaves and the spirit leaves the doll and it falls flat on its face in the direction of the person who is to be harmed.. and the ceremony is now complete and it is up to the spirit to cause harm to that person.
I was also told by Jagga that this was a method used by villagers to settle land disputes. You get a black magic ceremony against the neighbour or your brother (Sigh! What selfish people) and they would die after some days in mysterious circumstances which would be considered as natural death and not murder and then you are scott free to claim the entire land.
To me the whole ceremony looks like an illusion created by the sorcerer to get money from his clients, and his clients fall a pray to blind faith in Black Magic. Not sure if black magic ceremonies still happen in Kollegal. Would be interesting to observe such a ceremony some day (and I aint forgetting to keep the lemon under my foot).
So beware from now onwards and be nice to me. I know where Black Magic is done :P
Let me know what you feel about this topic.... Ciao
After a wonderful and exhausting weekend I am back to work.. Spent the weekend trekking from MM (Malay Mahadeshwara) Hills to Nag Male to Palar (the border of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu)..
It was a wonderful trek. Will need some time to write about it in detail.. But the salient topics I would cover in upcoming posts are "Black Magic in Kollegal" , "Trek from MM Hills to Nag Male", "Trekking barefoot in a jungle", "Chew or Swallow" (Dont get ideas I am talking about Ragi Mudde), "Lost in Veerappan teritory", "Precious water", "Buses in Tamil Nadu", "The hidden secrets behind 'Let me take your photo' ".
All I can write now is that I am dead tired, My entire body aches, completed half the trek on pain killers :) But the views and the experience was worth it..
Yay!!! I cleared the Mensa test (www.mensa.org , www.in.mensa.org). Got a 99+ percentile on the test so that certifies that fact that I am in the top one percent of the human population of Earth in terms of intellect and analytical thinking.. It would sure look good on my resume :) Pretty excited about this but then there is this joke about mensa people I would like to share..
A mensa meeting was going on in a restaurant. One of them realized that the salt shaker had pepper and the pepper shaker had salt in it.. So they started discussing on how to move all the pepper from the pepper shaker to the salt shaker and vice versa. People came up with really brilliant complex answers :) But not everyone agreed on any one solution.. After 3 to 4 hours of discussion the waitress came along and asked them what all the discussion was about.. They explained what the problem was and she said "Well is that it.. Why are you breaking your head on it" and exchanged the caps of the salt and pepper shaker and said "Done.. There you have it. Pepper in pepper shaker and salt in salt shaker".
So basically the point is that you dont have to have a certificate to prove you are brilliant.. But it doesnt hurt to have one :P
There are some questions which are universally branded as the wrong question to ask... For instance asking a lady her age is definitely a big NO NO.. (The only answers you will get lie between 16 and 24, It is like their age gets frozen at 24) Asking a politician if he is corrupt, (The answer is always going to be a big NO.. But in reality it depends, whether they are corrupt or not)..
Then there are some demographically wrong questions.. Asking a French/American national whom you hardly know about their family might offend them..
Another question which offends people is "What is your salary??"
WARNING: This post is obfuscated and you need to know the context to understand this.. After reading this you might think I have lost it but it would make sense only to a subset of people..
The last weekend on Sunday around 3PM I received a call from a friend of mine... (Lets call him plain).. Plain gave me some news and asked me to meet him at 4PM at corner house in Sheshadripuram... Due to some personal reasons like giving company to my fishes I could not make it to Corner House... I missed out on a Historic!!!1 occasion but what was more shocking was the news I heard the next day.. . I was ill and didnt come to office, Happened to check my mail from home and my Jaw dropped... Plain had just pulled a plain on us... What more the occasion was compared to a Formula one race... I wonder why it was a Formula one race and not a WWE match.. It could have been like, First I become the main contender and then and win the championship instead of qualifying and race day... It could have been compared to cricket also, but why F1..
Tell Me, Tell Me, Tell Me Da!! Tell Me!!
What was more shocking was the day after sunday another friend of mine(lets call him Mitwa) tells me that he has stopped drinking and so do some other guys lets call them Freeloader and Foreigner.. Mitwaa pulled an Aane yesterday by replying to each and every mail..
Whats up with this world... Everyone is pulling a plain...
Well if you find fishes gross you are warned do not read any further.... (Better to be careful and post a warning rather than finding a comment like "I find fishes gross, You should warn people that this post contains fishy material" )
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