I recently made one of my now-too-frequent trips to the hospital, where the doc gave me her practiced severe look for not taking care of myself, and prescribed pills for gastritis. One of these pills turned out to contain bacteria , something I find slightly disgusting and very cool. Damn. Five missed calls. And an sms: "Pl cd u call back? I just needed some information". Unknown number. My curiosity piqued, I decided to return this call first. "Hullo, this is Shrik." "Hullo, this is Mrs _____. I wanted some information from you as a mother." Interesting! "Sure", I said. This had all the makings of something that would make my day. Mrs _____ continued that she was going through the profiles on bharatmatrimony.com for her daughter, and both of them were quite taken by this boy who's from my undergrad college. She searched around on the internet and found that I'm from that college too. "I looked at your alumni page, and felt I could ...

Near Nal Stop, Pune

Remembered this when looking at Anurag's pics . Yosemite is one of my all-time favorite places. I've been there twice, and know that I can spend many more vacations there before I get tired of its overwhelming beauty. The last time, Baap - a friend from undergrad days - and I spent Christmas there. Dismissing the tourist village and going backcountry, we hiked along a little-frequented trail, and reached our campsite by a lake beyond twilight. Too tired or lazy to pitch tent, we unrolled our sleeping bags on the rocks by the waterside and were soon asleep. The next morning, we woke up in heaven - We were so awed, we didn't want to move or breathe, lest we disturb the stillness. Thankfully my camera was close at hand. After fifteen minutes, a wind stirred up, creating ripples, and we finally got out of our sleeping bags.

I was recently robbed. In, as they say, broad daylight. I let a stranded commuter (or so I thought) hitch a ride on my pillion seat. He alighted at what seemed a funny place for a commuter to alight - no buildings or bus stops or road junctions nearby. Much later, when I fished out my wallet from my backpack to pay a shopkeeper, I noticed something seriously amiss. My wallet had contained many thousand rupees and a twenty when I tossed it into my bag at home. Now, it contained only a twenty. Very smooth. It was clearly an opportunistic pinch - all my cards and other important stuff were intact. The only thing missing were the big bills, which I'd just withdrawn a couple days back, since I'd intended to do some shopping for the home. My mind was such a whirl of emotions, that I had to sit down with a coffee to disentangle one from the other and make sense of where I was. The first thing I felt was betrayal. It's not about the money , I told myself, it's the feeling that ...

I don't pride myself on my photography skills. In fact, when Anurag and Senti get started on one of their all-too-frequent photography discussions, I feel embarrased to know I have an SLR too, but can't differentiate between a Kodak BW400CN and a Konica VX 100. Senti used to borrow one of my zoom lenses till the point it was more his than mine, and then he bought one for himself and returned mine. I had hardly noticed its absence. One day, I realized that a roll of film had been lying in my camera for close to a year, and thus jumped at Senti's call inviting me to go photographing in the countryside. We rode our bikes beyond Sus on the Pashan-Sus road. Senti firmly resisted my entreaties to go climb a nearby hill, and settled down to do some macro photography. Here he is, contemplating the scenery, and wondering if it wouldn't look better at f4.5 with a slight bit of overexposure. Thank you, Sentiman! We shall go on more such trips in future... and next time, we shal...

I am as amazed by the amount of effort we put into creating new devices to make our lives complex, as I am by the number of simple loopholes that exist to resolve them. The red tape that's been on my mind for the past few weeks is called "The Address Proof", and the loophole that extricates one from it is called "The Company Letterhead". Let me elaborate... The first time I was introduced to the Address Proof was a few years back, when I went to the bank empty-handed (but for a cheque from my previous bank) and asked naïvely to open an account please, and bung my doubloons into it. The banker tried to shoo me away, asking me to return with an Identity Proof, and an Address Proof, since I no longer stayed at the address on the earlier bank's record. I dug out my drivers license, which the banker accepted as Identity Proof. There remained the question of Address Proof. Did I have electricity bills? (no, not in my name.) Telephone bills? (nope, yet to apply for...

These days, I get the eerie feeling of living in a soap opera. Where I'm hardly in control of the circumstances, and the said circs. are leading me, slowly and inevitably, to Valhalla. But wait. Rewind. Restart. Such are not the wheels I intended to blog about. The wheels under scrutiny are literal. Namely, one shiny new rear tyre, bought when I was facing an average of a puncture a day, and an old cracked front, which "can go for another 250km", or so the tyre guy said about 500km ago. The last two Sundays were starkly different - one was spent at work and the other in leisure - and yet, they had a common thread (other than the fact that they both were Sundays, that is...) They both involved bike rides in near perfect weather. I was considering a hike on the Sunday before last, when at the last minute but one a client called and said he wanted to meet. Argh! Determined to make the best of it, I rode my Pulsar all the way to Ranjangaon, about 50km from Pune. It was a rai...