Going South

Travelling from New Bombay (Navi Mumbai if you will) to South Bombay (or the “town” as we call it) is a real pain. You need to switch three local trains to get there and it takes a little more than an hour to reach Churchgate. Ever since I shifted to New Bombay, I haven’t felt the need or found the time to go there, but this Saturday I did just that. I needed to pick up a new graphics card for my home computer and as everyone knows Lamington Road is the place to go to if you need computer accessories quick and cheap.

An office colleague who knew the place well enough offered to help me shop for the card and so I met up with him at 2.30 in the afternoon. It was hot and humid, and by the time I reached Churney Road, where I was to meet my friend, my shirt was sticking to my back with sweat and rivulets of sweat were streaming down my face.

It took one and a half hour to finally find the card I wanted. It may surprise some people, but despite the surmise that Lamington Road is a geek’s paradise, the dealers are largely ignorant and unhelpful bunch of sods who are smart enough to survive partly due to the fact that the customers are more ignorant than them and partly due to the fact that they have an extensive network of “referral system”. If one of them doesn’t have what you want or doesn’t know what you are talking about, he will call up a couple of buddies of his and see if they can help. If they can, the dealer will ask the product to be brought over and take a cut of the percentage with the total cost being passed on to the customer. It’s a fine system that works both for the dealer (he gets a cut even though he doesn’t have the product) and the customer (he doesn’t have to hunt everywhere) and everyone goes home happy.

Anyway, my shopping done (for the record I picked up a XFX 6600GT, 128 MB, AGP for Rs. 9,500/-) my friend and I made our way to Churney Road via a shortcut through Lamington Road. It’s a lane that winds through an old Anglo-Indian community with quaint wooden houses that have architecture typical of the community. Almost every one of them had a small porch, a wooden staircase leading up to the first floor of the house, a balcony overlooking the street, and small glass windows with curtains drawn across them. The streets were clean and unusually quiet, even though it was 5 in the evening. However, we did come across a disembowelled rat that lay in the middle of a narrow lane that passed between two quiet brooding houses. We swiftly passed into a Hindu stronghold dominated by the Gujju community. Saffron flags hung everywhere and kids played cricket in the gallis. The contrast between the quiet of the Anglo-Indian community and the hustle and bustle of the Gujju community was remarkable. The main street was entirely taken over by shops selling greeting cards, although a couple of shops that sold the general necessities were also visible.

I eventually caught a bus to Victoria Terminus from where I would get a direct train to Navi Mumbai. The first thing that strikes you about VT is its architecture consisting of grand arches, ornamental railings and high vaulted ceilings. Take a look at this webpage that gives you a 360 degree view of the station including its surroundings, interiors and the courtyard:

http://www.world-heritage-tour.org/asia/in/chhatrapatiShivajiTerminus/map.html.

(Note how incongruous it looks when compared to its present day surroundings!)

I have a strong urge to make yet another trip down South, if only to see more of Old Bombay. There is so much in this city to see and so little time to see it all!

Holi Crap!

It's been one crazy week of deadlines and 12-14 hours of slog at work non-stop except for the one blissful Sunday in-between. If anyone thinks that making a video-game is a ultra-cool, relaxed and fun affair they are right, but only just. There is plenty of hard work and back-breaking stuff that goes on behind the scenes and there are days when you lose track of time, days and entire months! No kidding!

What's all this got to do with Holi, you may ask? Well, one of the days I did go for work was on Holi (15/3/2006), despite being a holiday. Knowing the fanatics that prowl the streets during the day, we (the team that is) decided to come to office post-lunch when things are usually a bit more tame. So it was that I headed out to office on my Pulsar 180 expecting to be ambushed by kids with water pistols or water balloons. Surprisingly, there was hardly anyone on the street. I was even more surprised when I found there was hardly any traffic on the highway as well. What a stroke of luck I thought to myself, and proceeded to enjoy a leisurely drive to office on a nearly empty road.

It wasn't until later that night when my mom rang me up that I found out that there had been some violence in Navi Mumbai due to Holi celebrations going awry. Police had been called in to calm down the situation and as a result life had been somewhat paralysed in that area. I had no idea!

There was more trouble in the same locality today in relation to the same Holi incident and as a result Navi Mumbai had been closed down again. I returned home to find that hotels and shops are all closed as a result of which I had to settle for a packed of Bourbon Chocolate biscuits for dinner. Oh well, it's better than nothing!

So much for Holi and the celebration of colours. Blood runs on the streets now.

Silence of the Mallus

Lazy sunday afternoon and a relative decides to drop in. Nothing wrong with that except that I don't know the relative very well and my Malayalam is passable at best.

As it is I'm not very good at making conversations (as some women I know would gladly testify), so I knew uncomfortable silences were going to be the order of the day. To add to the piquant sitation, I didn't have a T.V that would have helped tide over the lulls in conversation. There was nothing to it but to see the event throught its logical conclusion.

Our man turned up with a friend in tow who turns out to be yet another shy mallu whose name I managed to completely forget 2 seconds after he'd told me.

So there we were - three mallu's in a room trying our best to keep the boat of conversation afloat. In 10 mintues flat we had covered the usual topics regarding life, work, weather and health. After that it was long moments of fidgeting, staring out through the window at nothing in particular, examining the floor and other symptoms of men who wished they were somewhere else. The mallu-whose-name-I-forget seemed to be happy to sit silently throughout the conversation (or lack thereof) with a bemused expression on his face. I'm suprised he didn't burst out in a guffaw at my atrocious Malayalam wherein I defied every grammatical rule and logic in the book.

When we did have a conversation of sorts it was more like a question and answers session with mostly me asking the questions and the other(s) giving the answers. It wouldn't have been so bad if my questions hadn't sounded so contrived and utterly pointless to the point of being ridiculous. There was also a fatal flaw in this type of conversation - I had to constantly think up new questions every few minutes to keep up the conversation, which isn't easy I tell you when you have nothing in common with the other participants.

Anyhow, after 45 minutes of this utter torture had gone by, my relative glanced at his watch furiously (never mind that he'd been doing that for the past 20 minutes) and decided that he finally liked the position of the hour and the minute hand for him to throw in the towel thereby putting us all out of our misery.

"Okay then, I think we'd better be going now," he said. I would have enthusiastically shook his hand at this announcement if it hadn't been for my conscious effort at politeness. Instead, I merely feigned surprise and uttered a word two involving the words "oh" "already" and "okay" in more or less that order.

The exit was calm and controlled consisting of hurried goodbyes and much bashing of the lift-call button.

And so ended a boring lazy sunday afternoon. I don't think I'll be seeing my relative for a while.

The Name Game

Finally! It's mine! It's Mine! IT'S MINE!

After 45 minutes of luckless search for a suitable name for this blog, I finally came across a name that no one has thought of before! It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how clever, unusual, or obscure a name that you can come up with for a blog/username/website, someone else has already thought of it before. For example, these are the name I tried before I hit on riddlersden: reverselogic, strangeworld, doppleganger, gameover, wagtheblog, magichour, et al.
Okay so they aren't spectacularly unusual but what the heck!

Anyhow, riddlersden will have to do. Riddler's Den to be precise. Nothing to do with riddles I'm afraid, but hey who needs riddles when life is full of them eh?

Having said that, here is a riddle for you: Why would someone spend 45 minutes to start a blog with an intriguing name and then go on to post some completely useless gibberish that has no point whatsoever?

Beats me.