Wow! Another year gone by!! 2008 was a very mixed year. Some highs, lots of lows and a lot of the usual.

Here are some of the highlights of every month (whatever I can remember!!):

January: The year started off in Goa listening to a fake ABBA group playing at the Butter Lounge! LOL! The otherwise awesome New Years’ Goa trip with Sanju, Adi and Sandy was just after an equally awesome 8 day trip to Sri Lanka for Christmas with Pomchi!

I also got my Digital SLR camera – the Canon EOS 400D and I freaked out with it at the Lalbagh Flower Show!!

February: We had the biggest and best Perot Systems annual day ‘Perotsav’ till date in our campus. I was part of the core committee for the event and was very happy with the final execution. Kunal Ganjawala and Anushka Manchanda performed for the event and totally rocked the evening!

My dance classes at Swingers in Indiranagar culminated with a grand show at St. John’s auditorium, which I unfortunately could not be a part of thanks to being busy with Perotsav preparations.

I went with the entire team from my previous PHH Mortgage project on a day outing to Club Cabana.

I also got to attend an all night music event called the Fireflies Festival of Music held in the outskirts of Bangalore. The ambiance was superb and the various music groups representing different genres of music from India and around the world were brilliant and I totally enjoyed the event with Tejas and Sharath.

March: Went on a trip to Dandeli and Karwar with the Microsoft “J” gang! Had awesome fun rafting on the Kali river and camping at an island resort off Karwar with Sunil, Ranga, Raghavan, Ankith and Sreenath.

April: Went on a trip with mom to Mangalore to attend a family friend’s wedding and to Kerala to meet grand parents in Pallakkad and to attend the festival at the Rama temple in Tellichery.

I also got an awesome In Car Entertainment (ICE) setup in my car with a Pioneer DEH- 6050 head unit with JBL GT5-650C Components in front and JBL GT5-963 speakers in the rear.

May: At work I got selected for a new project in the BPM team, which required me to travel to the Noida campus for a Knowledge Transfer (KT) session. I stayed in Noida for over a month and used all the free time I could get to explore Delhi and Noida and several other cities and do a lot of things, including seeing the Taj Mahal at Agra, visiting Fatehpur Sikhri, River rafting at Rishikesh, bathing in the Ganges at Haridwar, seeing the Golden Temple at Amritsar and the Flag ceremony at the Indo-Pak Wagah Border, over the weekends. I saw a lot of great places and met several old friends (Animesh, Sayor, Nethra, Shobith and others)  and made many new ones (extended farmhouse gang). I really loved Delhi and its culture and monuments and markets and would love to go back and spend more time there sometime.

June: Returned from Noida and was generally busy learning and working on the new project.

July: This was a month of weddings and two of my closest friends got married. Roohi got married in Bangalore and Mehmood’s wedding took place in Pune.

A few of us from office (Vishnu, Anil Sir, Nagaraj Bhatt and myself) went for Mehmood’s wedding in Pune and had an awesome time there with Pawan and his roommate Piyush. We explored and partied in Pune and also went to Lonavala and Khandala and just about made it to the wedding!

I also went on a day outing to Anthargange with the extended farmhouse gang that I met in May in New Delhi.

August: This was my Birthday month and I turned a quarter of a century old! The whole month was one big party! I had a whole load of friends to treat and every other day was meeting a different gang!

September: This was the month of Festivals galore! Ganesh Chaturthi, Kolu and Onam meant a lot of visitors to home and a lot of visits to other homes. Not to forget a lot of sweets and delicacies!

October: I went to Chennai to write my GRE and TOEFL and although didn’t do all that great in the GRE, it was a great learning experience. The exam was good fun and studying for an exam after so many years of working was quite a challenge!!

November: Spent a lot of time researching on universities and working on my applications for higher studies. This was also the month of the terrible terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which was the most intense attack on India in a year that was filled with bomb blasts and mindless terror.

December: Went on a religious visit to Palakkad in Kerala with parents, sister, brother-in-law and nephew. Went to a lot of temples and met grand-parents as well.

December also saw a lot of parties (birthdays and general) and an outing to Wonder La! It all culminated in a farmhouse party at a friends place on New Years eve!

To sum things up 2008 was a decent year! I continued to make a lot of new friends and got some really close ones. A lot of friends either got engaged or married. I travelled quite a bit as usual and had my fair share of fun and adventure! Financially it was not that great a year. The stock market crash and the recession that has set in all over ensured my net-worth dropped considerably in the mayhem! Gadget wise it was all about my new car music system and ofcourse the dSLR camera for which I added quite a few accessories through the year! Work-wise I got to do a lot of great stuff and hope to do better this year.

Looking forward to a different and better 2009! Although the start is not all that great with the recession affecting us all in different ways.

Nonetheless, Happy New Year!