Afternoon Siesta

Anyway, Its only been 6 days here in Noida/Delhi and its been good so far! I’ve been going around and seeing a lot of new places, and met some old friends after ages and also made some new ones on this trip!

On my first day here last Thursday I met Animesh, who took me to Noida’s Sector 18, where all the malls and shopping and food places are and we had a great evening checking out different places and eating yummy road side food and getting a good experience of Noida’s night life (which does tend to die down rather quickly though!!)

Animesh at a chaat stall

Then on friday I met Animesh again along with another old friend from my Microsoft Academia days, Sayor and we went to Delhi – first to this place called New Friends Colony community centre for some great Dilli Chaat and later to Khan market for dinner at Chunas.

With Sayor in Khan market

The whole market/community centre concept to hang out at is really nice and comes with a good mix of old and new shops, eateries and modern cafes, books and gadgets, corridors and narrow lanes and lots of people! I havent seen any similar areas in Bangalore to hang out at. Delhi is filled with places like this as I discover over the next few days!

A view of NFC Community Centre

Saturday morning I went to more ‘markets’ – the M Block and N Block markets in GK 1 – with Badri’s sister, Nethra. She took me to a great place for lunch (Cafe Turtle), which had some good pasta and a nice ambience as it was in a book store. As Niti said of the place, it was very comforting being surrounded by books!

Saturday was a long day (and night) – after lunch Niti and I went to Humayun’s tomb [more in seperate post] and in the evening I met more friends who took me to Connaught Place (CP) and then to India Gate for some awesome Kala Katta Chusti and finally dinner at a restaurant in Pindara road!

Sunday was relatively lazy in the morning and in the evening I went to Delhi’s Sarita nagar, from where we went to Dilli Haat along with Niti, which is this government run bazaar kinda place with food stalls from every state in the country and a lot of interesting handlooms and handicraft items to shop.

All in all a great start to my Noida/Delhi trip!!

The demented and jealous Sun enters as the unsuspecting Sab works hard on the comp

Sun back stabbing poor Sab

“Et tu Sun?….aaaahh!! help!!!” - Sha and Sab are shocked and scream for help…but alas…

Sun then targets Sha and chokes him on the bed

Sab is barely alive…and this time Sun goes for the throat

Once Sab and Sha are out of the picture, Sun goes on to steal their code and ideas

As Sun is about to leave with some gadgets, he notices the camera capturing his every action

 A desperate Sun commits suicide in front of the camera…or did he?

No one knows what happened next…

Apart from these photos, nothing was recovered. No bodies. No code. No idea…

Wait a minute…the idea with quite a few modifications recently resurfaced at some distant land…could it be….??

Disclaimer: All characters are purely fictional and any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.

The three day weekend was the perfect chance for some of us to get away from Bangalore and have some fun. The planning bore fruit and although Rishabh couldn’t make it, another champ, Ankith joined us.

After leaving office early, we — Sunil, Sharath, Ghana, Raghavan, Ankith and myself –finally left on 28th April (Friday) evening in a Qualis (cab) to Kerala!

Our cab for the trip

The start wasn’t very good. While waiting to pick up Raghavan on Hosur road, we witnessed an accident. A mini bus tried to avoid a speeding two wheeler and swerved straight towards us, he then swerved again and the bus went flying and landed in a ditch, barely a few metres away from us. Luckily noone was hurt, except for probably the bike rider who was thrashed by the public for causing the accident and yeah the bus was a goner, it probably had to be craned out of the ditch. Later our cab developed some problem and we had to stop at a service centre for quite some time to get it fixed.

At the service station

The rest of the onward journey was long but fun! We all had a nice time talking various things. The major theme for the evening was love and relationships, which the “newly-in-love” dudes were busy talking about, while Raghavan and I enjoyed laughing at them and reminiscing about our own past relationships…they have no clue what’s in store for them!

Food!

Most of us didn’t sleep much that night in the car, or did so only in brief phases. We were all excited about the trip and eager to reach Munnar, our first stop. Next day early morning – we were treated to the most awesome entry into God’s own country, Kerala. Will write about that in another blog post!

On Saturday met up with some of my friends from college to celebrate Sashi’s birthday. We originally planned to go for Da Vinci Code, but thanks to the protests it wasn’t released this weekend, so we ended up going for Pink Panther at Inox. The movie was hilarious and though not in the league of some other comedies (like the Naked Gun series), it was good fun! We later had a nice long lunch at Cosmo Village near Garuda Mall.

I had to leave after lunch and join parents in visiting my sister’s new place near South End circle and after that to visit granma (mom’s mom) who was my at my aunts (mom’s sister) place in Jayanagar. Returned home to watch India lose a good match.

On Sunday had to wake up really early to go to Dad’s brother’s place for a family get-together and puja. Met lots of cousins and relatives!

Had to leave the function after lunch and head to Rohan’s birthday treat. Rohan is probably one of my oldest friends – i’ve known him since standard 1, when we were classmates in Bishop Cottons! Deepak Pillai and Sandeep Rao also came and we spent some time at Crosswords looking for a gift for Rohan and later went to Mojo’s for lunch and to Corner House for dessert!

Spent the rest of the Sunday at home reading a novel I bought at Crosswords – Holy Cow by Sarah MacDonald. Also read many friends’ blogs and uploaded more chapters of Ashok Banker’s King of Ayodhya at epicindia.com.

Thanks to some sudden work at office, on Thursday and Friday, I was unable to go on the Rameshwaram trip :( Many of my cousins went and are having a great time. They should return tomorrow morning.

On Saturday called up Anshu and Kannan and Prakash and we met up for Anshu’s belated birthday treat! I wanted to go for the Air Supply India tour concert at Bangalore but ended up going to coffee day and then to Star City for a great close game of bowling. Prakash, Anshu and I were tied at the same score at one point but I managed to beat Anshu by 1 point in the end and win the game! We then went to some salad bar and had a whole lot of vegetables (mom will murder me if she gets to know about this, since I hardly eat any vegetables at home!). After this the guys had to go back home, but the night was still young and I still had to have dinner.

I then called the usual movie gang (Sunil, Sharath, Ranganath, Ghana and Raghavan) and fixed up dinner (at Bobby da Dhaba) and a late night movie plan (Tom, Dick and Harry at Innovative Multiplex), although in the end only Raghavan and Sharath could come. The movie was ok and had a lot lacking and the comedy was just about ok. The actors could have been utilised in a better manner and the villain could have been a lot less silly. Sharath stayed back at my house that night and left by about 9 AM on Sunday. 

Sunday was no different and I met more friends once again. Through orkut – we organised a reunion of sorts for students from my class of 10C at Bishop Cotton Boys’ School. We (Neeraj, Rohan, Angad, Gautham, Deepak and myself) met up at Barista near Koshy’s and waited for long while without power due for our orders. We used the time to talk about a lot of old memories. About incidents that happened in class and also about our other classmates. It was nice and all of use were very nostalgic about the good old school days. The power had still not returned so we cancelled our orders and we (minus Gautham – who had to leave) headed to Corner House. After ice creams and more nostalgic moments Angad and Neeraj left and Deepak, Rohan and myself lazed for a while at Amoeba hoping to get a bowling lane, but to no avail. We then had dinner at Empire and headed home. I’ve uploaded some photos of the reunion here.

A great weekend for me – and incidentally I managed to meet friends from almost all spheres of my life, including School, PUC College, Engineering College and the Microsoft student champ program. Only office friends and some others were left out! I guess they are for another weekend now! 

Ghana, Rags, Rishabh and me at Garuda mall
(Also in the pic – Sunil’s S2 IS and the all important diary with all the trip details)

After a lot of talking of every other topic and a little brain-storming about the trip over lunch and some awesomely yummy dessert we came to some conclusion and if all goes according to plan we will be leaving on Friday (28th April) evening to Munnar and Alleppey and return on Tuesday (2nd May) morning!

The next three weekends of mine are now booked for trips and incidently in three different states! This weekend being the Kerala trip. Next weekend to Coorg (in Karnataka) for a colleagues’ wedding and the weekend after that to Rameshwaram (in Tamil Nadu) for a religious trip as conclusion to my earlier Kashi trip.

Now I just can’t wait for this week to end and for Friday to come. Monday morning blues already! Sigh!

After creating several draft posts, I am finally getting around to complete and publish the post about my visit to Wonder La on 12th February.

Sharath had stayed back at my place on 11th (Saturday) night and we had a great time watching various Coupling episodes and movies through the night. We had earlier been to a dhaba for dinner. Sunil was supposed to join us, but got held up someplace with his dad.

On Sunday (12th Feb) as part of the (so-called) Microsoft student champ “reunion“, Sunil, Sharath, Ghana, Raghavan and myself went to Wonder La amusement park! The park was simply amazing and we had loads of fun on the various land rides and later in the water rides!

On Sunday morning, Sharath left my place around 9:45 AM to go home and get ready and I was to pick him and the rest after a while. After some laziness and delays (as usual), I finally managed to pick everyone up by 11:15 AM or so and head off towards Bidadi on Mysore Road, where Wonder La is situated. The drive was great, since the roads were recently laid and were very smooth and there wasn’t much traffic!

We reached the park by around 12:15 PM [the park timings are 11 AM to 8 PM] and headed for the ticket counter. We all paid Rs. 480 for the entrance and though Sharath had his college id card, they said the student discount applies only if we come in groups of 20 or more with a letter from the insitution…!

Wonder La entrance – somehow we didn’t miss Ranga!

Anyway once inside we took a look at the park map and decided to go on all the rides marked as ‘High Thrill Rides’, but before we got to them we first checked out the crazy cars

Wonder La has some of the best land rides I have ever been on, including ‘Wonder La Bamba’, ‘Drop Zone’, ‘Insanity’, ‘Hurricane’, the highly enjoyable ‘Y-Scream’ and the mother of all rides – ‘Maverick’!

Y-Scream [above] and Maverick! [below]

We spent all afternoon on the land rides and had a great time. We wanted to go on them some more, but we were too exhausted and hungry. So finally around 4 we went for lunch at one of the restaurants in the park. After lunch we went back to the changing rooms and got ready for round two of the action – the water rides!

View of the water attractions

There were a whole lot to check out in the water park – from small slides and buckets over turning on your head to the wave-generator and the high thrill water slides that twisted and turned and some just dropped straight down and deposited you in the pool at the bottom. We had a great time in the (warm!!) water, but somehow felt the rides weren’t quite up to the mark. They were thrilling, no doubt, but not smooth. We felt the rides were a bit rough and not that fine tuned, especially when compared to the water park at Mangalore, which (pretty much) the same group visited (except for Rags) last year. Nonetheless we had a great time splashing about and made it a point to go on all the water rides. Finally around 6:30 PM we concluded the water rides with the same ‘Wonder Splash’ that we started off with and headed back to the changing rooms.

Wonder La Tower and Sky Wheel

Before we left we wanted to to check out the ‘Sky Wheel’, which is this huge 30 metre giant wheel on top of a 50 metre clock tower! We reached the top in time to see a beautiful sun set. The ride itself was slow but the view was simply great. We could see the whole park (and all the solar panels on top of every building, which is what the park uses to keep the water at room temperature) and we could also see for miles around! It was the perfect way to end a great day.

The sun sets [above] and we pose [below]

The park is not 100% complete and we saw lots of construction work still going on and many ries still being assembled, so it is only going to get better! The only ride the park is missing is a great roller coaster. I loved the place and have started recommending the place for all get togethers with various friends and colleagues! I would love to visit the park again (and again), especially for the awesome and high thrill land rides.

Check out the photos taken at the park here

I’m all excited about that! I’ve heard from a lot of people that it is a great place and there are some awesome rides to experience!

If you are a champ and want to attend and want more details then do contact me, Ghanashyam or Sunil.

We decided to go for a movie (Bluffmaster). The movie was good fun and decent time pass. After the movie we went to the Pit Stop at Garuda Mall for lunch, after which we decided to check out the Scary House attraction. It is this house that we have to walk through and though it was supposed to be very scary, we felt it was more funny than scary. Infact it wasn’t scary at all and was a total waste of money! Next we decided to have some ice-creams and so were back at the Pit Stop! We then checked out Garuda Mall itself and walked about with no purpose apart from just killing time. Soon it was evening and was getting late for some, so we all departed, although we wanted to spend more time together.

It was nice meeting my friends after a long time and we all had a nice time! We will be meeting up again, next weekend, for Rang De Basanti!!

The movie was very dark and intense and was very good. It was a thrilling phsycological suspense drama driven by vengeance. The direction by Sanjay Gupta was superb and so was the acting by Sanjay Dutt and John Abraham. Definitely worth a watch, especially since it’s so different from the regular stuff.

A new entry to the movie gang was my very good friend from Nitte, Seena. I was meeting him after a really long time and we had a nice time with lots of old memories and stories to discuss. :)