Trip to Coorg, Mysore palace, and Bylakuppe golden temple

Took the family for a trip to Coorg for three days. A few pictures:

Golden temple

Golden temple

Paintings at the golden temple

Golden temple

View from estate room

View from estate room

Estate stay house

View from estate

Brahmagiri hills on top of tala caveri

Mysore palace.

We were six people; and we went by my indigo marina. We stayed at an estate stay; the price was Rs 1,500 per room per night assuming double occupancy. Unlimited coffee and breakfast is included. Dinner was Rs 100 per head. They do not provide lunch. Some other folks [1] have written about less expensive accommodation, but I believe this money was worth it. The cost at this estate stay also changes with number of people and rooms occupied; a colleague was offered very different pricing. The place has a very large coffee estate and Indu Pooviah, the owner took us all around, introducing the local flora and fauna. A trek on a small part of the estate engaged us for over 2 hours. My wife and mom got introduced to a snake during the trek; a rat snake crossed their path as they were walking. I was recording them just a few seconds prior to the incident, and could have nearly had it on camera. We were not very keen on touristy stuff, and wanted to spend the day in a relaxed fashion. The only touristy place we went was the Tala Cauvery, the source of the Cauvery river which was very peaceful and quite. An interesting claim that Tala Caveri is not supported by geographic proof [1].

We were there for two nights; left on Wed morning, visited golden temple along the way, reached the estate at 6:00 PM. Relaxed for the night. We took a 2-3 hour trek around the estate the next day in the morning. At afternoon, we left for Tala Caveri and returnd at 6:00. The next day, we started off for Bangalore at around 10:00 AM, stopping by the Mysore palace and reacing Bangalore at 6:00 PM. Lucky for us, it did not rain much when we were there.

There is much to be done around coorg, and several bloggers have written about exciting treks in the brahmagiris [1, 2, 3]. The place is slowly getting spoiled by plastic and other issues related to tourists; we saw mounds of garbage dumped along the road to madikerri. Had a long talk with Indu Pooviah about how local people had petitioned that plastic be banned in the area. Plastic is now banned there, but you can still see garbage dumps along the road with plastic.

Which place do I belong: Bangalore to Buffalo to Bombay…

This is the reverse chronological order of cities where I have spent a bulk of my adult life. I belong to both Bangalore and Buffalo. Now, where would Obama place me?

The most enjoyable moments for me in Bombay was when I went out riding a bicycle alone on the roads of BARC. I used to often go riding for hours. The train ride with friends while going to college, and foot boarding across the Vashi creek was something I always looked forward to. When we were in Ghatkopar, I recall being able to witness awesome sunrises. On clear days, we could almost see up to the hills beyond New Bombay.

Buffalo (Sheridan drive) – what can I say about this place; my wife can describe Buffalo and our life there better than I can. No matter what I say about the Niagara Falls, Kissing Bridge, the simple Buffalo temple, or the Griffis Sculpture Park, there will be people who cannot appreciate the “dead city”. I still recall myself driving through the wilderness of South Dakota – miles and miles of nothingness, and when night came, a perfect star-studded sky.

Unfortunately though, in these times an individual cannot belong to all places. One has to choose.

Take me for example: I consider myself to belong to three places – and love them all equally. But if I walk up to the US consulate today and tell the consular officer that I want to visit South Dakota to spend a night in a motel at the outskirts of nowhere, I wonder if I would get a visa? Now that Obama has Bangalored us, we will not be able to go anywhere with any amount of ease.

Forget Obama, even politicians in Bombay once agitated that all non-locals must be sent back. One can see “local sentiment” in Bangalore as well. Watching the Niagara waters flow by on a full moon night, I had exclaimed: “With so much love in the world, how can one think of a war”. They can, because they “think”. I sometimes wish that whoever made us had never given us thought.

Travel by sleeper from Hyd to Blr

Its about 500 Kms from KCG to SBC, almost the distance from NYC to Buffalo. And it costed me Rs 274, little over 6 dollars to travel the distance. I had the dreadful side middle berth [1, 2, 3]. The TC later told us that side middle berths would be discontinued from July end. It was very warm as long as the train was at the Kacheguda station, but once it started moving it became much better. By about 7:50, it was very cool and beautiful. The compartment was very neat. It was unlike the AC compartments – no cell phone or laptop chargers, no hooks to hang bags. But everything was functional. However, there were loose screws here and there and some of the fittings were sharp.

Across from the side berths was  a family of four lads, 2 girls and their two gaurdians. A mom and dad were taking their kids or a trip to Mysore and the cousins also tagged along. As we settled in, the kids had become a little more noisy. There was also a family that boarded with a baby about 6-8 months of age. It was almost like my childhood, when we used to go on long train journeys; fighting for a window seat, jumping about on the upper berth, daddy scolding us to not touch the chain.

It rained pretty heavily tonight. And that made the trip even better. As we sped through drenched farms, the storm occasionally lighted up the countryside in a bright hue. The  brief glimpse of nature’s bounty with the sweet smell of rain-drenched soil was beautiful . While it sure was beautiful, the rain was heavy enough to have damaged standing crops. I later found out from Shekhar that his farm suffered about 50% damage to the beans plantation.

The train got to SBC about half an hour behind schedule. Even though it was a sleeper without the comfort of an AC, I did not fare too badly.

BTW, The Indian Railway Fan Club (IRFC) has a very interesting article on how railways evolved since independence. The trip reports also make for very interesting reading; one such report is about the incident at Nagpur’s diamond crossing junction (Photos here:[1, 2, 3] ).

Our visit to Nandhini Dairy Farm near Mandya, Bangalore and a small skirmish in the temple

Took the ladies to Melukote today and during the return trip, took an interesting detour to the Nandhini dairy farm near Mandya. Cheluvanarayana Swamy Temple (CST) first, and then theYoga-Narasimha Swamy Temple. The temples were not very crowded, well – by Indian standards. The concept of a crowd is very relative. The crowd was in some sort of a frenzy, somehow feeling that if they do not rush fast enough, they would lose something. I wonder what prompts crowds to behave in such manners. The crowd could be large, but if it is organized things get done quickly. Guess it is too difficult to explain such a problem. I was carrying a baby, and apart from a couple of people not many were concerned that they could end up hurting someone with all the pushing and shoving. This typical mindset is getting into too many people. The loss of patience has assumed epidemic proportions.

While returning towards Bangalore on the Bangalore-Mysore road, we saw several signs advertising Nandhini dairy’s ice-cream flavors a few kilometers after crossing Mandya.  It looked very appealing and made us stop after our recent (not-so-great) lunch. The badam milk and Pista icecream was divine. So was the burfi that we bought. I thought it would be a good idea to see how the ice-cream was made. Sheepishly, I and the two ladies approaced security, half expecting that we would be turned down. He had a couple of looks at me, the mother, and the daughter; guess it was the six month old lady who did the trick and he let us into the processing center after calling the office. We walked over to what looked like the admin building. How did we figure it was the admin building you say? Well, it had the quintessential white Amby, and little else of productive value. Most other building had chimneys, large freezer doors, and trucks of myriad sizes parked alongside. We were sure to find a babu who could grasp our broken Kannada and find a way to let us in.

Sure enough, we found one person who talked to us very nicely, but informed that the concerned person was not in and most of the people could only speak in Kannada. I rarely kept my arms down for fear of language; we insisted that “Swalpa Kannada maatlaadido, understand hogi”. He smiled, relented and was helpful enough to call one “Chandru” to take us around. Chandru took us to the processing center. At the first location, we saw milk trucks being weighed on a trucking scale. Milk is apparently measured multiple times from the trucks; first by weighing them and then measuring the flow of milk. The milk from each truck is sent for random testing, and immidiately put through a pasteurization unit. The pasturization system removes different percentages of fat from the milk, giving us the red, blue, and green packet milk. The fat separated at this stage is sent to generate ghee and butter.

The whole place smelled of milk. And me being the cow loving homo sapien, took all the lovely smells in. Imagine a machine processing 4,00,000 liters of milk each day, and a cow lover standing next to it!!!  The look in my eyes was that of a mesmerized kid. Wife was also equally pleased, but not as excited as she would be when we went to the next stop; the butter processing center. They had large wheelbarrows, each containing about 5-600 kilos of yellow, butter. The scent was overpowering, and my better half’s excitement knew no bounds. This was it, we felt – there was nothing more to be seen. Till we entered the ghee processing center . Lovely place, it had a system that can process 10,000 liters of ghee every couple of hours. Apparently, the system is run non-stop and can just manage to meet the demand. There were vats that could take 2-3 wheelbarrows of butter and process it into ghee. Pure ghee was flowing through taps as large as a water hydrant. We next stopped by the skimmed milk powder unit, and the peda unit. The unit combined 80 liters of milk with 60 KG of sugar to get 18 KG of pedas, and the process took about 1 hour. We did some other simpler things like walking through huge cold storage units which were kept at 0 degrees centigrade, and the automatic milk packaging machines.The supervisor at the lab that tested milk was very friendly and explained some of the basic aspects of testing milk.

All in all, it was a wonderful detour. Some of the nicest things happen when we do not plan for them. The marketing manger can be reached here:08232-274074. Maybe some day I would take a few kids with me for an industrial tour.

Jain aaramam (Temple) in Kolanpak, Warangal

Recently visited the Jain Temple at Aler, Warangal, a very beautiful structure, and what surprised me was that some of the marble in-lay work was very similar to the work at Taj Mahal. Read more about it here.

Its kind of painful to structure images in wordpress; does anyone know of an easy way to do this?

Warangal – Laknavaram cheruvu

The locales in Warangal are very beautiful and the bounty of nature inescapable. Today we visited Laknavala cheruvu or Laknavala Lake (wikimapia link), a beautiful land-locked water body with lazy, green islands strewn in between. The lake has suspension bridges to one of the islands, and several jetties on the bridge and along the lake end. There was a boat tied to one of the jetties, and it would have normally been made available to the general public. During our visit, the district collector was also scheduled to make a visit to the area, and the boat had been reserved for his use.

On our return drive we encountered buffaloes returning from grazing, huge numbers of them. It did not seem likely that our tiny vehicle could not negotiate the bovine traffic, and we waited around for solace. Along came an APSRTC (Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation) bus, and we got right behind it. The buffaloes could ignore our puny little 1000cc alto, but there was no way the very capable representative of APSRTC could be ignored. Incidentally, the buses are labeled on the sides with the words “palle velugu”; which means “village light”. The buses here are divided into a few categories: palle velugu that stops at nearly every location on the road, Express that has a few stops between major cities, Deluxe, Super deluxe, and Garuda. Garuda are volvo buses that travel between major cities and do not take any passengers between the start and destination stops. I use the Garuda buses between Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Train ko saaf rakho.

I am visiting Warangal this weekend. Will spend a few days with family and return on the morning of 4th.

Public transport in India is very evolved, and is probably the most affordable mode of transport the world over. It may not have a lot of fancy bells and whistles, but it does the job. I left Bangalore by volvo at around 8:00 PM Friday and got to Hyderabad at around 9:00 AM. Jyostna and I travelled from Hyderabad to Warangal by the satavahanam. I and Jyostna boarded the train at 3:30. We had reservations; our seats were 136 (aisle) and 137 (middle). Josu sat at the aisle seat, I adjusted myself in the center, and then there was one Mr Raju, a person in his late 40s at the window.

There were these kids with their mom and an elderly person who could have been their grandfather, or someone similar. There was an entourage of 3-4 men in their early 30s to 40s accompanying this family. There was a very stylish dude in the entourage wearing a body hugging off-white tee with “57″ written in “chocolate brown color cloth”, and “USA” on the back. Tight jeans, large dark glasses that were desperately trying to go from the 70s to the 80s. He was talking about the “East Coast” like he owned the place. They bought ice-cream. The vendor asked “How many”. Stylebhai says, “enni vunnayi, ivvu boss, andariki”. Vendor obliges; stylebhai takes each cup, opens the lid, puts a spoon in it, and gives one to each family member. The last family member refuses icecream. “ido, ii ice-cream vaddu”. Vendor: “Open chesaaru kada sir”. Stylebhai uses harsh language, cribs a lot about the icecream not being good etc, but it kinda fizzles out and he pays up. The youngest kid collects the empty cups from them and throws it out of the window. The train left promptly at 4:15, the right time.

I and Jyostna contemplate over events of the past few minutes. I lean over to the kid and tell him in the most calm and nice way “child, you threw those cups out of the door. It is not the right thing to do, we should not make our trains dirty, railways has provided a dustbin; we should throw it there”. Many passengers around us heard me, the mother chideed the kid. A few minutes later Josu and I start eating an orange. We peel it into a plastic cover. This young couple in front of us order coffee. Coffee done, the dude is throwing the cup into the usual place – the train window. I catch his hand, take the cup from him, put it in our plastic cover. “That is OK, if it is not easy for you, I will throw it in the dustbin”. The dude is totally embarrased, takes the cup back from us and does the obvious. Unfortunately, I have to do the same thing again to one another individual who just finished eating his dinner, had dumped his food tray on the tracks, and was ready to throw a paper out. He has an explanation: “It is only a small piece of paper”; his age: probably 45-50.

Mr. Raju then got up, he just had a coffee. He crossed all of us, went to the dust bin, and came back. The uncle who was with the kids dropped a banana peel on the floor. He lifted it with care, and the kids used the dust bin. I do not know if they will continue to be clean in their other journeys.