baingan bharta and paneer tikka

Today's lunch was at Pakwan, my most recent discovery of restaurants near office. As most places in downtown, its a small place, but the food was good. A taste of paneer tikka and then baingan bharta with real soft naan. Good start of the day!

account of Kalsubai terk

I wrote this account to post to one of the office fitness groups. Untill I find a better place to put it, I am posting it here too.
Trek to Mt. Kalsubai
kalsubai photos
This is one of the best treks I have been to. Kalsubai is the highest peak in Sahyadri mountain range in south-west part of India, about 165km from Bombay. The mountain stands tall at 5400ft. and on the top you are greeted with a small temple. (Most of the hill tops in Sahyadris, as elsewhere in India, are topped with either a temple of ruins of some fort) We did this trek in the July 2002, yes, in the middle of monsoon season in India. According to me, this is the best time to trek in Sahyadris as its neither very hot, nor cold and you have a good chance to get drenched in the monsoon rain, the greenery in the mountains is at its peak at this time. We started the trek from a small village called ‘Bari’. As most treks in Sahyadris, the path is not maintained and its easy to get lost in the forest. So we took a guide with us, a small boy, I think some 12 years old from the village. He was happy to accompany us all the way to the top. We started on the muddy path on this nice and cloudy day. Soon the first obstacle was a small stream of water, to be crossed on foot, the water was little above ankles and it was easy to cross. Then came the rain, making the path even more muddy. Along with the rain started flowing numerous waterfalls in the hills. Its hard to describe the beauty of the scenery around, you will have to look at the pictures, which I do not think can do much justice with the actual beauty. So, anyway on we went on, getting wet in the rain, crossing muddy streams. The next big obstacles are 3 big ladders. We had to be extremely careful while climbing these ladders as they are very old, and are based on hill sides over deep trenches. We crossed the ladders one at a time, rain and high winds were making everything even more difficult. Once atop all the ladders, we reached the top of the hill. It took us little over 3 hrs to reach the top. It was raining very hard by this time, and since we were on top of the hill, there was absolutely no protection from the wind. The rain was so hard that all you could see was a sheet of water coming down from heaven. The temperature had also dropped considerably at this height. At a point, some of us had to actually hold hands to prevent from being blown over. The big problem we faced now was how to eat our sandwiched without getting them soaked. Then we took turns to sit in the temple which was so small that only one person could enter it at a time. Although we had planned to spend longer time on the top, but rain and biting chill wind was making it hard to stay on top, so we started our descend after just half an hour on the top. The journey downwards was even more difficult as the path was slippery. Thankfully by the time we were down the 3 ladders, the rain had stopped somewhat and we could fasten the descend. We reached a small path of flat ground and took our time gazing at the natural beauty spread around us. All we wanted to do at this time was trap this beauty in our eyes, capture as much of it in our cameras as we could. After another food break at this point, we moved on, happy, singing songs. But what we did not anticipate was that our small stream that we crossed in the beginning of the trek had swollen into a small rivulet. The water was upto my waist by this time and the flow little harder. I had real hard time crossing this stream, with every step I felt that I am going to get washed with the stream. We all took another small break after crossing the river, and then headed back to the Bari village, where our bus was waiting to take us back to the concrete jungle of Pune city, away from this beautiful land.

Taken

The last weekend was a 'Taken' weekend. After all my plans of visiting the Golden Gate again where washed in the clouds, I headed to the library in search for something interesting. One thing that always came into my view, howmuch ever I tried to ignore it, was a (actually more than 1) DVD of Taken. I always wondered why do they have so many DVD of the same movie and noone every seems to take them. Anyway, to avoid seeing them again and spending time wondering why so many, I took one. Saturday was spent, first planning a perfect time to watch the movie and then finally watching it. Well it was a Spielberg movie, so after watching it once, it looked like either the movie was grossly incomplete or I did not understand anything. SO, anyway as I refuse to accept the second explaination, I headed to the library again on Sunday. That told me why I always see so many of those DVD, they are all different parts, its more like a teleseries from SciFi channel. So I got 2 more parts, spending another 6 hours on that on Sunday. As you can see, I was hooked, or more precise taken. There is still more to see, as I do not think that its complete yet, I guess there are more parts than just 3.

For the review, after spending 9 hrs on the weekend watching the DVDs, I do not have to state that I just loved it. The plot is good, the mystery well maintained, and you would not want to miss even a single word of the movie. It spans over 4 generations, starting in the 60s. The story is also spread over all of US and ofcourse of big span of characters. After sometime, I stopped reading the place and time that appeared in the bottom of the screen as the scenes change as they stopped making sense. Great story, movie well made, no unnecessary fancy stuff, no star wars, but a very believable story. (Except for that fact that like everyone else, the aliens (the real aliens from a different plant) ignored rest of the world and showed up only all over US.

Virus in my hotmail

Yesterday (when I was probably out jogging), something entered my hotmail account and sent mail to I guess some or maybe all the people in my address book. The subject of the mail is "please do this" and it asks you to click on the link in the mail and that will get me and the recepient both a t-shirt. Well, ofcourse there is no t-shirt to get. I apologize (though its clearly not my fault at all) if you got that mail and wasted time in going to that link. Just a note of caution for future, I do not send such e-mails, and if I ever send, I do not send them without a personal note from which you can be sure that I have sent it myself.
nyways, this whole spamming thing atleast helped me get in touch with a couple of old friends who I had not mailed for long as they had also not mailed me for long which in-turn they probably did not do as I had not mailed them for long. (Did that just sound like something from HHGG??)

Job hunting days

My job hunting days are back. Its so hard to find that one perfect job, especially when u do not know what perfect is. Guess everything just gets boring after sometime. Maybe software itself is boring. Sometimes I wonder if I should have done something else, like being reporter, singer, dancer, voyager, pilot, or something more exciting than just sitting at the same computer everyday and blogging.

Italian movie weekend

Last weekend was Italian movie weekend, I watched 2 of them, "Life is Beautiful' and "The last kiss". Life is beautiful is pretty famous I guess, though I did not find too much great in it, except the story may have been heart touching if I was not concentrating so hard on trying to understand what people are speaking without reading the sub-titles. And guess what, I did understand parts of it, it was great. Italian is very similar to Spanish, most words are similar, conjugations are little different. Infact in the beginning of the movie when I did not know that its in Italian, I was wondering if I have forgotten my Spanish and cannot understand or it is Italian. Anyways, it was nice, maybe learning Italian would not be too much effort then.

What am I blogging

Well, today is the blogging day. I just wrote the reviews to two of my favourite book series at our site http://bookreviewsbyus.blogspot.com/ and now I am writing here. No, I am not jobless, umm, actually I am, but I have work. It was just that today I was doing some ego surfing earlier in the day, (for those who do not know, I was searching for Tulika Agrawal on google) and I found out that my blog does not even show up anywhere. So much for a great search engine. You will find all sorts of things I posted on mailing lists, even years ago, but not my blog. If you have any suggestion on how can I make google show my blog under my name, please leave a comment.

Harry Potter Series - J. K. Rowling

Today is the review day, since I just wrote review to HHGG, its also time to write long pending review to one of our (yes, rahul and I) all time favourite books. These are few books in which you get so much involved that its hard to put it down without reading untill the last page. Some people would say that these are for kids (also from the fact that in the library you get them in the Teen section), but those 'adults' are just denying themselves the pleasure of a ride into the fascinating world of Witches and Wizards. (!poor muggles!), rest you can find after reading the books.

A MUST MUST read.

The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Today I was going through this site and realized that I still have not written the review to one of the most interesting books I have ever read, The HitchHiker's Guide!! Not that its been very long since I have read the books, but I have been its fan since I first read the first few pages of the first book in the series, and that was back in India, in late 2001, when the book used to be available free to read online. I never found the online edition again. But thanks to the public library, I can read all the five books once again. For those of you who have not heard about the books, let me tell you that HHGG is of course sci-fi, one of the most creative sci-fi, it is so creative that it actaully sits at the border of being creative and being insane, bizarre. While reading the book, if at any point you start feeling that you have understood what's happening, my advice would be - read again, u probably misread something. If still you think that you understood the book, you are a creative genius.

Literally speaking, Douglas Adams is a great satirist (did i get that right?). You will see him mocking everything from current face of Sci-Fi to different cultures on earth. But everything is said in such a funny way that you cannot help laughing out loud even in a crowded bus. (ya that's where i did most of my reading)

A MUST read.

Vitamin C

My recent project is to research vitamin C. It seems to be the culprit behind my never ending cold (though it does not look like, suddenly after moving to SFO I got vitamin C deficiency!!). Anyway I am hoping that its this, rather than allergy as most people think that it is. What can I possibly have allergy from, SFO air?? Pollution, yah right, after spending years in Delhi and Pune, I get allergy from pollution in San Francisco. Maybe its fog, that is something new, except these days its exceptionally clear in san francisco. so....

August 24, 2004

Another boring day in office gone. I cannot imagine how people spend years here like this, maybe they work. Only bright thing in the day was visit to the farmer's market at fisherman's wharf. Its quite a place and the best part is that you can try out so many things, like different cheese, peaches and almost everything. First time I know that there are different types of cheese and they taste different and they are all very expensive. I tried some different type of hummas also today, they are the closest thing to chutney I can think of.

August 12, 2004

This is another of those saturdays I am spending on office by choice, doing nothing. Though I am not sure why. In the morning I was sitting in my rajai, all nice and cozy, not a thing to do in the world and reading Hitch Hiker's Guide and also contemplating if I should go back to sleep. What a dream weekend, then suddenly it struck me, why not go to office and them gym which is near my office. And here I am, after 1 hr of smelly bus journey, sitting in office, reading my 100 useless mails at orkut, yeah they still do not have a select all and delete button, someone knock some sense in those people.

Only Love - Erich Segal

Finally there is a story which is not nostalgic, not overly modern and futuristic. This book resembels a regular hindi movie story, love, passion, betrayal etc. etc. Its a nice bed time reading. Nothing thrilling or chilling about the book, no surprises, you can almost guess the story. But what makes this book good is the author, the way he presents such a normal story that it looks interesting and refreshing. According to me (like most other Erich Segal books) this is a worth reading.

Timeline - Michael Crichton

One of the classical sci-fi books about time travel (ooops, there is nothing like 'timetravel'). It does not take a IQ of 100 to guess that this book talks about people going back in time, visiting history. You will learn a lot (a lot, more than you would care to) about history of france, england, while you can also revise your fundas of quantum computing, relativity and some other modern things. Its a typical thriller, no mystery, but people fighting againt a deadline. Worth a look I would say. If history bores you, then it would be enough to just read first few chapters, before people actually go back and last few chapters.

August 4th, 2004

Its already August, and there are still 5 more moths I need to spend here, and then guess back on the roads. San Francisco is showing its true colours, its been drizzling, drizzling, foggy, cloud rain, cloudy and all that for more than a week now. Only on sunday did we get a little darshan of sun. I wonder how its going to be in winter. How can people spend their lifes in such climate, this is what I call gloomy (believe me, I do not think that Seattle is at all gloomy), when its cloudy, drizzly and extremely windy all the time, and on top of that the city is so crowded, that u have to literally look straight up to see any sky.

The Best Laid Plans - Sidney Sheldon

This book is somewhat a disappointment. I would have expected something more subtle and intelligent from Sidney Sheldon. I just kept waiting for that one moment in the book when u go, "wow! that's brilliant", especially since the title of the book itself talks about best laid plan. There does not seem to be any plan in the book and even after finishing the book, I could not decide who the main character in the book is. There are surprises, but they surprise you in a stupid way, its just too obvious. I would say if you want exciting, suspense novel, then do not waste your time on this one.

The Long Road Home - Danielle Steel

This is definately not a happy book to read, full of tragedies which even sound real. Makes you think a lot of things about life (atleast made me think). Made me somewhat gloomy too. Like most of her novels, this is also well written, no fancy stuff, its easy to get involve in the book. Still I would not say that its the kind of book you cannot put down before finishing.

Sewing machine and cold weekend

This weekend was I guess more full of activities then any I had spent in SF. I got the cold at the right moment, eod Friday, so Saturday I was down with that cold and remained in my rajai almost whole day, convincing myself that this is the best thing for me, and reading book. It was nice in a way. Sunday was little better, so I dared to go all the way to library and got a bunch of books. Came home and my land lady was struggling with her sewing machine. She asked me, do you know anything about sewing machines. Well, do I know anything, not really except seeing my mom making dresses for me every summer. But anyway, I wanted to help her, we looked at her machine, and I ended up spending 4 hours cleaning, trying to make it work, recleaning and retrying. We used all funds of mechanics to understand why it was not working. And what do I say, these complicated machinery of present day!! All we had to do was press a button, and boom! there you go :D

Foundation's Edge - Isaac Asimov

This is the 4th book in foundation series. This book is filled with even more bizzare concepts than the first three, and there are few things which are just beyond understanding or explaination. If you try to understand the book and why some things happen they way they do, you have to really stretch your imagination to the point where it can break and everything look like a hallucination. For the prople who loved the first three foundations books, I would say that if you have not read this one, you are surely missing something. If you want to start the foundation series with this book, then I would say, give it a second thought. Whatever the author says, according to me, to fully appreciate the book, you need the background. (unless ofcourse you have a out of the world imagination :))

Friday 23/7/04

End of another week in San Francisco. Nothing exciting happening this weekend, planning to sit in the public library and look at some spanish stuff. Recently I have been planning to get something new done with my hair, maybe a new style. That might also materialize this weekend, although according to me, summer is not at all the right time to change your hairstyle as you cannot hide behind a scarf. Still I think I'll give it a shot, at present there does not seem to be anything to loose ;)