RainDrops

Ravi was on his third cup of chai that evening, huddled by the small, open fireplace in his family’s old stone cottage. Outside, the mountain town of Manali lay still, bathed in moonlight, each street corner covered in a pristine blanket of fresh snow. He could hear the faint sounds of holiday cheer wafting up from the distant marketplace, where vendors sold roasted chestnuts, fresh apples, and handmade woollen shawls to the few tourists braving the winter chill. He hadn’t been back to Manali in nearly five years. His world now was in Delhi, where he worked as an investment analyst, living a life of constant deadlines and traffic snarls. But here, surrounded by his childhood home’s familiar smells of pinewood and burning embers, his heart felt like it could finally breathe. And tonight, he needed that peace more than ever. Ravi sighed, his breath fogging in the chill of the room as he remembered his recent breakup. He’d been with Neha for two years, a relationship filled with promises ...

       'Oh God No!!! Not me please. What did I do to deserve this? What misery!". Twenty year old Leah thought for herself. She took a small sharp edged wood splinter hidden under her louse ridden blanket and pierced her long scaly finger. Nothing came out at her first and second try, and then she tried harder. This time a tiny amount of blood oozed out of her finger. She pressed her finger harder so the blood could come out in a gush. She applied the blood in her lips and her bonny face, so it look lovely and fresh. The German soldier barked out at the inmates, "Any one here sick? Any dead bodies?". No one moved. The soldier came to everyone's sleeping barracks, looked at the haggard faces and picked up a few of them who looked particularly ill. He reached Leah's bed, glanced towards her once, and moved on to other beds. The chosen ones are marched outside the barracks, and then no one heard of them ever.       The year was 1937. The 15 year old ...

Its been five years, I had been in Bangalore and in my current organization I work for. Things have changed so much so that Bangalore doesn't seem to be the good old 'Rustic Bangalore'. Water problems, Electricity problems, Commutation & Traffic problems, Sewage and Garbage disposal problems, problems, problems everywhere... Buildings popping up in all directions, Builders exploiting every piece of land available and Industries polluting or ending the once clean lakes around. Four hours of traffic commutation every day just to travel a 8 to 10 KM on road is just too much to ask. The Metro line program they had planned so far is such a BS piece of work that it benefit no one. And under construction Metro lines are still under construction, even after 5 years of its inception. There's no proper system laid on disposal of Garbage waste, and people dump their wastes on public road sides everywhere. BBMP have no idea on what to do with the garbage they collect and they...

For the past one month, I am in Istanbul; the cultural capital of Europe. Nice weather, nice people and nice places to visit. Don't expect anything for shopping though - except Turkish delights and Evil Eyes. And don't expect people to understand whatever you ‘blabber’ (Yes, that's the word which comes in your mind when you talk to those guys!)   One of my colleague had a severe lower back pain, on a Saturday morning. We were working, and I thought of going to the office in a relaxed mood by 10 AM. I was about to step down to my Taxi, when the phone bell rang... 'Hello Vipin, this is X; Hey I need your help. Can you please take Mr. Y to the hospital. He has severe back pain and I think he needs some medical help". I went up to this guy's room and he really was writhing with pain... So I tucked in some money (Fortunately or unfortunately, since I had converted the Traveler's cheque to Turkish Lira for some shopping on Sunday) and went with Mr. Y on the same...

“Did you hear that voice?”, Anjana asked him. “What voice?”, he asked, paying more attention to the direction in which she was directing to. “That soft raga, flowing out of somewhere…As if, as if It is coming just to tell me something...the way the sound flew from… As if its saying to go and meet the originator of the sound…” She replied with a soft exultation on her voice. “You have gone crazy!”, he pulled out of the room in anger and shut the door close.  She was still listening to the voice, flowing through the window, reaching her ears. And she almost stood there for about half an hour… The place, is where she was brought up; where she had ended up all his childhood and his teenage dreams. Place where she had confronted her first love. The place where she played Sitolia (Seven stones) with her childhood friends; The place around the pond where she and her friends used to sit for hours on end chatting and gossiping about the latest TV serials happened to see the ...

Have you ever seen this moped/bike before? Well....It's the Hero Motors "Hero Puch Shakti"... The bike I started my ride with... Incidentally, I have never seen or seldom seen Hero Puch mopeds running in South Indian roads..I don't know the reason why... In Northern India, it's still being used and people still prefer it with Luna/Scooty and the like... It was the year 1997, my college days just about to start after my 12th, and I started pestering my father for buying the moped for me...Finally after some days of "Niraahara Satyagraha" and "No-Talk" days with him, I got the brand new Hero-Puch Shakti 3G... What a heck of a mileage had that small piece of engine...It gave around 70 KM per liter of petrol most of the times, so cheap and very economical... I still remember, when I used to drop my sis in the moped to her school during the chilled Winter mornings of December/January in Jaipur, packed from top to bottom with sweaters, mufflers and h...

Writing after so long...."Life is a bux of Ammo..." (The famous Duke Nukem phrase!) You never know when the ammo gets exhausted, but you surely would know when it's gonna explode. :-) Past one month was like a wash out for me...Nothing serious, nothing memorable happened during this month. If you ask me what was special in the past month, I have nothing to talk about...yeah except Work and pain due to the dreaded fissure developed due to the Antibiotics which i have taken for the dental treatment. The fissure appears and it goes and then re-appears and I will be mainly off & on on laxatives. It appears like some one cutting from inside you with a knife, and the pain disappears as soon as you are done... I find warm water bath and the diltigesic cream Diltiazem very relieving. Please consult the doctor before you take over these medicines of your own. Rainy day has started in Bangalore. I love rain...Each time when I became drenched in the rain water, it feels the ...

Gotta chance to see The Terrorist [1999] after 10 years of its release. Oh man...How could I miss such a wonderful movie for 10 years? The Direction and Cinematography by Santosh Sivan was awesome...Ayesha Dharkar (of 'Bend it like Beckham' fame) as Malli was superb in her role. Some of the scenes in the movies was just Heart-warming and will remain with you for long, such as the scenes of Malli with her lover, and scenes where she clasps her stomach after knowing that she is pregnant...The story resembles the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by Tamil militants. Classic movie and a must watch if some one missed this... So life was moving ahead smoothly, without any turbulence, and suddenly from no where I got a severe constipation which road-blocked my smooth passes ;-) may be because of the chicken I ate during the last 2 weeks...compounded by the hot Bangalore weather. I had problems with constipation before but this time it seems to be severe...I am in a "banana diet"...

I have told you guys two of the encounters with the love bug. Now just jump on to the fifth and the last one...This happened when I am still in my present company...The company used to have an internal Instant messenger; In search of another colleague, I added Miss E into my friends list accidentally...And we chatted with each other now and then, whenever in office...Got to know her very well during these period...Apparently she was in love with another guy who was also in the same company but in a different location. You see, love is blind and deaf (I told you people this before!); that guy was no where a match for Miss E. I don't know how she even thought of coming near to him...Her parents also opposed the relation, along with her brother... And the evident happened...That guy married some other girl and she was left alone.... Even after knowing that she was in love with someone already, and even though we have never met each other physically (Yeah have seen pics of each other.....

Hmmm...writing after quite a few days now....Was totally occupied in home and office work and fatigued at the end of the day; As expected, Slumdog did a clean sweep....8 out of 10 Oscar Nominations. Great going guys...And at last, India got the pivoted Oscar, not one, not two but four...Rahman, Pookutty and 'Smile Pinki' made us proud.... The month of Feb ended; the past month was one of the worst month of my life. Anyways, looking forward for good days in these days of Economy slump. :-) Two of my old pals came to meet me yesterday, and one of them touched up a story which I dug out from my brain disk..So this was some 2.5 years back...My friend (not those of them which I mentioned just now) came one day with a news that we had to go urgently to Mysore...The way he talked was so grave, I thought some one from his relative was in trouble. I took up my travel bag and bike and we straight went to Bangalore Central Railway station. Then he opened his Pandora's Box secret that...

Writing after quite a few days now... Did a dual boot configuration on my personal laptop with Vista Home Premium and Linux Mint. This Linux distro rocks. The stability and the assortment of applications included in the distro is simply awesome. The installation is a breeze and anyone who have the basics of disks partitioning will sail through the installation process in seconds. I was a fan of Ubuntu, but now this spin-off of Ubuntu makes me it's fan. The desktop is Gnome by default, and it looks pretty awesome. And the kernel it uses basically supports all the current hardware configs, with the exception of some old Dial-up modems and some proprietary drivers (Like the NVidia graphics drivers). Here is the link to the distro: http://www.linuxmint.com. Hail Linux Mint!!! Life has always big surprises for you. You never know what's gonna come ahead in your life. I had no idea of Computers till my 3rd year of graduation in Science. And the subjects group which I have opted in th...

We all desire objects, which our mind see as a thing that we can't live without. I had several such desires... While in Accenture, I was fed up of the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) buses. It was and still is notorious for pick-pocketing, and almost 90% of my friends who traveled in BMTC buses had suffered been pick-pocketed at least once; especially the Bangalore techies. (Techies come default with a poster on their face: "I am a Techie...", so they are the easier prey for the pickers.) I used to put all my belongings (purse, mobile etc.) on my front pocket with my hands tucked in always in the pocket. So I had never been done with an Empty pocket. There comes the first object of my desire. I have taken my "first" bike this way... As you people might have guessed from my previous posts, I love Music. I had a mobile with FM Radio in it, but then again radios were full of Ads and unwanted songs. There comes the 2nd object of desire. I had my ...

Sometimes every thing seems to work against you...Today my Office laptop crashed (again!!!); I thought of using my personal laptop, then again the home Internet connection went berserk...What the heck...OK, I put aside these things and went for dinner, only to realize that I forgot my Purse and the helmet lock keys in Office. Luckily, the office is nearby, so I went in bike and got my purse and the keys. The security guard at the door inspected me from top to bottom, as if I am going to plant a bomb at 8'O click of night. Anyways, I don't complain because he is doing his duty and for the sake of us people. But sometimes, they become so confident that they allow people even without Office tags and the office vehicle stickers...especially at lunch hours. Traveling through the Koramangala-Madivala pass is an adventure now...The traffic has been made two-way in that area, and it takes 45 minutes at least for reaching me from office to home, while if I walk from office, it would ta...

Gotta chance to see "Provoked". It was a long time pending movie which I wished to see. So finally it's done. :-) Went today to Ayyappan temple at Madivala in the evening. Are you superstitious? We will say No, then why do we stop for some time when we are going outside for some purpose (say to meet a client!) and some one sneezes!!! I used to go for long drives on my bike alone, when my friends were busy or I was in a mood for a drive. So once I was on such a mood, and decided to go towards Hosur and towards Salem and that area. I don't know what happened to me, while I was going that way, I suddenly took a turn to some narrow path away from the main NH road...The place seems to be deserted, with no one there. I looked around and there was no one to be seen. I just moved on the bike ahead and suddenly there was a pungent smell of burning flesh floating around in the air. I just looked down and realized that I was footing on a shamshaan (Cemetery). There were bone ash...

hffff....A really long day, and it still not ended yet. Got up at 8 AM on a Saturday morning, a painful process. Today had to do because have to give my bike for servicing. The Service center is about 2/3 Kms from my home, so had a god exercise for legs. I gave my bike to Nidhi Motors (Hosur Road @ Kopen Agrahara, near Bomanahalli) , from where I had purchased the bike also,; Here is a good example of excellent service in Bangalore. I really am impressed by the guys working there. They will personally call or SMS you for all your vehicle related problems, be it for Insurance renewal, bike take-away after servicing etc. And since it's an Hero Honda authorized Service station, you are sure that they are charging you right. Really impressed... Bachelor life is becoming an over kill now :-) Felt so because all my friends are now married, busy with their world. I am standing alone where there used to be them also; now staring at their life moving away from me. My best friend drifted to ...