I didn’t get the time to put the pictures of the camping trip. I went camping in Masinagudi (Creek n Crag). This was a coffee estate, its more than 300 acres and they have a place for people to camp. They have two nice tree houses and they have kept the nature intact. Its kind of a bit luxury camping, they took care of the food part, they had bathroom facilities. But the one thing which scared me was all the stories they told about the wild life there.

They said they have seen leopards hunting deer and the place where we pitched out tent was the place where the elephants cross. Yeah sweet!

It was a wonderful trip. We weren’t lucky to spot any leopards or elephants.

More pictures

I went to Tuticorin to visit my cousins almost a month back, didn’t had the time to update the blog. The last time I went there was almost 10 years back and the place looked totally different and I could not recognize many of the places there.

Myself and cousins we decided to go to a place called Idayangudi, which is a village down south around 60km from Tuticorin. They have a church here and they were celebrating their 125th anniversary, so we decided to go and visit this church. This church was build by SBC missionary organization. Along the way almost many of the villages have churches built by these organizations and also they have schools and hospitals build by these organization.

Still don’t understand why they went to remote villages 100 years back to setup all this. Wonder how these villages will be if they didn’t setup all this?

The highlight of the trip was the ending. We were returning to Tuticorin and on the highway I was crossing a cyclist, and this guy decides to take a U turn with out seeing what is coming and I could not stop my bike. I hit him pretty hard and I lost balance and went and hit another cyclist, now there were two cyclists on the ground. The first guy knew that it was his fault and didn’t say anything, we offered him to take him to the hospital but he said he will take care of it. The second guy, since it was our fault we took him to the hospital gave him some money and we took off. We were lucky that no one was seriously injured. I guess I am still not used to riding or driving here.

Now it is little bit free at work and I am going to run away for the weekend. Planning to go camping, really really need a break.

This holiday season was very different for me. I just didn’t get the holiday sprit, I tried decorating the house ,tried listening to holiday music nothing helped. But I am happy to spend Christmas with the family after 7 years.

Tall, fair and handsome

Got to get the cream now…

I am going to miss the Delhi Marathon, Mumbai Marathon because I didn’t do enough training. Now I don’t want to miss the Chennai Marathon which is happening in Feb, so last week I sat and prepared a training schedule for myself. Well I did my first run last week and fell sick after that, I will wait for another day or two to get better and will start continuing my training. Not sure if I am going to follow it fully, but defenetly spend enough time to put this together. I got the schedule from Hal Higdon and modified it a bit.

I decided to head to the hospital and get some drip to get some fluid in my body. The doctor prescribed some antibiotics and some pain killer and told me that this can be because of food poisoning and asked me to be on liquid diet and asked me to go home. I am little bit surprised. I am thinking, dude I can’t even walk, I can’t take anything orally and you want me to go home and take some tablets?? Then I asked him if taking drips will help, then he is like “yeah if you want to get admitted in the hospital we can give you drips”. Aren’t these guys suppose to tell me the easy way out of my pain??

Anyways… Got admitted and got everything thru drips for a day and I am back to normal, still on liquid diet for the next 3 days.

Got to be careful eating outside and also had to find a good hospital!

Some of my friends were talking on Thursday about the weekend and all of a sudden we decided to do a wilderness camping, but unfortunately no one had much information about wilderness camping. I looked at some of the books I had and searched on the internet. But looks like everyone was talking about camping but no one seems to provide enough information about were to camp, where to get permission and stuff. Anyways we decided to just go there and find out.

On Saturday morning we set out for camping, we reached Muthathi and got hold of a local guy, he showed us some place were we can camp. But those places were all really dirty. We decided to look around some more. And we went to Bheemeshwari which was another 5 kilometers from Muthathi. There was a Cauvery fishing camp there. We talked with the watchman there and he told us that there is a secluded place 2 kilometer from there and we can probably camp there. We drove for another 2 kilometer and we found a really nice place. We pitched out tents there, but after that we found another really nice place very close by, so we just carried our tent to that place. It was a picture perfect campsite.

We meet some local people in the night and we had a small dancing section and a small game section with the boys. It was fun, because we couldn’t speak their language. But still we had fun.

In the night we spotted a fox, which was for some reason just watching our tent from the bush. There were supposed to be elephants also in this place. But unfortunately or fortunately we didn’t spot any.

To camp in any forest you need to get permission from the District Forest officer. Unfortunately I had no clue where to get permission, all I knew was I had to get permission. We also followed the ‘leave no trace behind’ policy.

It was really fun. I felt really bad to come back in just a day. I would love to do more camping, so if you guys know any good place close to Bangalore please let me know.

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One of my friend got married and I went to attend the wedding which took place in a small village near karaikudi in TamilNadu. The marriage actually took place in the girls house, yeah the houses were big enough to accommodate a huge crowd.

After the wedding some of my friends we went to take a tour of my friend’s house. The picture on top was one of the halls in the house. The house was built in 1918 and it has 40 rooms (yeah it has forty rooms). They don’t book any hall or hotel for any big events; they just conduct it in their house. They use their house only for that purpose, the rest of the time the house remains vacant.

Unfortunately we could get the keys to my friend’s house, but I was still amazed by the house.

Where ever I turn Sania is there. Go outside you will see Sania holding a phone (advertisement for a phone company). Turn on the TV and she is there in all the ads, read the news paper and she is there in the front page and full page news on the sport section. I am totally sick and tired of seeing her in everyplace and the hype the media is adding.

Yesterday she played against Maria Sharapova. The first news in the paper was “Its Sania Mania as she takes on 2nd seed Sharapova”. I mean is this news worthy to be in the first news in the first page?? I just don’t get it and then you go to the sports section and you see a big picture of her 3/4 of the page is a picture of her and more news about the match. May be if she has won the match, then I might be able to understand. But just the match was so much hyped. I wonder what might have happened if she actually won the match?

Why is the media hyping it up so much? Or may be I am the only person who feels that way. And then everyone wonders why people are behaving this way

‘"We were shocked with a few incidents back home. Mohammed Kaif's home was stoned; (Rahul) Dravid's car was smashed. These things should not happen," he said’ link from rediff news

This is what happened when the Indian Cricket team did not perform well in the world cup. When the media is hyping everything they just sit quiet because it favors the player. Then when things turn around they are shocked!!

I should be happy that they haven’t built a temple for Sania Mirza yet.

Two of my friends are getting married next month, so we went to a resort and spend the weekend. It was suppose to be a bachelor’s party, but it was filled with activities. We played badminton, snooker, cricket and swam for almost two hours.