Ripples on the brain

I think the main problem with non-mainstream tourist places in and around Chennai (admittedly not many) these days is alcoholism. Actually I have no problem with people consuming alcohol if they weren’t such a nuisance to others. As it turns out, most of the folks in this part of the world consume alcohol just to flaunt and be noticed. The problem compounds if there’s a larger group, for then it turns into a mob with every person considering himself to be all powerful and also going that extra mile to get better noticed than the rest of the crowd. I cannot fathom why liquor cannot be consumed in the confines of one’s home or room.

I have witnessed a lot of such behaviour at college and also at work. In Chennai, especially during weekends, in places along ECR, notably Mayajaal, this is a perennial problem, so much so I that sometimes consider moral policing befitting these people.

We ran into one such boisterous mob during our stay in Le Auroville in Yelagiri. We chose that place based on some of the travelogues and also on the hospitality of the host when we were there. The “resort” actually has very basic accomodation facilities (it was converted from a school) that is definitely not worth the rates charged. However, the host boasted of the “experience” for the price we paid. We were promised of things like strawberry picking in his farm, night safari, bikes to ride around the place, parasailing and so on that really made us choose the place, though we were somewhat apprehensive about the security of the place considering its location.

As it turned out, an unruly bunch of guys turned up at that place on Saturday evening and ruined the whole serene ambience. They were drunk as they drove in. The host told us later that the group had reserved claiming that they were going to be with their wives. I believed that part of his story as he appeared to be a bit shocked to see this huge bunch of guys and enquired them about their wives as they checked-in. This group took over the entire common area in the resort and the campfire in the night. My wife and I were not too bothered till this point as we were more happy visiting places, reading, drawing and chatting away.

It is what happened in the night that left a bad taste in the mouth. As we retired to the bed resigning to the fact that there was indeed going to be no strawberry picking and no night safari that the host had promised, we found a hand in the dark grab the doors of our window and try to open it and peep into our ground floor room. Thankfully, we had earlier asked the resort guy to fasten the boltless door using a rope so that guy wasn’t successful. We immediately raised an alarm and called all the resort guys. At this time, we discovered that the guy had earlier tried to peep into two other rooms. By the time he was in our place, the resort guy already knew that this guy was part of the bunch that I was referring to. In the night, the resort guy offered to turn the bunch away if we identified the offender (he even offered to use his shotgun ). It was obviously dark and the guy wasn’t actually successful. Besides there was a thick curtain in the window and so we just saw a shadow. We opted to stay in the same room as the option of moving to a different hotel in the dead of the night didn’t appear feasible.

What happened the subsequent morning was more bizarre. When we enquired with the resort guy who offered to use even his shotgun against the offender claimed that he actually identified the culprit. But he found that the culprit was so drunk that he actually thought our window was the entrance to his room. This explanation was laughable because that guy had peeped into 3 other rooms including a bathroom window of an adjacent room. As we discovered, this group frequented to this place almost every other week and hence presented a continuous revenue stream to the resort. The resort guy obviously didn’t want to alienate this group.

We decided not to talk with guy any further and left the resort resolving not to let this lone incident sully the otherwise pleasant memories we carried from this place. This was also a lesson for us to choose places of stay. We are better off with rooms closer together than being spread out from a security standpoint and it is better to get rooms in the top floors rather than in the ground floor.

My wife and I went on a weekend trip to Yelagiri in the first week of June. It was a very enjoyable trip for most part. The best thing about Yelagiri is its laid back nature. There are not a lot of “tourist spots”, so you can just go around the place, do your kind of activity - reading, drawing/painting or just walking around/trekking in serene surroundings.

Since we were there during the summer vacations, we had to make some advanced reservations. We followed this travelogue of Ram for all the planning. Our experience turned out be very similar to that of Ram except for the unpleasant stay at the Le Auroville “resort”.

The drive was very comfortable. The roads are amazing, but the traffic discipline, especially as you near the towns like Vellore/Katpadi, Ambur and Vaniyambadi leaves a lot to be desired. Especially at a bridge stretch as you approach Vellore, you can expect a sudden onslaught of slow moving vehicles, two wheelers coming the wrong way. Other than that, from time to time, you need to negotiate the cabs that flout all lane rules and through caution to the winds as they embark on overtaking other vehicles. Those are the only blemishes in the otherwise wonderful journey in the plains.

The ghat roads are pretty good and following some of the basic rules like not following a heavy vehicle closely when driving uphill and giving way to the oncoming traffic when driving down the hill should make that part of the drive incident free. The 14 hairpin bends make the drive really interesting.

A 5:30 am start would be ideal from Chennai. That way Poonamallee can be crossed by sun rise and the highway should be good at that time. A breakfast stop at Vellore would be ideal and it shouldn’t take more than 4.5 hours to reach Yelagiri including the stopover.

We visited a few places like a garden and the lake that are usual tourist places. But what we enjoyed most was the visit to the offbeat places like the farms / gardens on the way to the Swamimalai trek. The one we had gone to had red chillies, beans, different varities of rose, beans, brinjal, tomato and root vegetable plants. The Swamimalai trek was also pretty good. We wanted to do some other stuff like strawberry picking, night safari in the jungle and parasailing, which were promised by our resort guy but not fulfilled. There is one State Horticultural farm close to where the Swamimalai trek begins. Unfortunately, the farm is closed on Sundays which is when the place hosts a lot of tourists.

We found Jackfruit to be very popular here. We ate a lot of them when we were there and also bought loads of it for home. They are a lot cheaper in Yelagiri. We had all our food at our resort and so didn’t have a chance to try any restaurants in the hills. The food provided by our resort was good enough.

Overall we found Yelagiri to be good place for a weekend sojourn.

My best journey ever on the bus should be the one between KL and Singapore. I have not had a chance to travel in those 180 degree seat or sleeper buses in India, so I wouldn’t know if such buses are available here as well, but I must say the comfort in the bus should beat that available to business class travelers.

We did an overnight journey when we went to KL from Singapore. The journey takes five and half hours including the immigration formalities. Since we had boarded the bus after 11pm, the scenery outside was not visible during our onward journey. Nevertheless the bus interiors were very comfortable, save for a guy beside me who was using the in-seat entertainment system. The seats were just too cosy and I just didn’t want to leave it even after we reached KL. I got the best glimpse of KL when a taxiwala asked, “Enga sir poganum, taxi irukku” (Where do you want to go, sir) in Tamil, as we got down! For a moment I thought I was in Guindy .

The return journey was, however, still better. This time we did a daytime journey and in hindsight that was the best decision we could have taken. The vegetation along the road were such a treat to the eye and were more scenic than those that you get to see along the Coimbatore - Palghat route. The road itself best fits Vadivel’s description of Dubai roads in “Vetri Kodikattu“.

During the return journey, the bus stops at a highway food court for refreshment. The juice stall in that place is one that is not to be missed. One must in fact taste all the juice options available in the stall as it is very unlikely that one gets better ones anywhere else in the world. Even when we were at the Batu caves, the tender coconuts that we had were amazingly sweet and has copious amounts of water inside. The way these coconuts are cut is itself a treat to watch. Unlike in India, where we use aruval (sickle), in Malaysia the sharper and rectangular butcher’s knife is used. The bottom portion is cut flat so that the coconut can rest on the table without support (Believe me, some of these are so big and heavy that you wouldn’t want to hold them, more so because you also take a long time to finish drinking!). It is cut deep so that you have a wider mouth with a zigzag circumference and served with a straw and a metal spoon. The mouth is so wide that the spoon can be used to scrape the coconut meat.

What made the journey more wonderful was when there was a slight drizzle as we neared Singapore. The sight of an overcast sky, fog covered hills far away and rain drop trails along the large glasses on the window provides the ultimate mental relaxation.

All-in-all a perfect journey!

There has been a lot of attention to the announcements about the creation of new IIT’s and IIM’s. As the Centre tries to get maximum mileage out of it, there has also been apprehensions about the “dilution of the brand” of these elite institutes. It is sad that details such as location, names of these institutes get more prominence while other important details relating to the quality of faculty, research, facilities in the institutes are not debated at all.

I wonder why it is really important to set up new institutions that have to be named IIT’s. Why can’t existing institutes / universities be beefed up through government aids so that their quality can be enhanced to the level of IIT’s or more? For example, instead of having another IIT in Tamil Nadu, why not take up a defunct university here and make a grand research and technical institute out of the same? The advantage these universities have is the existing space, infrastructure and set up. The name of the institute is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to make it a great one.

When I was in Singapore recently, I had this great fortune to visit the campus of Nanyang Technological University. I was amazed by the infrastructure of the University. We only visited the Electrical and Electronics Department and I can say, the department itself is bigger than most institutes in India (even the IIT’s and the IISc and definitely all the engineering colleges). The class rooms, lab facilities etc. can never be matched by any institute here. I felt blessed just to be in the campus and visit its facilities.

That visit made me and my father wonder about the engineering institutes in India and the direction we are taking. While doing my graduation, I had a chance to visit some of the engineering college campuses in Tamil Nadu during inter-college events. It was appalling, to put it mildly, to see their infrastucture. Many of them had six or so departments in a single building. Including classrooms, seminar halls, labs, staff rooms etc. And mind you these were some of the more famous private engineering colleges. Most the even government engineering colleges have zilch research activity happening in their campuses. I wonder if it is this lack of academic activity that frees up the college adminstrators time and effort and makes them concentrate on other aspects like discipline and decorum .

As the Anandakrishnan Committee recently pointed out, even a premier university like the Anna University has been relegated to a governing and exam administering body. Universities end up this way because there is almost no other constant source of funds for them. The lesser said about the engineering colleges and deemed universities, the better. When I graduated, many of my classmates ended up as lecturers in one of the self financing colleges in TN. One friend even told me, just 6 months after we graduated, that if only he had a Masters degree, he would have been the Head of the Department; all the other colleagues were less experienced than him!

I wonder how regulating bodies like the AICTE allow such institutes to function when even lay persons like me can spot so many gross violations in these colleges. Instead of cracking whip on the technical institutes, AICTE seems to be hell bent on bringing some better-run non-technical institutes under its fold.

While it is common knowledge that under-graduate level education is so poor in India (apart from very few elite institutes), little is being done to remedy the situation.

I came back from a wonderful trip to Singapore and Malaysia early morning yesterday. I wish I could patiently write my experiences from that trip… Let us see how much I can update this blog with details from the trip. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it.

I was in Rajasthan for a vacation on the third week of December. Though I used by broken Hindi to good effect in most places, my bad vocabulary and the use of wrong words in places made it ample clear to the listener that I was not a native speaker of the language. This invariably led to questions on my mother tongue and such and to some funny exchanges. A couple of them are reproduced below:

Encounter 1:

Man: Aap kahan ke hain sir?
Me: Madras ke hain hum
Man: Achcha, vahan pe Telugu chalti hai naa?
Me: Telugu bhi chalti hai, par vahan ki bhasha Tamil hai
Man: Achcha achcha

Encounter 2:

Man: Aap ghar mein koun si bhasha bolte hain sir?
Me: Tamil
Man: Achcha, to aap Bangalore se aaye hain?
Me: !!?!!

That reminds of a conversation back in ISB some two and a half years ago. When our batch was new into ISB, everybody in the dining hall was almost a stranger to us. So, we used to sit in these long tables with ten people around trying to break ice, introduce ourselves to the group and chat in general. In one such conversation, there were 7-8 people around a table.

Guy1 (to another guy near him): So where are you from?
Guy2: I’m from Bangalore
Guy3: Oh, where are you originally from?
Guy2 (little surprised at the question): Why, I’m a Kannadiga from Bangalore.
All activity at the table stopped. For some reason, everybody wanted to act funny at the same time and so there was silence at the table and everybody looked at this guy.

Guy4: Kannadiga from Bangalore? Do you have a visa or something?
At this point everyone started laughing.

I visited the famous Devon Avenue when I was in Chicago a couple of months ago. The street is known for its Indian restaurants and all kinds of Indian stores - electronics, groceries, meat shops, etc. - apart from the Pakistani, Arabic and Israeli shops. I was very excited to walk along that avenue and look at the honorary names given to it at different points, after Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Mother Teresa et all.

Though the street looked Indian in every respect (including the way in which people stopped their cars right on the middle of the single lane road to let their family alight !), I somehow felt the shops/restaurants didn’t live up to the expectations. We went to a famous restaurant and ordered for masala dosas. The dosas were expensive as well as poorly cooked; they tasted worse than the frozen dosas you get here. We then went to one of the stores that sold “unlocked” cell phones run by a guy from Bombay. We looked at a model with a price tag of $399. “Don’t go by the tag”, the shopkeeper warned me even as I pointed the model out to him. “How much does it cost then?”. “$275″, he said after some thought. I looked at the features of the model and was trying to recall the price of a similar phone in India. “Theek hai, boss. I’ll give it you for $200″, he said. “I think we get these phones cheaper in India now”, I said, still failing to recollect its exact price in rupees. I was still contemplating when he finally said, “Closing time boss, I’ll give it to you for $150″!. I was totally taken aback by the way in which the price of the phone dropped within minutes and decided it was safe not to get one there. Overall, we felt that the shops generally fleeced customers with poor quality stuff.

While I was recounting my experience with Devon Avenue to a friend, he told me about a similar place in New Jersey that is even better than Devon Avenue. The moment I heard that, I longed to visit that place in NJ. Exactly two months later, I arrived this evening to Woodbridge on a business trip for a couple of days and guess what, Oak Tree Road, Edison, the very place that my friend mentioned, is a stone’s throw from where I stay!

Moments after we landed here, we immediately drove to that place to check out the Saravan Bhavan that was opened sometime last year. Though most of the reviews rated the restaurant from average to poor, we couldn’t miss this opportunity. As luck would have it, the restaurant was closed today (it has weekly off on Mondays). So, we went around that place and dined at a North Indian restaurant. The restaurant served authentic dishes and wasn’t very expensive too.

Unless one is told, any person walking along the road could clearly mistake the place to be in India. So many Indian restaurants, Patel stores selling anything and everything, electronic shops, subzi mandis, groceries, Indian video rentals and jewelry stores to name a few. I just felt like walking along the road over and over again!

So, Saravana Bhavan tomorrow…

As usual Ram does a neat and prompt job of describing the place we visited last weekend and putting up some good photographs of the visit. You can find them here.

Since I had visited the Golconda Fort earlier this year in Hyderabad, I had assumed that climbing the Gingee fort will require almost the same effort. It turned out to be false; it took almost an hour for us to climb up and around 45mins to get down. Also, I couldn’t climb the entire fort in one go (since I had also driven from Chennai), and had to take breaks in between. Though this fort is huge (situated on 3 hills spread in a large area) and has more buildings when compared to the Golconda one, I must say AP tourism has done a far better job in maintaining Golconda. They even have a light and sound show in the evening for the tourists. Its Gingee counterpart on the other hand is hardly maintained. The only person manning the fort seems to be the guy at the ticket counter.

I don’t understand why the Chennai city crowd is fascinated with the ECR (East Coast Road). A road with a toll of Rs.45 even for a short distance, a road without a median (when most highway accidents in the country happen due to head-on collision that also causes the maximum casualities)/service lane/pedestrian crossing, a road with single lane each way which when combined with the absence of median should make driving in the night nightmarish pales in comparison to the national highway 45 (extension of the GST road) that almost runs parallel to it.

As we found out last weekend, driving on NH 45 till Tindivanam is an absolute pleasure after Singaperumal koil. It is a two-lane one side road with ample and green median and the road meanders through some beautiful scenery of hills and lakes that gives one a feeling of driving somewhere in the US. In case one travels the entire stretch of the road which is about 150kms, the total toll (at two different places) works out to be Rs.40 one way. I sincerely recommend this road to the drive-loving public of Chennai. There’s of course one sore point - to get to the beautiful stretch of the road that I described, you need to tackle the traffic till Tambaram and after which might be one of the reasons why ECR is more popular.

Ramkumar has saved us the effort to write about our trip last week by posting the details in three parts here (follow the link in that post for the other parts) so religiously that I suspect he made it to the trip only to find something to write in his blog, just like the newspaper or magazine columnists.

Though I would’ve liked a more adventurous trip (as one of us pointed out, the places that we went were fit for a family trip to show the wife and kids, a piece of history), nevertheless, it was a chance to be with my friends again on a weekend.