Luck, it seems likes to play snakes and ladder with me a lot. I still manage to reach the end goal by doing nothing extra-ordinary and just going with the flow, you see the only thing I hate more than people asking me to do something is situations forcing me to do something; I like to follow the laws of nature and remain in the state of rest until driven by a force greater than my weight (which is increasing by the day).
So, lets roll the dice shall we? First roll and I am already on a ladder; I am invited to attend a training in the US and that too in the beautiful state of Colorado. And as Luck would have it, got bitten by snake on the next move; there is no Visa interview dates available for next 3 months!! I am back to where it started and was just going to give up when by some lucky roll of dice landed on a ladder again; suddenly on 20th of the month previous to my scheduled departure I decided to check the visa site and to my disbelief found visa interview date available just five days before my training date, I hurriedly booked it and informed my manager that I finally can make it to the US.
It might seem like the road is all smooth from here on but no, the snakes were still not giving up. Though the visa interview went fine and I was promised that the visa will be delivered to my office address within 2 days time, this however never happened. So here I am ready to leave next day with all my packing, air tickets, hotel reservations done and yet No Visa. Some good luck was still on my side as when I called the visa services office, they told me that there was some "technical difficulties" so they could issue the visa on time but now they have issued it and I could collect it from their office next day.
The next day BTW was the day when I was supposed to leave, one roll of dice should take me to the end goal it seemed no ladder of luck required here right? Well wrong again, I collected the visa alright but there was this snake in form of FOG waiting for me at the airport. I was supposed to catch a flight from Kolkata to Delhi and then after an hour's break the flight to US, Almost all flights from Kolkata to Delhi got cancelled due to heavy fog at Delhi Airport, except IA flight which was the flight I was booked for. Phew!!, managed to dodge this snake. In your face snakiee!.
One thing I totally forgot till this time and was brutally reminded by the snake bite at the last square, ie the check in counter of IA's flight to Delhi - my ticket was booked under waiting status and was still in the same status. I tried explaining that I have a international flight to catch and a very important business trip to make :D, but all seemed to be in vain. I was just rolling my dice in hopelessness when suddenly just 10 minutes before the flight was going to leave I got on to the ladder direct to the goal and my name was announced along with two other names at the check in counter with the message that one seat is available now as one of the passengers did not show up and luckily for me the other two persons whose name were announced before me also did not show up.
From here on it was all smooth, Colorado is a beautiful state and Colorado Springs is a great place to be. The people there are very nice and friendly and the view of mountains is simply amazing. For some of the pics I took there visit this and this.
The trip above was made during Jan this year, and what reminded me of that trip is that I am going to the US again, San Francisco this time. I already have a visa that is valid for next 10 years, I am taking a flight direcly from Kolkata, via Singapore this time no chances of fog at either of these places and have checked that all the flight booking status is confirmed no waiting this time! So lets see what plans luck have got for this time!!
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Concept phones
Was just looking around to decide upon which mobile phone to buy for myself and stumbled upon these few concept phones. These phones do not have any key pad and its all touch screen which can change according to the context. Nice idea!!
First there was this BenQ Black Box concept:
and now there's Nokia 'Aeon':
Awesome!! Dunno when such phones will be available but whenever they will be I guess it will be too costly to afford :(.
BTW if anyone is looking for purchasing a new mobile phone in India, the best site to start your search is indiagsm; it gives the list of all the mobile phones available along with its latest retail price and the list of phone features. Another such site is India-cellular but it does not give a lot of required information.
First there was this BenQ Black Box concept:
and now there's Nokia 'Aeon':
Awesome!! Dunno when such phones will be available but whenever they will be I guess it will be too costly to afford :(.
BTW if anyone is looking for purchasing a new mobile phone in India, the best site to start your search is indiagsm; it gives the list of all the mobile phones available along with its latest retail price and the list of phone features. Another such site is India-cellular but it does not give a lot of required information.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Home!
So I was at home last week, by home I mean the place at which my parents live I don't call the place I go every night to sleep 'home'. The place is village basically may be not so by the strict definition of village but I don't know what you call a place with not a single internet cafe these days. And on top of that I didn't carry my laptop there (I call the laptop provided to me by the company I work for mine, its just a feel good factor you see !), so in all it was a very strange experience being offline for whole 10 days !!.
Apart from not having any internet connection another interesting point at this place was the power (electricity) situation there, which was very good. They followed a very strict schedule of power cuts so no matter if there was any electricity during the day or not the scheduled cuts of morning 5 to 10 and evening 5 to 10 were followed very efficiently. It was nice to see that atleast for one thing a government office followed a schedule.
So with no internet, no electricity and no work the means of entertainment were very limited. Thankfully my sister decided to come down to same place for my rescue and along came my 1.5 yr old nephew. Kids, I don't know why, like me. Somehow I believe they see beyond my hairy existence a kid inside me too hence behaving as if I am of their age and some times to my horror even younger!!. My nephew, his name is Dhruv, no not the Super-Commando Dhruv, just Dhruv, like all other kids treated me differently then all other adults there. It was not clear if the treatment was as he would other kids or not but none the less it was different. Like he had a very limited vocabulary of not more than 10 words and most of the words being the relations; as in he can call his dad 'papa' his grandfather 'dada' and so on. He could even call his mom a very affectionate 'mummaa' but refused to utter a very similar sounding word 'mama' to call me. He also had a very cute habit of following whatever his dad does like for example see this pic below:
cute na!!.
This kids treating me like one of them have led me to many embarrassing situation, like when I was in 8th grade and a young cousin who had just started school used to go school on a same bus. Now this young kid didn't see me as of same age as her but she took the matters to another level and took me as even younger, this was clear to me when she insisted to play 'teacher-student' on way to school in the bus and I was to be the student according to her wishes. So here I was a student of class 8 writing away A-B-C-D in a bus full of other students of same age. Inevitable happened and other guys of my age noticed what I was doing and started laughing their lungs off!!. I tried to control the situation by saying things like "I am writing this just to improve my hand writing, you see as writing in a moving bus will give a better stability to my hands!!" but all in vein, the kids those days were not the gullible sort I guess.
Apart from not having any internet connection another interesting point at this place was the power (electricity) situation there, which was very good. They followed a very strict schedule of power cuts so no matter if there was any electricity during the day or not the scheduled cuts of morning 5 to 10 and evening 5 to 10 were followed very efficiently. It was nice to see that atleast for one thing a government office followed a schedule.
So with no internet, no electricity and no work the means of entertainment were very limited. Thankfully my sister decided to come down to same place for my rescue and along came my 1.5 yr old nephew. Kids, I don't know why, like me. Somehow I believe they see beyond my hairy existence a kid inside me too hence behaving as if I am of their age and some times to my horror even younger!!. My nephew, his name is Dhruv, no not the Super-Commando Dhruv, just Dhruv, like all other kids treated me differently then all other adults there. It was not clear if the treatment was as he would other kids or not but none the less it was different. Like he had a very limited vocabulary of not more than 10 words and most of the words being the relations; as in he can call his dad 'papa' his grandfather 'dada' and so on. He could even call his mom a very affectionate 'mummaa' but refused to utter a very similar sounding word 'mama' to call me. He also had a very cute habit of following whatever his dad does like for example see this pic below:
cute na!!.
This kids treating me like one of them have led me to many embarrassing situation, like when I was in 8th grade and a young cousin who had just started school used to go school on a same bus. Now this young kid didn't see me as of same age as her but she took the matters to another level and took me as even younger, this was clear to me when she insisted to play 'teacher-student' on way to school in the bus and I was to be the student according to her wishes. So here I was a student of class 8 writing away A-B-C-D in a bus full of other students of same age. Inevitable happened and other guys of my age noticed what I was doing and started laughing their lungs off!!. I tried to control the situation by saying things like "I am writing this just to improve my hand writing, you see as writing in a moving bus will give a better stability to my hands!!" but all in vein, the kids those days were not the gullible sort I guess.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Long time no sea!
Its been long since I have written anything here. I guess the 'creativity' required is lacking somewhere or may be I am just plain lazy. People who know will vote for the later but I believe its the first, whatever might have been the reason I'll try to be more regular now and I guess the best way to do that is to post about anything interesting that I come across while 'surfing' the net which I do a lot and thanks to this I feel so good about it too.
A friend just asked me if we can go on a trip to sikkim during Dec this year; now that reminds me of one other thing that I have been missing on ie travel, not counting the going-home-during-durga-puja as travel, it have been more than a year since I have gone on some real tour. It was October last year when I went to Mysore, it was dussehra time and at mysore it is the most important festival. The whole city was decorated with flowers and lighting specially the Mysore Palace, it was a beautiful sight. On the d-day every year there's a procession that goes round the city mostly comprising of people dressed in traditional dance costumes and performing the local folk dances. At the beginning of this procession there was a rally of all the old vintage cars and bikes owned by the royal family of this royal city, it was funny looking at all those old cars.
After Mysore we visited a close by hill station named Madekkiri, on route to which apart from the usual beautiful natural views to look at, there was this very beautiful Buddhist Monastery built by Tibetan people and a waterfall around which a small zoo was build; serves the purpose of a great place for picnic. (for pics from this trip visit this, this and this).
A friend just asked me if we can go on a trip to sikkim during Dec this year; now that reminds me of one other thing that I have been missing on ie travel, not counting the going-home-during-durga-puja as travel, it have been more than a year since I have gone on some real tour. It was October last year when I went to Mysore, it was dussehra time and at mysore it is the most important festival. The whole city was decorated with flowers and lighting specially the Mysore Palace, it was a beautiful sight. On the d-day every year there's a procession that goes round the city mostly comprising of people dressed in traditional dance costumes and performing the local folk dances. At the beginning of this procession there was a rally of all the old vintage cars and bikes owned by the royal family of this royal city, it was funny looking at all those old cars.
After Mysore we visited a close by hill station named Madekkiri, on route to which apart from the usual beautiful natural views to look at, there was this very beautiful Buddhist Monastery built by Tibetan people and a waterfall around which a small zoo was build; serves the purpose of a great place for picnic. (for pics from this trip visit this, this and this).
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