Life

Of late, whenever anyone throws a question asking which place (city) I'm from, there isn't by any means a ready answer. The confusion lies in the fact that I haven't lived for long in any place that I could call my home town and that I've lived major part of my life till now in the city of Bengaluru! Yes, I was born in Davanagere. The city famous for its Dosa and cotton mills. I was brought up in the lovely fort city of Chitradurga. Rocky hills, ponds and the truly mesmerizing channels of harvested rain water running into ponds that always made us wonder how the city even got into facing scarcity of water. It is said that a British officer who visited Chitradurga fort was quite relieved that they did not have to fight to win it. The historic fort is said to have been impenetrable.

Watching Cricket today was like the old times. Whether or not India wins, the World Cup sure has taken me back to Cricket nostalgia. Somewhere between all this, I just remembered how my own website started as a blog to write about Cricket back then - around 10 years back. It had started out as a little set of HTML pages on Geocities (a service that was provided by yahoo). I had this huge fan page just about Jammy (Rahul Dravid) and much of the website was mainly about Cricket. It was those Cricket crazy days. Any excuse could do to watch Cricket even during exams or just to go out and play Cricket on the road. Now, the craze just ends at an occasional game of Cricket on Android!

However, the addiction before getting out of the craze, had become catastrophic. I had to make a conscious attempt to keep away from anything that was Cricket except for rare visits to Cricinfo (which has now been acquired by ESPN and has become ESPNCricinfo). I had been quite successful in keeping myself away from watching Cricket matches for last few years - keeping myself busy with something or the other - more so when there were matches that couldn't be missed! The annoying ads played between every 'over' on TV was sort of an excuse or probably was one great excuse for me to not watch Cricket matches. It had worked really well. All that changed with an HD DTH connection I subscribed to last month. ESPN has a dedicated HD channel that telcasts live with amazing picture quality and without ads in between! The DTH service provider must have seen Cricket crazy people coming back to their old habits of watching Cricket through this or it might have been just me. I was completely bowled by the offer. Good thing though, because of that I now get to relax watching Nat Geo or Discovery in HD on occasions when I'm able to find time after the day's work.

I guess some people are still keeping a watch on my blog, which is rather encouraging considering that I haven't been writing here as regularly as I used to before. The website has long been neglected owing to several other of my free time commitments.

What is it like a Sunday you wake up to noises when you've hardly had any sleep overnight? Worse yet, the news paper carries on front, a page long report about deaths in double figures - and another with made-look fairy tale of a weirdo accident survivor.

N R Colony is a very nice locality, except just that getting a broadband connection here is equally tough. For last one week, I've been enjoying living very close to the lovely vegetarian restaurants of Basavanagudi, our usual hang outs of DVG Road, and not-so-polluted air of Bugle rock park. It is back to all-Kannada neighbourhood, which feels more like home (more like Shimoga where I've lived for more years than any other place), but not connected to the Internet all this while.

There was this not-so-good-looking card lying in my wallet for a long time now. I had never taken it out for last many months. It was no Credit Card, but Accident Relief Care card that my father had subscribed for me. Everyone at our home now has a subscription each of that.

Bangalore roads are never easy, even for the experienced. Few years back, I had travelled a great distance on my old bike through the dangerous NH 48 - Bangalore - ShravanaBelagola - Hassan - Shimoga and back without even a scratch or a tinge of bad experience. That was when I had my old and not-so-sophisticated bike as this one. But today was probably just a late dark day of [:http://www.physics.iisc.ernet.in/~baliga/quack/am.html|'Amaavasya'] for me.