An Escapade to Bangalore.

The Escapade to Bangalore
It occurred to me suddenly. Almost invasively. I was having a long day finishing all my work. Then suddenly I got this mail from Naresh calling us all out to Bangalore. Seeing that mail exhorting us to break free, in my Outlook inbox in the midst of meeting minutes, my commitments email, my WAR approval mails and my code review mails was a thing of beauty. Like a tired seaman seeing a lush palm-lined shoreline.
I jumped on to the bandwagon. We, ‘Bunty’ Partiban, Naresh and ‘Enthu’ Vimal and me decided to go to Bangalore to see our friends who were working there. Working in Microsoft has nudged me to use as many acronymns as possible. Probably one other way by which people project themselves as a mystic lot. So when we were travelling in the Train, we ‘repro’ed a lot of Vadivel comedies. By the way, for you mortals outside Microsoft, Repro’ing is reproducing something of interest a bug or a crash say. (you know, well, it happens.) In this case we were trying to repro the comedy for our own sake. We laughed all the way to Bangalore. The morning saw us in Bangalore. Our friends were there prompty in the station to receive us. ‘Palam’ Murugu, ‘Bhaghu’ Prasana, Prasanna ‘kutty’ were ther to receive us. We went to their house. Palam shares his appartment with Hemanth(ji), Chikki (I couldn’t get my hands on this pakki, He left to chennai at the same time I came to his appartment), Kannan (Nobody knows where he is), ‘PSY’ ASai, ‘Thala’ Shyam etc. I hope that the et cetra is useless there. That appartment is not intrinsically bad, but if you convert your hall into a place you throw your footwear, well, you cannot expect much. But it was were our friends were there and that’s all matters. After a wholesome bath, we settled to talk about everything. Oh, what a let out it was. The Trilogians were like, well, trilogians and they were looking as if they had trekked the Grand Canyon and were asked to fight fire in an oil well in Iraq and then been told to write a program which should take exactly O(n) for finding the SSN of the guy who ran the program.
Gokri, ‘the Pokri’ came from IIM, Ahmedabad and was sharing his set of experiences. In the evening, we went to Forum and gosh what a place it was. Full of people. I mean real people. I couldn’t take them all at once. Whoa. We went to the Apple Center. Inside displayed were the latest and coolest stuff from Apple. It seems that Apple has copyrighted the word ‘cool’. It was real cool. The music from iTunes, man hearing ‘Hotel California’ from the iPod was the ultimate technologically sensual experience. I would never forgive Microsoft for missing out on Digital Music. I am sure it wouldn’t forgive itself after all.
I bought some books from Landmark:
1) The Da Vinci Code. A sci-fiction with some historical non-fiction. An assured page turner.
2) The Road less travelled. Psychology pour homme. My all time favorite. I presurred at least 3 guys to buy this one.
3) The Inscrutable Americans. A light hearted comedy.
4) The Walking Drum. A 10th century travellogue of a sea pirate.
5) The Alchemist. A Novel about Dreams. I am about to finish this one.

We went to some hotel and had our dinner. I chose a very conventional dish. Sai decided to have something funny. And if I remember right, we were all suspicious of the fact that those cooks poured beer on his schewan fried rice. It was a terribble stink. I still don’t know how ASai finished his plate. Maybe he hit his home turf. ;-)
We went back to the appartment and saw the climax of ‘Gladiator’ and then saw one another and then I coaxed myself to a well deserved sleep next to ‘kutty’ Prasanna. It was as if we were back in our college days and were sleeping in our dingy hostel rooms again.
The next day we had the third Prasanna of our class coming to our appartment. I had a very fruitful discussion with S.Prasanna about this whole thing about Open source software. We all knew that we were standing at a profound moment in the history of computation. We could only wait for the things to unfold. I for one felt very uncomfortable about getting a free industry standard Operating system for free. I don’t want to talk about this here. That’ll be another write-up if you care enough.
We then went to Lalbagh gardens and lazily roamed the place. It was then that I remembered that I forgot that I had not told my home that I was going to Bangalore. But it was too late cos’ already a spam of telephone calls has spread the place and Bhaghu himself got a call from someone saying that my mom was trying to reach me. I called up my mom and told her that I was safe in Bangalore. As usual she called up Raghuram’s mother first.

In the terrace of Prasanna Srini's Appartment.

In some hotel in Bangalore.

Yipee! It is Saturday night!

In Murr's Appartment.

I took this photo. (Thats why i am not there :-()

What’s it about Bhaghu? Animal Magnetism? Everybody likes him. ;-)


I took this one. (I bet this is the best). Must say Bangalore is green. Everybody. (Except the A.Prasanna who was last seen complaining that his project got shifted back to Chennai.

We then went to Bhaghu’s place in Hossur. So in this weekend I have been in 3 states. I had a great lunch at Bhaghu’s place. The food was of the authentic Tamil type complete with ‘Appalam’ and pickle. I was having some real home made food after some real length of time. I couldn’t resist telling bhaghu’s mother that her food was the second best I have ever had. Second only to my mom’s food of course. As we were leaving the place we got some sweets (What do you call it) from a roadside vendor. We then returned back to Bangalore and went to Prasanna’s house. It was here that ‘mongy’ GokulNathBabu, DSPraveen, and both the prasannas was living. We were again talking about the companies we had come to work for. After sometime we thought it was a good idea to start packing our bags and get going to catch the bus back to Hyderabad. Before that we went to Trilogy office and had a game of TT. Finally, it was time to say goodbye to our friends. After wainting a lot of time at the bus stand, finally our bus came and I slept the most part of the journey to brace up for the Monday bug bash at my office.
I hope the next time I will spend a weekend in 3 different states it will be in Goa, Kashmir and Assam.
And so where were we? Does the DHCP server crash when the admin right clicks on the scope and hogs the bandwidth for 30 mi…………..