Maximum City Bombay, Lost and Found is a masala book, Suketu Mehta has tried his best to draw an enigmatic picture of the city. I like Bombay but not for the same reasons Suketu might like it. I haven't met any goons, dons, dance bar girls, shiv sena supremo, rioters and I surely don't have religiously jain friends, the ones I know might sometimes refuse to take a cake (with egg) after 12 in night but after some time you can find them having breezer (you know who I am talking about). The jain religion also makes sure that the friend does not eat chicken with bone, boneless is welcome if it is not served to his plate :-)

The book goes into describing some jain ceremony which is NOWHERE related to Bombay, if the author wanted to describe similarity between people throwing money at dance bars and while taking Diksha, he should have chosen a different theme for the whole book. Taking as much as 1/4th of the book for describing a jain diksha ??

I utilized the weekend in reading another book, The Da Vinci Code. I have always felt that I don't know any greek/roman mythology and my knowledge of christian and jewish religion is also very limited, specially the history. I felt it when reading Act of Faith by Erich Segal. The book starts beatifully and grips attention for nearly the whole book. The last part though could be improved. It was disappointing.. That happens to many books and movies nowadays.. A good story is built up and a good amount of twist and turns make it better but suddenly author realizes that he/she needs to complete the story and simply gives up in the end.

Currently I am reading Sphere by Chricton (is the spelling correct?).

Congrats Pandit

Pandi (Ashutosh Pandit) is getting married on 4th. It seems too many people are getting married nowadays.. Number of people getting married each year is increasing at alarming rate. So much so that I am not able to attend any marriage.

Vivek asked in a recent post on his blog.. I am almost sure that I won't be able to make it to his wedding. But will try to make sure that I make to my own wedding (if any)

An island of holiday.. I am not particularly fond of single holidays in the middle of week.. But we made most of it by watching 3 movies :-)

• The Fisher King


• Murder by Death


• The Negotiater

Just before watching the movies Panga suggested that names should be Kingfisher and Death by Murder. Hmm.. guess his favorite beverages.

All three movies are rated 7+ on imdb and I would recommend watching them (if only once). Fisher king becomes painful many times but overall impact and individual performances are tooo good.

Murder by Death is a good funny movie in the beginning but in the end it looks like direct lost grip. May be the storywriter could not figure out what to do in climax.

The Negotiater is general hollywood drama with curropt cop stuff. I like the work profile of negotiaters though :-)

Sinhgad

Went to Sinhgad on weekend. It is around 25 kms from Pune and the ride to the fort is good. Better roads would have made the journey more pleasant and of course the rainy season would be good for a second trip. You can see whole of Pune and Khadagwasla lake/dam from the height and it makes a good sight. Sachi also told me that in night the reflection of lights in the lake makes a good sight. Another trip in night is due soon :-)

Sinhgad has had an interesting history and I had read about it school textbooks earlier. I agree that it would have been difficult to conqueror but the place is definitely not 'well preserved'. Almost all the forts in Rajasthan are in much better shape than this one. Its only history of the fort and natural surrounding that attract tourists to visit and revisit, tourism department has definitely not done anything to promote this fort.

Anyone coming to bbay for techfest?

More changes !!

In another series of changes I have started listening to Pearl Jam, Deep Purple and Led Zepplin. I found all of them to be good. Atleast the songs that I have are good.

Just like vivek, I am thinking of (not yet planning) buying a laptop. I guess thinkpads are best..

I recently went to a friends office and found that there are two lifts in his building that are used only to take bikes to rooftop parking. It is definitely a good idea, not many buildings use terrace for anything worthwhile, I think it can also be commercially successful in areas near shopping centres (though cinema halls would be a mess).

After getting visits from people looking for shewag, I got another set of visitors on my blogs some time back, they were looking for bhappi lahiri, they should go and look for bappi lahiri instead.

Microsoft Outlook

I have been using outlook for last 40 days or so. I like the mail reader, much better than evolution that I used earlier. I have also been using winamp rather than noatun that I used earlier. My PC has not crashed even once in these 40 days.

I also like webshots, e-donkey, latest y!m and other software that I am using nowadays. Whenever I want to 'work' though, I use gvim, cygwin or telnet (putty) to solaris server.

I also managed to prepare a presentation from scratch in powerpoint (my first such prez. so far) and I have not yet downloaded firefox on my PC.

Some sites don't look that bad on windows as they used to look when I was some other OS.

Using windows as PC is definitely not as bad as I used to think.

Some of you might say, wait for some virus to affect it..

Thanks to vivek for waking me up...

First post of this year, though coming very late, I think I will keep posting regularly, though I don't write as good as vivek and I don't have specific topics like Harry Potter or Movies like ET, I would continue to post whatever comes to my mind :-)

So much of new stuff on the cards.. I have moved to Pune, it is a slow paced but happening place. Good weather, not so good roads and decentish people.

New year was spent with Sandy and co. in Goa. When I was planning to spend new year eve in Goa many people asked me what will I do there, its basically famous for booze, babes and beaches, friends think (assume) that I am not interested in first two and last one is not something that one would enjoy on 31st. Anyways, I liked the place, I might even like to settle there.

People work extremely slowly, sometimes you might get frustated but that's how you would find everyone in Goa, no hurry !!

I liked the different types of beaches, snake like roads and old homes.

I have loads of time after office and I managed to finish HHGG again, that makes it third time. I have started reading Maximum City, Mumbai by Suketu Mehta. I sometimes feel that he has some personal khunnas against Thackrey ( I am not a big fan myself !! ) Till now he has managed to paint a very grim picture of bombay by talking about riots etc. I think some of his statements can be called racist !

I also started doing two things that were there in my ever increasing TODO list. 1. Spanish classes 2. Fitness club, I want to start two more activities in the spare time that I have in this list : 1. Swimming 2. Four-wheeler driving.