It's all over, and it's an end of an era

It was only in the year 1991 I started watching cricket with a lot of curiosity… and the following year it was the 1992 Worldcup. The kiwis were the really in a good form at that time and i was supporting them and became a fan of Martin Crowe but me supporting the Kiwis dint last for a long.

When I was talking about cricket with my mom she was just listening to me as she doesn’t know much about the game in-fact even I don’t know much at that time, then ma dad told me about the mighty WINDIES and gave me some books that he has collected during his college days which was about the West Indian cricketers. The book just had pics of those players who toured Pakistan and Indian in 1980s and their records. Ma dad told a lot of Sir Viv Richards and I also got some inputs from ma grandpa. He was also a great fan of the then West Indian team.

We just had Doordarshan at that time and all the matches were not aired live and if you want to any cricket news the only way to read the news paper. One day the news was about a young cricketer who scored his maiden century against the Aussies. Yeah it was Lara and he scored 277 against the odds. From them, till date I am a hard core WINDIES fan…. In fact more than a fan. It's all cause of him, the one and only LARA. He has retired from international cricket now but I am still a great fan of the legendary WestIndian cricket team and will be supporting them at any cause….

Almost all his innings were unforgettable but some of the most memorable innings of Lara that I have witnessed were

His 96 out against Australia in 1996/97... The situation was 10 overs 96 to win and he single handedly won the match which made Australia failing to reach the finals of the Commonwealth Bank Series for the first time since the inaugural competition in 1979-80. 

All his innings in the Srilankan tour in which he scored almost 40% of the teams total

His century in the 1996 Worldcup against South Africa

153 in 143 balls against Pakistan in Sharjah

153* against Australia that made Windies win the test match

213 against Australia in the same series – another match winning innings

400* against to England and many more

FOR SOME SUCCESS IS THE WAY OF LIFE..............AND BRIAN CHARLES LARA IS NO EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE..............

Brian Lara' s 277 against Australia in Sydney 1993, his maiden Test century,was the fourth highest maiden Test century by any batsman, the highest individual score in all Tests between the two teams and the fourth-highest century ever recorded against Australia by any Test batsman

Lara celebrates breaking Garfield Sobers' record individual score of 365 in Tests, againt England on April 18, 1994, at St John's, Antigua

And later, Lara relaxes in the changing room after breaking the world record

Lara pulls on his way to 501 Warwickshire against Durham in 1994

Lara sweeps during his hundred against South Africa in the 1996 Wills World Cup quarter-finals at Karachi. Lara single-handedly knocked South Africa out of the tournament

Lara smashes one through the covers on his way to scoring 213 against Australia in 1999. Many say this innings, and his unbeaten 153 in the following Test, were his finest

Yet another special innings from Lara, his innings of 153* taking his team to victory over Australia




Lara was immense in the 2001-02 series in Sri Lanka, scoring an astonishing 42% of West Indies' runs




Almost ten years to the day, Lara breaks the record. Again. His magnificent 400 helped avoid a whitewash by England, whose bowlers had dominated the series

Lara holds aloft the ICC Champions Trophy in 2004, the biggest ODI tournament West Indies achieved under his captaincy

Lara celebrates after breaking Allan Border's record of 11,174 Test runs in Adelaide on November 26, 2005

Lara looks on during the opening ceremony photo shoot of the 2007 Worldcup

Lara walks through a guard of honor to start his final innings

Now its all over... bye bye Lara

Almost conquered Tadiyandamol

Till Wednesday evening I was planning how to go to Irrity for my friend’s sister wedding. I finally got two maps and also got all the info about the petrol bunks on the way as I was planning to go by bike. It was only on Thursday morning my friend Savita called and said she has invited some of our common friends from Chennai and we have to plan something for the weekend and I was confused and not sure what to do, join my Chennai friends and go to Irrity, many ppl told me that the ride all the way to Irrity would have been awesome. Later that day when I was spoke with ma friend Ganesh and I was indeed ordered not to go to Irrity if the Chennai ppl are coming. I have no option now but to join them.

Now the next question was what to plan for???? We had many plans and someone suggested Tadiyendamol. None of us had been there before except for my friend’s project manager Rudresh. Got some inputs from him and decided to go there.

By Thursday evening we got the approval from our HR to borrow the wildlife camping kits from our office (it’s always nice to get something free na) collected the same on Friday. We people did a lot of shopping on Friday for the trip and we are all set for the trek.

Saturday morning ppl from Chennai arrived got ready in hour or so at around 9 we (Myself, Magesh, Parvath, Sunil, Kaki, Lokesh, Mani, Srikanth, Savita)

We all started had our breakfast and we were heading towards Tadiyendamol. Everything was as per the plan till we started but on the way we got delayed and reached the place only at 4. Ppl told us it will not be possible to trek all the way as it’s already late and it would take some 4 hours to reach the peak. Then there was a change of plans and we decided go by the tempo to till Tadiyendamol fort and trek from there.

We reached fort at 5 PM started to walk and there first thing that welcomed us was bit of rain and lot of leeches. A local person guided us to a house where we can get kerosene as we forgot to get them along with us. We reached the house at around 5.30 got the kerosene and started towards Tadiyenda… the place where we have planned to camp is about 5 Kms away the path that was leading us to that point was amazing. It was actually getting foggy and dark as we were heading to the base. The base can be easily identified… It is a point where there is a huge rock and indeed the land is kinda flat too.

6.45 PM and we have reached the base.

Myself and Magesh went in search of the stream and found the same... it was not to my imagination. I actually thought it would a huge stream where was ppl can take bath but it was very thin, may be we went in a wrong season.

The minute we started to set up our tent the started and it was pouring. We managed to set up one tent in the rain and decided to wait till the rain to stop. Finally the rain god answered out prayers and a except for me, sunil n srika, others started to set up the tent. We 3 went in search of wood for the camp fire. But by the time we returned empty handed everything was set. The tents were perfect. We cooked yummy maggi that night.. yeah that was our dinner

It would have been really great if we had a camp fire as we ppl slept in fear (many told us that if we don’t have camp fire leopards may attack us in the night). We planned not to sleep and were chatting sitting on the huge rock till the rain god made us go into the tent n zip our self into the sleeping bags.

Sunday morning we started to trek towards the peak and reached a particular point before where we can take a lot of snaps…

The view from that peak was awesome and we were walking in the clouds. The view from there was enchanting. It was green forest every where and thank god people dint make this place as a picnic spot.

We spent some time there and by the time everyone reached that point it was 8 and few ppl were very tired and wanna go back to the camp. We had simple rule – “either everyone goes or no one goes” after a long discussion we decided to go back to the camp.

The first thing we did was make some breakfast... We had some maggi, bread and egg left. So its time for the veggies to have plain bread and for the others the menu was bread with scrambled egg and half boil ... We collected some stream water for cooking maggi and it tasted better than the one we made the earlier night (I am still not sure if kaki really made it taste good or it’s the stream water that gave the yummy taste)…

Time to pack up and start… :(

If not for the chennai friends (Magesh, Loks n Parvath) bus which was at 7.30 PM we would have reached the peak and spent somemore time in tadiyanda.

It was a truly beautiful trek except for the leeches... btw did i tel u litchi soda is my favourite drink ;)

We managed to take a lot of photos and i will be updating this blog soon with the link of those snaps :)

A Dream

Dreams – result of chemical reaction happening in brain. Well, I’m not interested in the science behind the dreams. Lot of things happens in dream, most of which we can’t remember when we wake up. Though sometimes it is not completely wiped out and we have a chance to rethink on our dreams. When we think of them, we realize that they are no surprise because they have relevance to whatever we were thinking for a while or what we can correlate to things we are aware of. Basically, we can get to the root of our dream. But there few, very few dreams which make us puzzled. Why this? What’s the relevance? Did I ever think about this? Who is this person? Have we ever met? Did this happen in my life or going to happen? If you have ever wondered with any of this question about any of your dreams then go on reading else you can safely quit reading as further reading will hardly make any sense to you. Here I’m describing one of such dreams which had no relevance to my thinking or any of the movies that I watched recently.

Guess most of us have this so called “Dream Partner” in our mind, which we can hardly express. And most of the times we ourselves are not aware of how this person looks as we just have dots that are not joined. My dream girl had curly hair, looks wheatish and athletic. Practically, there can’t be girl with the specification that I have in my mind as that is the ‘Ideal’ girl that never exists. I used to tell myself, look for all the specifications in a girl and compromise on few things that’s no problem. I have also classified the things which can be compromised and which can’t be. I had all the dots spread in the drawing sheet but couldn’t join them. With every girl I like, I try to join the dots. There have been instances where I had to convince myself, this is the girl as she covered most of the dots which no girl ever did. Just because she covered most than other girls, doesn’t mean she’s the ‘One’ because there are lots of other essential (not compromisable) dots yet to be connected. Slowly I was giving up on this “Dream Girl”. The face of my dream girl was never visible even in my dreams. If I press my mind to show the girl’s face, it replaces with the faces of recent crushes or the default, Salma Hayek.

When I woke up from my dream yesterday, I felt something different, a mixed feeling that I can never explain. I had a face in my mind which was slowly fading away. I closed my eyes again to rethink the dream. I’m with my friends (can’t remember even a single person though) on a tour to north India (don’t ask me which place). We are in a bus which is passing through so many cities, towns and villages. We enter into a semi crowded city in the evening. A local city bus crosses our bus in the opposite traffic and of all the people in the bus, only one face flashes in front of my eyes. There she is, my dream girl. I can hardly believe my eyes. I smile at her, she smiles back at me. The face: I have never seen in my life so far. So impressive, so exact to my imagination, it fits perfectly as my dream girl’s face. Well I don’t want to describe how my dream girl looked but definitely not like Salma Hayek. The other things that I noticed are – she was in uniform, may be a school girl. Who cares, all I’m happy about is all my dots joined and I have a face in mind. This feels so good, as my search now will be so refined. I don’t have to connect the dots for every girl; I have a face to look up to.

Face of the unknown Angel. No relevance to any of my crushes so far. The last of which is the Chinese waitress of Dynasty Buffet, who I gave a tip of $5 just to see the cute smile on her face. Man, she too was an Angel but sadly stands no chance in front of my dream girl. Now it is time to name my dream girl. After thinking on it for a day, realized it is very hard to name an Angel. I leave it to my dreams to give her a name too.

Trip to Oooooty

It was Thursday morning and one of ma friend from Chennai DC pinged me asked to call another friend in Chennai. I called him and it seems they are going to ooty and I was asked to join them.
Well Friday was a holiday for them n they started on Thursday evening. I wanna go ooty but how???? I told to myself... “No way I am going by bus” its jus 170 Kms from Mysore and i wanna go in bike. But who is gonna come along with me from Mysore?? The whole day I was just thinking of the Ooty trip and I was confused to core.
Friday as usual I went to office and I asked all ma friends if they are coming with me to Ooty, they had their own plans n said “sorry machi”. I was like a mad guy thinking of jus one thing “how to go to ooty”. Some asked me not to go alone what if the bike gets punctured or some problem happens in bandipur forest or Mudumalai forest … there wont be anyone to help and not safe to stop the bike in that dense forest. I even called ma friend in US and asked me what to do… even told me the same what others told... “Not safe to go alone”, safe in the sense like bike getting repaired. It was around 1.30 PM, Friday and I was still thinking of going or not. It was time to have lunch, and then at around 2.30 ma friends from Chennai called me again as asked me to join them. Well now its time to decide. I took a one rupee coin and tossed it up in the air… if it’s a tail I am going in the bike alone. Lucky me it was a tail. Told bye to ma friends and then started from office. Went home changed ma costume and started to Ooty, filled ma bike tank with fuel on the way. It was 4 PM.

It’s not the first time I am going for a long drive but it’s the first time I am going alone.

I started driving towards bandipur. I know that they won’t allow any vehicles to pass through bandipur after 5.30 or 6, so I had a non stop drive till that point… then was I was driving through the wildlife sanctuary. Saw different kinda monkeys and dears, peacocks were happily passing crossing the road. I dint cross the 30 Km/hr mark and was enjoying the drive. Finally I reached Karnataka Border and entered Tamilnadu. Now its time for me to cross another wildlife sanctuary and this time it’s Mudumalai, a place famous for elephants. The climate was awesome and so was the drive and to ma surprise there was a traffic jam in the forest… well it was small elephant blocking the way and we were asked not to disturb him (the elephant) after some 20 mins the way was clear and I started driving again… now ooty is just 20 Kms away and I need to climb up the hill a path which has 36 hairpin bends…. Believe me it not that easy to drive up the hill and as I moved it was getting chill and ma jerkin was in the bag. I don’t wanna stop the bike so the chillness made the driving worse.

Finally I reached Ooty.

We were 6 of us... Myself, Sethu, Siva, Venky, Thambi (Ravi) and Ashok we had a rocking 2 days in ooty. Queen park Residency was the place where we stayed, ma friend Ashok’s uncle was one of the partner of the place so we had a royal treatment there, roamed all over ooty and was partying big time in the night. 2 days went like 2 mins and it was time for me to leave Ooty. Sunday morning 11 and started back to Mysore… Our beloved President Mr.Kalam is giving a speech in ma campus on Sunday. I don’t wanna miss that so I dint stop anywhere but it took more time than I expected to reach Mysore and reached only at 2.30… and I missed his speech... Sad Na

Finally after a long time got a break from the regular work schedule and made a successful trip to Ooty.

Now its time for GO GOA….