skip to main |
skip to sidebar
July 22, 2009 was supposed to special. If you were to witness the longest total solar eclipse on this day then indeed it was special. So we, a bunch of colleagues, made a full proof plan of not missing the iconic event by driving down to Valsad, a place in Gujarat from where the eclipse would be seen in its totality!
The first dropout was announced when Amol was diagnosed with chickenpox on the previous morning. Un-excusable excuse! (What a healthy kid he must have been not to have those as a kid! I mean, it never really occurred to me that chickenpox was not kids-special disease..) So we tried finding if anyone else would want to join our madness and Ashok almost said, why didn't you tell me in the first place. So far so good.
Then halfway through the day, I was told to attend a meeting in Chandigarh. WTF! Dharmesh gave me an ultimatum to manage to cancel it. I even tried but without any success.
A 6.20 AM flight added some exotic hope of catching the heavenly sight of total eclipse in the air. So here I am, at the airport, at 5.30 AM, watching beginning of eclipse on the news channels and waiting for the boarding announcement but it was my mistake if I expected the flight to take off on time.
So after the flight took off a few minutes past half past six and after quite a few minutes when the clouds got cleared all I got to see was what you see in this picture.
By the way, I now hear that most parts of Gujarat were all cloudy during eclipse time and those who watched the eclipse on television were the lucky ones! The chances we were willing to take were well not taken then!!
No. What you see in this picture is not a temple. It is just an open auditorium outside what is supposed to be a family temple. It was the first temple we visited in Bali and no prizes for guessing how rich the family would be to which the temple belonged.
The brick structure painted in saffron with white contours is the standard look of all the temples in Bali. The golden design usually signifies the entrance to the existence of the shrine. But here, it just is one of structures in the temple field.
The first thing to be noticed here was, wow, all this is so clean!
Also, I posted my Bali Travelogue on Rediff. You can access it here.
Any guesses what this is?
This indeed is the Bandra-Worli Sea link that was talked about the most in the last one month. Or a decade I should say. I still remember the chaos it started with what sounded as a revolutionary idea almost fifteen years ago, I was still in the school then. A bridge in the sea, solution to the hugely increasing traffic in Mumbai? Well, half of the junta looked at it like a miracle. The media which was not half crazy as it is today still praised what may emerge as a miracle and of course as one the signs that will prove that we are not really a third world country. And the rest made it sound like a biggest controversy of the century. Right from the pollution to the great losses of the fishermen who fish in the stretch of the Bandra-Worli sea, every protest featured prominently on front pages.
Last week when I drive over this sea-link, the skyline of Mumbai that was visible from the bridge gave a sign of Mumbai is sure one impressive city. And as I drove further in the heavy rains, I couldn’t resist but capture this sight on the camera of my cell phone. Sometimes, you don’t need to express the feelings in words. In the middle of the sea, watching the mighty Mumbai at a little distance, it gave a sense of pleasure just by being on this bridge.
Also, happened to read a piece of news last week where a fisherman in the same area was interviewed. He expressed pleasure over the fact that there is an increased variety of the fishes that were not so common earlier which are not found around the columns of the sea link!
All's well that ends well, I guess.
Here is the war against the Rangda where Sahadeva and his men fight her and release her of all her evils. Although Rangda is killed, her one of the followers who is equally powerful continues the fight with the army of Sahadeva in several forms.
Well, so true it is. You may try to eliminate the evil but it always reappears in some form or the other. It reminds me of the last scene from the movie Captain Hook. After reaching the happily-ever-after part of the story that should mark an end of the story, Peter meets Captain Hook himself, for another time. Guys, there can't be only good in this world!
I always assumed that I knew almost all the stories from Mahabharata. And the very existence of Rangda was a blow to that assumption; forget the stories of her from Mahabharata. But like they say, the language changes every few miles, probably Rangda exists in the Balinese dialect of Mahabharata.
In the very front here, you see Sahadeva with his ministers on both his sides. The story portrays that despite Devi Kunti’s promise to Rangda about sacrificing Sahadeva to her, Sahadeva survives. Lord Shiva had bestowed immortality on Sahadeva before he was to be sacrificed. The story didn't offer any explanation on why, how etc but I really admire the fact that the high level management of things by people in high positions or people who know people in high positions can be traced back to the Mahabharata days!
The traditional plays in Bali have women to play the main (and good) characters. Maybe to bring out the contrast with the evil or to say that how much ever small the good might look, it will always win over the evil. The funny looking, long grey haired character on the right is the evil Rangda. She looked more funny than evil to me.
July 22, 2009 was supposed to special. If you were to witness the longest total solar eclipse on this day then indeed it was special. So we, a bunch of colleagues, made a full proof plan of not missing the iconic event by driving down to Valsad, a place in Gujarat from where the eclipse would be seen in its totality!
