Idle musings

On Saturday, 05-Oct-2019, I read a review of a play called "Rage and beyond: Irawati's Gandhari" in the newspaper. In the afternoon, I asked my wife: "The tickets for the play are available online. Shall we go?" Her reply was spontaneous: "It is rare that you say you want to see a movie or drama !. Let us go !" I feel that the word "play" is a misnomer for "Rage and beyond: Irawati's Gandhari". It is injustice to call such a creative performance "only" a play. I prefer to call it a dance enriched drama instead, in this blog post. At around 7:05 p.m., we found ourselves claiming the tickets booked online at Ranga Shankar. Soon, we were allowed upstairs. We sat in the centre, in the left end of the row. There must have been around eighty of us as audience. Directly in front of us on the stage, illuminated by a red stripped hue of spotlight from above was a neatly folded blindfold. Curiously, this was placed outside the

For six days starting from 18-Aug-2019, I went to Pune on an official visit along with friends and colleagues. This blog post captures my impressions about the visit. The hyperlinks provide useful supplementary information. As usual, I shall avoid using names. I will say this about the official purpose of our visit: The training that I attended gave me new insights into a familiar topic. The trainer shared professional experiences which aided in a better understanding. To me, this was the biggest take away from the training session. The rest of this blog post is about the non-official side of the trip ! Since there were several of us, we made two groups staying in two different hotels. In our hotel, we were ten of us. One person among us had lived in Pune earlier. His familiarity with the eateries in the area where our hotel was located was a big advantage for us. On Sunday afternoon when we arrived in Pune, we ate a simple lunch of misal pav and sabu dana vada. This was a rec

Sunday, 14-Jul-2019 saw two superb finals that will be remembered for a long time to come. In Wimbledon, Novak Djokovic defeated Roger Federer in the men's singles tennis final. Some time later, England narrowly pipped New Zealand in the cricket World Cup final at Lord's stadium. There were two deserving winners at the end of the day, but it is the spirit of the runners-up which stands out. I believe that the term "loser" is unfair in both matches ! Both, the New Zealand cricket team and Roger Federer fought valiantly and had victory beckoning at times. Until the 30th over or so in England's inning, New Zealand were the favourites to win. It was Jos Buttler and Ben Stokes who led the fightback for England. Similarly, Federer had a couple of championship points in the fourth set. Djokovic saved them, won the fourth set, took the decider fifth set into a tie-breaker and then won it to seal an amazing final ! Since the cricket World Cup final was also in progres

A couple of months ago, a senior colleague I respect a lot recommended a book for me to read. As an introduction, he said, "The simplicity in the book will lure you into it." He read a few lines from the book to me which are as follows: "About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3.8. billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures

My wife and I were in Sikkim for four nights. This blog post captures memories and sights from that trip. NOTES : 1.) As usual, I have avoided mentioning names of people and places in this blog post. 2.) The photographs in this blog post DO NOT have us in them. If you would like to see pictures of my wife and me, please email me separately. My wife and I have ended this trip with mixed memories : the sad part of our trip was that it was originally planned as a seven nights eight days tour. However, my wife suffered from food poisoning apparently, due to which I decided to cancel the trip mid-way. The fact that our trip did not go as planned did upset us a little, but under the circumstances we felt that it was better safe than sorry. I am sure neither of us would have enjoyed the trip anyway even if we had continued ! On the positive side of the trip are the wonderful sights and sensations that we have experienced during the trip. Bengaluru has been facing a severe summer. T