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We were leaving everything behind – well for 9 days anyway – our work, the media, the Internet, the swine flu and the mosquitoes in the Kingfisher Red bus who were hell-bent on kissing us good-bye.

On the Delhi-Leh flight, the landscape below changes before the cabin crew drags the food trolly to your seat. In the beginning, we saw mountains that lacked my notions of Himalayan grandeur – inferior specimens disowned and banished by the Himalayas. But once you cross Shimla, you start to see what you’d probably consider no-so-distant cousins to Mt. Everest. Most mountains were covered in snow. Wisps of clouds cast sharp shadows on them.

As we got ready for descent, snow-capped peaks went into the background and their place was taken by mountains of varied colors and textures – barren but strikingly beautiful.

The luxury of being able to go from Delhi (239 m / 784 ft. above mean sea level) to Leh (3,500 m / 11, 483 ft. above mean sea level) within 90 minutes, comes at the risk of altitude sickness. You won’t feel a thing immediately – in fact you’ll welcome the crisp mountain air after having inhaled the re-re-circulated airplane air for over 90 minutes. But a few minutes there and you’ll realize that your breathing is suddenly not a sub-concious activity you perform in the background.

Our guest house was a mere 10 minutes drive from the airport and despite being in the main area of the town, was nicely secluded from the hubbub of tourists and traffic. We had our breakfast at the guest house’s roof-top café in stunned silence – it is hard to talk with a view like this:

The guest house also had a well-tended garden. Most plants have a 3-4 month window of survival and the flowers and plants here were determined to make the most of it; even more than I was determined to make the most of our first day indoors:

What is common between an Auto driver in Bangalore and a Nikon D90?
One-And-A-Half.

p.s. Don’t worry if you didn’t get it. The audience for this PJ is probably in single digit.

Plonked a considerable sum of money on a new camera. Was looking for one with a better sensor (less noise for higher ISO), better focussing system, better shutter performance (1/8000 and 6.3 fps burst) and overall better handling (weather proofing, better viewfinder). EOS 50D fit the bill nicely. Seriously contemplated a switch to Nikon but it had the significant disadvantage of being incompatible with my existing collection of lenses – besides it would’ve got me fewer megapixels and no weather proofing for more money.

Yes, it doesn’t do HD movies – even the entry level EOS 500D does that these days; but I am not in it for moving pictures. And then, I can make up for my camera’s inability to shoot video with html and javascript. Here are a couple of studies in waltz time – performed by anonymous cast in front of the camera shop where the camera’s burst mode performance was being tested (very grainy ISO 3200):

1. Intro to waltz
2. Promenade Waltz

The links will open in a new window. Give the page some time to load and once the pictures start moving, hover over the them to see tooltips (and to slow the action down a bit). And please use a respectable browser (i.e. not IE).

Yet another visit to Coorg. A detailed travelogue will have to wait but this picture deserved a post of its own:

The weather gadget on Mac informs:

And if you are in Delhi, well, I feel for you:

Living without a TV and a newspaper has many merits. For instance, last year’s IPL was a non-event in our house. Yes, we did visit a Barista at Indira Nagar (now long closed) for catching the IPL opening ceremony on the telly, but that was it. Bangalore’s loss in the opener didn’t help either and I ended up backing up the team I felt least connected to – Rajasthan Royals (though only after they were decidedly close to winning – everybody loves a winner).

This year is different though. I’ve warmed up to the tournament, mostly because cricket is a large part of what I do now but partly because I seem to have arrived at a complex set of “loyalty” equations that help me chose which team I put my money on during a match. Without going into too many details, this is how it works:

Bangalore Royal Challengers (I live in Bangalore! And I admire Kumble and Dravid. And Kevin Pietersen is no longer in the team.) >
Chennai Super Kings (I admire Dhoni. Muralitharan and I share birth dates) >
Deccan Chargers (I am partial to everything south of Vindhyas) >
Rajasthan Royals (Love the fact that Warne gives a lot of chances to inexperienced youngsters) >
Delhi Daredevils (ah well, I was born in Delhi and that ought to count for *something*) >
Mumbai Indians (Mostly because they’ve got Tendulkar and Jayasuriya) >
Punjab Kings XI (someone’s gotta give company to Kolkata) = Kolkata Knight Riders (well someone’s got to be last).

The equations are devoid of even traces of cricketing knowledge (oh come on, it is 20-20) and chances are that the points table at the end of the tournament (with the exception of Kolkata) looks totally the opposite.

After the visit to Bhutan last year, I was convinced that I was not going to see hills or mountains so green ever again. The hills at Munnar might lack the grandeur of the Eastern Himalayas, but when it comes to verdure and biodiversity, they are an equal match.

We took a flight from Bangalore to Cochin and then took a cab to Munnar. Though just a little over 150 km from the airport, it takes close to 4 hours to negotiate the serpentine, hilly roads. The roads were in good shape throughout but the numerous sharp turns left me reeling.

Cochin was hot and humid and I had no idea how things were supposed to get any better just under a couple of hundred kilometers up the road. But things changed remarkably fast and once we were in the hills the air turned cool and refreshing.

We stayed at the Tea Valley Resort. Our room offered beautiful views of the hills and tea plantations in the valley below. We had reached late in the afternoon and after a quick lunch, found ourselves longing for a siesta. The weather too was conspiring to put us to sleep. Shortly it started raining. The thunder and the sound of the rain formed a perfect backdrop for our slumber.

The next morning was sunny but pleasantly cool. We went for a long walk all the way to the main town – a walk that took us through tea estates and cardamom plantations.

This scale for measuring the tea plants’ height reminded me of of the an Complan ad (”But I’m growing Mummy. I’m a Complan tea plant”).

With Lok Sabha elections around the corner, the town was abuzz with political activity. Posters of candidates vied for the attention of both men and cows.

The rest of the stay is a blur in my mind. The next two days are clumped together and all I remember is more long walks in the hills, through the tea estates and short drives to a river and a waterfall nearby. The camera agrees:

When we went to Coorg two weeks ago, we already knew that it was not going to be siginficantally cooler than Bangalore. And indeed, save for an occasionally misty early morning, it was every bit as warm and sunny as Bangalore gets in March. A few distant clouds were seen rolling over the hills, but they were unorganized mutinous soldiers and not the disciplined brigade it takes to start a downpour. Yet, they did manage to tinge the sunset with a bit of color and drama that the clear blue sky of all day long could hardly have managed alone.

But what this visit stands out in our minds for is coffee blossoms. Given how unpredictable the rains have been in Coorg, a lot of coffee estate owners have taken to irrigating their plantations themselves. Since everyone follows their own schedule, there is no one day you on which you’ll see all the estates blossom. Apparently this year, it had rained just a week before our arrival and practically every single coffee plant was bedecked with beautiful white blossoms. It was our noses that pointed this out first to us – the breeze in Coorg was fragrant with the scent of coffee flowers. Our eyes took notice of the unending sea of white much later.

Now if you are thinking ‘coffee smell’ here (you know the sort you get when you brew filter coffee, or step into a Café Coffee Day/Barista/Starbucks outlet), you are mistaken! Coffee flowers don’t smell even remotely like coffee. In fact, if you were classifying the coffee plant based on the smell of its flowers alone, you’ll place it somewhere next to Jasmine. This I think makes discovery of coffee an even more remarkable feat!

Unfortunately, the blossom is short-lived. Within a day, the flowers begin to wilt and turn brown. As we drove back to Bangalore, it was hard not to feel sad at their decay. But we had the smug satisfaction of knowing that hundreds of tourists who’d throng Coorg a week later (a long weekend) would have no idea what they had missed.

While looking for the Dev D music at a music store this weekend, I stumbled upon an older version of Devdas – rather Chandramukhi Devdas – starring Kamal Haasan and Sri Devi. My curiosity was sufficiently piqued, but this picture on the sleeve made sure I had to buy it:

Now you are probably thinking that this looks suspiciously close to the album cover of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Shahrukh Khan starrer:

A closer inspection of the two covers will reveal, that indeed, the Kamal Haasan variant is just a shoddy photoshop job on top of the Bhansali version. Someone not only planted Kamal Haasan’s head on to Shahrukh’s torso – they added insult to injury by repeating the process for Sridevi and Sripriya (with Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit being the respective victms).

The movie turned out to be a badly dubbed version of an old Tamizh movie. The soundtrack seemed to have been (badly) redone for the Hindi version – so ridiculous dialogues weren’t the only coat of fresh paint that had been applied over the original. That said, we managed to extract a few laughs from a movie that has been been roughly modeled on one of the greatest romantic tragedy of all times. Here is a synopsis in 8 easy chunks:

	Raja (Kamal) is a brat with prediliction for ridiculous pink t-shirts and chain smoking.
Enter Devi (Sri Devi) his love interest – who is an Air Hostess for Indian Airlines – no less! She is seen here clearing her ear, while her friend pretends the she and the movie camera do not exist.
	Through a series of contrived and rather forgettable events they fall in love and decide to get married. The families are happy with the match and the two go on a wedding card distribution spree.
But alas, the wedding is not to be – Raja, thanks to years of smoking like a chimney has – yes – cancer – very visible cancer.
	Devi’s brother comes to know of it and wants to save his sister from her fate.
He contacts the friendly family priest/astrologer and urges him to postpone their wedding by 6 months – knowing well that his chain-smoking-cancer-inflicted brother-in-law to be wouldn’t last that long. Note the clever assumption that his sister will show sound judgement and will not marry a dead man. The priest obliges.
	Raja in the meanwhile realizes the gravity of his condition and starts supplementing his copious intake of nicotine with healthy quantities of liquor. The jeopardy of his betrothal also opens door to a brothel. Enter Radha – played by a certain Sripriya. She is seen here indulging in an elaborate song and dance routine with the soon-to-be-dead man.
Devi – with a little nudging by big bro and a little prodding by Raja himself – ends up marrying an old friend of hers. He is visibly pleased. After the wedding they all come together at Radha’s place for a grand, tearjerking finale.

Taken at one of the numerous parks in London on a particularly hot summer day. For me, travel and photography are inseparable. I haven’t been doing a lot of the former, and so the latter has suffered. This is the nature of things that have been keeping me busy for the past few weeks.