VidhanaSoudha

VidhanaSoudha, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

This lovely pic has been chosen as the Boot up screen image for SuSE Linux 10 Beta 3, representing Bangalore :-)

Now even more people will get to see this pic !!!

Independence Day

We had a long weekend this Independence day. We had three days off, Saturday to Monday. Well, spent the first day in office and the second day at home with lots of work.

The third day was some great fun. We had planned for a bike trip to Shivana Samudram waterfalls. We were four of us on four bikes. We started at 7 in the morning. The whole day was cloudy, and luckily it didnt rain anywhere. Just a light drizzle for about 5 minutes thats all.

On the way I found this school where they were celebrating our Independence Day. The kids were singing songs and then the girl in this pic behind the mike was giving a well by-hearted speech on Mahatma Gandhi. It reminded me of my days when i was on stage and was strictly asked to make the speech look more real and should always be fun-filled, with light jokes to wake up the sleeping audience :p

We went by the Kanakpura road which was a very good road. Just 2 bad patches. The whole round trip was about 300 kms, and luckily we didnt have any hiccups.

We reached the waterfalls at 11 am. We were supposed to meet another gang of freaky bike riders who had been biking for the past 5 days !!! Yeah, they had been to Tamil Nadu on their bikes to attend some friend's wedding and roam the whole of Ooty and its surrounding areas.

We went down towards the base of waterfalls. It was a very tricky path going down. Well, some adventure. Nothing so great though. The most surprising thing was the huge crowd that we saw. It was astonishing to see a traffic jam on the way to the parking lot. The gate keeper said that he had never seen so much rush here, and that the previous day being a Sunday, there were close to 2000 cars !!! All, because it was a long weekend and this place was very near to Bangalore and also, the waterfalls was full with the rains coming handsome this season.

After spending more than an hour down there in the cool breeze, we decided to go back. But, our great monkey friend KP Rajesh, decided otherways and stayed there for a few minutes before starting his way back on the top. But that fool, thought that we were going towards another stream flowing there and went searching for us all the places and left us scared and worried for one full hour !!! At the end he comes up and says, I thought you guys were going to the stream down there and went searching for you'll !!! ...

After that one incident, we started our way back to Bangalore. On the way, we took a diversion and went into a forest which runs along the river Cauvery. It was an awesome stretch. The initial part of the road was through a village and the road was untarred. After a stretch of about 5 kms, the remaining 20kms stretch was just wonderful. We had beautiful scenes and a very cool breeze all along the way. Especially since it had just drizzled lightly, the air was sooooo fresh and pure :)

We finally reached Bangalore sharp at 9pm in my watch and waited for those crazy bikers who were getting delayed since they were taking snaps :). One the guys had bought a new digital camera, and took pics close to 2.5 GB !!! in 5 days. That was heights of craziness for me. I wonder if he will ever watch all those snaps even twice in his entire life ...

As usual, came back to a very hectic work schedule and got time only to post this blog only today !!!. Hope to improve on this more and start blogging on the day an event happens :)

Gone to ashes

Wow ... what a match it was !!!

I was really thrilled to watch a test match getting sooo close and being so well fought by both the teams, England and Australia. I really pity the Aussies, coming so close and loosing it ... boy, thats painful. This match was so exciting and interesting that i didnt even see the other one day match that was being played between India and West Indies.

Aussies chose to ball after winning the toss which many people were criticising. England were alll out for 408 on the first day [ quite a good run rate that is ] ... and then the Aussies were all out for 308. A very good fight back from England. And then a still better performance by the Aussie bowlers, especially Shane Warne and they restricted the lead to be just 280.

The only time that aussies had chased more than 270 against England was in 1949. So the odds were definately against them. Not many players played any long innings in their reply. Ponting got out for a duck, which didnt help the matters anyway. Australia had lost 6 wickets and still needed about 150 runs. Clarke played some sensible cricket and chased well. But he was out for a beauty at the fag end of the third day [ yeah right ... the whole match lasted only for 4 days !!! , infact it was 3 days and 100 minutes to be precise ]. By the end of the third day, after taking an extra 30 minutes to finish off the tail of Australia, the aussies needed about 100 more runs with Shane Warne and Brett Lee at the crease. There were only 2 wickets remaining.

Shane Warne played some really sensible cricket and scored the highest runs in that innings for Australia [ 42 ] and brought a glimmer of hope. Kasprowich was the last come to join Lee after Warne was out. Lee was a surprise to watch. Though he didnt face the ball well, especially the bouncers by Flintoff, he did play some lovely cover drives at times. Lee got the brunt of all the bouncers and was hit atleast 5 to 6 times on his left hand facing those deadly bouncers from Flintoff. Kasprowich played the best folly to Lee and with the England bowlers taking it easy and bowling all bad bowls, the runs were coming eaily to Australia. The moment Aussies needed less than 10 runs to win, you could the panic getting into the England players. They were really tensed. If it was not for that good surprising bouncer from Harmisson, and had Kasprowich played that delivery well, the Aussies would have had a great come back victory. Englad won this great epic match by just 2 runs !!!