In the early morning of last sunday, I stepped out of my house before the sun had risen. I walked up to my bike, started it and simply drove away…

I have always wanted to do a long drive on my bike and despite having owned my bike for over an year I had only traveled in the city. I love driving in sections of the city where there were smooth roads clear of traffic, enjoying the wind and the speed. But I always missed doing that bike trip.

In the week before my birthday I was determined to go on a long drive. I discussed with my friends and we decided to go on the drive on Saturday, but unfortunately I had to work on Sat and missed it. On sunday all I was thinking about was driving…

As I rode away from the city, I realized that I was traveling exactly the opposite direction of the sunrise, the kaleidoscope that is a beautiful sunrise unfolded in my rear view mirrors. I drove for three hours, the longest time and distance I have ever done on my bike.

Halfway thru I realized that this was for me a bit like meditation, my mind was clear, my heart calm and body relaxed… It was truly an holy experience…

Now I will look forward to a longer and more relaxing drive

The last four years of my life has been well documented thanks to this blog and my writings in my personal journal and at other places, but its the time before that where things are hazy. I have very little memories about my childhood… a few special days, photos that recreate scenes that I recognize… but its no where near enough.

My teenage years have lots of important and special memories, People and places that cannot be separated from who I was, what I wanted to be and what I became… Then my recent past, stronger and sweeter memories… Events that if I close my eyes I can feel them happening right then and there…

There is a lot about the last 25 years that are truly special to me. I have never mentioned those events and people in my blog or my writings. So I have decided to write this series of posts which talk about these 25 years of my life.

This has probably been done before but I am going to try something different. The mind you see does not sort things according to chronological order, it has this awesome tagging system that links events together. Each post will be about a common theme and my experiences about that theme… in chronological order.

Now a lot of the things I mention here will be deeply personal, so not all posts will be available publicly. My Lj friends will have the benefit of seeing most of these posts and even fewer will have access to all of the posts. Sorry guys but I need to do this as a few of things I mention will be about people who are probably going to be reading my blog…

So here is to a new beginning… right back from square one…

Ps: If you are not an LJ friend and want access to my personal posts, mail me

New York is the story of three friends whose lives are changed by the events of 9/11. Director Kabir Khan makes an honest attempt at telling the story of two Muslims entangled in all the injustice that followed the events on that fateful day. He succeeds in making a movie that is not just engaging right thru but since its based on a genuinely different story, gets the message home.

This movie for me is a good example of how a different story should be handled for the Indian audience. The movie seems similar to Khuda Kay Liye but its not fair to compare the two movies. KKL was written for a global audience but NY was intended mostly for the Indian public.

What is great about the movie is how well the movie is shot. Some scenes just took my breath away, some had me in awe of the ability of the director to make a seemingly long conversation non-monotonous. There is this scene in the movie where Irrfan Khan is interrogating Neil Nitin Mukesh, NNM is not a great actor but the scene is shot in such a way that it takes what is the best part of NNM’s acting technique and combines it with Irrfan’s brilliance. For most of the scene we are given a close up on NNM’s face giving priority to his very expressive eyes. Spectacular work!

The songs of the movie are brilliant and well placed in the movie. I had listened to only one song before going to the movie, now I simply love the whole album! Mere Sang by Sunidhi Chauhan and Tune Jo Na Kaha by Mohit Chauhan are simply beautiful.

The movie also has its set of flaws. There is zero chemistry between John Abraham & Katrina Kaif. The love between the two is not the main interest in the movie but the scenes leave a hole in the movie. Katrina Kaif is well cast in the movie but she lost her charm towards the end of the film. Honestly the climax was almost totally ruined by a ton of melodrama. There are cheesy lines in the movie and loads of ‘assumptions’ made to push the story ahead.

Despite all that I think New York is a brilliant movie. There is so many things that are right in the movie that I feel its my duty to appreciate a filmmaker that will most definitely be inching closer to perfection in future movies. New York is movie that falls in the class of Johnny Gaddar, an attempt at something different. If you like Indian cinema you should check this movie out.

For my 25th birthday I decided to look back in my life and thank all those amazing people that have touched my life making it more special for me. I sent out a few emails but no where near the number I had initially in my mind.

One of the biggest groups of friends I have had over the year has to be the readers of my blog. You guys have inspired me at the right moments, encouraged me when I need it the most, shared my thoughts, gave me strength at my weakest of moments and added to my happiness on all those special occasions… Thank you guys, thanks for everything.

During these four short years I have met so many amazing people, conversed about things that literally changed my life and reached out to people I never thought I could every speak to. Its a truly humbling thing to realize the support you have recieved, the love and encouragement, without which I probably wouldnt be the man I am right now.

I feel like this ray of light that was on his merry way without realizing that the stars and planets thousands of miles away were slowly changing my direction… Now four years later I couldnt have been here, at this moment without you wonderful people.

Thank you guys

The 25th year of my life had started on a very sorry note. I was incredibly depressed a year ago and what was more irritating was that I had no idea why. The first few months echoed that day and very soon I had almost stopped doing most of the things I loved. It was almost like I had forgotten the basics of how to be me… It took me a long time to get back on my feet and figure out things again. By the end of the year things had come a full circle. My last week doing the needed of finishing the last pieces of the puzzle that was my 25th year.

For me, the advent of a new year is something like the finish line… I make an effort to sprint across the line giving it all in the home stretch. There was a bunch of things on my todo list this last week and like the past few years I finished almost everything on that list. The list is in no way simple, it has tasks that take time and effort but what is rewarding is the thought that just these tasks on thier own make the whole year worthwhile. This year the tasks were very close to my heart. I was happy I could finish most of them in time

The day itself was packed. I had a pooja at home (not related to my bday) so had the company of my cousins for most of the day. In the evening I cut 3 cakes, almost did not get invited to one of the parties and finished the day with some very intellectual conversations about psychology and theater.

I got many calls from across the globe but wishes thru the Internet topped in numbers. Thanks for all the love folks its much appreciated.

All in all that was my 25th. Lets see what twists the 26th trip brings into my life.

I am not a huge fan of the X Men series, so the biggest motivating factor for me to to watch this movie was Hugh Jackman (and the ease of getting tickets and timing of the movie ). I personally consider Hugh Jackman to be one of the most versatile actors in Hollywood. He is not one to shy away from new and different roles… Most often he does a lot of justice to the characters he portrays. Given that Wolverine‎ was still disappointing.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine‎ is a prequel to the X-Men series. As the name suggests it explains the origins of Wolverine‎ and Victor(Wolverine‎’s brother). The movie starts out with the sequence of events that lead to Logan discovering that he is a mutant. Soon he and his brother Victor(also a mutant) are forced to fend for themselves. Many years later they meet William Stryker who recruits them for a mission. The mission brings out the dark side of Victor and its upto Logan to stop them.

What works in the movie is the special effects and dialogues. There are some good fight sequences and well written exchanges. What disappoints is the story that I felt was pretty weak and varied a lot in pace. Some of the funny moments seem over used and some really good characters make a blink and miss appearance. All in all I felt this was a couple of notches lower as compared to the other xmen movies.

It sure as hell doesnt feel like winning though

If you didnt know, I happen to have a huge media collection. Everybody has Giga bytes of music and maybe a few episodes of their favorite tv shows. I have that and about 80 unwatched movies on my comp at any given time

For me one of the biggest problem was to decide which movie to watch next. Normally what happens is that, I read a review of a movie or someone recommends one to me… I get my hands on the movie and forget about it. Months later I browse thru the names and wont recognize the movie… I am too lazy to lookup IMDB each time so that basically means I wont watch it for the next few months as well.

Recently I found a super solution for this problem, A media center called XBMC. All I need to do with XBMC is point it to the folder containing my movies/tv shows/music and it loads them to its library. It picks up the names in the background and automatically downloads all the relevant info about the movie/tv show. After a while you have the entire details of you collection – IMBD ratings, actor info, genre info ect. Now you can search the library based on Genre, Actor, Director… hell even the production house!

So lets say, one fine day… I decide to watch a movie, my mood tells me ‘comedy’… I can simply go to Movies->By Genre->Comedy and check out what movies I already have that are good comedies.

To add to the features, XBMC even gets you the short plot description which you can check to confirm you want to watch this movie right now!

What I love about XBMC is its Eye-Candiness… One look at how it handles TV Shows and I was totally fida over it. Anyway here are some screenshots of it.

If you store all your media in your comp and want an awesome way to catalog and seach it, give XBMC a try… its totally worth it

Ps: Its open source, and available for Win, Linux and MAC

The RAM was cleared by trying it on my friends system and the hard disk seemed fine in the few minutes the system stayed on. So I decided to get the motherboard checked and tried to locate a computer service center near my place.

Justdial.com informed me that there was a computer service center right in front of my home(apparently the residence of the guy, hence no sign boards). I called up the guy and he was busy, so he sent his colleague over. His colleague was not exactly his colleague, apparently these service centers have an internal deal with each other to share customers in case of being overloaded.

Now since the guy was already home and I didnt have the heart to tell him that I don’t want the comp at his office(which was relatively far away), so I let him have a look. He told me that he would need to take it his office. Considering I needed the computer badly I agreed.

The next day was the weekend and I only heard from him on monday, he informed me that the motherboard was indeed the culprit and he would fix it. I thought about it and said ok… only later realizing that it might not be smart to let someone meddle with the mother board, the better option would be to simply get a new one. But the guy insisted that he would fix it without a problem. I thought ‘what the heck, its gone anyway’.

The next day he tells me that he could not fix it coz the components weren’t available. I told him to deliver the cpu so that I could get a new mother board and get the system working again.

Meanwhile my colleague told me to check if the motherboard was in warranty, I had assumed a 1 year warranty but apparently some mother boards come with a 3 year warranty. To my luck this was one such board, I wondered how close I had come to voiding the warranty by letting him change the components.

I came home that evening and he had not delivered the computer. I tried calling him and he was not reachable. A little confused I called him early next day and he informed me that he had been hospitalized due to some infection in his mouth! Of all the weird things to happen!

He said he would drop the machine by in the evening, I told him take rest and come when he was fine. The next few days were frustrating, added to the mix was the possibility that it would take a week to fifteen days for the motherboard to be replaced once returned to the company.

Three days later he was ready to return the comp but it was my parents marriage anniversary and they were going to a temple and all that jazz so no one was home Considering that my laptop too was going thru the bad phase at this time, I just wanted to hit something

Eventually he delivered it the next day. I went to the service center with the mother board half expecting him to say that the warranty was void or that I had to wait a month for a replacement. But instead he looked at the mother board, took it inside for a while, came back with a few papers he asked me to fill. Once I was done he bought another mother board and gave it to me! I was like “awesome”.

I spent the day putting my computer back together, this was my first time rigging up a system and it was easier that I thought

Finally my desktop was back on track marking a clear end to my computer problems… so much for a frustrating few weeks

Since the story of each system is entertaining in itself I will start with my laptop:

Last week my laptop refused to boot, the attempts at reviving the system were mostly futile, leading me to start looking at picking up a new laptop. I was highly attracted to the new netbooks and considering my colleague had a Samsung NC10 for a while now, It was on top of my laptop list.

After looking around I decided to drop the idea of the netbooks with 10″ size. The small screen size was a huge hindrance to me, ofcourse I could have gotten used to the size but 12″ was simply perfect for me. Among the 12″ netbooks I found only the Samsung NC20 that seemed good and reasonable. Despite never seeing a single laptop in person I went ahead and booked it.

So on Thursday I contacted the dealer and he said he would confirm on Friday with me. On friday he requested me to pay an advance (Rs 1000) at the dealer, considering this was a new series of laptop he needed the assurance that I would buy it from him.

On saturday morning my colleagues and I decided that we wanted to have a look at the interiors of the old laptop. Within minutes we had the system taken apart and were looking at the problematic parts that caused the failure. My colleague wanted to try fixing the problem by changing the material of the heat sink. Since I had given up hope on the laptop I told him to go ahead and try it out. Guess what, it actually fixed a major part of the problem!

The system was not only booting well it was performing waaay better than it ever did before. Now I was in a dilemma, should i buy the new laptop with the old one working well?

After much speculation I asked the dealer to wait till monday. He was very worried that I would not buy the laptop and tried his best to convince me. Finally he agreed to wait till monday.

Sunday was spent in attempts to stress test my laptop. I did everything from heavy processing to rendering HD movies on a large screen. The system was working fine, better than it ever had. I slowly prepared myself to tell the dealer that I wasnt going to need that new system.

Late Sunday night, I watched the Indian cricket team choke against the English and get knocked out of the championship. In the despair I was about to go to sleep and decided to try putting my laptop to sleep, Little did I know that the laptop would never wake up again.

Monday morning I promptly called up the laptop sales man and said that I would pick up my new laptop in the evening.

Apparently I wasnt done yet… The new laptop had been delivered with a 80Gb Hard disk, when the offer clearly was for a 160Gb Hard disk. So now I waited for 2 hours as the dealer manually replaced the hard disk and later had it sent to get the software loaded into it. I could have ofcourse done the software loading myself but without a CD drive in the laptop I was helpless.

Finally late monday evening I had my new laptop. One of my two computer problems solved replaced

Ps: Owing to the length of the post, I will make another post about my desktop
PPs: Wow congratulate yourself you actually read the whole post

A couple of weeks ago, I had been to Kanteerva Indoor Stadium in Bangalore to pick up my entry to the 10k run. Outside the stadium I was pleasantly surprised to find the 2008 Force India car.

The car didnt do great in the world championship but it looked gorgeous(as every F1 car looks). I spent a little time near the car snapping it in different angles.

Yesterday, my laptop refused to boot. This problem had happened once in the past and I had found an unorthodox solution for the problem. The solution had worked and the Laptop had been problem free for three months. This time again the solution worked.

The problem was that the solution was very temporary this time. After multiple attempts to revive the system, the laptop simply gave up on me. Pity I really liked the laptop.

So Now, I am writing this post on my good old PIII system. A system I refused to give away as I wanted to(and did) use as a download server at home.

PS: The move from a 2.7GHz AMD X2 dual core system with 2Gb ram to a 733MHz Pentium 3 system with 256mb ram is noticeable but not as much as I thought i would be

I got the results of my run a couple of days ago. Had posted the link on twitter and forgotten to write about it here. Anyway thanks to all of you for the support, advice and wishes Successfully completing the event would have been just a dream without it.

Results:

Split Times and Average Speed:

Finish Information:

I had been looking forward for the run for almost 2 months now and this is how the event unfolded…

The Day Before:

My last run was regular 2K run that I do on weekdays.  To be fit and charged up for the 10K, I did my last regular run on tuesday and concentrated on rest and carbing up.  Oddly on the penultimate day I got really nervous about the run.  My mind was racing looking for minute signs of pain or strain in different parts of my body.  I lost my appetite and that eventually led to me losing a lot of sleep too.  All this for an event I believed that I was well prepared for.

I remember once telling a friend that I get really nervous about an exam or a test when I either have prepared for everything or nothing.

Stage fright was the last thing on my mind during my preparation days and now all of a sudden I was scared about anything and everything.  I had the race day morning all well planned and went to bed making sure I had everything I needed.

Morning Of The Race:

The race was scheduled to start at 8:10 am.  My plan was to be at the stadium by about 7:30 am and do a good warm up routine before giving it all in the race.  About 5 other friends I knew were running with me but our holding area would be different so I was already expecting to run the distance mostly by myself.

I reached my friend’s place by about 7 am.  By the time my other friends made it there and decided on the mode of transportation the time was already 7:45am!  It was 8am when we reached near the stadium and I wasnt very happy with the delay   At this point I just wanted to start the race.

The Start:

The holding area was a section of the huge stadium.  As I entered I got the first view of the people running with me.  Approximately 6000 people where there and the atmosphere was simply electric.

Before we knew it, the gates were opened and people were jogging towards the start line… The gunshot marked the start and slowly waves of people were running out of the stadium… It took me about 2 minutes to even reach the start line and then started my first 10K run

The First Few Kilometers(0-2Km):

As I crossed the start line I was amazed at the number of people cheering us on.  I decided to take the moment to savor the awesome moment.  It was the first time in about 5 that I was inside this stadium and it felt great.

As we headed out to the streets, the presence of tv cameras and photographers became obvious.  There were a lot of people outside the stadium with mobile phone taking candid photos of the runners.  I gave a couple of thumbs up to a few cheering people and glanced at the beautiful buildings that surrounded us.

Before the start with all the tension of making the race in time, I was feeling thirsty.  My mouth was dry and as soon as the race started I was keeping at eye out for water.  Fortunately within the first 500 meters there was  a water point and I managed to keep my throat moist.

My next worry was an acute pain in my ankle.  I was very worried about this as I had never felt something like this before.  I was worried that I might have tied my shoes a bit too tight or hurt the ankle by mis stepping along the way.  Fortunately again the pain slowly subsided.  Before long I was upto my regular running speed.

To The Half Way Point:

From the 2Km mark to the 5Km mark I was the most comfortable.  The cheering was on in full flow but the photographers were missing in most of this section.  I took regular sips from the water bottle to keep my self hydrated.

This section had the first signs of people slowing down and walking.  As I kept a constant pace it was pretty straight forward to overtake people in the bucket loads.  Leaving people behind was tasting good until I reminded myself that I might have to take a short walking break so that I can push towards the end.

The Testing Time (5-7Km):

Before this run I had easily finished 5Km runs, so my confidence upto the 5Km mark was very good.  After this point I was venturing into the unknown.

The first signs of pain was from the side of my stomach.  I have a constant worry about having a stomach upset and so I told myself that a little water will take care of that.  The pain subsided about 200 meters later  but all of a sudden the right extreme of my ribs started hurting.  The pain was simply unbearable and I had to slow down to a walk.

After walking for a few minutes the pain toned down a little and I moved to a slow jog, as soon as I started the pain shot up again… At this time I was worried if I could even finish the run.  This was the first time I had felt that part of my body hurt and that left me a little confused as to what I should do.  I decided to switch to a brisk walk for a little while.

Surprisingly I was still pretty fast even on a walk, I kept pace easily with the runners next to me.  At the 7 km mark I told myself that the end is near and this is just the home stretch.

Running past Vidhana Soudha (8-9.5 Km):

The next section of the run was something I was looking forward to all evening.  It was the final stage but it also involved running past possibly the most beautiful building in Bangalore.  I have done the strech hundreds of times on my bike, and each time I reach the end in few seconds.  This time though it was going to be a long run to the other end.

As I entered the stretch I decided to give one last push and run nonstop to the finish line.  In the last section a lot of people I had gone past had overtaken me.  I also knew that on the other side of the road was the finish line.

This section I ran next to an elderly gentleman, just looking at him I got charged up again.  The man had a nice consistent pace and was doing a good job.  Running with him I managed to cover most of the distance.

The pain hadnt entirely subsided but the cheers were stronger now.  People kept reminding that the end was near.  Crossing the 9Km mark was such an awesome feeling.  I was going to finish my first 10K run.

Finish Line (10K):

I made a mistake in a judgement call and started running at a good pace much before I should have.  With 300m still to go I ran out of steam and switched to fast walking.

The moment of the event for me was seeing the finish line for the first time.  The feeling was so amazing that the adrenaline shot up and I actually started sprinting towards the finish.  I think I did that last 100m in a very impressive time.  For me it was almost like a 100m dash, I must have overtaken atleast 50 people in that final stretch alone

As I was sprinting I saw a photographer aiming his camera at me, all I want is that photo of me almost running for my life

Aftermath:

This event was hands down the most toughest exercise I had ever done.  My body knew it and it took me a few minutes to regain my breath and a little strength.  After that it was all the euphoria of finishing the race.

I stood at the finish line waiting for my friends and watching exhausted runners cross the line.  It was one experience I wont forget in a hurry.

Ironically I remember sitting for a few minutes and then telling my friend “I could have done a couple of Kilometers more”   Maybe I could have but it wouldnt have been easy