In Helsinki, my couchsurfing host was studying and working to become a nuclear scientist. It was interesting having conversations about physics, linux and other geek stuff with him. I would stay in Helsinki for 3 days eventually mostly walking around the city and taking pictures and talking to the locals. Helsinki is a pretty small city and it is possible to cover all the interesting places on foot and that is exactly what I did. It helped that most of the time I had a good company from local couchsurfers.

The Church in the Rock

The Church in the Rock (Temppeliaukion kirkkois - “Temple Square Church” in Finnish) one of the offbeat and must-see locations in Helsinki. It lives up to it’s name and looks like a a rock cave from the outside. From the inside, the huge roof looks like an overturned saucer and the from above it looks like a crashed flying saucer. Due to this, It is colloquially called as the “UFO church”. It has a minimalistic architecture and has great acoustics so concerts are held inside the church frequently.

Töölönlahti and the National Parliament

Töölönlahti is a bay located norwest of the central station and is a jogger’s paradise. It is natural park that is surrounded by Finlandia Concert hall and the National Opera (see below for the photo of Hooks used to hang coats in the cold winters). Various ducks and birds abound in this rare natural reserve in the center of a thriving city. The National Parliament building is pretty massive and right next to the National Museum. The Parliament annex has metal sculptures of strawberry plants and magnolias (see below)

The National Museum of Finland

Somone from Schmap noticed the photo below and it has was included in the schmap guide for the iPhone. Ironically I did not visit the museum as there were more interesting things to do that day.

Bekal Fort is the largest and most well preserved of all the forts in Kerala. Bekal fort is more than 300 years old and was occupied by Hyder Ali and his more illustrious son Tipu Sultan. The fort occupies an area of about 40 odd acres and is beautifully preserved by the Archaeological Survey of India. One of the watchtowers of the fort stretches into the Arabian sea and looks like a giant keyhole while the other one in the center of the fort has a steep ramp to climb to the top. Both of these provide beautiful vistas of the Arabian Sea and the beautiful coastline.

It is a easy bus ride to Bekal fort (about 16 kms and ~40 minutes). Bekal also has a railway station and you can see the railway line skirting the open sea from one of the fort watchtowers. The song “Tu Hi Re” from the Mani Ratnam movie “Bombay” was shot here. While I was there, I saw several post-marriage videos being shot there (looks like they had been inspired by the movie).

We recently visited a couchsurfer’s coffee estate near Sakleshpur. Travelling overnight with a bunch of couchsurfers, we took a break before dawn on NH48 just ahead of Sakleshpur. We climbed our way in the darkness to the Manjarabad fort. Tipu Sultan is said to have built this fort as it is in a strategic location close to the Arabian Sea coast through the Sakleshpur Ghat. The Manjarabad fort (pictured in the map above) is constructed out of stones and mud in the form of a 8-pointed star with large moat around it. While inspecting the construction of the fort, Tipu Sultan is said to have observed fog (known in Kannada as “Manju”) around this place and decided to name this fort Manjarabad. True to it’s name, there was heavy fog around the foothills before sunrise. The local taluka headquarters is still known by this name despite the town being renamed Sakleshpur.

Last weekend I went to the Fireflies festival of Music. Fireflies festival was relatively less known underground indie festival on the outskirts of Bangalore but has become popular over the years. This years edition had several good bands crossing various genres and covering everything from traditional and experimental sounds of Kerala to sufi inspired hymns to Lounge Piranha’s alternative grunge and Low Rhyderz Reggae and Hiphop.

I reached a little late around 7pm and stayed through the night through till the last two acts. All the acts were very good and the variety was staggering. The only downside was the time taken to setup the stage and occasional problems with the sound setup.

Esperanto Soul Fusion

With Geeta Navale on the Veena, the esperanto project had some funky psychedelic sounds combined with Carnatic music.

HFT Jazz

Shabnam Virmani rendtion of “Kabir ke dohe”

Shabnam Virmani – Filmmaker-turned-singer regaled the audience with her soulful rendition of couplets of Kabir. She explained the meaning of the couplets before singing them. Her performance got a fantastic response from the audience.

Hulivesa

Definitely the highlight if the evening was Huilvesa – a traditional dance from coastal Karnataka. Hulivesa (Loose Tulu translation “In the form of a tiger”) is performed by young males typically aged between 5 years to 10 years are painted with yellow and black stripes like tiger adorning tiger masks and other props. The kids dance to a familiar drumbeat and perform various acts such as eating a coconut and doing acrobatic acts.

Lounge Piranha

Lounge Piranha are a post-rock alternative grunge band. They performed several songs from their released (and upcoming) albums. They played some good guitar riffs. The lead singer had a wry sense of humour and kept making jibes at “world music”.

Qawwali – Bharat Sargam and group

The Qawwali troupe got the audience on their feet by playing some popular songs such as “Jhoom Barabar Jhoom” and “Mast Kalandar”. There was almost a mini riot when the audience wanted to play one more song but the organisers wouldn’t relent and let them play the request.

Vayali – Traditional Kerala songs and experimental bamboo orchestra

Vayali started with an experimental bamboo orchestra in which all the instruments (mainly percussion) were made of Bamboo. They ended their performance with traditional Kerala songs.

Low Rhyderz

Low Rhyderz is a Hip-Hop/Reggae band. Probably the least interesting on all the performances, they were not able to engage the audiences like the other artistes. They were high on style but disappointingly low on entertainment.

Along the small coat of Karnataka are several small pilgrimage places such as Murudeshwar, Udupi and Gokarna. Each of these town has a different character and has some unique characteristics. Two of the three towns – Murudeshwar and Gokarna have been mentioned in the Ramayana while Udupi is famous for it’s ancient Krishna temple. Most people associate Udupi with food but there are very few good places to eat in Udupi itself, which is surprising considering that you get Udupi restaurants dime-a-dozen in most South Indian cities. Udupi is also much smaller than I had imagined it to be. The city has grown about 2 km radius around the temple which is located in the centre. The day we reached there, preparations were on for the chariot-car festivals and decorated car-chariots dominated the entrances to the temple complex. The Malpe beach is one of the few white-sand beaches in India but we had to skip it as we headed towards Murudeshwara.

Murudeshwara is famous for the Murudeshwara (shiva) temple and the world’s largest Shiva statue. It also has a beautiful virgin beach and the water is very clear making it a good place to go scuba diving (Netrani Island). Murudeshwara is surrounded on three sides by the sea and the temple is located on the rock jutting out to Sea. Under the huge Shiva statue by the sea is another temple. The temple is surrounded on three sides by a exhibit which explains the mythological origins of the ‘Linga’ worshipped in the temple dating back to the Ramayana. Another notable feature of the Murudeshwara temple is the huge gopuram (Raja Gopuram – about 250 ft tall) at the entrance of the temple. It has 20 stories and is probably the tallest gopuram in the world. Murudeshwara is a hidden gem on the Karnataka coast.

]]>http://thoughts.vinayakhegde.com/2010/02/12/udupi-and-murudeshwara/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/VinayakH/~3/eS9OKXT88OE/ 2010-02-02T04:25:29Z Vinayak Hegde Last year I had been to a friend’s place and seen a painting at her place which I liked a lot. She said she had bought it at Chitra Santhe. Chitra Santhe is typically held on the last Sunday of January every year along the Kumara Krupa Road. This year it was crowded and buzzing [...]

Last year I had been to a friend’s place and seen a painting at her place which I liked a lot. She said she had bought it at Chitra Santhe. Chitra Santhe is typically held on the last Sunday of January every year along the Kumara Krupa Road. This year it was crowded and buzzing with activity and I saw several people carrying cartloads of paintings. This year, Chitra Santhe attracted more than 1300 artists and the road was choc-a-bloc with paintings of various styles. Also every other person seemed to carry a DSLR to take pictures of the artists and paintings. I did not carry my camera but the fair was a treat for the eyes. I bought a series of paintings depicting dances of India – Odissi, Bharatnatyam and Kathak. If you are in Bangalore during that time of the year, this is one event you should not miss.

Yamini is a annual Dusk-to-Dawn Cultural Festival at IIM Bangalore. Last year, I went to Yamini and it was a fantastic experience. It is conveniently scheduled on the eve of 26th January. Yamini 2010 continued till the wee hours of dawn and featured perfomances from :

• Carnatic Vocals by Nityashree Mahadevan
• Veena performances by Vidushi Gayathri
• Kathak Performance by Shambhavi Vaze (and troupe)
• Hindustani Vocals by Anand Bhate (from the Kirana Gharana)

Some of the strains of earlier songs performed by Veena Gayathri reminded me of the early blues and distortion guitar (One of the songs performed eerily reminded me of Jimi Hendrix’s guitaring). Anand Bhate’s hindustani vocal was the standout performance and had the audience begging for more. The performance continued well into the morning as Anand Bhate sang the Rag Malkauns, kannada bhajans and marathi abhangs. His was one of the best voices I have heard in a long time and the amount of control and range he had was amazing. The performances were co-ordinated by SPIC-MACAY IIM Bangalore sub-chapter.

Some of the photos from the Kathak Performances by Shambhavi Vaze and group are posted below. The complete set on flickr .

The ACM India launch was addressed by 3 Turing Award Winners – Barbara Liskov, C.A.R Hoare (Tony Hoare) and Raj Reddy. The ACM Turing award is “The Nobel Prize for Computing” and it is rare to see three Turing Award winners address the audience at any event. Barbara Liskov is the most recent awardee of the Turing award (the 2nd woman to win it) and she spoke on the power of abstraction. She spoke about the problems early programmers faced when writing large and complex programs. She explained how she tried to solve it using abstractions similar to (what is now called) Object-oriented programming. She talked at length on how her insights and experiences with these programming problem led to design of the CLU language. CLU was the first language to implement iterators and generators (as well as exception handling). It was a good lesson in computer history listening to her. I learned later that she was the first woman to get her PhD from a Computer Science Department. (Her doctoral advisor was the legendary John McCarthy). Her presentation and the mentioned references in it make for good reading.

Dr Raj Reddy is the only Indian who has won the Turing award for his contributions to field of Artificial Intelligence. Incidentally, his PhD advisor was also John McCarthy – AI Pioneer and Turing Award winner. Dr Raj Reddy spoke about the growth of computing over the years and the challenges of reaching the “bottom of the Pyramid”. He explained why there was need to move from the WIMP-paradigm in user interfaces to the SILK (Speech, Image, Language and Knowledge) to increase the reach of computing. His Turing award lecture (“To dream the possible dream”) makes for interesting read as well.

C.A.R Hoare (Tony Hoare) was the next speaker. He is a living legend in computer science. I was looking forward to hearing him speak as I had studied the Quicksort algorithm (which he invented) and Communicating Sequential Processes paper in college. He was remarkably witty and his enthusiasm for computer science shone through in his talk. In particular he spoke about the Verified Software initiative which he contended was similar in scope and impact (for Computer Science) to the Hubble Telescope and the Human genome project.

The following 2 days, we had the ACM Compute 2010 conference and there were several hands-on Tutorials on Cloud Computing, Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 apps, Widgets and Mobile Applications. The RIA tutorial was conducted by Mrinal Wadhwa (slides embedded below) and the Facebook connect tutorial by Prateek Dayal (of Muziboo).

(Disclosure:I am the secretary of the Bangalore Chapter and am on the program committee for ACM Compute 2010.)

One of the few things that I remember from my childhood when we first got a television home (in time for the ‘87 World Cup) was a Kathakali performance. The other things I remember (other than cricket) were the Megaserials – Ramayan and Mahabharat. Ever since I saw that Kathakali performance as a child on TV, I always wondered how the elaborate makeup was done.

Kathakali is the classical dance form of Kerala which originated in the first half of 17th Century. Kathakali is derived from the Malayalam words for Story (“Katha”) and Performance (“Kali”). Kathakali stories are drawn from the Mahabharata, Ramayana and the Bhagvatha Purana. Kathakali is generally performed in temples during festivals. The performance starts around 9pm in the night and continues all through the night till early morning.

While at Thekkady, I booked tickets to see a Kathakali performance. I reached 2 1/2 hours earlier than the scheduled performance to see the makeup being done. All the colours used in the Kathakali makeup are made of various kinds of rocks found in the region. Oil and rice flours are used a binders to hold the natural colours together. The rice flour (along with a bit of lime) is also used as glue to hold together the “chutti” – a series of white ridges (made of matte paper) on the cheeks on both sides of the face. The “Chutti” are a distinctive mark of Kathakali along with the elaborate head-dress. The different colours of the makeup depict different attributes of the characters. Green depicts righteousness / godliness, red depicts regality and black depicts evil.

The first part of the make-up is done by another artist who paints the artists face. In the second stage, the artist does the fine makeup around the eyes, forehead and the neck. After the facial makeup is done – the artist has to put crumpled starched garments with lots of frills around the waist tightly. This holds the lower part of the costume. The final stage is when the artist dons the costume and the headgear. Another trivia is that there is often a scarf like accompaniment to the costume. It has mirrors at the end of the scarf which hangs around the neck. The mirrors are used stealthily during the performance by the artist to check if he is makeup is alright and not running due to the sweat.

The story that was performed and shown in the pictures is as follows:

Narakasuravadham or The Murder of Narakasura

Nakrathundi, slave (maid servant) of the powerful demon King Narakasura, leaves for the heaven to kidnap the heavenly beauties, as ordered by Narakasura. On reaching heaven, Nakrathundi finds handsome Jayantha, son of Lord Indra. Nakrathundi, filled with lust on the sign of Jayantha disguises herself as Lalitha (a beautiful woman) and approaches with beautiful dance movements.

Lalitha (Nakrathundi) tells that she is rejoiced at his sight and by the grace of god, she will be getting a handsome husband like Jayantha. Jayantha in turn, asks Lalitha to reveal her identity and why she has approached him. Lalitha introduces herse;lf as the heavenly beauty and invites Jayantha for a sexual relationship. Jayantha humbly replies that he will not marry anyone without his father’s (Lord Indra’s) permission. Lalitha tells that she is unable to leave Jayantha and tries to embrace him with her lustful desires.

Jayantha becomes furious and orders Lalitha to leave the place immediately. Lalitha informs him that she came to kidnap him and shows her original form of Nakrathundi and tries to catch hold of Jayantha. At last, Jayantha becomes angry and cuts Nakrathundi’s ears, nose and breasts. Nakrathundi, roaring with acute pain, returns to Narakasura and Jayantha leaves the place to meet his father to inform him of the incident.

Some random trivia / observations from Kerala:

• The buses are open air with canvas drapes – the poor man’s idea of air cooled buses.
• Keralites love films. Every 500m you will find a big hoarding proclaiming the presence of a mohanlal fan club.
• Southern Kerala is thickly populated – so much so it is difficult sometimes to ascertain whether you have left the city.
• Everywhere you will see signs of influence of expats from the gulf – from majestic houses to the shops selling the latest goods (and flaunting arabic scripts). This is even more true in northern Kerala as compared to Southern Kerala.
• Because of the backwaters, using boats is pretty much a standard form of public transport – especially in the towns on the shores of the Vembanad lake.
• Everywhere around Kerala, you can see the traces of it’s trading past (and present) – from well developed ports to several large trading outpost handed down generations.

Kochi

I reached Kochi early morning by overnight bus from Bangalore and my parents reached Kochi by an evening flight from Mumbai. We were lucky to get accommodation in a home-stay that was by the waterfront near Bolgatty palace. The best part was however that the property had a licensed Chinese fishing net. It was a great experience to see the Chinese fishing nets in action. There is a hanging stretched net attached to a long poles. The net itself is attached to an intricate cantilever system with a variety of weights (attached with ropes of varying sizes). At the center of the net is a generally a light bulb which is meant to attract shrimps, crabs and other fish. The net is lowered and then hauled back up again after 15-20 minutes. The catch is collected from the larger net using a smaller handheld net and the net is lowered back. There is also a small hit attached to the Chinese net platform which is used for waiting when the net is lowered. Kochi is sea-food lovers paradise and there is a wide variety of fresh water fish available. The other attractions in Kochi are the Marine drive (an evening cruise there is recommended), the Jewish Synagogue and the St Francis church (the oldest European Church in India).

Thekkady

From Kochi we proceeded to Thekkady. The ferry on a Periyar wildlife sanctuary was closed as an overloaded ferry had capsized killing 45 people. All the hotels were deserted due to this when we reached there. We visited a spice garden nearby where we were able to see and listen about how various spices are cultivated and harvested. The downside to the spice boom has been that the natural vegetation in the area is being cut to make way for tea gardens (in Wayanad especially) or spice gardens. We also saw Kalaripattayu and Kathakali performance on consecutive evenings. I will cover that in another blog post though.

Alleppey

From the high hills and forests of Thekkady, we came back to Alleppey on the shores of the Vembanad Lake to stay on a houseboat. We boarded the houseboat at the same place where the annual Nehru boat race is held. Later on the cruise, I was able to see long snake boat used in the race. The houseboat stay was the best part of the trip – just listening to music and just hanging around the deck looking at the endless water and leaning coconut trees. The food was excellent as well with rice and fish being staple diet in Kerala. My idea of perfect idyllic holiday

Athirampally Waterfalls

The Athirampally waterfalls are located in the middle of pristine forest about 80 kms from Kochi. They are often called the Niagara falls of India. They are wide and have a fall of about 80 feet. The view from the foot of the falls is majestic. There was a lot of water gushing from the falls as we had visited just after the rains.

I shall cover the Northern part of the trip in the next blog post.