Kangra Valley Train and Palampur

I took the beautiful narrow gauge train from Pathankot to Palampur. The journey of a 127 kms took around 8 hours but it was really awesome. If you're in a hurry, a bus journey is recommended since the bus route is only a 100kms and takes around 3 1/2 hours. Luckily I wasn't in a hurry and got to spend the extra 4 1/2 hours meeting people and looking out through the window.

Got to Palampur and checked in to Hotel Highland by around 6.30 p.m. I then went out and bought a card reader to upload all my pictures. However, it turned out that they were just too large to upload so I had to ditch it and go watch India vs. West Indies in 'Chicken Center' with a Hawyards 10000 super strong beer, the only beer people here have.

Figured out later at night that the camera itself has an option to make images smaller so I selected a few pics to upload. In the morning, I took an 8 km hike up to Neugal Gorge and back. This place seems really friendly and nice, and I think I'll probably hang out for another day before heading to McLeod Ganj. Though there are quite a few guest houses and hotels here, I think it's probably for people from Punjab who come up for the weekends in summer. Its totally empty of tourists right now, and people are shocked that I've travelled all the way from Kerala to come here. On finding out that Kerala is a 50hr train ride from Delhi, a few people have even asked me whether Kerala is in India... and remarked on what a large country we have! Anyway, here are some of the pics, enjoy.

Jalandhar Railway Station Pathankot Railway Station

Pathankot Railway Station Tea and Blogging at Pathankot

The Kangra Valley Train

The Kangra Valley Train

The Kangra Valley Train

Passengers on the Train

View of the Beas from the Train

View of the Beas -2

View of the Beas - 3

First view of the Dauladar Range

The Snow capped Dauladars

The Chicken Center

Tea Estates in Palampur on the way to Neugal

Tea Estates in Palampur on the way to Neugal

The Neuagal Gorge

The Neugal Cafe

On the Jammu Mail

Its 5.30 a.m. now and though I don't reach Pathankot for another 2 hrs, I'm already up. I woke up around an hour ago when all the small children in the train started crying more or less simultaneously. Though I usually have kids crying on the train, I can't help but be sympathetic since its really (really really) cold. This might turn out to be flip flop wearing weather in South Bend, this is officially the coldest I've ever been.

I woke up at Jalandar and got out to take some pictures and realised that the 'full metal body' of the camera which the salesman was so enthusiastic about has its disadvantages: its freezing cold to touch! The really sleek build (I can fit it in my shirt pocket as I had proudly told Beks on the phone yesterday) makes it kinda impossible to operate with gloves.

Most of the people in the train are awake now and having multiple cups of chai. I thought it strange when I saw the chai walla getting on at 4.30 in the morning wondering who would get out of their blankets to have tea at this time. I guess HSBC is right when they mention the importance of local knowledge for a business in their adverts. I have around 2hrs in Pathankot before the train to Kangra. Was going through the Rough Guide which Beks bought last week for our Rajasthan trip and it really has a wealth of info. Even they don't have anything about Pathankot though except train and bus timings to more interesting places. Maybe I'll write an entry for then....

(I wrote this post on a paper first and now typing it on my phone. Don't know how to format and put paragraphs from here so please excuse)

Test Email Post

I just set up my blog so I could post via email which I thought would be a cool thing to do since I'm travelling. Anyway, just thought that I'd test out the feature before I travel too far... My flight to Delhi was delayed by an hour and a half yesterday, and as usual, before landing we had to circle in the air for around 15 mins before getting a landing space in the heavily crowded Delhi airport. Even after landing, the aircraft had to wait on the runway for another 10 mins before getting a free parking bay. Then there was ofcourse the huge rush near the baggage conveyor belt and I finally got to Roychayen's place around 10.15. Luckily I met someone on the flight who gave me a lift back so didn't have to face the cold in an auto.

I got home and Roychayen wasn't there and no dinner was prepared so I ordered a BigBoy burger from Nirula's for old times' sake. This morning I walked around and now am just going to get ready for my Rochester interview. Wish me luck! I'm looking forward to trying out the much talked about Delhi Metro after the interview. I've also booked a ticket to Pathankot tonight by the Jammu Express and should get there by around 7.30 a.m and then take the narrow gauge train to Kangra and so on. I'm so excited. I'm not sure whether Beks has already posted about the new Nikon S8 that we bought, but in any case, I'll be taking a lot of pictures and will be giving the camera a good workout. More later.

Gearing up

My last week in Ktym before my first trip starts. However, now with the change of plans, I'll be coming all the way back from Delhi after my rafting trip, and then heading all the way back to Allahabad for the start of my trip with Beks.

I have around 4 days between my Simon Interview and the rafting trip so am planning to take a short trip on my own. The mountains will be pretty cold at this time of the year but I still love it, and it will probably be my last trip to the Himalayas in a while. (Not that I've been frequenting it or anything). This will be my first trip all alone since my trip to McLeod Ganj between the Analysis I and Analysis II exams in first year of college in 1997 May. (I'm not counting work trips which I've made alone, since its not at all the same thing). Thats almost 10 years ago and I'm so excited.

Strangely, I'm drawn to going to the same place, mainly cause this time I want to take the narrow gauge train from Pathankot to Kangra and Palampur. I loved the Kangra valley on my last trip and took a bus down from McLeod Ganj and walked all the way back up, 18 kms through the valley. It was summer then and absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, digital cameras were not invented then, and though I loved my film SLR, hard copies of photographs (and everything else in fact) are so much more difficult to store and I've lost all the photos probably shifting houses in Bombay. I'm really looking forward to the trip, and I also have a friend in Palampur now, Mr. Shambhu Ram, a shepherd I met at Chandra Taal in Spiti, who said he would show me around. My marathon training for the past week should hopefully help me keep up with him, which I couldn't really do in Spiti. Oh yeah, I could run more than I expected, and managed to do around a tenth of a marathon. This will also give me a chance to do some high altitude training :)

On my last trip, on of the things I observed a day of silence, where I even ordered and packed food the previous day so that I wouldn't have to speak at all. Speech creates disturbances in the mind stuff, Chitta vritti in sanskrit, and control of speech is highly recommended in the Yoga sutras of Patanjali. At the time, I didn't know anything about it, but just wanted to do it, having just heard of the concept and thinking it sounded cool. That was probably my first exercise in self discipline as well, which now has become a major part of things I like to do.

I haven't finalised any travel plans yet, but planning to head somewhere out of Delhi and probably get to Haridwar a day or two before the start of the rafting trip. Should go to Rishikesh as well, since its just 24kms from there and since it obviously influenced the Beatles so much. Anyway, whatever I finally do, I guess from now till March, I'll probably cover at least 12,000 kms or so, around the diameter of the Earth.

4th Anniversary - My version

Another late post, but as I was saying, I've been thinking about this blog for some time...

Those of you who come here from B's blog or just happen to know us, will know that it was our 4th wedding anniversary on the 5th of January, the day after my brother's 4th wedding anniversary. Four years zipped by and I think as I grow older, the years seem to going by really fast.

Our anniversary falls in such a busy time, shortly after the Holiday season and the day before B's birthday. This also means I have to get 3 gifts pretty much at the same time. For our anniversary, this year's gift was a sandwich toaster.

The wedding day was just such a blur for me since I was on some incredible sort of high. I feel excited every time I think about it, though I don't really focus on anything. I was just so emotional that we finally got married. At last!

I knew that B was the person I was going to marry the first moment I saw her, at a wedding reception. I didn't even speak to her till a week later when she gatecrashed a school party. Anyway, like a good movie, I saw her only for the last bloody song at the party and I was just so excited that I could at least now find out her name. So we hardly spoke for like 5 mins and B anyway lied to me saying she was in the 12th. I was totally in love with her and knew I would get married to her. Perhaps I was ‘an honourable man’ at the time and falling in love for me meant getting married. I met her again 7 months later and the rest of course is too long to bore you with details.

However, 10 ½ years later, still can’t imagine any other situation in which I would be happier. I was /am an idealist but at the time I met B, I used to theorize everything I believed in and I even wrote an essay just for myself on God being the sum total of all matter and energy which followed laws of physics blah blah. Today I realize that some things cannot be analyzed using regular rules because they cannot be broken down into smaller parts. Such as God and Love. We can try to describe parts of the experience but it is just to urge us on to experience the real thing.

I still cannot satisfactorily explain the process of falling in love with B. Is falling in love ever a process? I had absolutely no data to make a decision on, other than the obvious looks. B is hot! but that doesn’t explain how everything turned out perfect. Is it instinct? Does every person who falls in love, no matter how well they know their beloved, lose logic and reason at that point of actually falling in love? Didn’t some philosopher say how we just believe in something, and make up reasons for why we believe in it, rather than the other way around.

B and I keep wondering whether we’re weird for praising each other so much. The other theory is that we’re just oxytosin junkies. I think its just so comfortable that most of the time (somewhere close to 95% according to some estimates) we just talk junk. We can’t even talk about it to other people because it just doesn’t make any sense at all.

What did we do for our anniversary? Well we like doing our routine the best, so we did that but I also made special lunch and dinner, beef in soya sauce and honey lemon walnut chicken respectively. I think I also pigged out at Baskin Robbins.

Chennai Trip

This post is a bit delayed since I got back from Chennai on the 30th after my ISB interview. However, it was after the Chennai trip that I first thought about keeping another blog so I thought I would just write something about it.

It was really weird this time in Chennai cause no one was there. Usually its always always a difficult thing to divide time in Chennai between the in-laws, Chech (my elder sister) and Achach (elder brother). This time however, Achach was down in Kerala and Chech was in Thailand. I decided to stay at my in-laws but it was pretty empty there as well since my brother in law Tarun was in Kottayam and my mother-in-law in Bangalore. My dad in law went out for some wedding dinner with his dad in law and I was stuck at home wondering what to do.

It turned out that the only person I could think of that I knew in Chennai was Cilanne, a french-canadian mathematician who had been our guest for the past week. Anyway, I looked up the number of The Savera and called her and we went to Zara's (which had run out of all their foreign alcohol presumably due to the Christmas Season) and then to Mocha where Tarun works. It was my first time at Mocha and I thought it was done very well. It was full of mosquitoes though and I was horrified to find that Winnipeg has even more mosquitoes during summer and apparently you can't keep them away even with Banish or Odomos like things. I guess I can't escape all the bad sides of India by moving to the U.S.

I went for the ISB interview the next morning with thoughts of starting a business in Canada selling the mosquito bat. Surely that has to kill them. The interview was at the Connemara and afterwards I walked to Spencer Plaza and bought a birthday and anniversary gift for Beks.

After lunch, Appa took me to Beks' grandparent's place on the way to drop me at the airport. Though Appa has been married for 29 years and has probably spent a year of that at least staying alone at home, Ammachi was so concerned about whether we had proper lunch and kept offering us cutlets of some other snacks. I guess mothers will always be the same, and I felt that perhaps I had been too harsh on my mother when refusing to go to the doctor two days before Christmas...

Got back to Cochin airport just after the Bandh called by the communists to protest the hanging of Saddam. I swear, these Mallu's will be the only people calling a bandh for something like this. "Oh hey, I don't feel like going to work in the afternoon, hey jojy, joby, jebin, jebu, what are you guys up to this afternoon? shall we call a bandh?"

Freeing My Blog

Welcome to my new blog. I'm making this my primary blog and shifting away from If I Were Dictator. I had registered my previous blog on some MBA bloglists and slowly found that I didn't feel like writing articles not related to the MBA. It wasn't really about privacy, since how private is a blog anyway? It was more to do with not wanting to waste other people's time, because the MBA list sorts the blog titles datewise and everytime I put up a new post, fellow applicants might click it thinking it might be MBA admissions related. This caused a lot of my post ideas last couple of weeks to not materialize since they had nothing to do with MBA stuff. Anyway, after much debate on whether I should delete the blog from the MBA list and whether it would be too cumbersome to have two blogs, I finally decided on this. I wonder whether the other blog will die out now... Anyway for now, I've put a feed on both the blogs to the other one so if there's anything new on either, you can read it.