This weekend had been to Mysore to visit Savithri chikamma's family. Met divya and ranganath chikappa. Shankaran Mavas' family was in Bangalore. He was busy with election duty !

Well, what shud i say abou Mysore.....It is one city that never has let down its visitors and has always emerged as a thriving market for exotic sandalwood & incense, the Mysore silk sarees and stone-carved sculptures.

Divya took me to the Jaganmohan's palace and the Mysore Palace. Both grand in their facade...Adorned with amazing paintings....especially the Ravi Verma ones.

The Jaganmohan Palace housing the art gallery is in itself a master piece. We are not allowed to take the snaps but one can always buy colorful post cards of all that is inside the palace and thus keep the memory intact. The rich and eye-catching facade of the palace, the durbar hall where royal meetings used to take place, the colourful paintings which acts as visual records of some royal events and the very many artifacts therein serves to provide a glimpse of the rich, royal life.

This painting of a lady with a lamp is a masterpiece. I spent nearly an hour admiring it. The Silhouette is so perfect and the glow on the lady's face is priceless !





The Mysore Palace with its beautifully coloured rooms and floors is another main attraction. The palace also has a museum with a good collection of musical instruments, children's toys, many paintings, costumes, weapons, etc., belonging to the Royal family. .

Yesterday was Prashant Mohata's wedding ! First wedding of one of our classmates at NITIE. Golden Palms, at the norther outskirts of Bangalore was the venue. Nearly 25 of us attended the ceremony. It was also a good occasion for a get-together.

Last week, had been to Davangare, Harihar, Chitradurga, Holalkere, Kalaghatta ! Met Venkatesh Mava, Summa Atte, Ajja, Ajji, Sindhu, Harish, Suma (Harish's wife), Suhas (harish and suma's son) and Dodamma (Harish's mother) at Davangare. Was meeting them after 7 long years. !! At Harihar, met Smita, Vishwanath (her husband), Narayan Mava, Gayatri Atte, Diwakar and family, and Swarna. At Holalkere (our ancestral town and where nobody lives now !), visited the Ganesh Temple. At chitradurga, met Anant Mava, Vijaya Atte, Ulhas, Rajee Mava and family. Didnt meet their son(guru) and daughter (Saumya). Finally at Kalghatta, met Nagan Mava, Atte, Arvind.
Phew, one hectic journey !!

This weekend (24th April) will be going to Mysore to visit Savithri Chikamma and Shankaran Mava's family. God bless !

Team India celebrates their victory over Pakistan in the third and final Test in Rawalpindi. India won the Test by an innings and 131 runs It is the first time that India won a Test series in Pakistan. Rahul Dravid won the man-of-the-match award for his brilliant 270 while Virender Sehwag won the man-of-the-series award after scoring 438 runs, including the record-breaking 309 at the Multan Test.

I woke up today to the news of Brian Lara's amazing knock at Antigua. Against the same opposition, ten years ago, Brian Charles Lara scored 375 not out. This time he not only went past the same record, but also erased the recent record of 380 set by Australia's Mathew Hayden. Lara scored an unbelievable 400 Not Out to silence his critics once and for all ....Phew he deserves to be known as the best batsman of our times !!
For any cricket lover, this is an amazing and inspiring feat. Moments such as these make us bigger fans of this adorable game. And for an Indian Cricket fan, comparisons between Lara and Tendulkar immediately crop up ! Not an easy comparison to make .....
At times, the debacle of West Indies' batting and the dominance of England's bowling in the first three Tests was almost forgotten as Lara reminded everyone just how good he really is. To bat for more than 12 hours and for more than 200 overs in searing heat takes incredible concentration and no little fitness. And to do it after making just 100 runs in his six previous innings, and after being pilloried by the local media, is an outstanding achievement.
Lara has always been one of my more enduring idols. He seems to come back every time the media and fans put him down and out. Captaining one of the weaker teams of current times and certainly the weekest WI team ever, its not easy to gather scores like these !

Indeed I consider myself fortunate to live in the same era of tendulkar and Lara. Some exceptional feats from both have come over the past few decades...All i wish, and I am sure, Sachin wishes the same too, is the WORLD CUP...the next world cup will probably be the best chance for the current indian team and probably the last chance to some of the senior players to win the coveted title and bring solace to millions of restless Indian cricket fans.

An excellent piece in today's TOI editorial:

Gamble on God


Toss a coin to see if God exists? Why not? That's what was suggested by Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher in the 1600s. Pascal, who co-developed the theory of probability and whose later theological writings contain frequent applications of such calculations, argued that faith in a Creator was an unbeatable wager.

He maintained that although no one could actually prove the existence or non-existence of God, the advantages of believing in Him, if in fact He existed, far outweighed the harm of such a belief if it was in fact false. On the basis of this logic he even proposed - Pascal's wager as it famously came to be called later - that one should be willing to bet all in favour of God's existence because, as he put it, it was a safe gamble. Meaning, if one believes in God and this turns out to be incorrect, one has lost nothing; but if one doesn't believe in God and that turns out to be incorrect, one could end up getting the stick. So betting on God's non-existence is a draw-lose proposal: Either one finishes with nothing like all the other players, or one suffers eternal damnation. In other words, it's foolish to be an atheist and belief is the superior choice from a wagering perspective at least.

Since the mid-seventeenth century when it was first formulated, the wager has continued to be viciously targeted by atheists for appearing only as a superficially strong and compelling argument for theism. However, it now appears that these people may have been hedging their bets all along and Pascal could be partially right after all.

The reason is because a British physicist has recently calculated that the mathematical probability of God existing is two to one in favour. Using a 200-year-old probability formula called Bayes Theorem, Dr Stephen Unwin weighed the existence of evil and suffering against natural miracles and those that occur when prayers are answered, simultaneously factoring in free will, altruism and morality along with the various philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God and came up with a medium-high 67 per cent chance He existed. Confronted by such impeccable methodology, God obviously has only three choices left. Either He emerges from these details to become a semi-towering two-thirds majority Creator - thereby crushing the null-set vision of non-believers and tipping the precariously balanced 50-50 world of agnostics in the process. Or He vanishes into the remaining minority statistic and jolts believers by having a third of their faith suddenly diluted. Or He cont! ! !
inues existing as if nothing had happened. Which, in more senses than one, would be entirely true.

Trip to OOTY !!

Vodka at Mithun Da's Monarch Hotel, Boating at Pykara Boat House, City Spotting from Doddabetta Peak, Go-Karting at the Park, sipping masala tea at Coonor tea gardens....OUR TRIP in a nutshell !! :)

A normal trip with friends....Ooty doesnt excite me to write anything further...So goodbye for now !! :)

MONSTER....growwwl..This movie is in my head for some time now. Almost a fortnight since I saw it, but it refuses to budge !!
A brilliant transformation of the singularly beautiful (if somehow bland) Charlize Theron into a truly hideous creature...
CT worked very hard in gaining that extra 50 pounds for the meaty role. She ate potato chips day and night...
The lithe actress has already lost the pounds, but she's gaining bucket loads of acclaim: she's been been awarded Best Actress by the Golden Globes and the coveted Oscar.
The trick of becoming unattractive and downright pathetic in exchang for awards and acclaim has worked before. Nicole Kidman was rewarded for her marvelous performance in "The Hours" – or was it the prothetic nose that dimmed her movie star looks? The most famous example is Halle Berry who won an Oscar for her performances as a dejected single mother in "Monster's Ball." Like Charlize Theron, she wept frequently throughout the film.

The film is based on Aileen Wuornos, the prostitute who was executed last year in Florida after confessing to six murders.

I after watching the movie went into a shell wondering on how different people are. But no matter how hideous, cruel, ugly people turn out to be..from the inside each and every person is GOOD. CT was a good person, but as she herself says in the movie, circumstanceshad made her the person she was.

"Monster" tells a sordid, unappealing story, ripped from the headlines. CT (Wuornos) is forced to despise her livelihood, i.e prostitution because of rape attempts by several of her customers. Finally she cant take it any more and goes on a shooting spree !! The filmmaking is straightforward: the story starts off not long before the first murder and progresses through a series of dead men in parked cars until Wuornos' apprehension and conviction. Pity is what one feels for the woman. She tries her best to leave her past behind and take up a clean job, but she is forced right back into it. Her search for love forces her to befriend christina ricci whom she meets in a gay bar. As Wuornos' young lover Shelby, Ricci is heartbreakingly sweet, simple, and selfish, wrapped into a blue-jeaned tiny package with a bulky cast on her right arm. The early scenes of the film, when Ricci and Theron meet and fall in love, are the very best. However, while Selby is not as hateful as her serial murderer lover, she is not such a great girl herself.They stay together till the truth comes right in the open.
Charlize, one of my favorite actresses, really does look awfully bad in this movie, and it seems that her gamble has paid off. Maybe she is going to follow in Berry's footsteps: take home her Oscar, add millions to her future paychecks, and take off her clothes for the next James Bond flick !! :)................sign off